I’ve been meaning to write a post about ebooks and my book project for a while and of course, Sarah’s video post gave me the kick in the pants I needed to do it. If you haven’t seen her video yet, do so. Even if you’re not of the pound-on-the-table-and-take-to-the-streets temperament, you’ll benefit from listening to her raise some excellent points.

We're not dinosaurs. I hope.

The thing that drew a lot of us to this profession was the staunch nonprofitness of it. We’re not only nonprofit organizations (insert joke about not-making-a-profit librarians here), but we’re pretty strictly anti-commercial, too. Every library I’ve worked at has had a clear policy about advertising: no, thank you. Partnerships with other nonprofits in town? Sure. Cross-promotion of programs with those nonprofits? No problem. But we draw the line at commercial enterprise – a hard line. I’ve refused the sort of local crafts-people and music teachers who personally give me the warm fuzzies, but who represent the top of a slippery slope when it comes to advertising in the library.

Our relationships with vendors are equally fraught. Too often, we end up acting like, to paraphrase Sarah, the poor orphan beggars groveling for stuff. That relationship deteriorates even further once the products we’re buying seem necessary. Academic libraries have experienced this keenly with journals. Public libraries are now getting hammered with that feeling about ebooks. Increasingly, ebooks are less a whiz-bang new thing and more a standard library service. So our vendor is not just providing something new and shiny, but something core to our mission.

(Wait, I know what you’re about to say. Yes, we buy books from vendors. I should clarify – I mean vendors who also control our patron interfaces. ILS vendors, database vendors, ebook vendors. We’re not buying stuff from them so much as we’re buying access and a whole new face for the library.)

Tech trendsters at library conferences usually talk at least a little bit about products. Stuff our patrons might be buying or bringing to the library. Stuff that’s shaping their expectations of technology and services. These are things that are out of our hands, most of the time. We wait to see what Apple or Amazon drops into our worlds and try to incorporate whatever they do as intelligently as we can into library services. Sometimes, we drift too far into speculation, or we miss the boat entirely, but the intention is awareness and relevance for librarians.

As libraries started promoting creation as a library-related activity, we have started buying products based on ease of use, popularity, and cost. We have been, in effect, promoting certain technologies and products over others. I don’t think it ever felt like that, because a Flip camera doesn’t represent a core library value. But ebooks do.

A quickly changing marketplace and confusion about vendors and features makes us assess ebooks the same way we follow the product lines of technology companies. While ebooks may be at the top of every trend follower’s list, how we evaluate them requires a different approach. For people who are reading primarily ebooks, these products will simply be books from the library. We may know that they’re not conforming to the same properties as our print collection – they’re licensed, not owned; they may or may not be accessible by a third party; patron data may or may not be protected. For those patrons, that will simply be how the library works; not very much like a library at all.

Patrons may never have appreciated our diligence in removing stealthily-placed bookmarks from businesses or pamphlets left around by people trying to make it as a business consultant or chiropractor, but we do it because it’s part of what the library stands for. The (almost) complete vendor control of ebooks challenges all of our strong nonprofit instincts and library ethics. Those vendors may be very nice people. I was at a meeting today with three lovely representatives from companies selling ebooks. All three were clearly knocking themselves out to make a product that librarians and patrons will like. But they’re not a library. That’s our job and we have to find a way to keep doing it.

Up until that point, my Internet experience was entirely text-based, no clicking. Someone had explained hyperlinks to me, but I didn’t really get it. I had been terribly disappointed when I used what must have been something like Lynx to look at the Library of Congress only to find it was the catalog and not the books themselves. I was pretty sure the LoC had some cool stuff and I was hoping it was transcribed on the Internet. Hypercard was kind of cool, but sort of disappointing. I was a kid and while the idea of a clicky, on-your-computer address book or card file seemed nice and all, I didn’t have too much use for it.

Enter Jurassic Park.

Each dinosaur name linked out to information about that dinosaur. This wasn’t information that existed in the original text. Instantly, the power of hyperlinking became clear. Ebooks (not that they were called that then) were going to CHANGE EVERYTHING.

Many years later, when the web was still relatively new (and ebooks had not yet changed much of anything, as far as I could see), I spent several hours on the phone with a friend across my very snowy college campus. We each had Internet access in our rooms and she had called to tell me that she found a picture of Robertson Davies and he looked like what she imagined God to look like when she was small. This was pre-Google and I was a big fan of Dogpile, which made me feel very web-savvy.

We spent the whole evening just searching for stuff and clicking around and sending each other links. Now, that’s known as “wasting your evening online” but then, it was pure discovery. I had no idea what Robertson Davies looked like before that night. Each page we stumbled on was a revelation – there was so much stuff online.

That bar keeps moving, though, so what it takes to spark that sense of wonder changes. In the past two minutes, I’ve seen tweets touting Slate’s Hollywood Career-o-Matic and an app that tracks happiness in order to create maps of people’s emotions. Now we need clever mashups and participatory projects to grab our interest.

And yet…

When the Library of Congress started putting images up on Flickr, it had that wide-eyed, time-sucking effect on many of us. Locally, my state library has been partnering with libraries to digitize local history collections. Again, I’ve watched people start clicking on things and get that dreamy, content look on their face as they lose themselves in these collections.

Thanks, LoC! (click through to see a great series of comments)

I don’t know how our digital future is going to play out. I don’t know how libraries will end up handling ebooks, if ebooks will be the final death knell of the local library’s popular collection, or if we’ll have some kind of digitally-driven renaissance. I’m terribly interested to see what will come out of the DPLA’s beta sprint and I was heartned by Char Booth’s excellent interview about the Hathi Trust.

I was an archives concentrator in library school in part because I liked the idea of offering access to unique collections. The stuff that makes us go slightly slack-jawed when we get to see it. A recurring theme in my archives training was figuring out what lived where. My parents, both social workers, were surprised that the place to go to do research on the early days of social work was Minnesota.  I was surprised that Julia Child’s papers were not at her (and my) alma mater Smith College, but at Radcliffe (I soon learned that the Schlesinger has an incredible culinary collection). Scholars of these areas, naturally, would know this. But the merely curious would not.

The Merely Curious stand to benefit the most from projects like the DPLA and Hathi Trust. They are the public library’s most treasured patrons and best advocates. Nate Hill’s wonderful scenarios for the DPLA take that “where is it” question out of the equation and also tap into one of the lovely effects of the LoC’s work on Flickr – conversation and community.

I am, perhaps, less interested in what these projects will do about the best sellers. Providing e-copies of the latest must read in as many formats as our patrons have devices will (one hopes) simply become good service. Like buying extra copies of a paperback when a book is made into a movie. Just part of our daily routine. But making the weird and wonderful bits and pieces of our collections available online still has the potential to be something special.

Imagine how many of the Merely Curious are out there, not using their library because they don’t realize that in the back corner, there’s a pamphlet file or photo collection or map drawer filled with strange goodies waiting to provide them with that frisson of joy that they get from finding an online trove.

In between typing this little rant, I’ve been clicking around the Hathi Trust. Each click makes me want to know more, in the best possible way. How was this 1920 grade school program for Ann Arbor used? Did they, as one page suggests, separate first grade from kindergarten? Was this typical of education programs at the time? The more I click around, the more questions I have. Some of them I know I can answer with relative ease, others I know will take some more digging. But I like how clicking and curiosity beget themselves. It’s what made me like the library as a kid – flipping through books and the card catalog and indulging my curiosity.

Because I am Merely Curious, I don’t have the funds or time to dig around they way I might want to. I also don’t live in Ann Arbor. When I think back to my initial amazement at the power of the hyperlink, I want more of that. I want links to other resources about elementary education in the 1920s and Ann Arbor in the 1920s and a StoryCorps story from someone who grew up in or taught in Ann Arbor at that time and I would like someone with some expertise in the history of elementary education to write up a nice digest to go along with each of these digital objects. Oh, and then I want all of the architecture of this to be open so that developers can build cool mashups to do things I haven’t thought of yet. I want all of the communities – Ann Arbor, historians, educators, librarians, coders, everyone – to connect to this one digitized book to create not just that context and conversation Nate advocates for so well, but also a trail for the happy searcher to explore, creating and answering questions as she clicks along.

I can’t wait to see what the beta sprinters come up with for DPLA and where the Hathi Trust goes. I hope they build wonderful things for the Merely Curious, not just scholars or even avid readers. I am hopeful that the end result will allow for the Merely Curious to experience that frisson of joy and delight that comes with the discovery of an online rabbit hole we can fall down.

Fly, little birdie! But please don't peck my eyes out...

“This is why we can’t have nice things!” has been my favorite thing to harrumph lately. Said to my dog, it has a literal meaning (oh, the shedding and the slobber). Said apropos of nothing out loud in my (shared) office, it usually means I’ve read something about libraries that makes me want to scream with frustration. My primary occupation these days is as a library trainer but like many librarians, I’ve always spent some of my time at work teaching people. Also like many librarians, I haven’t had a lot of formal training in training. I missed the bibliographic instruction courses in library school and have figured out what to do through trial and error, watching good trainers, and attending conference sessions on training.
I’m in the “thinking about it a lot” stages of preparing to give a presentation on training at the upcoming Evergreen conference and I’ve been picking people’s brains about training whenever I get a chance. Iterative and incremental improvement has been my practical goal, but I’ve found myself at a philosophical crossroads.
Karen Schneider recently posted on Facebook about a webinar called When A Training Session is Not the Answer, And What Is? The less-is-more approach has loomed large in my personal crash course on training. Fewer trainings generally, and trainings that focus on the big picture and don’t obsess over every new website or piece of software are where it’s at. That’s one of the big lessons of Helene Blowers’ Learning 2.0 – teach a librarian how to navigate MySpace and you consign her to inevitable obsolescence. Teach a librarian how to play with and adapt to social media and you can transform your library.

Yet trainers all seem to agree: librarians have a culture of overdependence on training. Training is supposed to give an overview of a website’s or program’s capabilities and general structure; librarians want blow-by-blow instructions for every task.
Similarly, assessment and evaluation are key to improving training sessions, but trainers are hearing feedback from librarians who often expect to walk out of a training session feeling as comfortable and familiar with new software as they do with whatever programs they use daily. Familiarity is not understanding. So, the goals of the trainer revolve around understanding while the librarians in the class prize comfort.
This is a broken culture, people. This is why we can’t have nice things! Yes, it is scary to have to move from one version of Word to an entirely different “upgrade,” it is a pain in the neck to learn a new email client. And a new ILS? Terrifying, I know! I say a squillion times a session that even though a new system makes you feel like you don’t know how to do your job, it’s really just new buttons to push.
I see my job as making sure everyone understands how the new system handles patrons, items, and bibs, not to hand out checklists of “click here, then click there.” It’s the same principle I used when training the public. It’s impossible to show someone new to Excel everything that in the program during an hour-long session, just as my academic library friends don’t (as far as I can tell) try to show every possible resource during a bibliographic instruction session. In those situations, we hit the highlights, but lay the groundwork to enable and encourage future exploration.
As a trainer, I want to push my little birdies out of the nest and make sure they have the tools to fly on their own. I want them to call me up and tell me they found a cool shortcut that I didn’t know about, so I can tell everyone else (with full credit, of course- the better to encourage everyone to keep their eyes peeled for new work flows). I want to make sure they understand their software, not saddle them with page after page of mind-numbing procedures.
But I’m caught. I want to make sure that my classes leave people feeling prepared, but what if only those “then click ‘ok’” directions are what will accomplish that? I can see clearly how librarian culture has landed in this confusing and frustrating impasse. Each trainer has to find her own balance between issuing directions and working toward understanding.
Finding that middle way is crucial whether you’re training librarians, students, or the general public. Each room full of people will exert its own pull on the trainer and influence where she lands on that spectrum. Like reference work, training is not about the person at the podium or behind the desk. It requires compassion, kindness, and leaving your own needs in the car.
At TechSource, I posted recently about abandoning the fear that keeps us from engaging with new technologies. As trainers, maybe our side of that bargain is to abandon methodologies that encourage fear and dependence. Maybe we have to live through cranky evaluations until the culture changes. We definitely can’t afford trainers who are more invested in their own power than in watching their students soar.
I know other trainers struggle with this culture of codependence. For independent contractors, bad evaluations can cost them future work. For me, unhappy librarians will mean the difference between a successful migration and a really lousy summer. I’m about two months away from the biggest training undertaking of my life and I am still not sure where that balance is.
Luckily, I have fantastic coworkers who have been through huge migrations and the accompanying trainings before, but I still have to figure some of this out for myself. I want the people I train (in any class I teach) to go back to their libraries (or off into their lives) confident not that they know every little step for every possible situation, but that they have the ability to figure out whatever their jobs can throw at them.
Library trainers, we can’t simply shrug our shoulders at the librarian obsession with training. We have a responsibility to fix the broken culture. I know lots of folks are out there trying (I can’t wait for the archive of Pat Wagner’s webinar). So what do we do? What are you doing in your trainings to ease away from the paint-by-numbers methodology? Is there a 23 Things for boring stuff like office software and ILS? What are you doing to make sure we can have some nice things?

First, the self-promotion. We’re For You, Not Against You: A Librarian’s Take On E-book Lending is this week’s Soapbox column in Publisher’s Weekly. As you might have guessed, I am said librarian, as those of you who know me can tell by the photograph by the incredible Cindi Trainor. It would be unjust of me to link to this without saying that Karen Schneider and Brett Bonfield both brought their significant talents both as readers and as writers to bear on this piece before I shipped it off to PW. I am eternally grateful to them both!

Now, the fun stuff. This year’s class of Movers and Shakers was announced and I’m thrilled to see so many of my lovely friends of both the online and in-life variety in their ranks. Congratulations to you all! If you know amazing librarians (and I know you do), nominate them. It’s great fun. How lucky are we to be in a profession with such zeal, creativity, and drive?

First of all, I know a lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of a boycott. I understand. The word feels intense and rash and it may not be the right word to be using. Again, I don’t think libraries are going to cause some giant financial problem for HarperCollins, but I do think we have a responsibility to spend our tiny budgets wisely. Also, this isn’t about now. Ebooks are gravy right now, but this is our future and we have a major stake in how this plays out.

Several have suggested to me that it is far too late now. We should have been on this years ago, lobbying for digital first sale rights and true ownership of digital materials. We can be mad at ten years ago us or we can look for solutions now. So, we’re waking up, as Karen put it, mid-boil. And that means, perhaps, some libraries won’t survive.

I haven’t been surprised by HarperCollins and I haven’t felt angry about the #hcod issue. But this makes me mad. If a library fails, it should be because it is not serving its community, not because it can’t afford a publisher’s terms. Patrons should determine if a library is successful, not our vendors. Libraries that can roll with a future dictated by others may not feel obligated to stand up for smaller libraries, preferring instead to think that not everyone was ready for the digital future. Whose digital future is it, then?

Personally, I don’t think buying or not buying HarperCollins books is the central issue – if you’re not comfortable with a purchasing boycott, don’t do that part. But do participate. This is a flash point for our future. What’s important here is that we are waking up and raising our voices. Libraries aren’t centrally run – we don’t all have to agree on the details. But we all think libraries are important and worthy of inclusion while everyone Figures This Out.

If that makes me a whiny librarian, fine. I became a librarian because I believe in what libraries stand for. I’m not quite ready to give up on that. And just so you don’t think I do nothing but whine, I’ll post my suggestions for actions over the next several days.

I have a new post at ALA TechSource about learning, collies, and technology.

Initially, I was put off by the idea of a boycott. It seemed like denying patrons access to material based on our own interests. Libraries are quick to absorb cuts from outside forces without passing that pain onto our patrons. It’s our first instinct- to protect our members and preserve our services and make due with what we have. It works if we’re talking about a temporary cut to get us through lean times, but it falls apart when it becomes a lifestyle. It allows the public to think we’re fine without their help and it encourages a martyr attitude in library workers.

Librarians have long said that we need a seat at the table in the ebook debate, but we have yet to figure out how to take one. We’ve relied on other companies like Overdrive to do our negotiating for us. In some ways, this makes sense- Overdrive has a deal with publishers and we all have a deal with Overdrive. It’s sort like collective bargaining, except when it’s not. Librarians have railed against DRM and restrictive licensing agreements, but calls for boycotts have not been heeded. We’re stuck in the middle – boycotting DRM meant boycotting ebooks for many libraries. Helplessness was the primary feeling expressed.

Meanwhile, publishers were facing declining sales and ebooks raised the specter of pirated books. Publishing is a business and after watching the music and movie business struggle for years, publishers were understandably nervous. Authors, too. Libraries want to make everyone happy in a scary market – we want authors to make money, we want publishers to sell us stuff, we want our patrons to be happy and we want our communities to value their libraries. But you can’t get on an elevator these days without being asked if libraries are going to close once books go digital. And everyone’s had a few scary budget seasons.

This is all an oversimplification, of course, but the point is that everyone from authors to publishers to librarians to booksellers is trying to figure out how to ride the ebook wave without drowning. So far, the answer has been to treat ebooks as much like print as possible – an ebook can be checked out by one person for a set period of time. It expires, so no overdue charges, which makes patrons happy and libraries that depend on fines for income nervous. From the publisher’s perspective, it’s not like print at all, because it never falls apart. There’s no wear and tear. From the library perspective, it’s not like print at all because it’s only viable for a certain percentage of our patrons and we don’t have any of our normal first-sale doctrine rights. We can’t sell a gently used extra in our booksales, people can’t donate their old copies to us, and let’s not even talk about bookgroups and ILL.

HarperCollins has this idea to essentially impose an annual fee on their ebook titles. 26 circulations at 2 weeks a circ is about a year of constant use. This makes it sort of more like a print book for them and not at all like a print book to libraries. But I’m glad they’re trying something (though I’d prefer they try tiered pricing), because we needed to have the discussion we’re all having now.

So, a boycott was hatched. This is not normally our thing. Librarians don’t block access, we throw our doors open as wide as we can afford to. Telling our patrons we wouldn’t be getting  a book because we don’t like a publisher policy isn’t our style. It feels a little icky. The Library Bill of Rights is all about ensuring access and challenging censorship. We buy stuff we don’t personally or professionally like all the time. How is this different?

I think we have the wrong imagery in mind when we talk about this boycott. This isn’t a picket line demanding that HarperCollins acquiesce to our demands. This is a tactic. It feels unfamiliar because we never vote with our wallets. As consumers, we do this all the time. Groups organize boycotts to get companies to change their advertising or corporate policy and the two sides come to an agreement and then we can shop at Target again. As librarians, we don’t really have enough money to use it as a bargaining chip. But we’re trying it with this boycott. The demand isn’t to go back to the way things were, because that isn’t going to work for anyone. It’s to come together to find a new solution that will help us all.

Ebooks aren’t our bread and butter… yet. We are all of us standing on the edge of a major sea change in publishing, reading, and writing. The annual fee structure isn’t good for libraries or their patrons and we have a responsibility to our members and our funders to fight for a model that we can live with. Right now, this is a small percentage of our circulation, but it’s only going to grow. This is the ground floor and we have to build something that won’t collapse on top of us. This is about our readers’ rights in the long haul.

This isn’t a boycott of HarperCollins indefinitely. This isn’t even going to block library patrons’ access to these materials (we’re certainly not the only ebook game in town and I don’t think everyone has said they’d stop buying print versions of HarperCollins books). This is a chance to involve the early ebook adopters that use the library in shaping how the ebook revolution turns out. As Karen Schneider said on twitter today: this isn’t asking for a divorce, it’s asking for a conversation.

I’d like to think that HarperCollins put this policy out there as an opening move. Until now, libraryland’s response to ebook restrictions has been to prevaricate, form committees, and worry. The boycott of HarperCollins is a resounding and clear response to a proposal that will hurt libraries and readers.

Liz asked how this related to the ALA bill of rights. The boycott isn’t about the content of the materials, which is the focus of the ALA Bill of Rights, it’s about the price. Libraries always make decisions based on price. I have told patrons that while I would love to buy the book they asked for, it simply costs too much. I’m sure we’d all love to buy ebooks from all of the big publishers (including the two that don’t sell ebooks to libraries), but the cost of this policy is simply too high.

New things are messy. Ebooks are new, they’re messy for everyone involved. Publishers, authors, booksellers, librarians, and readers have to slog through the messy beginnings together. This boycott isn’t designed to punish HarperCollins for trying to come up with a solution, it’s a megaphone for libraries to advocate for ourselves and our members while the ebook world is still fresh and malleable. No one wants to infringe on readers’ rights, least of all librarians. The proposed boycott is an attempt to protect those rights while we still can.

Lo these many years ago, I worked as a reference librarian at a library that signed up with these newfangled services  NetLibrary and Overdrive. I made umpteen Powerpoints for staff and patrons on how to download ebooks (it wasn’t any simpler then). Patrons thought we were making the term “e-book” (and it had a hyphen) up. Who would ever want to read on a screen? But a few tried it. It was often a resource of last resort – the only item we had on the subject they needed was an ebook or all the paper copies were out. But every person who tried it asked me the same thing: why can’t more than one person have a “book” at the same time? I usually told them that it was how the vendors structured the service and they didn’t want to be book Napster, but agreed it was kind of silly. One guy argued with me about it for several minutes, thinking I was unclear on how digital information worked (yet somehow capable of designing the entire ebook distribution infrastructure).

Explaining vendor policies to patrons is an exquisite kind of torment. We’re bound by them and often feel that we have to sign up for services with restrictions we don’t like in order to meet patron demand, yet libraries take the brunt of the blame from our patrons. My consortium manages an Overdrive collection for participating members and I do not envy my coworkers the task of explaining the HarperCollins mess to our members and to the patrons that contact us (and I really feel for our member libraries who have seen an explosion in interest in ebooks).

I spend most of my time these days at small-to-tiny public libraries. They want to offer ebooks and thanks to their consortium membership, they sometimes can. Some of them are too small and broke to buy into our Overdrive membership. These are seriously committed, hard-working librarians who offer vital services and love their communities. If HarperCollins wants to argue that books usually get 26 circs, fine. Come to my libraries and watch them carefully repair their materials with book tape. Watch them fret over the cost of buying one copy of each book on the best seller list and trying to decide which of the top ten they absolutely have to buy. Come spend time with librarians who build collections on the kindness of their patrons who buy books and donate them when they’ve read them. If they learn to carefully patch together the bits and bytes in an ebook, can they eke 40 circs out of it? Can their patrons donate their used copies from their kindles and ipads?

I know, I know, publishers need to make money. I get that, I’m sympathetic – I’d like it if libraries and librarians (and authors, for that matter) could make more money. But we’re on your side. We want people to want your product. We want to build so much buzz for that first-time author that our wait list becomes unbearable and people buy their own copies (and then give them to us when they’re done). You want to lease us your materials. We could probably work with that – lots of libraries lease paper books, after all. But we decide when to lease and when to buy.

And if you’re going to use this technology to impose restrictions on us, why not use it to break out of the paper-based mental model a little bit? Librarians are going to be stuck explaining this policy to patrons, who are going to walk out thinking we’re fools for going along with this. How can we, with straight faces, tell the book-loving public that ebooks are going to really catch on if we also have to tell them that ebooks are actually *more* restrictive than paper. If they’re going to self-destruct, at least let multiple people read them simultaneously. It’s just sad that we – and by we, I mean everyone: readers, librarians, authors, publishers, everyone who consumes information – are looking at a whole new way to distribute and consume content and the first thing that happens is a move to cut libraries out of the picture.

As for the publisher “concern” over consortia – are you kidding me? This feel like insult on top of injury in light of Connecticut’s recent budget announcements. Connecticut has two statewide programs that really define our library services – Connecitcard, which is statewide reciprocal borrowing, and Connecticar, which is a little group of vans that move library materials around the state. These are relatively cheap programs that make our libraries incredibly powerful. Of course, they’re on the chopping block in the governor’s budget. Shared resources make every library in Connecticut better. I work for the largest consortium in the state and have seen the power of those programs magnified with even more resource sharing. As it is, our libraries that don’t participate in our Overdrive program find themselves with lots of confused patrons who can’t figure out why they can go to the library in the next town over and borrow physical materials but not digital items. If the ability to share a collection goes away, I can’t imagine it will mean anything but lost customers for Overdrive.

If we’re really about information and not just books, we have to figure this out. We’re just putting more and more middlemen in between our patrons and the content they want. Now it’s not just vendors, but the software they choose and platforms they’ll support and policies they’ll create. Ebooks should be an exciting new frontier and librarians should be front lines innovators, working with readers to enhance their experience with the content publishers provide. This shouldn’t be the death knell for libraries. Sarah’s call to action cannot be overstated.

I realize I’m frequently drawing metaphors to the print world here, even as I’m saying we should shed those limitations. I thought about going back and “correcting” that, but left it in, because it represents the messiness of figuring out the emergence of ebooks as a viable container. A twitter buddy asked if HarperCollins was just struggling to figure this out with the rest of us or if this was really an “evil empire” kind of move. In my more charitable moments, I think they’re probably working their way through this shift and hey, at least they sell to libraries.

But this is a decision that treats libraries like freeloaders, like the cousin who crashes on your couch “for a week” between jobs and is still there months later, running up your electric bill and eating your good cheese. Libraries are a vital part of the publishing world, the friend who borrows a cup of sugar, and brings back your measuring cup with a cake. It’s really good cake, too, delicious enough to make the borrowed sugar a negligible cost. Don’t break down our door in the middle of the night, demanding that we give back a pound of sugar for every cup we’ve ever borrowed. Enjoy the damn cake.

please come to my house! image used under cc license from flickr user kenjonbro

I’m from a very small town. At one time, there was a town dump, which was exactly what it sounds like – a very large pile of the town’s garbage. Sometime in the ‘90s, it became a “transfer station,” but everyone still calls it “The Dump.” The first time I drove a car, I drove it to The Dump. I’ve lived in places that don’t have garbage pick-up and in places that require it. The town I live in now has a transfer station and relatively cheap garbage pick up. Most people seem to opt for pick-up, if the trash cans at the end of my street’s driveways on Thursday mornings are any indication. I think of the trash can-laden trek up my driveway as a shorter dump run.

Several weeks ago, my husband and I found a scrap of paper in the bushes that said our refuse company was going to change the garbage pickup day and separate garbage day from recycling day. We weren’t sure if this applied to us or had been blown in from somewhere else or what. We took the path of least resistance: watch to see what the neighbors do. As it turned out, the neighbors weren’t sure either, and our street devolved into garbage can chaos as everyone opted for a different day. Experiments were difficult to conduct, especially since past experience has taught me that the garbage pick up will throw out recyclables if they’re left with the trash cans. After our recycling was left out, but the corrugated cardboard disappeared, we called the garbage company.

We were told that recycling was now on Tuesday, with garbage remaining on Thursday. We were also informed that we had to stop putting our cans and jars in bags and put them loose in the recycling bin with the newspapers in bags on top. That week, it became clear that the garbage pick up was actually on Tuesday, so maybe recycling is on Thursday? I’m still not sure. I did come home one day last week to find all of my milk cartons and tetrapak (those boxy things soup comes in) cartons on the front lawn. “I guess those aren’t recyclable,” my husband deadpanned.

It’s been several weeks of confusion and I think we have the new routines down. Last week, they took our bottles and cans, but left the newspaper. I’m not entirely sure why, but my neighbor (who opts to take her stuff to the transfer station) said that the recycling pickup won’t take non-newspaper paper (though it can be recycled at the transfer station).

The rules and schedule are convoluted, unclear, and a little arcane (I’m still unclear on the paper issue). This might all be clearer if there was a chart online (or even sent via snail mail – I’ll take anything), but something as seemingly straightforward as garbage pickup shouldn’t require a chart, should it? I’m sure the company that does the pickup thinks I’m a complete dolt for being so confused by the garbage and recycling rules and schedules.

Does this sound familiar? Does your library have a set of circulation and fine rules that require a chart, handout, or series of bookmarks? This is the sort of thing that seems like a good idea as it evolves (“I know, let’s charge lower fines for children’s books, since parents take out big stacks of them and children sometimes lose them!”) but eventually involves committees and shared Excel files.

Simplicity may be overrated when it comes to selling appliances – Don Norman’s assessment of washing machines and marketing taught us that while people will pay more for complex controls, they really only need and use a few settings. Immensely complicated library “settings” that leave our members cross checking their patron type with their items out or require staff to launch into lengthy explanations serve no one.

Complexity is good – when it serves a purpose. Library bloggers have long exhorted librarians to look closely at any “that’s the way we’ve always done it” practice. Unnecessary complexity may be a useful shorthand for ferreting out policies that leave your patrons aggravated and ready to dump their library.

Bibliomation is a consortium of 48 public and 24 school libraries planning a migration to Evergreen. I came on as part of the Open Source team to work on the BibliOak project. In order to prepare for the migration, Bibliomation wanted to bring some libraries up on Evergreen before the big migration. A few consortia have done this by asking for volunteers from within their members. Bibliomation put a call out to nonmembers, recruiting a group of small libraries as development partners.

I spend a lot of my time driving around the state, meeting with and training the staff at these small libraries. The idea with the development partners is that they’ll provide lots of feedback and we’ll funnel it into the larger Evergreen community. This library is our smallest BibliOak library. They don’t have an ILS or a bathroom. I love going there, but I made sure I knew where all the Dunkin Donuts were along the way.

We have two groups of libraries – our current membership and our development partners. So we’re getting two very different types of feedback and addressing two sets of concerns. Our members are concerned about what they might lose, what they could gain. They’re using a modern ILS and while they have to migrate no matter what, they want to minimize the impact on their work and their patrons. The development partners either aren’t automated or are using much older ILS. The change to Evergreen is huge for them. I originally thought that the two groups would be like oranges and kumquats – different, but similar. Now that we’re migrating libraries, it’s clear that each library has it’s own concerns and it’s harder to lump them together like that. It’s more like oranges, kumquats, grapefruits, pomelos…

Keeping FUD to a minimum is a huge part of the lead-up to this migration. The development partners are operating on much shorter timelines than the membership and they’re expecting huge changes. Our members want something better than what they’ve got, and they have a collective and individual love-hate relationship with their ILS. I think it’s a pretty typical library/ILS dysfunctional relationship: “I hate it, but it’s probably the best there is and I love this one feature, so I don’t want to lose that…” We’ve all been there – it’s a dynamic borne not out of software limitations, but out of a feeling of powerlessness.

Since our development partners are either not automated, or using systems that remind me of playing “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” on an Apple IIgs, I foolishly assumed that this change would be smoother sailing for them. Moving from an outdated system to shiny, modern (cutting edge, even) automation would be great! But it’s still major change, and it’s still stressful…

Even when we sign up for it, massive change is hard. It’s so cliche to say that, but it’s so true. A new ILS is like a new job for most library staff, especially if they’ve never been through a migration before. Because our development partners are not on systems we’re familiar with, we’re unable to show them crosswalks in Evergreen and often, they don’t exist because their legacy systems are dated. My coworkers are all extremely well-versed in Horizon, so they’re able to provide a Horizon to Evergreen translation for our members. Anyone who’s migrated from one major system to another has been through that, but our development partners are just jumping in the deep end, which is wonderful, but a heck of a lot of work. Also, they’re not only getting a wildly different system, they’re joining a consortium, which brings up a whole other set of issues.

So, I spend a lot of time unpacking Evergreen issues from consortial issues. Things like centralized cataloging, intralibrary loans, and standardized barcodes are consortial. Barcode problems can take a tremendous amount of time to fix (and can be totally maddening), but they have nothing to do with Evergreen.

Between learning about consoria and Evergreen, problem-solving, training and migrations, the thing that I’ve found the most surprising is how my own understanding and explanations of open source software has evolved.

The story we’ve (and I’m using we here to mean the broader library-tech community and yes, I know, it’s a sweeping generalization) all been telling about OS tends towards OS=magic. We’ve created a lot of false expectations. The model most people are familiar with is Firefox, which is software used by individuals. Evergreen is software used by organizations, typically networks of organizations. It’s a completely different animal.

When we start talking about open source, the first thing we start talking about seems to be the code. Which makes sense – it’s the source in “open source” – but isn’t helpful for people who don’t know how code and development work. When libraries start asking for complete overhauls of the software, saying “that can’t be too many lines of code, can it?” it’s a sign that the real story of open source isn’t clear.

An open source ILS is a lot like many other library resources. We have a shared classification system that we work together to improve and maintain. Libraries that devise their own classification system would need more staff to maintain it. But it’s not magic and we’re inviting disappointment with that explanation.

I don’t know what the solution is, but I think that when we talk about open source in libraries, the emphasis needs to be on the community around it. Community-driven development is incredibly powerful – it’s the community that makes my heart skip a beat every time I see libraries pulling together to fund development of a feature or figure out a solution to a problem.

“hey, we can all see the code” is an incredible part of open source that only matters to the small group of people who can do something with it. For the rest of us, the power of open source comes in moving past that feeling of helplessness that plagues us in our relationships with proprietary products.

I’m closing with this picture, because I don’t want people to come away from my presentations (or this post) thinking I’m offering a negative spin on open source. Evergreen is wonderful, the community around it even more so. This is the display case from one of our development partners. They modified a “Happy Birthday” banner to say “Happy Day” for their move to Evergreen.

We have eight public libraries and three school libraries in our development partner group. The consortium itself has migrated a number of times. By the time we’ve moved the entire consortium to Evergreen, we’ll have quite the wellspring of migration horror stories. It’s fun to talk about glitches, barcodes gone awry, the ISBNs that got away, but it’s not the whole story.

Open source is here. Happy Day!