 A couple of things, I think it should not go unnoted that there are more faculty here now than students, which is both a perhaps a good thing and perhaps also maybe not a good thing. But in terms of the good thing, this is the kind of discussion that I think we probably could build more take more into our monthly collaborations earlier on, especially in the beginning for lots of students because they're going to get a sense from faculty that things don't always go. The way they might have imagined, and it's also not a bad way for faculty to get to know each other a little bit better too, because we do our separate works and we don't have too many occasions wherein we find out a little bit about what each other has gone through in our own work. And so I'm not going to talk very much of my content, but some of the other, this can't help but be a little bit autobiographical in terms of the blind alleys that occur in the course of a career. So I wanted to share this with you. I'm a first generation person to graduated even high school in my family. And I think one of the things that I have discovered in some of the work that I've been doing on first generation student experiences, the degree to which it's very common for people from a first generation background to be very idealistic about the way that in which they approach their work as a professional. And so I refer here to this notion of vocational law, which is gaining some traction in critical areas of LIS, wherein librarians ideas and values and assumptions about themselves and their profession are inherent that the institution is inherently but sacred basically and therefore beyond critique beyond essential critique, not about little things around the edges but about essential critique this this notion of library exceptionalism, and I certainly drank deeply from that Kool-Aid as a first generation professional. And so, when I came to understand that the institution was not exceptional that all of the things that we experienced in society and other institutions are also present in the library. And that includes bad management, poor resource allocation, bad evaluation procedures and all the other things that can happen. And so I during the process of my doctoral work was really partly leaving the field. I had been so disenchanted because of my earlier romantic visions of what the institution should be that I was moving away. So I was going into history and I wasn't going to give a damn about libraries. And that turned out to be, I wouldn't say a blind alley, but perhaps a big fatal mistake, because had I continued or blended my history scholarship in graduate school and through my dissertation with library history. I'd be the dean of library history right now. There's only one other guy that really, one other man who a person who really does a lot of library history, and he's written only two books and I would have been been doing that as at least as much had I started as a library historian, but I refer back to my reconciliation here or my bad reconciliation with vocational law and the study of history so I went in another direction for a long time, and it cost me. So that's one blind thing. So, what are these people laughing about. And I asked here, do you remember parties. I don't know what they're laughing about. But what I do use this image for is to characterize how scholarship really supposed to work. Scholars don't simply arrive at a party and plop down their topics on the table. As questions or thesis, they don't just join up a group like this and start talking about their stuff. We just don't show up and say hey, nobody's talking about my topic so I'm just going to assert it. In the academic community, the party so to speak, first requires listening critically to what others have said first, and then making your contribution. And oftentimes, we are so enamored with our own concerns or our own interests that we just want to continue to assert our original question, assert our question or presumption, and we go on down the road trying to just cherry pick the evidence that fits our presumptions, about scholarship. When I was in graduate school, I read a very powerful urban history by historian Mike Davis called City of Courts about Los Angeles and he had this image in there that just profoundly struck me called the bum proof bus bench. And during the late eight mid 80s through the 90s through actually now. The first thing of hostile architecture was implemented throughout the city in lots of ways reflected and manifested in in street furniture, lots of different kinds of street furniture. And it really tweaked me when I was in graduate school and I was looking around for, remember I'm moving away from librarianship toward what am I going to study as a historian. I was gravitated toward a very info this very influential book, and this notion of what there must be history of street furniture and what does it say about public space. And so that was how I started off. Looking at notions of public space as reflected and manifested in in street furniture and of course you have this image here. It's a street roof, which means someone who's homeless, or even tired, can't really lay down to recline on it. And it's only one example of hostile street furniture and architecture, compared to the 1920s. When street furniture was viewed as a civic good. It was elaborate. It was specific to neighborhoods, each neighborhood had its own street standard and its own ornamental street lighting system. And they even fought about it and that's one of the things that I was able to study as a historian that the discourses that that fought between how street furniture was to reflect pedestrian public space in the metropolis of Los Angeles. And I was into lots of lots of primary sources there I got to look, sometimes even at old, not even museum but old storehouses of street furniture, including these light fixtures. And sometimes they let you keep the helmet. That's just a cute little thing I got to, I got to keep. So street furniture has become a very legitimate form or concept for for historians to look at. And this is a very famous light exhibit that appears at the LA County Art Museum now celebrating different notions of street furniture, and people get married in this in this space but my studies of space, it continually expanded backward and forward in time. And I've, I've pursued notions of political occupations of public space such as this example here at the easy Berkeley campus during the occupied movement, in which the University forbade tents from being on campus after dark. And so students floated tents by using helium field balloons. And so they floated the tents at night, and then brought them back down again during the daytime for the occupation. But this notion of spaces is very powerful, and I went back in history to study the ways in which GM factory workers struck during the during the Depression, all the way through of course the Occupy movement, and going forward. In terms of my own dissertation, I rather flipped the script rather than looking at what the literature was then looking at in terms of women and public space. I tried to imagine it in terms of working class public space I was asking a new question, based upon the party that I entered in urban history. And rather than looking at feminist public space I started looking at working class public space. The literature really wouldn't support that at the time. So I had to fall back into think about notions of working, I mean middle class public space, and that's where I got into the ornamentation of public street furniture and so on. So that was sort of a, not a blind alley, but it was an alley I learned to pursue as a historian based upon where the literature was at the time where the party was at the time when I arrived. And it's important my, I say I share that story because it's important to keep two things in your mind at the same time as you're going through a project like this. And that takes practice to learn how to do that. But you've got to keep the literature's current question or the problem, as we say in library science. What's the literature's current articulation of a problem that we're generally relating to our, in terms of our topic, as well as our own new question that we are asking. The more constant, they are constant in dynamic tension with one another. The more we read the secondary literature, the more the, the literature's question or problem changes a bit becomes more sophisticated more complex as should be our own question in relationship to it. It's not me just coming to the party and talking about my stuff. It's how it contributes to what the scholarship has been already studying. In the library spaces, once I got into our own faculty, and I needed to begin develop my own research body, body of research. I took the notion of space, and I applied it to the interiors of libraries, relative to a particular population in this case teenagers. And so, one of the blind alleys that I pursued as a practitioner, while also a graduate student. I was doing both of these things at once. I began to apply the notion of space and young adults to libraries. I started to edit a book, and I collected authors, and I got them to draft, and I got them to edit drafts, but I just didn't have time to close the deal. And I continued to feel badly about that because people spent time developing these chapters that they were practitioner articles so it's not as though people had gone out and collected actual data. They were sharing their experience and their enthusiasm, but they gave me their good faith efforts, and there were several edits that I'd asked for, and people went back and did them. And just, I was coming up on my, my oral exam, and my, my qualifying exams for my doctorate I just didn't have time to work, edit, and be a graduate student at the same time, and there's still a couple of people. Well, I'm not proud of this but there are a couple of people still in the field who are pissed off at me because I asked them to do these things and we never published the book. So that's something that's a definite. I don't call that a blind alley but that's something that didn't that I didn't finish. And it's stuff that other people gave me that wasn't finished. And that's a, that's certainly black mark on on my, my background. But these were the kinds of spaces these two images here were the kinds of spaces I was talking about trying to critique. On the right hand side, you can see the librarians commitment to eight and a half by 11 black print on white paper signs everywhere, attempting to somehow welcome young people into a space. And then on the left you can see the standard matching furniture that is supposed to be space for young people but of course I, I don't see how that reads young people in any, any way. Until I joined the faculty that I actually started gathering data and collecting analysis of literature that I was able to start producing other things that yielded difficulty, as we find in Carol Cluthal's ISP theory. I went through the same stages that everyone goes through and developing scholarly work. And I don't know if we ever get to the final, if I ever got to the final laughing stage but I went through all of these stages, and I go through them still with every new project. But at the conclusion of that project, I was able to bring something new to the field, which was young people involved in space design, and you can see that contrasting images here, of course, this is not a very good, these are not very lively images but this is what a lot of young people look like for a very long time. And now we're doing more of this. And I do say more as opposed to we're doing this because in most cases we're not, but we have some examples and they continue to leak out from time to time, where in young people have participated systematically in the meaningful contribution to the design of space, and now we're creating different kinds of spaces. A couple of months ago, Lily, our own Lily lower gave a presentation on collecting on obtrusive data and that's what historians do. We don't go out and survey people anymore typically we use data that has been collected and we refer to it as primary sources. So starting my dissertation, I was going, I just happened to be going to the library with a member of my cohort at the same time the same day same time Randy and I were walking in the library. And I remember the situation very distinctly Randy walked over to these big beautiful bound New York Times index volumes, and he looked up his topic he gathered his citations at the time this is how we get it by the way, paper and pens and stuff like that. So Randy took a long list of the, the articles that he wanted to go look up from the New York Times. I of course didn't do this, I was looking up the LA Times which didn't have a bound printed index, going back forever. The index that I had to look at was recorded on handwritten three by five cards that gave specific references to microfilm readings. So I had to go from the index card to the microfilm to the microfilm reader or in this case the microfeesh reader. And I had to read, I had to go and find the specific newspaper articles that way took me many more months. Then it took Randy to get his newspaper citation so the moral of the story is be Randy, and not me. So this is the, this is the kind of where I got stuck in terms of looking at the, the newspaper articles that I needed. So, several months ago, I took out to lunch, a professor I had when I was at Cal as a library school student. She told me that I was the only library school student ever to take a architecture theory class. I was retiring from Cal finally. And so I had lunch with her and I asked her this question, what do you feel you left on the table from your career. And her answer was quite startling to me, it was that she felt that the way that she was trying to get architects to design had utterly failed. She had a whole career, she had been all over the world, she's been published in published many books and many articles she's taught everywhere. But at the end of the day that she had not helped architects do better by the design principles that she was trying to advocate for and I, I felt badly about that for her but I think if we're trying to ask big questions, and trying to really impact the field with our work with our data, our analysis, we should be choosing something big, and we're not always going to feel as though we succeed. I for example feel that I have not been very successful in terms of getting libraries to imagine young people as design partners. I've been advocating it for 20 years I have data I have examples I've written published all that stuff but I don't feel I've been very successful that way so that could be viewed, at least as a part of partly failure. My current project though, I'm hoping to open the door for master's programs, specifically regarding their pedagogy to be more sensitive and knowledgeable about students social class backgrounds. We have a lot of discussion these days about DEI and rightfully so, but DEI almost never includes social class, and that is a identity concept that transcends all of the DEI categories plus more. So I'm hoping that my work will be able to do that that won't be. I'm hoping that it won't be a dead end, and then my biggest fear at this point in my own work is that my biggest project the project that I really that really must cap my career is a scholarly history of how libraries have served young people teenagers a history, a scholarly history, not just stories, not just anecdotes not just sharing my disappointment so to speak, but a real scholarly history based upon joining a party of history about young people. Where is that discussion. What is the big question coming out of that work, and then how can adding an examination of critical examination of library history change and improve that add that add to that body of knowledge about libraries are and and how we don't have dealt with young people over time. And I suspect that I'm going to not be very odd by our institutional contributions in that regard but I'm willing to let the data. Direct how I come up on that. So, there we are blind alleys. Don't finish everything as Mary's mom didn't say. There are ups and downs. There are big things to be done. But it's important to understand that for the moment that you are arriving with your dissertation. It should be the hottest thing on the block, because it's building upon a community of scholarship that you have analyzed. And it contributes new data and new analysis to a big question about what you're doing and about what the field, where the field should be going. I'm going to end it off to the next generation.