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 find their place "inside" bigger organizations where resources are "never enough", where constructed scarcity, legacies of ableism, sexism, and deficit framing have shaped the culture's norms in more brittle ways even than the library's. In organizations like these, at budget time, service providers in all fields of work often find themselves envious of peers' generous budgets for innovative projects which seem to invariably win out when resources are divvied up.
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" for your legacy-building? 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 or racial-majority dominated search committee or panel, just say "No" and suggest alternates who would improve the team. Know how to articulate what would allow you to change your mind about joining but be willing to walk away.
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). We can't afford to continue using a scale that always promotes for innovation or potential--a scale that we will all fail on in different ways when we necessarily focus on maintainer goals like keeping the trains running and the lights on. Let's instead 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 produce, and putting up each season's bounty as preserves for the future.
This is more sustainable than competing against each other for dwindling resources where we constantly have to be seeking new ways to prove our worth or justify our work. We're going to keep "looking" too, and moving toward a new kind of "Yes." In dance,
Rainer's No Manifesto of 1978 was displaced twenty-six years later by Mette Ingvartsen's YES MANIFESTO (
2004). It reads like this:
How long will it take librarians to reclaim "yes" in a way that works for us?
