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10 Practical Tips for Compiling Your Promotion or Tenure File

Sep 23rd, 2013
by Bohyun (Library Hat).
Comments are off for this post

 This post was originally published in ACRL TechConnect on Sep. 23, 2013.

Flickr image by Frederic Bisson http://www.flickr.com/photos/38712296@N07/3604417507/

If you work at an academic library, you may count as faculty. Whether the faculty status comes with a tenure track or not, it usually entails a more complicated procedure for promotion than the professional staff status. At some libraries, the promotion policy and procedure is well documented, and a lot of help and guidance are given to those who are new to the process. At other libraries, on the other hand, there may be less help available and the procedure documentation can be not quite clear. I recently had the experience of compiling my promotion file. I thought that creating a promotion file would not be too difficult since I have been collecting most of my academic and professional activities. But this was not the case at all. Looking back, there are many things I would have done differently to make the process less stressful.

While this post does not really cover a technology topic that we at ACRL TechConnect usually write about, applying for promotion and/or tenure is something that many academic librarians go through. So I wanted to share some lessons that I learned from my first-time experience of crating a promotion binder as a non-tenure track faculty.

Please bear in mind that the actual process of assembling your promotion or tenure file can differ depending on your institution. At my university, everything has to be printed and filed in a binder and multiple copies of such a binder are required for the use of the tenure and promotion committee. At some places, librarians may only need to print all documentation but don’t need to actually create a binder. At other places, you may do everything online using a system such as Digital Measures, Sedona or Interfolio, and you do not have to deal with papers or binders at all. Be aware that if you do have to deal with actual photocopying, filing, and creating a binder, there will be some additional challenges.

Also my experience described here was for promotion, not tenure. If you are applying for a tenure, see these posts that may be helpful:

1. Get a copy of the promotion and tenure policy manual of your library and institution.

In my case, this was not possible since my library as well as the College of Medicine, to which the library belongs, did not have the promotion policy until very recently. But if you work at an established academic library, there will be a promotion/tenure procedure and policy manual for librarians. Some of the manual may refer to the institution’s faculty promotion and tenure policy manual as well. So get a copy of both and make sure to find out under which category librarians fall. You may count as non-tenured faculty, tenure-track faculty, or simply professionals. You may also belong to an academic department and a specific college, or you may belong to simply your library which counts as a college with a library dean.

You do not have to read the manual as soon as you start working. It will certainly not be a gripping read. But do get a copy and file it in your binder. (It is good to have a binder for promotion-related records even if you do not actually have to create a promotion binder yourself or everything can be filed electronically.)

2. Know when you become eligible for the application for promotion/tenure and what the criteria are.

Once you obtain a copy of your library’s promotion/tenure policy, take a quick look at the section that specifies how many years of work is required for you to apply for promotion or tenure and what the promotion / tenure criteria are. An example of the rankings of non-tenure track librarians at an academic library are: Instructor, Assistant, Associate, and University Librarian. This mirrors the academic faculty rankings of Instructor, Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor. But again, your institution may have a different system. Each level of promotion will have a minimum number of years required, such as 2 years for the promotion from Instructor to Assistant Librarian, and specific criteria applied to that type of promotion. This is good to know early in your career, so that you can coordinate and organize your academic and professional activities to match what your institution expects its librarians to perform as much as possible.

3. Ask those who went through the same process already.

Needless to day, the most helpful advice comes from those librarians who went through the same process. They have a wealth of knowledge to share. So don’t hesitate to ask them what the good preparatory steps are for future application. Even if you have a very general question, they will always point out what to pay attention to in advance.

Also at some libraries, the promotion and tenure committee holds an annual workshop for those who are interested in submitting an application. Even if you are not yet planning to apply and it seems way too early to even consider such a thing, it may be a good idea to attend one just to get an overview. The committee is very knowledgeable about the whole process and consists of librarians experienced in the promotion and tenure process.

4. Collect and gather documentation under the same categories that your application file requires.

The promotion file can require a lot of documentation that you may neglect to collect on a daily basis. For example, I never bothered to keep track of the committee appointment notification e-mails, and the only reason I saved the conference program booklets were because of a colleague’s advice that I got to save them for the promotion binder in the future as the proof of attendance. (It would have never dawned on me. And even then, I lost some program booklets for conferences I attended.) This is not a good thing.

Since there was no official promotion policy for my library when I started, I simply created a binder and filed anything and everything that might be relevant to the promotion file some day. However, over the last five years, this binder got extremely fat. This is also not a good practice. When I needed those documentation to actually create and organize my promotion file, it was a mess. It was good that I had at least quite a bit of documentation saved. But I had to look through all of them again because they belonged to different categories and the dates were all mixed up.

So, it is highly recommended that you should check the categories of the application file that your library/institution requires before creating a binder. Do not just throw things into a binder or a drawer if possible. Make separate binders or drawers under the same categories that your application file requires such as publication, presentation, university service, community service, professional services, etc. Also organize the documentation by year and keep the list of items in each category. Add to the list every time you file something. Pretend that you are doing this for your work, not for your promotion, to motivate yourself.

Depending on your preference and the way your institution handles the documentation for your promotion or tenure application, it may make a better sense to scan and organize everything in a digital form as long as the original document is not required. You can use citation management system such as Mendeley or Refworks to keep the copies of all your publications for example. These will easily generate the up-to-date bibliography of your publications for your CV. If your institution uses a system that keeps track of faculty’s research, grant, publication, teaching, and service activities such as Digital Measures or Sedona, those systems may suit you better as you can keep track of more types of activities than just publications. You can also keep a personal digital archive of everything that will go into your application file either on your local computer or on your Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive account. The key is to save and organize when you have something that would count towards promotion and tenure in hand “right away.”

One more thing. If you publish a book chapter, depending on the situation, you may not get the copy of the book or the final version of your book chapter as a PDF from your editor or publisher. This is no big deal until you have to ask your college to do a rush ILL for you. So take time in advance to obtain at least one hard copy or the finished PDF version of your publication particularly in the case of book chapters.

5. What do I put into my promotion file or tenure dossier?

There are common items such as personal statement, CV, publications, and services, which are specified in the promotion/tenure policy manual. But some of the things that may not belong to these categories or that make you wonder if it is worth putting into your promotion file. It really depends on what else you have it in your application file. If your application file is strong enough, you may skip things like miscellaneous talks that you gave or newsletter articles that you wrote for a regional professional organization. But ask a colleague for advice first and check if your file looks balanced in all areas.

6. Make sure to keep documentation for projects that only lived a short life.

Another thing to keep in mind is to keep track of all the projects you worked on. As time goes on, you may forget some of the work you did. If you create a website, a LibGuide, a database application, a section in the staff intranet, etc., some of those may last a long time, but others may get used only for a while and then disappear or be removed. Once disappeared projects are hard to show in your file as part of your work and achievement unless you documented the final project result when it was up and running and being used. So take the screenshots, print out the color copies of those screenshots, and keep the record of the dates during which you worked on the project and of the date on which the project result was released, implemented etc.

If you work in technology, you may have more of this type of work than academic publications. Check your library’s promotion and tenure policy manual to see if it has the category of ‘Creative Works’ or something similar under which you can add these items.

If you are assembling your binder right now, and some projects you worked on are completely gone, check the WayBack machine from the Internet Archive and see if you can find an archived copy. Not always available, but if you don’t have anything else, this may the only way to find some evidence of your work that you can document.

7. Update your CV and the list of Continuing Education activities on a regular basis.

Ideally, you will be doing this every year when you do your performance review. But it may not be required. Updating your CV is certainly not the most exciting thing to do, but it must be done. Over the last five years, I have done CV updates only when it was required for accreditation purposes (which requires the current CVs of all faculty). This was better than not having updated my CV at all for sure. But since I did not really update it with the promotion application in mind, when I needed to create one for the promotion application file, I had to redo the CV moving items and organizing them in different categories. So make sure to check your library’s or your institution’s faculty promotion/tenure policy manual. The manual includes the format of CV that the dossier needs to adopt. Use that format for your CV and update it every year. (I think that during the Christmas holidays may be a good time for this kind of task from now on for me.)

Some people keep the most up-to-date CV in their Dropbox’s public folder, and that is also a good idea if you have a website and share your CV there.

Some of the systems I have mentioned earlier – Digital Measure and Sedona – also allow you to create a custom template which you can utilize for the promotion/tenure application purpose. If the system has been in use for many years in your institution, there may be a pre-made template for promotion and tenure purposes.

8. Make sure to collect all appointment e-mails to committees and other types of services you do.

Keeping the records of all services is a tricky thing as we tend to pay little attention to the appointment e-mails to committees or other types of services that we perform for universities or professional organizations. I assumed that they were all in my inbox somewhere and did not properly organize them. As a result, I had to spend hours looking for them when I was compiling my binder.

This can be easily avoided if you keep a well-organized e-mail archive where you file e-mails as they come in. Sometimes, I found that I either lost the appointment e-mail or never received one. You can file other email correspondences as documentation for that service. But the official appointment e-mail would certainly be better in this case.

This also reminded me that I should write thank-you e-mails to the members of my committees that I chaired and to the committee chairs I worked with as a board member of ALA New Members Round Table. It is always nice to file a letter of appreciation rather than a letter of appointment. And as a committee chair or a board member, it should be something that you do without being asked. By sending these thank you e-mails, your committee members or chairs can file and use them when they need for their performance, promotion, or tenure review without requesting and waiting.

9. Check the timeline dates for the application.

Universities and colleges usually have a set of deadlines you have to meet in order for you to be considered for promotion or tenure. For example, you may have to have a meeting by a certain date with your supervisor or your library dean and get the green light to go for promotion. Your supervisor may have to file an official memorandum to the dean’s office until a certain date as a formal notification. Your department chair (if you are appointed to an academic department) may have to receive a memo about your application by a certain date. Your promotion file may have to be submitted to your academic department’s Promotion and Tenure committee by some time in advance before it gets forwarded to the Promotion and Tenure committee of the college. The list goes on and on. These deadlines are hard to keep tabs on but have to be tracked carefully not to miss them.

10. Plan ahead

I had to compile and create my promotion binder and three copies within a week’s notice, but this is a very unusual case due to special circumstances. Something like this is unlikely to happen to you, but remember that creating the whole application file will take much more time than you imagine. I could have done some of the sorting out and organizing documentation work myself in advance but delayed it because there was a web data application which I was developing for my library. Looking back, I should have at least started working on the promotion file even if things were unclear and even if I had little time to spare outside of my ongoing work projects. It would have given me a much more accurate sense of how much time I will have to spend eventually on the whole dossier.

Also remember to request evaluation letters in advance. This was the most crazy part for me because I was literally given one week to request and get letters from internal and external reviewers. Asking people of a letter in a week’s time is close to asking for the impossible particularly if the reviewers are outside of your institution and have to be contacted not by you but by a third party. I was very lucky to get all the signed PDF letters in time, but I do not recommend this kind of experience to anyone.

Plan ahead and plan well in advance. Find out whether you need letters from internal or external reviewers, how many, and what the letters need to cover. Make sure to create a list of colleagues you can request a letter from who are familiar with your work. When you request a letter, make sure to highlight the promotion or tenure criteria and what the letter needs to address, so that letter writers can quickly see what they need to focus on when they review your work. If there are any supplementary materials such as publications, book chapters, presentations, etc., make sure to forward them as well along with your CV and statement.

Lastly, if Your Application File Must be In Print…

You are lucky if you have the option to submit everything electronically or to simply submit the documentation to someone who will do the rest of work such as photocopying, filing, making binders, etc. But your institution may require the application file to be submitted in print, in multiple copies sometimes. And you may be responsible for creating those binders and copies yourself. I had to submit 4 binders, each of which exactly identical, and I was the one who had to do all the photocopying, punching holes, and filing them into a binder. I can tell you photocopying and punching holes for the documents that fill up a very thick binder and doing that multiple times was not exactly inspiring work. If this is your case as well, I recommend creating one binder as a master copy and using the professional photocopy/binding service to create copies. It would have been so much better for my sanity. In my case, the time was too short for me to create one master copy and then bring it to the outside service to make additional copies. So plan ahead and make sure you have time to use outside service. I highly recommend not using your own labor for photocopying and filing.

* * *

If you have any extra tips or experience to share about the promotion or tenure process at an academic library, please share them in the comments section. Hopefully in the future, all institutions will allow people to file their documentation electronically. There are also tools such as Interfolio (http://www.interfolio.com/) that you can use, which is particularly convenient for those who has to get external letters that directly have to go to the tenure and promotion committee.

Are there any other tools? Please share them in the comments section as well. Best of luck to all librarians going for promotion and tenure!

 

How to Make Your Writing Less Terrible

Feb 15th, 2012
by Bohyun (Library Hat).
2 comments

We all write whether it is a Facebook update, a short e-mail at work, a blog post for a professional or personal blog, or a research paper for publication. We write everyday for all kinds of purposes. For being such a common activity, writing well is, well, a challenge to say the least.  As one who is terrible at writing (and even more terrible at getting to the point of writing for that matter), I thought it would be fun to write about how to make a piece of writing less terrible.  A brilliant idea, don’t you think? Or so I thought.  =)

Actually, one good way to think about writing well is to think about what kind of writing we like to read.  No matter how bad we are at writing, we are all equipped with the uncanny ability to detect and distinguish a good piece of writing from a bad one.  We agree much more readily and quickly on what a well-written piece is, what writings are joy to read, and which writings are just awful and impossible to read.
(Warning: not necessarily applicable to fiction and poetry.)

Write the way you would enjoy reading.

So, my mantra for writing is “Write the way you would enjoy reading.”  This may sound personal, but it really isn’t.  There are things that are commonly found in all writings we love to read.  A good piece of writing makes reading effortless. They are clear, readable, to the point, and got something to say that matters.

Writing on the Pont de l’Alma by UrbanDigger.com in Flickr

  • Clear

A well-written piece of writing makes you feel that you are speaking to an interesting person with a clear and logical mind. Everything the writer says in her or his writing makes sense to you whether you agree or not with the claims it makes. The writing doesn’t confuse you. It never makes you stop and say “huh?” And the transitions inside the piece will feel natural in your mind.

  • Readable

A well-written piece of writing provides information in an accessible manner.  Even if it covers quantum physics or discrete mathematics, a good piece of writing will give you a sense of understanding and let you follow what the writer is trying to say. Whatever you wrote, if it can be read and understood by, say, a middle school student, then you are getting somewhere.

  • To the point

A well-written piece of writing doesn’t make you wait for the best part. It will tell you pretty soon what it will talk about and what argument or claim it is going to make.  All writing is communication. If your writing communicates badly, it fails. A good piece of writing achieves efficient communication between a reader and a writer. No matter how significant and brilliant your point is, if you don’t bring it out clearly and early enough, your readers will leave you with “tl;dr.”

  • Got something to say that matters.

A good piece of writing should have something to say that matters.  Writing is meaningful when it brings something new to the world or at least adds something new to what has been already written by others.

I personally hate reading things that just regurgitate what many people wrote already.  If I know what a piece of writing says and there is nothing new, unique, or interesting about it, reading it would be just a waste of time. Chances are, many things that are interesting to you are less so to others, and vice versa.  So it is a big red flag if you find yourself feeling blasé about your own topic.  It’s already hard work to make something that is fascinating to you interesting to others.  Turning something that bores you into something exciting to others is an impossible task. Save your time to write about something that matters to you and that you believe matters to others. Your passion and energy itself will immediately make your writing more powerful.

Ways to make your writing less terrible

We all begin with the intention to write something clear, readable, to the point, and that also offers something that matters to others. But most often, what trips us is the execution. Take it for granted that you will first write something terribly unclear, unreadable, and long-winded.  Don’t despair – everyone does it. There is no easy way to turn terrible writing into excellent writing overnight.  But here are some things that you can check off the list to make your writing “less terrible”.  And then you keep re-writing until it is “not so terrible.”

  • Do not write in the way your thinking took place.

I think the most common mistake in writing comes from writing in the same way we think. This leads to a disaster because the way we think and the way we write are very different, if not reverse. When we think, our mind wander in many different directions, get inspirations from many different sources, and make creative connections and associations that are not always logical. This is all good for brainstorming and getting ideas for writing. But if you start writing down things in the manner that they came to your mind, your readers will be clueless about what you are trying to say.

Think about it this way. When you are thinking, you are being an explorer trying to map a new route. When you are writing, you are being a sailor whose task is to explain to others the route to a certain destination, so that others can follow to get to the same place.  If you start your explanation of the route by the story of how you dreamed about sailing since your childhood or how you met your exploration crew, in no time you will lose your audience. If you start rambling on how you tried five routes to India and blabber on and on about each of the five routes, your audience who just want to get the information about the “fastest” route will be frustrated. Or even worse, they won’t be able to tell if you will ever tell them about the fastest route at some point!

So when you write, break down the elements of what you want to say into small bits. And then analyze and arrange them in a logical manner that a reader can easily follow. Do not pour out things that had filled your mind that led to what you want to say.

  • Make one single point stand out.

Check if the major point of your writing stands out.  If there are multiple major points, chances are, they won’t stand out because they interfere with one another.  As a writer, we are prone to think that there are many important points and that all of them are equally important. Why wouldn’t they, right?

But as a reader, we all know that we have limited time and attention.  If it is not a PhD dissertation, you do not have to cover every important thing that has to do with your topic.  By trying to cover more, you will be actually delivering less.  Focus on the most important point and deliver it in a way that readers cannot miss it even if they try.  By making the major point of writing stand out, clarity will almost always improve by itself.

  • Use only as many words as necessary.

There is nothing more dispiriting than reading a long piece of writing, the message of which could have been delivered in a much shorter form.  If your writing conveys the same thing with less words, it will be more powerful and make a greater impression to readers.  If you are writing with more words than necessary, your point will inevitably be watered down.

  • The matter of details

Details can be a deal maker; details can be a deal breaker. We want to stay away from the latter and employ only the former. But it is a fine line to draw. One key way to distinguish good details from bad details is looking at the flow of writing around where the detail is. If the two blocks of writing before and after the detail flow better without it, then by all means the detail is in the wrong place or unnecessary.  If the flow gets awkward without the detail, then you know that it is in the right place and making some contribution to the whole piece.

 Some obstacles to writing that we all know about

To me, the hardest part in writing is just getting to the point of writing.  I don’t know what it is, but when I have to write something, I find myself doing everything and anything but writing – cleaning, e-mailing, exercising, dog-walking, you name it. Although I have been suffering from this for a long time, I have not found a good solution to this.  The only thing that helps in my case is to pick a topic that is exciting and fascinating to me. Then my enthusiasm tends to overcome my resistance to writing.

The other obstacle to writing for me is the knowledge that my draft will be terrible, and I will know the badness of it as soon as I read it. Many times, I write something and I just can’t believe how badly it was written (yes, by me).  But there is no way to avoid this experience until you get reasonably better at writing.  I also suspect no matter how better you get, this feeling may still follow somehow.

So, there is no shortcut to writing well but to start writing and keep re-writing.  But hopefully, in that process, some of these things I do to make my writing less terrible would be helpful to you as well.

If you have other writing tips that work for you, please share! Heaven knows I can use them.

 

Tips for Everyone Doing the #codeyear

Jan 30th, 2012
by Bohyun (Library Hat).
2 comments

***   This post has been originally posted to the ACRL TechConnect blog.  ***

Learn to Code in 2012!

If you are a librarian interested in learning how to code, 2012 is a perfect year for you to start the project. Thanks to CodeAcademy (http://codeacademy.com), free JavaScript lessons are provided every week at http://codeyear.com/. The lessons are interactive and geared towards beginners. So even if you do not have any previous experience in programming, you will be able to pick up the new skill soon enough as long as you are patient and willing to spend time on mastering each lesson every week.

A great thing about this learn-how-to-program project, called #codeyear in Twitter (#libcodeyear and #catcode in the library-land) is that there are +375,443 people (and counting up) out there who are doing exactly the same lessons as you are. The greatest thing about this #libcodeyear / #catcode project is that librarians have organized themselves around this project for the collective learning experience.  How librarian-like, don’t you think?

Now, if you are ready to dive in, here are some useful resources.  And after these Resources, I will tell you a little bit more about how to best ask help about your codes when they are not working for you.

Resources for Collective Learning

Syntax Error: Catch the most frustrating bugs!

Now what I really like about #codeyear lessons so far is that some of the lessons trip you by trivial things like a typo! So you need to find a typo and fix it to pass a certain lesson. Now you may ask “How the hell does fixing a typo count as a programming lesson?”

Let me tell you. Finding a typo is no triviality in coding. Catching a similar syntax error will save you from the most frustrating experience in coding.

The examples of seemingly innocuous syntax errors are:

  • var myFunction = funtction (){blah, blah, blah … };
  • var myNewFunction = function (]{blah, blah, blah … };
  • for(i=0,  i<10, i++;)
  • var substr=’Hello World’; alert(subst);
  • –//This is my first JavaScript

Can you figure out why these lines would not work?  Give it a try! You won’t be sorry. Post your answers in the comments section.

How to Ask Help about Your Codes      

by Matteo De Felice in Flickr (http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3577/3502347936_43b5e2a886.jpg)

I am assuming that as #codeyear, #catcode, #libcodeyear project progresses, more people are going to ask questions about problems that stump them. Some lessons already have Q&A in the CodeAcademy site. So check those out. Reading through others’ questions will give valuable insight to how codes work and where they can easily trip you.

That having been said, you may want to ask questions to the places mentioned in the Resources section above. If you do, it’s a good idea to follow some rules. This will make your question more likely to be looked at by others and way more likely to be answered correctly.

  • Before asking a question, try to research yourself. Google the question, check out the Q&A section in the CodeAcademy website, check out other online tutorials about JS (see below for some of the recommended ones).
  • If this fails, do the following:
    • Specify your problem clearly.
      (Don’t say things like “I don’t get lesson 3.5.” or “JavaScript function is too hard” unless the purpose is just to rant.)
    • Provide your codes with any parts/details that are related to the lines with a problem.
      (Bear in mind that you might think there is a problem in line 10 but the problem may lie in line 1, which you are not looking.) Highlight/color code the line you are having a problem. Make it easy for others to immediately see the problematic part.
    • Describe what you have done to troubleshoot this (even if it didn’t work.)
      : This helps the possible commenter to know what your reasoning is behind your codes and what solutions you have already tried, thereby saving their time. So this will make it more likely that someone will actually help you. To believe it or not, what seems completely obvious and clear to you can be completely alien and unfathomable to others.

Some JavaScript Resources

There are many resources that will facilitate your learning JavaScript. In addition to the lessons provided by CodeAcademy, you may also find these other tutorials helpful to get a quick overview of JavaScript syntax, usage, functions, etc. From my experience, I know that I get a better understanding when I review the same subject from more than one resource.

If you have other favorite Javascript please share in the comment section.

ACRL TechConnect blog will continue to cover #libcodeyear / #catcode related topics throughout the year!  The post up next will tell you all about some of the excuses people deploy to postpone learning how to code and what might break the mental blockage!