PVLD Director's Blog

The Feral Library

Kate Sheehan, who blogs as the Loose Cannon Librarian, had a great post called The Library Without Us.  She coined the term "the feral library" to describe a library without librarians, and ponders what that would look like.  After a bit of a rant about how difficult we make it for our customers [Our OPACs suck, our databases have unfriendly search pages (and impenetrable names- “Oh, you’ll find that in EBSCO or InfoTrac” is a great sentence to utter to make a patron go away) and the key to accessing it all is usually a fourteen digit library card number and possibly a mysterious PIN....] she asks

"How much of our time is spent ameliorating the difficulty of the rules, structures and interfaces we’ve put in place? No, the Dewey Decimal System isn’t that hard, but how many other institutions expect users/customers/patrons to learn their internal systems (have you ever been asked for a stock number in a store)? How often do we steer people out of the reference section or get frustrated because they don’t know if the book waiting for them is a hold or an ILL?"

I felt like standing up and yelling "You go girl!" 

One of the topics we talked about at last week's Eurkea Institute was the fairly widely held belief among library staff that the library exists for and because of them.  I think this misperception is at least part of the reason we have the rules, structures, and systems that Kate is talking about.

Just yesterday I was having a conversation with a staff member (who I'll refer to as "Employee 1" to protect the guilty!) about another employee's (call him employee number 2) idea for providing more copies of current bestsellers at a lower cost by in effect outsourcing some activities.  Employee number 1 said "But I don't want someone else to do xxx...that's my job!" Think about the underlying message - "I don't care if the proposed system makes more items available to our customers and saves the taxpayers money".  I do understand concerns about job security, but I can think of lots of other things for this employee to do that would make better use of their skills and abilities and contribute to better services for our customers.

What would happen if we designed every system and made every decision with the convenience of the customer and the needs and aspirations of our community as the first priority?  Wouldn't we have MORE job security?  I think so!  If that's a "feral library" count me as a feral librarian.

Eureka!

This past week I had the honor and pleasure of serving as a mentor for the first Eureka Leadership Institute - a weeklong, intensive leadership development program for emerging library leaders in California.

While my official role at the Institute was "mentor", I think I learned at least as much as the participants.  It is a rare gift to be able to spend a week thinking about leadership and what it means in a library context and I came away reinvigorated (despite the 12 hour days!) and with plenty of food for thought about both how to improve my own leadership abilities and how to lead PVLD towards the future.  I also came away with a whole new network of relationships with people I might otherwise never have had the opportunity to really get to know (or possibly even to meet) and with a renewed sense of optimism about the future of public libraries in California.

I'm looking forward to continued involvement through the Eureka blog, follow-up webinars and meetings, and reunions at ALA, CLA, etc.  I'm also looking forward to working with PVLD Department Managers Eve Wittenmyer and Jennifer Addington who participated in the Institute as they work on their leadership project over the next year or so.

It would ruin the experience for future participants if I write too much about the content of the Institute.  Suffice it to say that I will be encouraging more PVLD leaders to apply, and am hoping that I will have the opportunity to again serve as a mentor in future.

Now its back to the "real world"!

Deconstructing librarianship

One of the bonuses of spending this week at the Eureka Leadership Institute is the opportunity to spend time with my fellow mentors, who bring diverse perspectives and backgrounds but share a common passion for our profession.  OVer lunch yesterday a conversation with Joan Frye Williams (consultant/futurist/librarian) and Cheryl Gould (of Infopeople, the organizers of the Institute  and no relation although we joke about it) about a workshop Joan is developing on the Restructuring Reference.

Joan talked about her view that what librarians call "reference" is really a bundle of activities that we need to desconstruct in order to find the best way to delvier that particular service to our communities.  For reference the activities might be seen as

• "Directional" - either helping people find there way to somewhere (the restrooms, the biographies, etc.) or helping people find a particular item ("do you have this book and where do I find it?")
• "Coaching" - helping people become more effective problem-solvers/information seekers (this would include what we traditionally call "information literacy", teaching people to use our online resources, etc.)
• "Advising/Consulting" - recommending reading material or resources, recommending solutions to a particular need or question
• Research - actually digging out sources and finding information on behalf of the customer

As Joan points out, we try to provide all of these activities at the "reference desk", when the customer would probably be best served if we consider each individually and figure how best to provide each in terms of staffing, location, design of the access points, etc.

The conversation got me thinking about the language we use for other core professional activities and how the terms we use obscure the richness and importance of the activity.

For example we talk about "programming", but in my mind (as I've said to some of the staff) that is really a code word for the critical activities of providing lifelong learning opportunities and finding ways to connect the library with the community.

"Collection development/management" has an "order fulfillment" element (all of the logistical systems that go into meeting customer demand from standing orders for bestsellers through the ILL and holds processes) but it also has a "discovery" element of creating those serendipitous connections between people and books that they might never have otherwise found (so it includes the use of professional judgement to select materials that might be outside the mainstream, as well as thinking about how we make those items available so people can discover them...the "connecting people and ideas" part of our PVLD vision).

That fairly brief conversation with Joan and Cheryl over lunch has helped me see what we do with new eyes....and I think will have a big impact on how we approach the design of PVLD's services going forward.  That alone is worth taking a week of my time to participate in Eureka!

Recharging my blogging batteries!

Its been a while since I've felt that I have written a really good, thought-provoking post on this blog.  I really could relate to this post from Logic+Emotion about the challenge of consistently writing really great posts.

I've got more than usual on my plate at work at the moment (budget challenges, union negotiations, issues with our major supplier of books that are resulting in bare shelves and customer complaints, plans for the renovation/expansion of both branches and the associated fundraising efforts, the usual Spring rush of community and legislative activities, negotiations over the proposed redevelopment of the property next to our main library with potentially big implications for us, etc. etc. etc.)

Combine that with lots of houseguests, a string of appliance failures and home maintenance issues, and the normal busy-ness of life and finding time to read and reflect (which for me is a pre-requisite to a good blog post) is a real challenge.

I've also noticed that while I still try to skim my normal complement of library and non-library blogs, they have not been the source of much inspiration lately.  My bet is that some of my fellow bloggers are feeling some of the same pressures I am, but I also think that ideas that seemed new and exciting to me a year ago are less so today.

This blog is important to me, so I'm going to keep at it...but I'm going to try posting a bit less often and putting more time and thought into the posts I do make.

Next week I'm going to be spending the week as a mentor at the Eureka Leadership Institute, a weeklong program for emerging library leaders in California.  I'm hopeful that even though I am there as a mentor and not a participant I will have a chance to reflect on my own leadership abilities and performance and also to recharge my batteries though being in a new environment with a group of energetic young professionals.  I don't expect to be posting much, though!

Hopefully when I get back to work in early May my batteries will be re-charged and you'll see an improvement in this blog....

Curiouser and Curiouser

I came across this gem of a video of Seth Godin talking about the importance of being curious on John Blyberg's blog today and I was struck by the role libraries can and do play in "priming the pump" of curiosity.

I was also reminded of a post I wrote back in February in which I quoted an impassioned email from one of our PVLD Librarians, Sylvia Richardson, about her perception that in their quest for relevence librarians are chasing numbers and growth and forgetting, as she puts it, that

"Our job as librarians is to engage people in growth throughout their lives, before, during and after "school" days, to be a beacon of free thought unencumbered by sales figures, which more often indicates mass market thinking than new and daring concepts; the sales curve always follows some distance behind the new concepts humans create.  (Was Van Gogh a bestselling artist in his lifetime???)  It is our job, as I see it, to include in our collections "items" that may be less than mainstream, but more important precisely because they are out of the main stream; new directions, offshoots, upstarts, wellsprings off the beaten path."

Sylvia's comments have been bouncing around in the back of my mind since she wrote them, and it was one of those interesting instances of synchronicity to first see the Seth Godin video and then, within an hour or two, to read John Berry's column in the April 15, 2008 issue of Library Journal in which he reminds his readers that libraries are more than gateways to information and librarians are more than "information professionals".  I'm sure Sylvia would agree with Berry's comment that while people do come to the library for information, they also

"... come to the library to do much more than that. Many are, of course, studying, searching, reading, seeking, and finding the recorded stuff. But many more are there enjoying, interacting, exploring, and, as old Jesse Shera once put it, engaging in “the quiet stir of thought” unrecorded, unmanaged, uncaptured."

I am a firm believer in the role libraries and librarians can play in exposing people to new authors, new thoughts, and new ideas and I'd be the last one to say that we should let the development of our collections and services be driven solely by giving people what is popular.

At the same time, I recognize that in order to expose people to Sylvia's "...."items" that may be less than mainstream, but more important precisely because they are out of the main stream; new directions, offshoots, upstarts, wellsprings off the beaten path."  We need to get them in the door (whether the physical door to our physical libraries or the virtual door to our virtual libraries), and they won't come (or won't come back) if we don't also give them what they are looking for.

Finding this balance between giving people what they want and providing them an opportunity to discover something that they will value but would not have asked for is to my mind one of the core responsibilities of the professional librarian.  It is particularly challenging given the always present limitations on money (do I buy another copy of the latest Michael Crichton or do I buy something by a little known but outstanding new author?), space (How many copies of this Sue Grafton do we need?  Should I keep our only copy of The Sun Also Rises even though it hasn't circulated in a year?) and staff capacity (do I offer another session of Clutterology, which practically runs itself and always gets a good turnout or do I take a chance on a speaker who might be a bit challenging and may only attract a dozen people?)

It occurred to me today that when making these decisions we could do worse than ask ourselves "How does this "prime the pump" of curiosity?"

Bringing 'Em In

I am currently reading and thoroughly enjoying Letter from Point Clear by Dennis McFarland.  This morning I read a scene in which the young pastor (whose name is Pastor!) of a growing evangelical church who, while describing the church's plans for a new Christian Center complete with a gym, basketball courts, meeting rooms, and running track, says "Half of it is getting them in the door....the other half is building community."

My immediate reaction was "could have been spoken by a library director".  And if you think basketball courts and running tracks are beyond the mission of the library, here's a reminder that this may not be so from Neal Pierce of the Washington Post Writer's Group in a recent blog post on the important role libraries play in the assimilation of immigrants -

"The idea of libraries as social gathering places is hardly new. Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate who built 2,500 free public libraries around the world in response to the immigrant flows and broad social gaps of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intended them to be places to attract young people. Robert McNulty, a library advocate and president of Partners for Livable Communities, reminds us that Carnegie actually built gymnasiums, boxing rings and swimming pools into some of his libraries -- hoping that once there, the youths would "be exposed to books and learn to read." "  (emphasis mine)

Puts the 21st century debate about gaming in libraries into context, doesn't it?

Hmmm...as we think about the expansion and remodel of the Miraleste Library maybe we ought to think about a gym!

Growing Up Online

BAck in January the PBS program Frontline aired this program on "Growing Up Online".  The entire episode and a lot of interesting supplemental material is available on the Frontline website.  It will take about an hour of your time to view all of the "chapters" - but I found it was an hour well spent in terms of the insights I gained into how today's teens, the first generation to grow up with the Internet as a fact of life, are using the technology.

The program doesn't shy away from the risks of being online, including a poignant segment on the tragic consequences of cyber-bullying, and I have to confess that even my Internet-embracing self was shocked by some of what the kids were doing online. And as a childless person I sure felt for the parents interviewed!  (At the same time the former adolescent in me was also moved by the way some of the kids interviewed were using the Internet to connect with, empower, and validate their deepest selves in ways that would be impossible in the physical world).

In the end I appreciated Danah Boyd's comment to the effect that these kids live in a society with fundamentally different properties than the one I grew up in, and this is not going to change.  Strategies like blocking access to the parts of that society that make us fearful are not at the end of the day going to keep kids safe.  As fast as we block access to something, an alternative will spring up. What we need to do is teach people how to live in this new society safely - just as we teach them to look before crossing the street or to wear a seatbelt.

Libraries are already playing a role in helping people understand how to be safe online, but it seems to me there is more that we could do....

Is what librarians have done for decades the latest trend?

Thank you to George Needham over at It's all good for pointing me to this tidbit from Wired Magazine about the limitations of strictly algorithm-based online searching and the "latest trend" to incorporate the human touch into to the online search and information delivery process.

There's been quite a bit of press about this topic lately as new search services like the "human-powered search engine" Mahalo have come onto the market.  To be honest, I hadn't thought a whole lot about the implications for librarians other than to idly wonder how we could participate.

As I read the article in Wired, though, I began to steam.  It gives a number of examples of companies from fledgling start-ups to Google that have recognized that there is value in enhancing the Web with "the kind of critical thinking that's alien to software but that comes naturally to humans".

I have absolutely no problem with that concept.  What got me steamed was that EVERY example of how these companies are applying the "human touch" was something librarians do every day, and in most cases have done for at least 100 years!

Create bibliographies and webliographies?  Check.  "Curate" (i.e. select, organize, and display) information? Check.  Write reviews and abstracts? Check.  Interact with information-seekers to help them find exactly what they are looking for?  Check.

If this is the latest trend then we were 100 years ahead of the curve!  So why aren't we recognized for what we do?  Because we don't "sell" ourselves?  Because people don't recognize that our specialized training is necessary?  Your guess is as good as mine....so leave a comment and tell me what you think.

More on the Library Catalog and the Dewey Decimal System

If the persistance of a topic on the conference circuit and in the blogosphere is any indication of its importance as a topic of professional discussion, then the issue of whether the Dewey Decimal System meets the needs of 21st century library users is on the minds of a lot of librarians these days.  I've blogged about this before, but wanted to share a couple more contributions to the debate.

From the PLA Minneapolis Blog put together by PVLD librarians Jennifer Addington and Debra Petersen some thoughts about ways that library collections can be organzed to better meet the needs of users without abandoning Dewey.  There are some great ideas that we can use at PVLD...and I know Eve Wittenmyer and Melissa Little up in the Circulation Department have even more ideas about how to make the collection organization more user friendly.

And I loved this from Michael Casey , whose Library Crunch blog I is one of my favorites -

Wholesale abandonment of Dewey is probably not practical for an established library, but the discussion of its relevance is healthy, and its amazing to see all of the amazing ways libraries are adapting or working around it to better serve our customers.  Look for some of these kinds of adaptations at PVLD in the coming months!

Is PVLD already a 2.0 library?

  I came across the following video by Cindi Trainor on the Travelin' Librarian today.  It displays a bit wierd so you may want to go directly to the blip.tv website

Apart from the fact that the "follow me as I type" format is pretty cool, I liked the fact that the video does not define "Library 2.0" in terms of technology but about people in the library and their willingness to experiment and embrace change.

I was struck, however, by the fact that there is not a single thing in the green "Library 2.0" circle that PVLD is not already doing and that PVLD employees have not embraced. Does that make us a 2.0 library?

I don't think so.  To my mind the journey to "2.0" (and beyond) as just that - a journey. "2.0" is not a destination, its an orientation. It's the difference between saying "we're going to San Francisco" and "we're going north". Every step that we take in the direction of "Library 2.0" also shifts our perspective so that we see new opportunities (and sometimes challenges).

Now that we've gotten our feet wet with console-based video games we are talking about how to offer web-based massive multi-player games like World of Warcraft. Now that we have a content-management based website we see opportunities to really trick out our blogs as a way of delivering content.  Now that we see how much customers like the face-out shelving in the new book section we're looking for other opportunities to merchandise the collection....

If "Library 2.0" is fundamentally, as the video implies, about being willing to change what we do so that we can enhance our ability to connect with users then the journey towards 2.0 is one that many libraries, including PVLD, have been on for a very long time.  And as this video highlights, it's not about the technology....it's about the people.