Launched after a discussion with a passionate young librarian who cares. Please challenge, change, add to, subtract from, edit, tussle with, and share these thoughts.
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All technologies evolve and die. Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday.
You fear loss of control, but that has already happened. Ride the wave.
You are not a format. You are a service.
The OPAC is not the sun. The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system.
The user is the sun.
The user is the magic element that transforms librarianship from a gatekeeping trade to a services profession.
The user is not broken.
Your system is broken until proven otherwise.
That vendor who just sold you the million-dollar system because “librarians need to help people” doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about, and his system is broken, too.
Most of your most passionate users will never meet you face to face.
Most of your most alienated users will never meet you face to face.
The most significant help you can provide your users is to add value and meaning to the information experience, wherever it happens; defend their right to read; and then get out of the way.
Your website is your ambassador to tomorrow’s taxpayers. They will meet the website long before they see your building, your physical resources, or your people.
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to find a library website that is usable and friendly and provides services rather than talking about them in weird library jargon.
Information flows down the path of least resistance. If you block a tool the users want, users will go elsewhere to find it.
You cannot change the user, but you can transform the user experience to meet the user.
Meet people where they are–not where you want them to be.
The user is not “remote.” You, the librarian, are remote, and it is your job to close that gap.
The average library decision about implementing new technologies takes longer than the average life cycle for new technologies.
If you are reading about it in Time and Newsweek and your library isn’t adapted for it or offering it, you’re behind.
Stop moaning about the good old days. The card catalog sucked, and you thought so at the time, too.
If we continue fetishizing the format and ignoring the user, we will be tomorrow’s cobblers.
We have wonderful third spaces that offer our users a place where they can think and dream and experience information. Is your library a place where people can dream?
Your ignorance will not protect you.
Posted on this day, other years:
- City view, sunny day - 2010
- June, Spoon, Noon, Croon, Tune, & Sandy - 2009
- Ah, MPOW, I hardly knew ye... - 2008
- Tallahassee Event: An Evening of Drama with Drew Willard - 2007
- NASIG Presentation - 2007
- Don't Agonize, Get Busy - 2005
- The Un-Cola: Current Cites - 2005
- ALA offers Wireless for ALA Council, Staff - 2004
- MT Comment Registration Somewhat Funky - 2004
Can I get a hell, yes! here? I’m a recent graduate who has been wading into the entire Library 2.0/Web 2.0 dialogue and I have to say that this post encompasses a lot of what I’ve been mulling over and feeling lately. You’d think a lot of it would be common sense but it really does help to lay it out in black and white. I think it keeps the whole experience in perspective and makes what can often seem like a very overwhelming journey much more understandable and manageable. Kudos!
Loved it: portuguese translation at http://bib20.janjos.com/2006/06/a_biblioblogosfera_est_ao_rubr.php
Thank you/Obrigada!
Yes, yes, yes!
Can this please be printed and distributed to every librarian and every library school? Please?
Thank you for a wonderful post!
“Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday.” And it doesn’t take long. I remember how totally up-to-date Parker Posey sounded in Party Girl, explaining how to do internet searches with Gopher and FTP. Way back in 1995. Every librarian has seen that film, right?
I just love this. Translated to norwegian on Blogg og bibliotek (Blog and library): http://bloggbib.net/?p=75
Hello,
I liked it very much and translated it in Dutch. Without dictionaries though, so it might be a bit clumsy. Thxs for the post!
http://zbdigitaal.blogspot.com/2006/06/bibliotheek-20-24-stellingen-om-bij_05.html
The library as a flux, a transformative experience–more verb than noun.
Karen, can you explain more about the following points: “You are not a format, you are a service” and “If we continue fetishizing the format…” I want to make sure I understand what “format” means to you in those contexts. Thanks.
So much truth here!
Luke, I’m thinking about our traditional relationship with books. As a reader and writer, I’m a book lover. As a librarian, I need to be careful that my relationship with that object does not overwhelm or displace my relationship with the user I am serving.
Walt, I’ve always wanted to do a short film lit class for librarians, with Party Girl, Desk Set, and It’s a Wonderful Life.
Oh, and Takk and Danki for the translations!
Amen.
We need this in a poster form so we can go tack it onto the door of the church.
Thank you, thank you, thank you
I’ve printed this out in BIG letters and have it tacked to the wall of my office for all to see as they enter.
Karen-
This is one of the best library statements I have ever read. I’ve sent it to everyone I know including my board.
Jackie
This is great. As a current MLS candidate and someone who is new to the profession, these are exactly the kinds of thoughts that pass through my mind every day. Thank you for gathering this together in one place. I will be adding to it and spreading the word among my peers…Thanks!!
RE: “I’ve always wanted to do a short film lit class for librarians, with Party Girl, Desk Set, and It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Don’t miss Ann Seidl at ALA with
“Hollywood Librarian.”
Amen!
Wonderfully said!
Thank you.
Phyllis, I just read about the showing at ALA early this afternoon! Color me psyched to the max!
You are in the business of providing convenience.
(Not sure I get the OPAC/planet analogy. Now, if you had said that the OPAC is a black hole …)
“tack it onto the door of the church” … wasn’t the Reformation the first revolution started by a blog post?
Yes, and I’m not taken in by bull, either! 😉
Thanks, Karen! Your words are inspirational and I predict that this meme will become a classic!
The revolution will be blogged. And tagged, while we’re at it. And discoverable via search engines. It will have permalinks. And comments? Definitely allowed–nay, encouraged. Thanks.
Weblog-Surftipp des Tages: Free Range Librarian
Nachdem letzte Woche auf Karen G. Schneiders Artikelserie über OPACs bei ALA TechSource hingewiesen worden war, ist heute eine pauschale Empfehlung íhres persönlichen Weblogs sehr passend. In dessen aktuellem Beitrag The User Is Not Broken: A meme masq…
and the french translation is here: http://klog.hautetfort.com/archive/2006/06/06/l-usager-n-est-pas-obsolete.html
The card catalog s*******? The only thing lacking with the card catalog (as is the case today) is sound instruction on how to use it and its many facets. Which is more desirable, browsing the stacks hoping beyond hope that something valuable will fall off the stacks and fill your need, or throwing a keyword into a browser and hoping beyond hope that you will find something valuable which satisfies your need, or going about your bibliograhic inquiry in a structured fashion?
Let’s all jump on the trendy bandwagon and give the users what they want…only tomorrow to be met with something else they want, and tomorrow, and tomorrow ….
Added to the bulletin board in the breakroom. As another “passionate young librarian”, this has managed to encapsulate a lot of the things I’ve been trying to say in a very clumsy manner myself. Kudos.
A possible addition: Librarians are their own worst enemy. We will become obselete if we continue to make ourselves irrelevant.
Merci, Clotilde! Justin, very Pogo of you–how I agree. Laura, did you know I had a Techsource post about the NCSU implementation of Endeca (about how the OPAC was made much more useful with a search engine layered on top) called The Revolution will be Folksonomied?
I have forwarded this to my marketing class at the University of Alberta Library school and put it on the agenda for tomorrow’s discussion. We have been talking about how to change the library instead of changing the user, and this will notch the conversation up a level, thanks.
Thanks, Margaret; I’d love to hear what students would add/change about this list (and I bet many others would as well). If they blog or write somewhere online about it, drop a comment here pointing FRL toward it!
Giving users what they want is trendy? Great! Libraries should be trendy! I mean, why wouldn’t they be? Why wouldn’t they change with the times? And if libraries aren’t giving users what they want…what the heck are the giving anyone?
Not a librarian, just a reader (who voted yes on Prop 81 this morning, btw) but I loved the card catalog! I’m in the Contra Costa library district and it is awesome, particularly the intra-library book availability, but I miss the card catalog. If I don’t spell an author’s name exactly right it won’t pop up in the web site search. The card catalog was more forgiving and much easier to find books in the same category.
OTOH, I didn’t have to file the new cards into it. I believe I thought they were put there by elves.
“Let’s all jump on the trendy bandwagon and give the users what they want…only tomorrow to be met with something else they want, and tomorrow, and tomorrow ….” 🙂
YES! That would be the point EXACTLY. (except it’s not realy a trend, it’s a good business plan!)
Give them what they want and watch them come back, again and again.
“OTOH, I didn’t have to file the new cards into it. I believe I thought they were put there by elves.” Ah, you have found us out 🙂
You raise an interesting point about the card catalog having higher error tolerance in some respects. I agree with you that our online catalogs should not be SO DOGGONE HARD TO USE and so completely unforgiving. I am the sort of library user who will look for “Brunch at Tiffany’s” or misspell ‘Capote’. There’s no reason for an online catalog not to help the user with that kind of problem. That’s part of what I’m getting at when I write about the system being broken until proven otherwise, and the user not being broken. Your expectations are perfectly reasonable and a fairly low bar for current technologies. If cars were that hard to drive we’d all still be on horses!
“Let’s all jump on the trendy bandwagon and give the users what they want…only tomorrow to be met with something else they want, and tomorrow, and tomorrow ….”
on sarcasm: Yes! Forget those pesky user with their pesky inconsistent needs. My library is stocked only with what I want in the format I want it in. And the users had sure as hell better like it!: off sarcasm
And there’s absolutely no reason why an OPAC can’t be as forgiving of misspellings as Amazon or Google. Or for blog comments to not let me put on sarcasm/ off sarcasm in HTML! 🙂
This is an inspiring statement – although I would add one other sentence:
“If you chuck it out it isn’t there when the next reader wants it.”
Now that you mention it, yes, I do remember “The Revolution Will Be Folksonomied.” Good stuff. If only I could get the folksonomy of my brain to wire together a little more tightly at times. . . .
The User is not broken
You better believe it. These and other wise words in an interesting post from Karen Schneider over the weekend. The post takes the form of a list of statements, the vast majority of which it must surely be almost…
I enjoyed the post and have been encouraging a similar persepective (when possible!!) for years. It is astounding that the suggested spellings offered by Google and others is not a feature in our online catalogues and you’re absolutely right that it takes almost longer than the life of a new technology for libraries to adopt them. Ah, well, despite these difficulties, change does come. Still, it has always made me wonder why most library environments would rather spend an eon discussing an idea–particularly the possible difficulties which might arise if the idea becomes reality–rather than just giving things a go. I wonder if it’s endemic in the personalities that tend towards the profession? Not sure. And, having said this, there ARE many exceptional libraries and librarians out there who dive in and work for the user. The trick might be getting them altogether in one place…he he.
All technologies evolve and die. Every technology you learned about in library school will be dead someday.
I spent several classes learning to use command based systems in library school. The year I graduated, almost every single one of them introduced a web based interface.
If we continue fetishizing the format and ignoring the user, we will be tomorrow’s cobblers.
Does anyone have a good, friendly, non-jargony sounding word for a generic library item that doesn’t imply format? Something to avoid the laundry list of things you can search for in an OPAC, for instance. (“Search for books, videos, audio tapes and disks, kits, government documents, ebooks, websites, etc.”)
Part of the problem is language.
A major problem with ILSs is that their primary customers are librarians. If ILS development was driven by users who took their business and money elsewhere, the average ILS would look like Googlezon. 🙂
“The average library decision about implementing new technologies takes longer than the average life cycle for new technologies.” Hear, hear!! Organizations are so very slow to move. Users and their needs are zipping past us.
Overall, some solid, strong points to consider.
Two small critiques…
I wish you’d written this with we statements instead of you. As is, the use of you sets my teeth on edge a bit.
Also, I understand your point on this, but the phrasing of it bothered me: You are not a format. You are a service.
I’d much prefer We are not format providers. We are service providers. Even sticking with you, I’d prefer You are not a format provider. You are a service provider. Not as catchy, to be sure, but more humanizing.
“You fear loss of control, but that has already happened. Ride the wave.â€
She is right-on target about a lot of things, too glib and simplistic about others. The above quote sounds “real zen,†but supports the main problem of our society: the technological imperative to change as a mode of totalitarianism. Three things to think about, the third in the form of a quote:
-There may be people at top controlling that wave. They may be manipulating the appearance of certain waves through filters. The wave – or meme, to use an all too convenient euphemism – may be a media simulation or distortion. The people at the top, who may be controlling the waves, may have less than pure motives.
-That the book is a also a technology that may die is not necessarily a good thing. Not all new technologies replacing the old have been good for our mental and physical health — nor good for the mental health of our societies and the physical health of our planet.
-“A dead thing can go with the stream; only a living thing can go against it.”
– GK CHESTERSON
Elena, your point about POV is interesting. I chewed over that and even asked myself that question. If I had to repitch this meme I might do it like that. “You” is a challenging point of view to write from.
I also tussled (very briefly–I wrote this in 45 minutes or less, not really sure) with “you are not a format.” I don’t think “You are not a format provider” is quite there–I’m not quite willing to relinquish prose to accuracy–but recasting that line might help.
Adam, it’s kind of interesting to read about myself in the third person on this blog (she said to herself, sipping ginger ale…). I’m not sure books are dying, at least not in my generation. I do wish the typical monstrously ineffective OPAC–introduced as state of the art technology for many librarians–would die, die, die, sooner than later, too–and it is our job to help its death along.
Karen, I liked this. There’s a whole buncha t-shirts in there just waiting to be cafe-pressed 😉 I am not a librarian (although, as an IS manager I once had responsibility for a library) but my wife is and I read this out loud to her, but had to wait for her gales of recognition laughter to subside so that I could finish it.
To Adam: a book is not made of paper. Books will not die, but their format is changing. And GKC was not God, he only thought he was. While a live thing can struggle against the current, it will only do so to get somewhere the world has already been – the smart thing is to go with the flow toward the future and make sure you’re able to handle whatever may bob to the surface.
Cheers
mark
Without disagreeing when it comes to service issues, let’s be sure our exuberance about trendy user-centered ideas doesn’t lead us to forget what libraries do (and that other info sources don’t do).
The posted comments are almost exclusively about two elements in the equation: the user(s) and the service (and library staff who provide service). What is not prominent here is the collection, which is why the service exists, to serve the user.
There were libraries before librarians: our profession came into being to connect users with collections more effectively. There is plenty of information out there that is very user-centric in the sense that it’s “all about” easy delivery (but often not about content): TV was the pinnacle of that world for a while, and not it’s the internet, which is increasingly being commercialized to resemble a bigger better TV wasteland.
Expenses for services compete with expenses for content. Sometimes you can’t have it all. Which is worse: good delivery, inferior content; or inferior delivery, good content? Arguable: but the latter is a library, and the former is not. So choose wisely.
The collection also imposes its demands, not just the users. When our collections were paper, those demands meant “come to the library building.” Today, the demands imposed by collections are about copyright holder rights, licensing issues, authorization of users, oligopolies among publishers, and high costs. If librarians ruled the world, these would fade away, but we don’t: we are constrained to deliver what is on the market. The design of our Web sites, the rules that annoy our users, and the difference between a collection vs the Web are among the results.
“Let’s all jump on the trendy bandwagon and give the users what they want…only tomorrow to be met with something else they want, and tomorrow, and tomorrow ….”
on sarcasm: Yes! Forget those pesky user with their pesky inconsistent needs.
WANTS and NEEDS are two different things! Think about it! A student has to write an English essay on assisted suicide. She comes to the desk and says, “I want the chemical formula for cyanide”. You, with all your education about what would better serve the patron, are going to hand her the chemical formula for cyanide? You have met her “want”. She goes away happy. You are trendy, so you are happy. But, have you met her “need”?
Why did we spend so much time getting our education, just to give current students short shrift in their quests? Educate them! Teach them how to formulate a logical question about what they NEED, before they start casting their nets, by throwing keywords all over the place. Then TEACH them how to search the BEST way (as your education and experience has taught you). Then teach them how to evaluate their hits. It’s far easier to evaluate 10 hits as the result of a carefully considered and well constructed search, than it is to wade through the millions of hits as the result of indiscriminate keyword searching. They don’t have the time or patience for that. Why not teach them to spend 5 minutes on the front end defining what they NEED, rather than 60 trying to sort through to locate something they WANT? Be trendy if you want. But are you really furthering education and scholarship?
A professional colleague and good friend of mine referred to this meme in a speech yesterday. I wonder if “Service trumps format” sums up the line people are discussing?? (Not in the “donald” sense, but in the card-playing sense.)
Karen, I mostly agree with what you’ve said. The one section I take exception to is the one about tomorrow’s taxpayers meeting the web site before they meet building, resources or people. I work for a library council, not in an building, but I have two young children and live in an urban (majority low-income) district. The “future taxpayers” here use the public library heavily before they can even type on a keyboard. Older kids use it as a safe haven after school where they can study, socialize and have encouraging adult contact. Most, I would guess, have never visited the library’s web site. (no computers at home, one in a classroom, too few in the library). Yes, the systems need to work, but sometimes I think we librarians often lose sight of the importance of place and an inviting staff. A warm place that welcomes users of all sorts can overcome the obstacles of clumsy tools and systems. This is especially true for the younger set, no matter how much we hear they are enamored with technology. In practice, they mostly want a place where they are treated as important citizens in the community. And, if we have the will, we can change the way we treat patrons a lot more quickly and cheaply than we can change systems!