Loose Cannon Librarian

Over at Joho the blog, David Weinberger tells a brutally honest story about meeting a guy he didn’t like. He realized that the problem was not the person he met, but his inexplicable response to him.

And it makes me wonder how often the people I don’t like I don’t like because I don’t like who I am with them.

I hope the guy in question finds the post and comments, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. I’m curious about his perspective on this. Did he think Weinberger was a competitive jurkface? Ordinarily, I’d say no. Generally speaking, we’re much more aware of ourselves than the people around us are. The guy may have been thinking “I can’t believe I was such a tool to David Weinberger!” or “Wow! I met David Weinberger in a bar!” or “Man, was I up late on Friday night!” However (and you knew this was coming, didn’t you?), I think a different set of rules apply in the library.

When we’re out and about in our non-library lives, we’ve all had experiences like the one Weinberger describes. A friend of mine coined the term “chemical hate.” As in, “I didn’t like her the moment I met her and I don’t know why. I just chemically hate her.” In our personal lives, we’re entitled to the occasional chemical dislike. We don’t have to like everyone we meet, though a little self-awareness goes a long way, as Weinberger demonstrates. But on the job, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard.

I’ve written here before about listening to “difficult” users and trying not to hoard pigeon poop. Plenty of our patrons still walk through our doors expecting buns, shushing and hostility. People expect bad service everywhere, and come to us ready to fight for what they want. The fastest way to reinforce that attitude (and hate our jobs) is to meet those expectations. If Ellen Degeneres came to your reference desk tomorrow, could you disabuse her of her negative ideas about librarians just by being really good at your job?

One of the most exhausting elements of public service is staying helpful and relatively cheerful over the course of several hours which may bring Angry People who are Mean. We all know not to take it personally, but can we take it to the next level? Can we be so damn good at helping them, they walk away, like Weinberger, and realize that the problem with the librarian is actually theirs? On a lazy Sunday morning, that seems like a tall order, but it beats the alternative: being the librarian that meets those expectations, that goes home angry at the perceived injustices visited on us by the public, that doesn’t help people who come in wanting to like the library.

People don’t want to be jerks. Weinberger walked away from the guy in the bar because he didn’t want to be the person he was being. We can’t walk away from our patrons, but we can walk away from negative expectations, chemical hate, anger and our own egos. When people come to us ready to fight to get their needs met, they’re usually more interested in their needs then the fight. Our attitude at the desk, in our policies, in each small interaction in person and online is a chance to meet those needs and allow our patrons to walk out unscathed.

I am fortunate to live relatively close to my job, though I am less fortunate to live in a place where distance is meaningless in the face of unbelievable traffic. Audiobooks are the salvation of the carbon-spewing, vehicle-bound commuter. I’ve just started listening to The World Without Us. I avoid highways when I can and work in a picturesque New England town, so as I listen to the Very Serious Narrator intone about the plant life that will overtake the skyscrapers and subway systems and bridges, I’m soaking up the luminous clarity of spring. The crisp whites and luscious pinks of the flowering trees, the joyous purples and reds of bulb flowers forcing their way towards the sun and the piercing yellow-green of the first leaves are the gorgeous preview of what the author thinks could be coming to a planet near you. Looking around from my little glass and steel box, I find it surprisingly easy to imagine the world without us, but it’s almost unbearably sad to think that I won’t be there to watch a humanless world bloom.

I’m only a few discs into The World Without Us, but the author quickly dispensed with the notion that we are in any way essential to the planet. Everything will move along swimmingly (though differently) without us. So far, I’ve spent several trips between my house and my library hearing about how much time humans spend keeping nature from reclaiming the artificial structures we’re still using. Coincidentally, one of my terribly smart coworkers recently mentioned the old joke about getting all these annoying patrons out of the building so that we can do our jobs! The joke is, of course, that without patrons we don’t have much of a library. But what about the Library Without Us? No librarians, no staff- the feral library. What does that look like?

One of my least favorite arguments for librarians is “information literacy.” Sure, literacy is more complicated now that there are so many avenues to information production. I used to tell my Basic Internet classes that I could put a website up called Kate’s House of Llamas and Pancakes and pretend to be a llama expert. How would they know that all I know about llamas is that they’re cute? But healthy skepticism and critical thinking skills have always been a part of literacy. Frequently, when people are talking about information literacy what they’re really talking about is interface literacy. Our interfaces are bad, so our users need us. Easy job security.

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. I know, I know, a lot of this is vendor driven and most library workers aren’t programmers and really, our hands are tied because gosh, it’s all just so proprietary! But the difficulty of our online interfaces has a lot to do with library (and librarian) culture and demand.

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? What if we made our libraries easier and got out of our patrons’ way? The Library Without Us might be much easier to use.

As usual, Seth Godin has the right idea. Fear of the users isn’t limited to libraries:

The best way to keep your bank from getting robbed is to not open a bank.

Sometimes, in our zeal to avoid loss at all costs, we focus too hard on the false positives (that guy might be a robber) and not enough on the false negatives (we just turned away a good prospect).

…

Tolerating some noise and shoplifting and cranky customers is part of the deal. Better to be too open than too closed, I think.

Our users shouldn’t need us to get their hands on a book, a movie or an article. They may want us, which is great; why send someone scurrying all over your library when you can let them browse and enjoy themselves while you hand deliver exactly what they asked for. It’s easy for staff to print an article or grab a book and it has the same kind of effect as a spa that brings customers a glass of wine or mug of tea. It’s a small thing with a big impact, but there’s a difference between excellent service (”let me get that for you”) and confusing interface (”I can’t find this book”).

The feral library might be easier for people to use than the library with complicated artificial structures that we’ve built in. We’re not there to regulate access to our materials- we’re not in the business of stuff. We’re there to make connections: between the library and the community, between our users who are asking the same questions, between the book a patron is asking for and the article she might not know about, between the statistics she wants and the statistics she hasn’t thought to ask for yet. Did anyone go into library work wanting to act as a gatekeeper? We’re there to promote access, but handing out library cards and instruction sheets on using our databases isn’t going to cut it. Besides, it’s sort of boring.

What the staff of a library offers has to go beyond mere access. The librarians (and by “librarians” I mean everyone who works in the library) stand at the intersection of the library with everything it has to offer and the community. The “value added” is the human touch- the person who invests herself in her patrons and their projects, who digs into a subject with her users, who acts as a conduit to the deep resources of her organization and not as another clunky interface between patron and particular section of shelf.

Computers in Libraries was, as per usual, a great conference. It was wonderful to meet so many twitterfolk in person and the entire trip was a lovely mix of interesting sessions and librarian cocktail hours. Catching up post-conference has meant no time to post. A quicky overview is in order.

I had the great fortune to be on an all-Mac panel with some fantastic librarians. Karen Schneider (doing her very best Ed Sullivan) was our emcee and Roy Tennant, Cindi Trainor and John Blyberg gave knockout presentations. From Woepac to Wowpac was great fun and I was honored to present alongside such stellar folks. Cindi’s slides, John’s slides and my slides are all online in PDF form.

The standout theme of the sessions I went to was “fail toward success.” Easier said then done, especially for perfectionist-leaning librarians, but essential for the

Helene Blowers and Michael Porter

Everybody is interested in marketing.
2.0 tools are about conversations
Brand. What is the library brand?
Often is logo, always is books (Cindi’s book pic!)

Old paradigm: control look and feel of brand
this is still part of approach

New paradigm: influence character and portability of the brand
Chick-fil-a Show me the cow dot com.
Everyone can participate in our brand.

“Consumers are beginning in a very real sense to own our brands and participate in their creation… We need to learn to begin to let go”

MP
Allen County Public Library
On Main page on right- Community Album
collection of images related to service area.
Not new tech, but it’s participatory

A Day in the life of Allen County- they participate and ask users to participate. On Flickr

Santa Claral County Library.
Great Wikipedia Page
We don’t care about YouTube as a site in itself, it’s just where the people are.
library’s video didn’t come up in YouTube search- management of presence is important

Palo Alto
wiki for book reviews. Reviews for kids, by kids.
bad robots from Mars!
lots of blogs that are very active.
teen blog with links to all schools in area.

Flickr
moo cards for the library (Darien’s reference moo cards should be in this week!)
best resource for visual information about libraries online.
365 library days project (which I started doing at a FPOW and then didn’t keep up with)
press kits.

Delicious
kept list of 365 libs references- about 1/8th aren’t in english.

MySpace works for Brooklyn
2ndLife Library has a blog and great youtube videos. whatever tools work, they use.

HB
It’s not about us, it’s about the community
yes yes yes!
Libraries are about stories, but we’re horrible about telling our own stories. Our communities don’t know what we offer. They don’t know what we have.
communities have moved online.

Hennepin County
Send a photo of yourself reading Harry Potter!
Great disclaimer text on that page.
Flickr page and on the website.

Gail Borden Public Library
Storypalooza
videos of Favorite books

New Jersey Public Libraries
We Love Our Libraries: 3 reasons
videos on YouTube.
Viral marketing- they’ll show their friends/family/etc.

National Library Week at PLCMC
Big Huge Labs
Create your own motivational poster. Use them in online gallery and print publications

Denver Public Library YouTube Contest
How are you having fun in the library? Had to be in or outside of the library and include mention of the library or eVolver (their MySpace page)
winning video involved a “book angel” (heh.)

Louisville PL
A Library Champion Lives Here!
lawn signs and they encouraged people to take pics of themselves with the signs. had a rotating display on their website (over 100 pictures!)

8 steps to Marketing 2.0
-Educate. learn about social media
-Experience. participate and join the conversation. can’t do it by reading about it.
-Envision. Develop a 2.0 marketing plan. encourage participation! how can we shift the focus?
-Engage. Create social celebrations. Celebrate the customer in our space.
-Enable. help your library brand and content travel. allowing patrons to embed a piece of your library in their space.
focus on portability, not webpage hits
-Expand. multimedia.
-Explore. learn as you go, track success. you’re not going to have everything in place right away. we can’t predict outcomes and we won’t have all the answers up front
-Experiment, experiment, experiment. you’re not going to hit it out of the ballpark right away.

allow your customers to market the library by marketing themselves. Shift the focus!

Links will be on wiki page- Roger.
cil2008-techtools is delicious tag.

RSS creation tool
SendMyRSS
mobile, outook

Adobe Kooler color palette generator
share color palettes with others.
big flash application
can set base color and pick types of palettes from there (monochromatic/triads/etc)
desktop version too- Mac, Win, Lnux widget, sidebar tools.
good for inspiration.
works in dreamweaver- populate css codes directly. like a visual and pretty select all.
not cool oss, but free. there are a lot of variations from other places. Adobe’s is very social, though.

Glance.net.
WebExesque. easy download $49/month, but can get it cheaper?
Shared desktop, remote control, etc.

Toolbar- Conduit.com. LibX too

PDFhammer
be careful around copyright. (prompted by q from audience)
no alt tags on pictures etc.

WebDeveloper toolbar for Firefox
turn off images, hide background images only
turn CSS off to analyze structure
see comments from html
look at colors and palette swatches with codes
508 compliance check

PonyFish- creates RSS feeds (also, omg poneez!)

what are people going to use to bookmark your site?
AddThis.com
36 services. metrics, including bookmarks.

ProcessLibrary.com- gives info about dll files and other stuff that pops up on virus scans (wow, wish I knew about this when I was PC-bound)
tells risk factors, tries to sell antivirus software, but library is free.

Fantastico.
metaservice.
caveat: often behind releases (Laziness means I’m not on WP 2.5 because Fantastico hasn’t caught up yet.)

Rollyo.

BrowserShots.org
lets you see a site in a 42 browser types.
distributed information thing- sends out to bunch of computers with those browsers. default cache is 30 minutes.

Snagit (Snagit is great!)
gussy up screenshots.

Firebug
sophisticated tool for web development
also good for looking at your site in green.
great for troubleshooting CSS issues. shows where rules are overriding each other.

WatchThatPage
updates you with updates
email version of PonyFish

ScribeFire
ff extension
if you use more than one type of blog, allows post to blogs without leaving page you’re writing about.
post to multiple blogs with one tool.

Gifup
create slideshows easily.
again with the copyright.

Zotero
OSS RefWorks/EndNotes
ff add on

Camtasia
$299/user
presos with audio
wink and youtipyou (this is new) freebie alternatives

YouTube offline
tool on TechCrunch website (legit, not spam, pr0n, virus)

Michaels Stephens and Casey

Chris Andersen article Naked CEO
Used to be everything came from PR department filtered you knew it was coming from the PR dept.
now everyone has a blog. everyone blogs about what they’ve done right and (more interestingly) what we’ve done wrong.
Superintendent in CM county. blog apology for a survey. we didn’t do it right, don’t complete survey, we’re going to fix it.

Lincoln Nebraska’s Chief’s blog.

Transparency, Web 2.0
lots of books, sessions etc.
we make it sound easy.
“yay! go blog! that was me in 2005″ M Stephens

It’s not easy. 45 minute encapsulation makes it sound great.

Evesdropping: “Everytime people really like something, we get rid of it”

Cell phone sign signed Library Director
Reserved for Director parking sign
Indiana library that blocked SN sites b/c of rowdy teens

Locked down library web sites
Privacy paternalism

What are your road blocks?
-no OSS
-we’ve always done it this way
-control-freak IT support
-I don’t have admin privileges
-Only making cosmetic changes
-budget
-excessive love of process
-luddite trustees

We don’t need to be here, but the luddite trustees do! (feeling a moment of love for our fantastic board!)

Multiple avenues for open communication
Visit front lines regularly
Cross train
Consider the role of anonymity

Staff Input and ACT on it.
don’t look for input then ignore it.

People want to talk to each other!
conversations need to sound human, not PR speak

Go to the Field
bring them out
visit the front lines
Examine different staffing models
Develop big picture understanding
Administrators should understand everyone’s roles
Get out of the office?
Decisions are not made in a vacuum
Crucial if administrators are not librarians.

Administrators have to be customers too.
Administrators should be able to work any desk in the building.

Darien’s Front Desk Shout Out!!

Web 2.0 is not an age issue, it’s an effort issue!

Anonymous is not always easy to deal with.
but it gets good survey results!
look past the snark, and you’ll get honesty.

Don’t forget face to face
-The only time some people will be honest
-one on one time
-office hours

Culture of Perfect
-let’s go over this document one more time. lose 90 minutes of your life
-listen to user and staff needs
-look for ways to listen, not ways to be perfect

Say “Yes”
Meeting the Mission, convey the Vision
if mission is bad, try to get it changed

A cultural shift not a shiny new toy.

Helene Blowers

“We keep talking about tools, but how do we get change, how do we get innovation?”
how do we move our organizations forward?

Tony Tallent

dir of youth and outreach of PLCML
Imaginon Team! Tricycle Music Fest last summer
New initiative with staff called Deal Day (Drop Everything and Learn)
How you put “I” into Innovation.

Innovation starts with “I”

We’ll have more questions than answers
for some people Innovation is substance, some it’s sweet and keeps us going, some it’s cellophane- great, but hard to digest.

What Innovation is Not:
Suggestion Box, Strategic Planning, Best Practice, Change Agentry, Thinking Outside the Box- let’s retire this phrase!
These are good ingredients, but we have to breathe new life into them.
What it Is:
Intersection of ideas, imagination and reality. a pivotal point of opportunity
Doing. New. Things.
Action.

Book: Seeds of Innovation

Book bundles efficiency thing
Children’s more popular than adults for this.
came from user.

low-tech: yarn and books

Evolution
Taco Bell: Open 24 hours, we take ATM cards
It’s not disparate parts, it’s bringing new parts together to make something new.

Revolutionary
the iPod
Zoom Shopping- vending machine for iPods.

Not about best practice, about Fresh Practices. remixing things, looking at trends and how our users have changed.

Creativity and Strategy, Implementation, Profitability.
Hard to get past strategy and convince other people.

I’ve got an idea! Everyone has ideas. There’s no dearth.
Do your homework! What can I do to freshen it up? Do initial legwork- who else knows about this? You’re more than your job description. Staff are leaders too- remind your staff everyday.
I’ll take risks with you. WITH. Not one innovator on staff. It can’t be bottom-up or top-down, has to be together.

offer a framework, put resources behind expectations, create growth, opportunities, support work, celebrate success, make the ground fertile. grow our people, grow ideas. take risks with staff. when in doubt, celebrate your staff.

improvement for innovation. you have your own idea about innovation and everyone else has own definition. they’re probably similar, but they might not be.

know your ingredients (”the blender is a great symbol”)
take the parts and pieces to make something new and blend without reinventing the wheel.

Wild Seeds. create wild success.

Strategy is the area we have the most trouble with.
Change Agent has nothing to do with idea, has everything to do with making change happen.

Make it believable.

MVV
Mission
Vision
Values

Create alliances
farm idea around, don’t approach it alone.
test drive ideas

each location is a test lab.
No golf pencils! yes yes yes!

don’t ask for permission, ask for support. (nice)
apologetic spirit. don’t backtrack as soon as there’s a small problem- first cup of coffee that spills, no more coffee cup.

Don’t sell your ideas on paper. Sell them personally. no one’s reading your beautiful and long (and probably boring) report. ask for time at a management meeting or with a decision maker.
prototype it.

What does wild success look like? it’s not business as usual. might feel like panic.
might feel like magic.

Summer Reading is the biggest program for any public library.
give a theater experience instead of a tchotchkies. everyone loved it and it was insane.
Tony felt like a jurkface because it was so crazy. even though it was good.

innovation is failure. you have to fail a lot, but learn from it (library failure wiki, anyone?)

persistence. your ideas will get knocked down, no matter what.
remove self-limiting inhibitions
take risks, make mistakes, reward mistakes
escape
write things down.
Find unusual patterns and create connections
Stay Curious!!

be idea supporters!

keynote- the Dutch Boys

video of the tour
if the books go away, what’s left?
we are good at making stories

in delft, there’s a public library that’s trying to stay one step ahead and they give kids equipment to make their own stories.

tons of equipment in the RV- you can tell a good story in a short period of time.
there isn’t any wifi in Nebraska
Nebraska is the Bermuda Triangle of the US

there’s a Bureau of Library Innovation?

NYPL
video at NYPL
“the universe is made of stories, not atoms”
Paul H from NYPL
one year in NY is like 7 years in LA

Library without walls. make the building less formidable. make people think “it’s sexy to think!”

The museum didn’t take over the role that schools had left vacant- art education is terrible in US.

we need inspiration everywhere.
libraries should take up what schools have dropped.

people love libraries! says the librarian from georgia who is being put on the spot.

Next Charlotte Mecklenberg

Imaginon
They’ve got vision.
Matt Gullett

how do you see the library in 5 or 10 years time.
death of the book isn’t coming. formats will change depending on genre.
containers for information and culture.
the container will be determined by the content and economic forces.
role of libraries is moving towards community learning center
community innovation centers
“the book is one of the best technologies we’ve ever invented.”

in the last four months- the Kindle has come out. do you still feel the same about the death of the book?

Matt: economic forces will still determine. generations that love the warmth of a book. Kindle isn’t water, goop or puke proof. his kids used to go to bed with a bunch of books and sleep on them.

we’re creating environments to tell stories and what does that mean for future building spaces?

technology changes, gets smaller. space helps with setting scenes, but you can do this in small environments. you can do this in old buildings.
need open, flexible spaces and plenty of places to plug into!

Spin the Library bottle at Michael Stephens’ class.

LIS students
in the Netherlands, fewer and fewer people are getting into the profession.

what skills should future librarians have? “the ability to adapt to change”

DOK
The Library Concept Center!
Why?
We think libraries are important
we think it’s important to think about the future, the concept of the library in the future

Libraries have media, but what will that be in the future
vast amounts are already digital
grab chances and opportunities to make something of it.
more mobile phones than people in holland.

make the library a cool place to stay.
wii interlude
a library can’t be without games.

if we care for, keep, share stories we’ve done a great job.
the library is a place to be.

LSW a year old. Twitter conversation about ALA and everyone’s broke and we can’t participate in ALA. We should make our own ALA that would be free. LSW was born in PBwiki and then meebo!

Josh Neff does not mind being upstaged by porn.

Steve Lawson: LSW is a conference every day!
membership is diverse and interesting

Rikhei: personal and professional support.
Steve: two sets of colleagues. Laura in Wy has fewer people around her and can get CSS help in LSW.
R: it’s been successful because there are low expectations

A rickroll interlude

Steve: hey we’ve got this neat group wouldn’t be a great presentation. Clay Shirkey book- here’s a nice community. Our premise is “show up and have an interesting conversation” The tool has a different dynamic. You have to be there. If you show up good things might happen. LSW: we’ll never make you go to Anaheim.

Josh: you have to show up and engage with us, but if you do, we’ll play. You can show up in the LSW room and decide you hate them and leave and it’s okay. If you’re on an ALA committee and you don’t get along with your group, you’re stuck. It’s not really a viable alternative to ALA, it’s a group of people blowing off steam.

Steve: it doesn’t have to be us, it could be a different group. people might not like the swearing and casualness of LSW- it’s more like spending time with your coworkers at a bar then at the reference desk.

Josh: because all of these tools are so easily created if someone wanted to come in and talk about hookers and blow, another room/blog/wiki can be opened until the spammers go away.

What if it got too big?

R: there’s never any more than 20 or 25 people in the chat room, but even if there were more, that would be okay
J:  it’s like the Internet in miniature- if it got unwieldy, people would form groups

J: it’s like a 24-7 unconference. whoever shows up are the right people.

I lost my internet connection and didn’t get to blog the second group, who were infodoodad and very good.

NIST.
researchers
hugely broad mission
Information Services Division partners with NIST through entire knowledge creation cycle.
Major customers are labs in variety of disciplines
Physics labs have Nobel prize people, but manufacturing lab is very industry oriented.

liaison program
getting to know you…getting to know all about yoooouuuuu!
targeted collaborations- in-depth lit searches, information analysis, collection development

Primary product is results
lots of reports. publications, presentations
expanding customer horizon and keep things fresh for library.

NIST has center-wide review process. maintain database of all publications. dataset of journals and conferences over time. journals pretty easy, but had to create own dataset around conferences (which are more prestigious, etc).

building relationships with local orgs/businesses.

used web of science. drill into pubs to see which had been done w/ MD orgs.
industry sector- manual process to parse.
30 some odd percent unspecified.
broad range of sectors, though.

Oracle db, Java and Flex to sort.
official or quasi-offical writing has to go through their process. built in Java.
other pieces being written in Flex.
all comes together through Oracle database (this all sounds very complicated)

loan out ipods for podcasts. pre-loaded with speakers, books, etc.
so successful, they decided to create podcast for library.
remote science project.