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Riffing on Roy

Monday, February 21, 2011
Roy Tennant, WilsWorld edition

Roy Tennant, WilsWorld edition

Roy Tennant just posted a marvelous set of advice for new(er) librarians in Library Journal.  To riff on his points, allow me to remind my Gentle Readers of my post about mentoring from 2008 (and if you liked that post, also see this one, about how mentoring was key to restoring my faith in myself during a rough time).

Tiny Objection: Roy says he hasn’t had time for what he calls the “pain” of “governance” (ALA committee work), and yet his first piece of advice is to find “fellow travelers.” Roy, not surprisingly, has forged his own path and peer groups independent of complex organizations; that’s one of his gifts. But we aren’t all Roys.

If ALA serves any core value at all to new librarians, it is to give them a place to build peer relationships, learn teamwork, find out what they value in their peers, and mingle with people who are at various places in their professional lives.  This is truer than ever before, thanks to our ability to connect in almost-real-time with librarians worldwide.

Tiny Observation: I say this in my 2008 post, but let me reiterate that it’s key for bosses to understand that they nearly always cannot be a real mentor to their own employees, nor can they find these relationships for their staff. Bosses can coach, lead, inspire, guide, and encourage, but mentoring is something else altogether.

What bosses CAN do is…

  • Encourage the activities that lead to mentoring opportunities — even if you’re broke, there are many opportunities. You just have to find them;
  • Be mentors to others outside their organizations — to sharpen their self-awareness of what their own staff are going through (and no matter how good you are, that adjustment phase is hard, just as it is for any job); and,
  • Be the best boss you can be — which is something I’m focusing on these days, since it is part and parcel of my goal to have MPOW become the best small private library in California.  Part of my journey is through a workbook called “Be a Great Boss,” which was gifted to me by a librarian colleague. This book has a Facebook group as well (closed–not sure why) and I’ve just posted my first week’s efforts.

P.S. One last must-read: Linda Absher’s post about what makes librarianship worthwhile (spoiler alert: because we’re all about continuity, sharing, empathy, and long term preservation of the cultural record).

Filed in Librarian Wisdom, Librarianship | | Comments (6)

Random Acts of Trendness

Saturday, February 12, 2011
Smith-Corona Classic 12, by Flickr user mpclemens

Smith-Corona Classic 12, by Flickr user mpclemens

I promised that post-ALA I’d sketch up some technology trends I have observed, to complement the trendsetting discussions held elsewhere, such as LITA’s Top Tech Trends.

“The Big Shift.” I had a number of mini-conversations with respected colleagues where we agreed that the adoption of ebooks and the shift from DVD to streaming was happening faster than even we anticipated. Netflix now streams more than it rents, the Kindle is no longer a novelty and has serious competition, and there are multiple publishing streams.

I am personally considering republishing my published essays as a Kindle or Google Books collection.  (I remember proposing this to an agent in Florida in 2009, who stared at me uncomprehendingly.)

For me, the Big Shift also has a hugely literal component: the shifting of books from libraries to offsite storage, and the shifting of library space use from housing low-use, just-in-case print materials to supporting individual and community information behaviors, pedagogical, creative, entertainment-oriented, exploratory, etc.

The “literal shift” is being enabled by the print repository movement, which is finally trickling into mainstream higher-ed awareness; it even made the Chronicle of Higher Ed last week. In anticipation of the ability to move materials offsite, I’ve been moving the pieces on this board by having our library join OCLC, implementing interlibrary loan (yes, I know, party like it’s 1977… we’re behind on our developmental markers), and implementing OCLC’s Navigator and express-van delivery for our Camino service (ok, now we’re ahead of most of you). That, and oodles and oodles of grim sloggy work, a lot of it still ahead of us, to ensure that all of our books are in OCLC.

Oh, and when anyone asks me about compact shelving, I reply, repositories. A far better investment. The print we keep will be display-worthy, the sort of books to showcase on bookstore-style gondolas with handsome endcap treatment, not to stuff into ponderous, expensive “compact” [sic] shelving with all the appeal of prison housing.

I’ve been talking about regional repositories in general, and WEST specifically, ever since I spent two weeks traveling through Australia in 2008 with repository guru Lizanne Payne.

Listening to her, I had that same “ah hah” moment I’ve had a few other times in my library career, like the first time I brought up Mosaic on my home computer and got the TCP-IP stack to work, and when a huge NASA image of Jupiter appeared on my screen I was so excited I had to leave the house and drive for an hour just to calm down. I haven’t shouted “squee” over repositories (not the same sex appeal), but as noted above, I’m getting ready for them.

I’m now going to let you in on a dirty little secret. I was asked the other day by a library student why I would shift materials offsite rather than rigorously weed them first. Yes, we do weeding, but it’s a bare smidgen compared to the size of the collection, even after weeding 6,000 volumes through last May and a few more hundred since then.

The answer is I will never have enough expert labor to weed our collection top to bottom, let alone do the sort of collection analysis to determine if I’m taking responsible “last copy” actions with our materials. I run a university library with 4.0 FTE, forcryinoutloud. Even if our workforce doubled, I wouldn’t direct its efforts in that direction, not when I could wrinkle my nose, Elizabeth-Montgomery-style, and make the books move offsite (well, it may take a teensy more than that).

Yes, I am foisting hard decisions on another generation. But I write this so that anyone studying the repository movement knows the reasoning and motivations of at least one library with skin in this game.

Wifi saturation. Our institutions cannot keep up with the thirst for wifi. I have observed a mini-trend where universities are reverting to wired usage wherever connectivity is critical (see notes to this Flickr trip report for UC Merced). As Donald Barclay noted in MPOW’s visit to Merced,  people are wandering around armed with multiple mobile devices, many of which are wifi-enabled, many of which are always on, and which are sucking ever-more-intensive webpages (my language, not his…).

Elsewhere people have commented on the surge in tablet use; Jason Griffey noted in a post-midwinter webinar that the Consumer Electronics Show featured over 40 tablets. The New York Times recently reported on the surge of e-readers by young adults. In addition to using actual data (“At HarperCollins, for example, e-books made up 25 percent of all young-adult sales in January, up from about 6 percent a year before”), this article was notable for not even attempting to debunk the trend in ebook readers, which assuredly would have happened ten or even three years ago.

My hunch, down the line (and I doubt this is a unique observation), is that we will all end up being our own personal networks; cellular speeds or other technologies will allow us self-contained connectivity. The person with an iPad with 3G is essentially a network unto herself.

I recently traveled shoulder-to-shoulder with Alison Head (of Project Information Literacy fame), and we were a walking ad for iPad + 3G; we’d be in an airport and she’d be surfing and I’d be sitting there, wishing I could get online and begging to use her IPad. (My observation: an iPad with wifi is a toy; an iPad with 3G is a tool.)

Laptops. Yeah, you’re thinking, what’s new about that? First, and simply, is the trend line, relentlessly moving upward. We surveyed our incoming freshmen and found that 89% have laptops–a surprisingly high figure, based on our anecdotal observations.

The assumption has been that our students are “poor” and don’t have laptops. What’s going on, I suspect, is infrastructure and workflow: the need for electrical power, ubiquitous (and always-reliable, ever-faster) wifi; and the logistics of toting a “mobile device” for 14 hours a day, to and from work, school, and so forth–lugging it, protecting it, worrying about where to secure it (I’ve seen a number of libraries that offer lockers, some with power built-in; Loyola Marymount, for example). We have wifi, but the demand on it is great; and students are now using resources that simply aren’t useful without network connectivity.

Another assumption is that laptops are still viewed as mobile devices. Compared to the computer in Desk Set, yes. Compared to tablets such as iPads, they now seem pretty bulky. I wonder if laptops are the new PCs (or even the new Smith Coronas–remember going off to school with your typewriter)?

In any event, for the people who are carrying their Smith Coronas with them (and when we cleaned the processing room I found a “portable” microfilm reader; how cool is that?) what I am seeing on many  site visits to libraries academic and otherwise (including a whirlwind tour to Lafayette Public a week or so ago) is a shift from providing computers to providing ancillary support for mobile technology: at minimum, comfortable study areas and desks with power, and large monitors with VGA cables (for MPOW we’re pondering dual-VGA cables, labeled Mac and PC, with a MacBook VGA adapter taped to one cable). A variety of tables, a variety of seating, a variety of study rooms, and plenty of food.

Most libraries are still providing computers, and for many public libraries they are necessary lifeline services, but for academic libraries and public libraries where the population is more affluent, the days when every available table and network drop was occupied by a library-provided computer — and when the bulk of purchasing was devoted to these computers — is a ship that has sailed.

I should end this post with a flourish, but I’ll just have to wrinkle my nose and post it (Darren and Tabitha are calling).

Filed in Librarianship, Top Tech Trends | | Comments (9)

In Praise of Succeeding

Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Torture irons on the ship SUCCESS (LOC)

Torture irons on the ship SUCCESS (LOC)

Last weekend on Twitter I saw a post:  “Tell me your favorite books on failing and failure, especially as it relates to innovation and leadership.”  I responded with this comment: “another blog post I don’t have time 2 write: how failure is overrated, & often confused w iterative design.”

I got up a little earlier than usual this on Monday (thanks to a cat who was licking my face) and decided to see if I could succeed (as in, not fail) at a 20-minute post on this topic. Cindi Trainor does a good job of capturing some of my thoughts, but I wanted to paraphrase/amplify, if only in the spirit of chiming in. I’ll use my writing experience to add crunchy bits of flavor and texture.

I know the conversations about failure are intended to get us comfortable with owning up to the idea that we don’t always succeed, and that if you don’t break a few eggs, you’ll never make an omelette (or something). That’s terrific. But let’s be clear that succeeding is personally and professionally more rewarding than failing. The delta is the difference between how I feel when I get a rejection letter and how I feel when I get that magic email or phone call that an essay has been accepted for publication.

Furthermore, claiming you’re comfortable with failure is dangerous if what you’re really doing is being uncomfortable with iterative design and group input. Don’t give up too early in the design process, and for God’s sake, set your vanity aside and let others help you. A good idea may need tuning; it will nearly always need iteration, particularly after it’s been tested in anything like a functioning environment.  If you love your idea, if you think it’s valid, you owe it more than one try.

(I cannot tell you how many times, late in the survey design process, I have to insist that yes we DO need to test the survey one more time–and I’m talking about surveys I’ve designed, not others. You don’t get a do-over once you launch a survey, just like you get one chance to submit an essay to a literary journal. That last 10% of effort separates good from great.)

Invention usually comes from individuals (a point Roy Tennant has made more than once), but it takes a village to bring ideas to life. One phenom I’ve observed in work organizations here and there is discomfort with feedback, coupled with the mistaken idea that input on a design immediately voids the value of the original creator’s effort. My guess is this stems from how we approach higher education these days, which is to emphasize individual achievement–a very artificial model.

I have heard workers say, “Well, I can’t take credit for this idea, because others helped me.”  I acknowledge all the people who help me with my own writing, but in the wee small hours of the morning, it’s me and my keyboard, revising my essay. It’s still your idea, even if someone told you it would be better off purple, not green.

I’ve also observed workers losing interest in an idea once they received feedback on it. Absolutely we want to acknowledge people who participated in making an idea come to life. But it doesn’t negate the value of the original idea.

My first semester in the MFA program, back in 2004, I observed one very smart, skilled writer dropping out of the program within weeks of starting. My take then (never voiced, just pondered) was that this  person could not cope with the very radical level of feedback provided in the workshop environment. This writer liked the idea of “succeeding,” writer-style — to see a work improved enough to be ultimately published — but was not able to handle what success actually required.

My suspicions were further solidified several years later, when I was running a writers’ workshop in Florida and two new members were introduced who unsettled the group for several months through their discomfort with feedback. Needless to say, neither would-be writer had much success getting anything published. But their unhappiness with anything less than glowing confirmation of their writing skills translated into disruptive behavior that threatened the very core of the group. Fortunately, this kind of person is at heart a quitter, and quit they did, before we had to take the final steps to “evict” them.

Are you declaring failure too early  because you’re pain-averse? Almost never have I observed a writing workshop where feedback was intended to kill a writing idea, but the best feedback is necessarily painful–excruciating, I-hate-myself, I-suck, I-am-not-a-writer, pound-the-steering-wheel-all-the-way-home painful.

A writer submitting a manuscript to her peers believes deep down that this will be the time when the other writers say, “This work is perfect.” A writer needs to think that this response is possible; it’s what forces you to give your all to a manuscript for hundreds or thousands of hours upon end only to share it with other people whose role it is to tell you what works, but also, what doesn’t work. A writer may spend thousands of hours on a manuscript only to be told by trusted peers that it needs overhauling top to bottom, or hundreds of pages need to be tossed, or that second-person-omniscence really isn’t working, or magical realism doesn’t belong in a recipe collection. But a writer who wants to succeed will subject herself to the process willingly, fully aware that pain lies ahead.

By the way, if you think most good ideas, or literary works, are extracted in the space of a long afternoon, think again.  Most writers have to curl their hands and breathe shallowly when people say, “Oh yeah, I keep meaning to take a day and write a short story,” and only fantasies about this person’s comeuppance help us survive these moments. (Anne Lamott said it better in Bird by Bird, which should be required management reading; note that her subtitle is Some Instructions on Writing and Life). A long afternoon is about how much time it takes to produce five paragraphs, four and a half of which will soon end up on the cutting-room floor, with or without your workshop’s help (since the purpose of a workshop is to gradually build the governor in your brain that does their work for you), so that the remainder can be revised ten times over.  The same is true of the execution of nearly any good idea.

Finally, the failure may not be in the idea, but how it is introduced and managed. A good idea needs curation: coordination, timing, communication, care and feeding, iteration. Someone tweeted Lombardi’s truism that winning isn’t everything, it’ s the only thing. I don’t buy that, because I’ve learned a lot from good ideas that I couldn’t bring to life (and also because it’s heartless). But you can’t win/succeed/not-fail if you aren’t willing to accept that the response to your great idea may be that it can’t be executed the very minute you think it up and without any modification or coordination. In an organization with the resources to execute ten good ideas, the eleventh idea either has to bump something else off the table, or it will have to wait.

Patience, grasshopper. “Not now” is not the same as “no.”  Sometimes a great idea needs to wait its turn; sometimes it is simply precocious, and in a year will be timely. Other times, a great idea has lost its prime moment and needs to be left behind on the altar of things that could have happened in an alternate universe. You’re all the better for having had a great idea; there will be many more.

Yes, winning is part of it, but learning how to win is even bigger. I didn’t complete this post on Monday; I had to get to work, and it wasn’t done. It was better to let it marinate a day while I forged on to other things. It’s still not much as far as writing goes–it’s a hasty blog post, not an essay in the New Yorker, and my expectations for it are low.  The essay I worked on for an hour and a half early this morning, on the other hand, will take many more hours to reach its first draft, and I will willingly break my heart ten times over, shredding the essay to pieces, reconstituting it, spending sunny days staring at a screen, to see it succeed.

Filed in Librarian Wisdom, Life, Uncategorized, Writing | | Comments (10)

Change Management Ideas Solicited

Friday, January 21, 2011
Change by alexlc13, on Flickr

Change by alexlc13, on Flickr

In February I’m giving a talk to medical librarians that explores these questions:

  • How do we know when and what to let go?
  • What are the ingredients to effective change management?
  • How do we inspire buy-in from those we work with and from our key stakeholders?

I would add this final point that has arisen In Light Of Recent Events:

  • How do we recognize and respond to strategic moments?

This is one of those cases where I feel the audacity of addressing these questions. Do I really know the answers, even in part? I have led change from time to time, but have I done it well, and and have I learned from the experiences, particularly the bad ones?

Then it occurred to me that change is like eating: everyone does it. So I turn back to you, gentle readers. What do you say?

(Yes, it has occurred to me that I have had recent experience with a kerfuffle that was almost entirely about change management from every possible angle. For the wisest observations and best roundup of other posts, see Michael Golrick, and no, I’m not just sending you there because he liked my post–he raised the “strategic moment” issue that needs greater attention and that I didn’t address.)

By the way, Brad, I’m really hoping you chip in with some observations on Evergreen.

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Armadillos on Fire: Revisiting ALA’s Open Meeting Policy

Friday, January 14, 2011
Claire the Armadillo, courtesy Houston city gov.

Claire the Armadillo, courtesy Houston city gov.

Last Saturday at the LITA board meeting, board member Jason Griffey set an armadillo on fire and let it loose in the room. I watched in amazement as board members (metaphorically) leapt on chairs and screamed.

The armadillo was ALA’s open meeting policy, and the fire was Jason opening his MacBook and streaming the proceedings to the world at large.  Within minutes the fire was put out, when board members voted to request that Jason kill the streaming. Jason complied.

Several of us continued Tweeting the proceedings; there were complaints about this as well, directed to No One In Particular but obviously pointed at us. But if the membership ain’t free to write about what happens at an open meeting, we’re in gulag territory, so I played dumb. Elsewhere librarians have observed that complaining about tweeting after voting to kill the stream was disingenuous.

In general, it’s a bad idea to surprise your boss or your board. If you’re doing this routinely, you aren’t a maverick; you simply lack the skill or discipline to communicate and coordinate. To use an mnemonic the team I was on cooked up  at Squadron Officer School back in the day, Purple Oranges Don’t Cause Cancer: responsible action requires planning, organizing, delegating, coordinating, and communicating.

However, an organization that routinely streams other open meetings should not be startled when, in 2011, the camera shows up at their proceedings. Frankly, the board was not prepared for virtual participation, which in 2011 is all wrong for an organization where the “T” means technology. Streaming (thankfully) isn’t new to LITA;  LITA’s Top Technology Trends was streamed the next day, as it has been for a while, and I don’t know that anyone complained. You’re going to reply, but that’s a program! No, my friends, at Midwinter, we don’t HAVE programs, remember? TTT at Midwinter is an open meeting. Check the schedule.

Boards rely on trust relationships, and the generational disconnect between Jason’s action and the board’s reaction didn’t build that trust. But I will swear by Ranganathan that Jason wasn’t trying to pull a fast one. The board may also think I was invited just for this event–which I was not. When I realized Jason was streaming, I vaguely thought “That’s cool,” and my brain moved on.

That is exactly the response I have had in describing the incident to people:

Me: The LITA board was being streamed…

Person: Oh yeah? That’s cool…

Me: Um…

Ironically, at Sunday’s Top Technology Trends, none of the Trendsters commented on streaming as a trend, which could mean it isn’t novel enough to mention. (Or it could mean that the trends were generally a bit cerebral, save those of Monique; it was a good discussion, but I will share my own, far more sublunary trends in a day or two.)

At the meeting, the board tried to retrofit its reaction, reasoning that there was a consultant presenting copyrighted material.  But that assumes that there is some middle ground for open meetings where they are open to the people in the room but not to ALA members elsewhere. The policy does not establish or even mention such a middle ground, though it is one that has been long-assumed by some members.

On the other hand, the complaints on Twitter that the stream should have been left wide open are a bit naive about current ALA open meeting policy. I’m not defending the wording, but as it stands, meetings at conferences are open to registered attendees. You might find this absurd or restrictive, but in its time, this was part of a broad series of reforms. Well before my time, in the late 1960s, there was an “ALAgate” that had to do with… open meetings. The more things change…

Anyhoo, the Open Meeting policy has obviously been OBT (Overcome By Technology). Also, the Incident of the Armadillo Engulfed in Flames has surfaced something even more  intriguing, which is that all of that maverick-y streaming of routine work done by divisions such as ACRL, YALSA, RUSA, etc. (organizations that unlike LITA are not hemmoraging members and revenue) is technically out of compliance with ALA policy. You’ve All Been Breaking The Law!

I am not advocating cease-and-desist. In fact, based on the numbers, OBT lawbreaking appears to be key to fiduciary health; allowing for the impact of a very bad economy, the “streamers” are doing better overall than the “meatwares.”

However counterintuitive to the people who count nickels, the more you open your proceedings, the healthier your organization (which is in line with a finding from the Task Force on Electronic Meeting Participation–more about that below–that there is a correlation between the rise of member access to technology and increased attendance at ALA conferences).  If that’s the case, and we all agree that ALA is itself a higher good, then particularly after ALA’s recent fiscal troubles, it’s clear that the law needs to be brought into line with good practice.

ALA as a body needs to immediately point its wonkiest law-making committees at the “open meeting” question, and the response — which needs to happen no later than Annual 2011 — needs to be both informed by ALA values (such as our historical commitment to intellectual freedom) and by our urgent need to stop losing money.

We began to explore the definition of open meetings on the Task Force on Electronic Meeting Participation (hi Janet!), but even less than five years ago, our concern was not that streaming needed to be limited, but that ALA didn’t have the resources to make it widely available.

At the time, it seemed impossible to imagine that within five years a member could bring fairly standard personal technology to a meeting and use it to share the meeting with the world.  I think our points about Midwinter were (and are) quite valid–and perhaps prescient; I remember commenting more than once that a fiscal downturn could be a game-changer. But the comments about Midwinter also tended to distract people from other things we were saying (as Janet warned us might happen).

One warning to all is that as as rule, ALA committees tend to get focused on the idea that something needs to be made available to the entire association, BY the association, in a uniform manner. I’m all for authority control, but we need to let flowers bloom when they’re ready, and ease up on the argument that “we can’t afford it” because ALA, as an association, can’t personally put a camera in every meeting room. (And an organization where the “T” stands for technology should in theory have more than the usual number of early bloomers.)

Learning to bless a practice without mandating it would also allow ALA to become more Darwinian about its divisions.  It’s not good fiscal practice for ALA the bureaucracy to keep a division alive on artificial life support, and it’s not fair to the dues-paying members, either–it’s the equivalent of wasting taxpayer dollars on standing orders for print reference. If a division can’t evolve to meet the needs and expectations of ALA members, then we need to thank it for its years of service and send it on its way. (Incidentally, I’m not actually thinking of LITA as I write that–I’m going way back in time.)

Filed in American Liberry Ass'n | | Comments (22)

Midwinter comes but once a year…

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

And when it comes, oh dear, oh dear! ALA Midwinter is next week?! How can that BE? It’s not even New Year’s yet!

In any event, here is my skeleton schedule for ALA and events leading up to it. Campus starts up again Tuesday, which is one reason I’m cutting Midwinter short. Work one day, head to two conferences… January will be a January with lots of extra January in it!

I have plenty of time for vendor visits and exhibit-walking, and meetings with friends where we both have a big asterisk hanging at present. See you in San Diego!

Wednesday 1/5

1.5-day annual conference in Santa Cruz for our campus ISAC program (Integrated Studies Across Cultures)

Thursday 1/6

Fly out of SFO 4:55, arrive SAN 6:25

7:30 Beer with Men

Friday 1/7

8:00 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Beams & Bytes: Constructing the Future Library — Architectural and Digital Considerations San Diego Convention Center, Room 04

Evening: open

Saturday 1/8

Breakfast/run with MJ. Power-talk many important things. Laugh at times gone by.

10:30 am – 12:00 pm (Tentative) The Power of Data, Technology and Community: the OCLC Platform Strategy. Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel, Aqua Room 314

4 p.m. Camino OCLC meeting

CHANGED LOCATION: 5:30 p.m. SCELC Reception, Hilton San Diego Bayfront Hotel, One Park Blvd (on south side of convention center), Suite 1101/1102

7 p.m. Dinner with old friends

6:00pm – 9:00pm GLBTRT Social, Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery, 401 G Street

Sunday 1/9

8 a.m. Breakfast w/K. Pick her brain for lively insights. Pick raisins off her oatmeal when she’s not looking.

10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Navigator User Group, OCLC Blue Suite in the Hilton San Diego Bayfront at 1 Park Boulevard, San Diego.

Sunday afternoon: depart

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The Devil Needs No Advocate

Wednesday, December 29, 2010
"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

"All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

I was teaching a library-science class about a decade ago when a student snaked her hand into the air.

“You know how no good deed goes unpunished?” she asked.

“No,” I said, and continued lecturing.

I knew where she was going with that question, because I knew her from another context, where she was the self-designated killjoy who approached every project confident of its failure–which, for the record, is an excellent way to ensure failure happens. She’s the one who will ask, “Just to play Devil’s advocate”–as if Satan needed any help.

And we have all sat in meetings where this person  dwelled ad infinitum on every possible thing that could go wrong with a good idea that hadn’t even been launched, or itemized in exquisite detail the inevitable failings of any good idea in progress. There have been times when I have been this person (and will be again in the future), and for this I humbly repent.

I was reminded of this moment recently when I read the (relatively mild) commentary on an article in Library Journal, “Netflix-inspired Pilot Program for Borrowing in California Library Languishes,” and then, reluctantly, prodded from a Tweet, turned my eyes to this post by the Annoying Librarian (yes, I know that’s not her real fake name). It was at that moment I realized why I loathe her: because I’ve suffered her kith and kin at nearly every library job I’ve ever had.

Which leads into a response I’ve wanted to post for a while about what directors do for a living.

In my last post about my concerns about eBooks and the traditional lending model, a commenter said something I’ve heard many times in different guises: “I think the problem lies in the fact that a lot of librarians and admin don’t really know shit about eBooks. Admin’s role has changed from less about being the guardian of the library to more of a fundraiser/politician role.”

I’m not singling out Justin, but I have wanted to respond to his comment for over a month, and the Netflix-lending posts only fueled my desire to do so.

If I have to point to my professionally challenges for the year ahead, it is all about fundraising and politics. I realize it’s awfully cute that I work in such a small library that I end up washing dishes, hanging pictures, and (teeth gritted) cataloging books.  I  am also tech-savvy enough that my staff don’t have to get out the flannel board and hand puppets to have a conversation with me about eBooks, and I bet that is a relief to them. (Though we are also fortunate to have a true geek on board in charge of library systems–an unusually strong resource for a tiny library–and we are also all tech-literate, which is no coincidence, either.)

But I don’t have a list posted to my wall about the tech issues I need to grasp over the next year. Instead, my wall features my professional goals, blown up in type large enough to read from my desk, and they are all related to my “fundraiser/political role.”  In fact, looking over the last 14 months, and at the year ahead, all of my successes, my challenges, and my successes-in-progress directly relate to that role. It’s my job, the one I was hired to do.

Our biggest challenge in libraries right now is about how we position ourselves within the stakeholder/funding process, and much of that has to do with strategic communications. I strive for this not only through direction (I have a strategic-communications document, though that’s an understatement, because nearly everything I have done in the past year relates back to how we communicate) but also, I hope, through example. I recently faced a daunting challenge that for a while had me very frustrated. But I chose to face this challenge with a positive face forward every single day, to stay on message and upbeat, and to turn it into a win for the library.

My director peers who don’t entirely understand eBooks can be forgiven. They have a daunting job these days: to keep libraries positioned.

I realize not all admins are approachable, have an interest in information technology, or want to know. But if there’s something absolutely crucial your “admin” needs to know, you have a responsibility to make every effort to find a way to share this knowledge with them. If the “admins” don’t know “shit” about eBooks, it’s the job of those who do to find a way to communicate crucial facts to them: just what they need to know, and no more than that, and in a manner in which the information can be quickly absorbed.

So now, back to Hayward Public Library. Here we have a director trying something new, and then being transparent that it hasn’t worked out yet.  I found it interesting that this story made Library Journal at all (slow week?), but at that point it was inevitable that AL would begin shouting.

If there’s one thing writing has taught me, it is that shitty first drafts are a necessary part of the process, and that second, third, and fourth drafts aren’t much better. In fact, as a writer, I have to bite back the snark when someone says, “Oh yes, I’ve been meaning to write a story one of these days,” as if good literature were something banged out in a single session on a stray weekend afternoon, and not something extracted through exhausting, nausea-generating iterations (cue Jack Nicholson in The Shining, typing the same sentence over and over and OVER).  It’s understandable; excellence appears effortlessness.

But excellence also requires much behind-scenes sausagemaking and experimentation. This is particularly true for new ideas. It is extremely hard to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas early in the iterative design process (and that goes for everything from writing and homebrewing to designing library buildings). Sometimes the goal is right, but the method needs rethinking. Sometimes the goal itself needs rethinking. And sometimes a good idea just needs time, timing, and tweaking to triumph. You will just not know until you’ve put some effort into it for a while.

It can be heartbreaking to walk away from an idea you’ve poured work into, but it’s part of the process. The significantly harder part of any idea is believing in it before it’s fully-baked, when the effort to make it happen outstrips the apparent payoff, and you feel the impatience of others, hear the negative voices, sniff the faint odor of doubt. That’s the point where you need to have faith in things unseen.

But none of this bothers the Annoying Librarian, because she’s all about the turd in the punch bowl, the preemptive negativism, the soul-sucking, nasty worldview in which no good deed goes unpunished and They are always against Us. It’s a convenient, lazy perch, particularly when you do it behind the lack of accountability that  anonymity provides. It’s good for page views and quick laughs at the expense of whatever idea she’s excoriating at the moment. But it doesn’t make the world a better place. It doesn’t make you a better person, either.

I forced myself to view the Annoying Librarian’s site once more before ending this post, and she’s true to form: there she is saying “I hate to say I told you so.” The facts don’t matter; it’s just another instance where she correlates something she doesn’t like with failure, however tenuous the connection.

Thing is, AL doesn’t hate to say she told us so, not one bit (any more than anyone using that expression feels that way). Like the Dementors, she keens for the moment of destruction; she loves failure more than the creative spark of life itself.  Devil’s advocate? She’s his liege.

I don’t know if Hayward has found the right solution yet. But they tried something new, were up front about it, and are clearly interested in positioning the library for the future. The director seems less interested in the mechanics of this particular approach than addressing the root problems that led to this experiment.

He’s on his game. I’m trying to be on mine. You do your part, too, whether it’s reaching a little harder to explain to your boss about eBooks, thinking twice before you make that negative comment or laugh at a cheap shot, or forcing yourself to go into your next meeting with the most positive spin on things you can muster (you may be surprised at how good you feel when you do this). We have a lot of work to do, those of us who care fiercely about libraries, and we need all the help–and faith–we can get.

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Scilken’s Law and the Future of Libraries

Saturday, November 20, 2010
Beautiful books, New Orleans city archives

Beautiful books, New Orleans city archives

Last week I briefly stuck my finger into a discussion about the future of libraries initially launched by Jason Perlow of ZDNet. Then I got busy with work and personal writing deadlines and pulled my finger back out.

However, half of what I would have said was summed rather tidily in an anonymous comment on Jason’s follow-up mea-culpa, libraries-are-wonderful post (featuring a 50-minute [!] video about the Darien Library). Snark Snark wrote:

Why are all the Eggheads missing the point here? The discussion shouldn’t be about trying to justify intellectually the role of Librarians and Libraries as an overall concept. We get it–they both rule (and are wild continued successes in many places). Instead we should remember that title. Physical books will go away eventually because they won’t be economically viable to print in smaller numbers. Economically disadvantaged communities, without the “cushion” of advanced libraries with Internet Kiosks, public meeting spaces and other rich-folk goodies will be faced with less books, and eventually a realization that they’re maintaining an increasingly empty building. It may take a long time, but it will happen. And those “poor” libraries will close, while the “rich” ones thrive and diversify.

Yes, and physical books will go away because fair use is an inconvenient obstacle to maximizing publishing revenue (which makes publishers wealthier, but will not improve the lot of writers). The electronic format of ebooks represents the ultimate bonanza for publishers: the ability to insert a tollbooth in front of every reading transaction. Technology is now catching up to this dream, and this is the decade of the second big shift (the first happened with journals and was really over by the fin de siecle).

Jason, in his original post, before he was fed the Library Kool-Aid, came very close to echoing Scilken’s Law (authored by Marvin Scilken, a library leader who among other gifts to the profession almost single-handedly pushed forward an investigation of publisher price-fixing): “If the service in question was the only service offered, could the library get local tax dollars to do it?”  The answer for everything except book-lending is “not likely.”

The public library is built around the book-lending model, and only luxury-home communities such as Darien will want to justify public libraries on the scale we knew them in the 20th century, as a kind of trompe l’oeil to underscore their cultural creds. The other communities? They will fund police, fire, and the town square. Those humongous edifices filled largely with paper-based anachronisms may not be torn down anytime soon (though I’m sure ebook providers lick their chops over the idea of monopolistic control of consumption), but the service providers–we library workers–will be reduced to skeleton crews.

This is not to say that the other things public libraries do are unimportant. We who believe in libraries believe wholeheartedly in these services, and we’re on the right side of that argument. But, as Marvin was pointing out, the middle-class public’s love for reading and books has helped us provide the other services; we squeeze them in and around our popular role, book-lending.

(Reading that interview today almost chills me; I wrote back then, “even I—a militant Cyber-booster—can’t see a community funding an Internet-only public library.”)

I haven’t said much about Andy Woodworth’s responses to Jason’s original post. The barycenter of his argument is that “libraries will not close so long as there is a digital divide,” but he begins his post by acknowledging that public libraries now face dire funding cuts, and concludes his article by pointing to  the Posh Spice of public libraries, an outlier that will likely be the Last Public Library Standing.

(The other response to Jason’s post, which posits the future of libraries in a kind of vague partnership with other equally-threatened services,  begins with an effusive account of a library run by a PhD for a “ridiculously small salary.” In other words, we just love, love our libraries as long as we don’t have to actually pay for them.)

My response to Andy is that no matter what we wish for, a public service that no longer serves the needs of the middle class, once reduced or eliminated, will rarely return. The public’s mood these days suits the DRM model perfectly: a book for me, but none for thee. They aren’t going to go to bat for either fair use or public libraries, and that leaves the advocacy for both pretty much to us.

So the other reason fair use will go away is because we let that happen. In less than a decade we can allow malaise and failure to take action to undo an honorable practice that began at the dawn of the written word. We will be the lesser for it.

I know there has been discussion about stopping the train in its tracks. I don’t know if that’s possible at this point, but I do know that we need intelligent, hard-hitting leadership to at least fight the good fight, and if I were not running a tiny university library with 4 library workers and a handful of students (and if I hadn’t set my cap on leading this library toward several significant renovations), I’d run for ALA President on this platform and make it the sole focus of my presidency.

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One Year Anniversary

Thursday, November 11, 2010

October 30 was the anniversary of my first day at my then-new job. As I commented over on the ACRL blog (in an guest article about faculty status for librarians), I haven’t been this happy in a job in a long time.

What makes me happy?

A values-driven institution. My uni may not have a barrel of money, but it has a lot of soul. The vast majority of people who work there in any capacity are there because they believe in what they’re doing. The faculty, students, and staff truly believe in their institution. It is impossible to overstate how important that environment is to me.

A great boss. She’s supportive, insightful, interesting, and helpful. She will tell me when to rethink something and provides great feedback for my questions and contexts for my decisions, but lets me run the library. That’s a great balance and a good model for my own management.

Campus support for our goals. I stumbled across a slideset from last December and was delighted to see that we had met every goal set back then — goals focused on making the library more welcoming, safer, and more service-oriented. But other services on campus were crucial to this achievement. Departments such as campus services extended themselves to help us make the library a better place for everyone.

A great team. That’s been in development all year, first to fill a temporary position and then to upgrade a position. I can’t think of another library that can claim a team like ours. Everyone is smart, techno-literate, dedicated to the mission, and full of win. We all work too hard and don’t quite get everything done (there’s 4.5 of us, after all, not counting student workers), but we’re awfully good at what we do.

The sense that I’m part of something larger than myself. This may always have been true at other jobs, but I haven’t always believed it or felt it. It’s palpable here. That no doubt loops back to working at a values-driven institution.

Me. I make me happy. I know some of you are  thinking I’m sitting here with a nitrous oxide canister, but I made a promise to myself when I started this job that no matter what baggage or burden I have in my life, work-related or personal, when I walk into this library every morning I would be upbeat and positive, and treat each day as what it is: a gift. I am grateful for this chance to return home. I am grateful for a good, interesting, significant job. I am grateful for health and challenge and having eucalyptus trees right outside my office. I am grateful to work around so many wonderful people. So my gift back for this gratitude is to frame each day as positively as I can.

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Wait, I Could Have Had a Sinecure?

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Imagine, all this time I’ve been working my behind off in library jobs, and I could have spent it reclining on a chaise-lounge reading fat novels? Or so says LSSI, the library-outsourcing company, in a deliciously slurpy quote for the New York Times:

“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

Once upon a time I was an outsourced librarian (for the EPA), which meant this: I was paid much less than the federal employees, my benefits were not as good as theirs, and my “supervisor” was some wahoo several states over who had most recently supervised clerks at Toys ‘R’ Us. It was never about anything other than saving the feds a few bucks, which became painfully but at least publicly evident when the EPA libraries were threatened with closure.

I worked hard there, and I “have [had] to work” at nearly every other library I’ve worked at for two decades. Where I work now, we work full-tilt all fall, then do projects over the winter break, then work-work-work all spring, and then catch up on projects all summer. I typically get to work before 7:30 and I’m usually there at least til 5, and I’m in earlier and stay later as needed, and I drag work home. The library is hardly alone in this level of work effort; it’s just typical of our campus. We do great work, and then we get up the next day and do more of it.

God forbid I ever encounter (or have to work for) a Pezzanite. Among other things, you have to be some kind of cad to generalize an entire profession to the Times so boastfully.

I could go on, but you know what? It’s already 5:30 a.m., and I need to get a move on — the day ticks away as I write.

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