In the above image, Wellspring an artwork by artist Charles Luna, a woman holds a small child in patch of grass in the desert. The viewers' eyes might dance between the cityscape in the background, the artist's model in the foreground, and the desert all around. And yet, our eyes always come back to the centre, to the oasis the pair make. Instead of lamenting the desert and all that they do not have, the woman and child are focused on each other and all they DO have when they are together.

Exercises such as engaging with this artwork emphasize "asset framing" over "deficit framing". As articulated by Trabian Shorters, asset framing is about shifting narratives, so that instead of defining individuals or communities by what they lack, we instead "define a people by their aspirations and contributions" (Shorters 2018). In other words, instead of lamenting the mother/child pair's surrounding environment, we instead would define them based on what they have, their hopes, and their contributions to the world around them.

Planning and engaging in work for libraries through the lens of asset framing similarly shifts our perspective. Librarians often work in organizations where resources are "never enough", where scarcity and deficit framing are the norms. At budget time, maintainers in all fields of work can be envious of generous budgets for peers' innovative projects which almost always seem to win out when resources are divvied up.

As Ursula K. Le Guin writes in The Left Hand of Darkness, "To oppose something is to maintain it... you must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road" (Le Guin 2019, 163). So, instead of continuing to using a scale that always promotes for innovation or potential --a scale that we will all fail on in different ways if we're focused on keeping the trains running and the lights on, let's walk down a different road and work towards a new future of academic librarianship, one where we treat cycles of innovation and maintenance like we do the cycle of propagating seeds, sowing them, harvesting our crops, and putting up each season's produce as preserves for the future.

Decision makers would often rather 'invest' in innovation than budget for maintenance. Managers sometimes hire or promote on this basis too. They place a bet on potential rather than making personnel decisions based on a candidate's actual record of success or provable qualifications. This cavalier "No risk, No reward" mindset is characteristically demonstrated and perpetuated more often by male leaders than female decision makers. Why? Because if you place a bet and come out "ahead" the spoils are "all yours"?   Ironically, just like in the casino, most people who make these sort of gambles time after time don't remember or talk about the inevitable losses which typically outpace their wins.  Male dominated organizations like the universities that house our academic libraries can unwittingly ignore this disconnect, rewarding risk taking regardless of its outcomes until inequitable pay structures arise between innovation and service/maintenance and those compensation structures become intractably gendered. 

So, where can we go from here?  We can start by staging honest conversations about how articulating the need for support improves both innovation and maintenance project outcomes. We can practice being able to say and be heard when we speak that: "If I’m going to do this new project x successfully, I’m going to need to give up other duty y, and get help from z. We can become more articulate and circumspect about  saying "No" in our personal and professional lives--it's a way to go about prioritizing our efforts, to stop burning ourselves out, to stop letting ourselves and others down.  If you're invited to serve on a gender dominated search committee or  manel, just say "No" and suggest alternate candidates who would improve the panel or a balance that would allow you to change your mind about joining. 

 “It twists my head that I only started disbelieving in useful and useless people when I proved to be useless. Then I had this revelation that the scale I’d judged people on--the scale that I was failing on-- was irrelevant.” (Doctorow 2017, 208)

This brings us right back to Bartleby and his boss's frustration at how to treat his refusing employee once he wasn't fit for work. Was Bartleby then a managerial challenge? A puzzle to fix? a mere eyesore, a problem to be gotten rid of?  He's much more than that, which is why Melville makes  Bartleby's situation so impossible to "look away from".