A Typical Day? I Wish… Or Maybe Not

I enjoyed my friend Michael Golrick’s attempt to paint out a “typical” day in his work life. I thought about doing the same, but I don’t have a typical day. Every week includes a few predictable activities, primarily reviewing the final version of the New This Week newsletter, and pressing the magic button that makes it go live. But every week is anywhere from a little to a lot different, probably the way Michael’s is, as well. Testing systems, giving presentations, reviewing invoices, haggling over contracts, debriefing staff and/or the board, talking to press, rewriting help pages… universal activities, I guess, but ever hard to pin down in a “typical” day.

My job has evolved over the last four years. I think about that a lot these days, as we get ready to make a major platform change. Librarian in Black recently featured a screen capture of the forthcoming site, and we’ve had a lot of preliminary positive feedback. I’m really eager to get us on the new system–in fact, we have to move by October 1, or the site hosting the old software will turn us off, so you can bet we’ll be moved one way or the other. Our new vendors are the bee’s knees. (We had been working with them in another role for a long time–the database we are using is theirs–so the transition has been simple and indeed, a bit of a relief.) What a joy it is to work with people who get it, who want to get it right the first time, and who take pride in what they do (sort of like us at MPOW, come to think of it).

When I first came on board back in September, 2001, MPOW was evolving from a rough and ready pioneer project to a stable library service. In those days, my job as director had many hours where I served as editor/content creator. I still get “down and dirty” and create a lot of content for short-notice special projects, such as Hurricane Katrina. But early on I decided I would focus on developing our services, improving our funding, and getting us onto a new software platform. It wasn’t that I don’t like finding and writing up websites, or editing descriptions; I do. But MPOW already has gifted and dedicated librarians who do that work, and frankly, they do it better than anyone else because they know their work so well.

So I wrote policies, style manuals, and procedures designed to make it easy for the team to do their job, so that if they had a question, in most cases, the documentation had anticipated and answered it. (This seems to be something I do at every job: document what gets done and who does it.) I also reorganized things slightly so that we now had a senior editor who had final editorial decision-making power over weekly activities. Development money was directed into supporting better division of roles and a smoother, easier workflow for our weekly activities–not just for creating and editing content, but organizing and maintaining it. Sort of like establishing a collection development department and then giving it tools to do its job.

I also stretched us into several experimental projects. One was with a really neat agency within the University of California. One was with a large public library. One was with an entire state. The first project continues, and it’s likely the third project will continue as well. All of this took (takes!) a lot of effort. Joint projects don’t fall off trees. When I talked to someone from another project about working with a well-known project that has been doing a lot of work with state agencies, she said “but then we would have to work with another organization.” I sympathise with the comment: it may sound facile, but in a small organization, the overhead in “collaboration” can overwhelm you, particularly if you factor in complex political organizations and their own internecine battles. On the other hand, it is a joy to work with organizations that believe in zeroing in on what they want with a minimum of cow manure.

Another thing I did was build the advisory board and develop the mission statement. A lot of people think mission statements are so much hoo-hah, yet another hoop to jump through to please the higher-ups. I saw our work in this area as essential clarifying activity. What exactly were we about? This was a very important question in 2002, when the dot-com-bomb hit California and chewed away a chunk of MPOW’s budget, as well. When the budget axe hits, the instinct is to begin gnawing off limbs as quickly as possible to get out of the trap. It’s harder to step back, look at everything, survey the users, and hold the long discussions that answer the question: what makes us who we are?

In MPOW’s case, by identifying our mission, it was easier to see what was extraneous or optional and what, even in the face of daunting budget problems, should be emphasized or even increased. We had one service that seemed awfully nice until I calculated that it would take 6000 hours a year to support it. It was either a boutique service offered to libraries “in the know,” or it was insupportable; and in either case, it didn’t relate well to the mission. We had other things we did that superficially appeared to be “money-savers,” but actually generated major overhead.

On the other hand, surveying our users, as we have done every year now since then, revealed some things we might have missed or deemphasized. How much they appreciated MPOW’s weekly newsletter–so much so that there is a significant contingent of users who do not use the website but cherish us entirely (and highly) for the mailing/RSS feed. How much they appreciated the quality of our content–an obvious point, you might think, but one that has driven quite a few internal decisions about what we do and how we do it. How much, in fact, our users see us as a service. That last point was one I have carried forward. To get very Zen, or possibly a little Cobain, all we are is what we are to our users. We aren’t any more or less than that.

So, sometime in the next week or shortly into the following, we will throw the master switch and move to a new system. The new design is simply a small part of that. I won’t miss the old design; it was intended to tide us over a few months, back in 2002, when it replaced a still-older design, and it looks increasingly dowdy and dated. I won’t miss the old system, either. But once in a while I might miss those early days, just a little bit, when we were still small and didn’t know what we meant to people. Or perhaps not.