It's Best To Make the Most Of This

It's not about you. Well it is. It is about you providing the best services to the most people. I truly believe this is what we are interested in doing, and that's why I talk about relationships all of the time, even on other blogs. Because we want to do our jobs well, we often focus on our jobs, which can work against our interests. As a service organization, the depth of our specific knowledge and the breadth of our professional knowledge and services is often invisible. We want to make it apparent, to show everyone what we know and what we can do for them. However, "marketing" our services can happen in a way that is unhelpful or even belligerent and off-putting.

I am thinking about how we listen. How often do we run into or engage in the kind of interaction I described in this tweet?

this is a not ideal situation: 1: Please, we welcome your input! 2: here is my input. 1: oh, you should do this thing.

— M is for Rachel (@RachelMFleming) September 3, 2015

Now, I am a person who hates being told what to do, so when this happens to me, I feel like my input isn't valued, and wasn't even wanted in the first place.  I understand the impulse to respond to input with the array of services available or avenues for action, but this impulse is wrong. We need to work on shutting it down. Erin wrote about developing relationships with faculty based, saying

And when we ask faculty what their ideal relationship with a librarian looks like, let's ask because we really want to know and not because we want faculty to take us seriously or see as as equals.

To really listen, to be interested and want to know, our impulse has to shift from "marketing" our services to understanding our users and their needs. The brief conversation in my tweet should read something like

1: Please, we welcome your input!
2: Here is my input.
1: Wow, okay. I hear that. Can you tell me more about what has led you to that position and what you would like to see happen to address this issue? Where do you want to be in that process?

or:

1: Please, we welcome your input!
2: Here is my input.
1: I can definitely help you with that.

This should be the response even when you already offer a service that addresses the concern. Maybe there is something you can improve, maybe you can address a past wrong, maybe you will learn something. There is never a situation where a constructive answer is "oh, you know, we offer that service" or "if you would volunteer for a committee you will be able to address that concern," even when those things are true. Those responses do not encourage the actions that either party would like to see, they do not cultivate relationships. Every interaction is an opportunity to go deeper, as well. By shifting from a focus on what we do to a focus on our users, we can turn "our tech desk checks out several types of camera" to "wow that assignment sounds really interesting, what are you hoping your students learn from it? how else do you incorporate technology into your teaching? when you have some time, I'd love to show you some of the things our technology desk offers for checkout and introduce you to our technology staff."

When we ask for input, we need to be ready to hear input, because when people give input, they want to be heard. Of course, that sounds great and we can all agree that it's best and that my example is what we try to do. I think we need to practice turning off our "let me tell you what we already do" defenses more and harder to make sure we're always ready to listen and engage on a personal level.

What can you say to tell the person you're interacting with that they're being heard? What can you personally do, in that moment or in the short term future, to address their input constructively? How can you connect with their broader concerns?

And every time, after every interaction: how could I have done that better?

Keep Rockin'
Rachel

Everything is fine, fine, fine

Library Journal and Gale/Cengage produced a report called "Bridging the Librarian-Faculty Gap in the Academic Library" which documents the results of a survey sent to a pool of academic faculty and academic librarians. The purpose of the survey was to identify where faculty and librarians are in agreement with regard to what constitutes an essential library service and what can be done to increase communication and understanding. An executive summary can be found here.

The most interesting part of the summary is the set of bar graphs in the middle of the document. The first bar graph notes the percentage of faculty respondents and librarian respondents who considered a particular service essential in academic libraries. The second bar graph indicates the percentage of faculty respondents and librarian respondents who rated their library "excellent" when it came to providing the services referenced in the first bar graph.

There are a handful of services on the first graph that a higher percentage of faculty consider essential than librarians: supporting faculty research, coordinating research data services, adding faculty articles to the digital repository,  text and data mining, parceling course materials from separate texts, and managing research grants. Interestingly, faculty also gave librarians higher marks on providing those services than the librarians gave themselves.

It is worth noting that the faculty respondents came from private, college or universities and that many of the respondents came from the sciences and the humanities. It is also worth noting that every individual library operates in a different context. So what this report says on a macro-level might not scale down to your individual library.

On Thursday, Rachel wrote about how the best way to understand our undergraduate users is to engage with them and then provide them with the services they want. She wrote:

There is a simple solution, you know. We can get comfortably uncomfortable and ask students what they want out of interactions with librarians and libraries. We can ask students what their ideal relationship with a librarian looks like throughout their college career. We can listen seriously to what they say, and try to be exactly who and what they need and want.

The report from Library Journal and Gale/Cengage gives us a place from which to start the conversation. Asking what we can do to support faculty research is a good place to start the conversation about what their ideal relationship with a librarian looks like. But let's not stop there, assuming that's all they want. And when we ask faculty what their ideal relationship with a librarian looks like, let's ask because we really want to know and not because we want faculty to take us seriously or see as as equals.

Ultimately, I think that coming into agreement about which services are essential for each of our user groups is the most important thing we can do to succeed. There are some library services we will never be able to jettison, and that's not a bad thing. But there are some services we offer our users that made sense at the time, but which have been rendered obsolete by the passage of time. It isn't that those services never had value--they did. But now they don't, and those services (and the people who provide them) can be transformed into something new and even more useful for users. We just have to be open to having the conversation and open to accepting the feedback even when it makes us uncomfortable.

Stay positive,
Erin

A thousand compromises (don't add up to a win)

I often find that when I am uncomfortable with something, I need to pause and think about what it is about that thing that makes me uncomfortable beyond my initial knee-jerk reaction.

So it was when I read this this essay from Inside Higher Ed. (hat tip to Jacob Berg, noted BeerBrarian).

I agreed with much of what Ward had to say about how envisioning the future a campus library has to be a collaborative effort between the library’s leadership and campus-wide stakeholders.

Ward writes: 

It will take a university community to shape a future library that meets the specific needs of learning and research at that institution. This transition is not just about libraries. It is about how colleges and universities come together to solve a collective challenge. Libraries cannot puzzle out their future alone.

And as much I as I agreed with Ward on this, something didn’t sit right with me. After writing and deleting several blog posts worth of material, suddenly I was confronted with what made me uncomfortable about Ward’s essay.

Ward is right in that academic library leadership must understand the decision-making process of key university stakeholders and he is correct that that process is both “complex and ambiguous.”  Understanding what faculty and administrators value is important when considering what areas of collections or services you need to develop. Are members of your science faculty working more on securing grants? Great—work on developing a plan to build up your data management services, including better understanding grant requirements. Are members of your humanities faculty working more on incorporating geospatial components to their research? Great—maybe it’s time to consider investing in a GIS Librarian!

Ward writes:

At the same time, librarians will be unsuccessful in planning for the future on their own. They possess much expertise about libraries, but less about trends in research and curriculum. Moving forward, the process of recreating the library must be one that involves many people in many roles on campus.

But I feel like it goes both ways. The academic library plays a unique role on a college campus, but I feel like its leadership is not always invited to participate in conversations in which it possesses expertise. Does someone from your library serve on your college’s curriculum committee? Is your library represented on your college’s committee on rank and tenure?

Academic library leaders should absolutely involve campus stakeholders in the planning process. Have summits, run focus groups, host strategic planning days to better understand the needs of constituencies.  Develop relationships with your stakeholders based on areas of mutual concern. I have written before about how important it is to develop relationships with stakeholders by crafting compelling stories about our services and collections.

But academic library leadership shouldn’t stop there. They should be active in their college’s community, offering their expertise on issues where their library is uniquely qualified to comment and offer solutions.

So, I guess the question is—what is it that the academic library is uniquely qualified to do that no other department on campus can? And how do we include stakeholders in developing our future without giving that away?

Stay positive,

Erin

On metadata and user experience

In addition to writing on the blog, I tweet. A lot. While Twitter is great for rapid fire conversations, the downside of Twitter is that 140 characters doesn't allow for a lengthy development of a thought. The upside is having a blog where you can expand on an idea.

Today, I tweeted the following tweets:

We talk about making library collections more discoverable w/out also talking about supporting creation/remediation of underlying metadata.
— Erin Leach (@erinaleach) March 18, 2015

Like, how do you expect your "next gen" OPACs to work if the metadata in them is really terrible?
— Erin Leach (@erinaleach) March 18, 2015

Libraries have to spend money on metadata creation/remediation if they want to improve the experience of their patrons on the search end.
— Erin Leach (@erinaleach) March 18, 2015

And based on the number of re-tweets they got, I can tell that I struck a nerve.

There seems to be a disconnect between the notion of patron's discovering information via the online catalog and the creation and remediation of the metadata that populates the online catalog.

Cataloging departments are often understaffed and underfunded. Positions in cataloging departments often go unfilled after they are vacated, their funding line reallocated to a different part of the library. The 'do less with more' meme is true everywhere in libraries, but it feels truer in cataloging.

The value that administrators place on the creation and remediation of metadata in their organizations is less than, say, the value they place on the experience of users in libraries. But one inescapable part of a user's experience of the library is discovery of library materials in an online catalog. Maybe your users aren't looking for the same kind of material now that they were a decade ago. And maybe the ways they search are different. But if someone is coming to your library to find something, chances are that an online catalog of your library's materials is often the first place they go.

You can't have a good online catalog without good metadata driving it. And the best way to get good metadata is to support the creation and remediation of metadata within your organization.

Yes, there are tools that can automate this process. And yes, there are ways that we can streamline the cataloging of materials. I am not opposed to outsourcing of cataloging or the purchase of vendor records. But a value has to be placed on the metadata that is created from these sources as well.

So why are we, as catalogers, so terrible at communicating our value to the people in our organizations who drive decisions?

I think it circles back to yesterday's post on creating compelling stories. As much as we want people to understand our point of view, we have to start talking about how our work impacts the experience of library users in a jargon-free way. We all say that cataloging is a public service, but do we explain how the metadata that has been created and remediated in the appropriate ways has a direct effect on whether or not a user finds what they're looking for? Do we explain how fields in the records we create effect facted searching and how incorrectly coded records show up under the wrong facet?

I don't think it's always that administrators won't listen. I think it's that administrators have limited resources and it's not immediately apparent how the creation and remediation of metadata impacts how users experience the library. When you're trying to be a good steward of funds, it's easy to allocate resources to the services that you can see directly and immediately impacting library users.

I'm going to take my own advice on this one. I'm going to work on coming up with a compelling, jargon-free elevator pitch in support of allocating resources to the creation and remediation of metadata. I'm not saying it will solve the problem. But maybe it will start the conversation.

Stay positive,
Erin

Take your passion (and make it happen)

Being the change you want to see isn't just about the change you affect in your own library. It's also about finding ways to contribute to librarianship. There are a lot of organizations, professional associations, and causes that need people to care deeply about them and you're only one person with a day job and a life to manage. If you're a passionate person, it can be easy to over-extend yourself by committing to too many things.

Tenure can make the waters of being an active professional even murkier. Being on the tenure track means you have to balance your passion with the kind of service that your institution values. It's also possible that your institution values other things (like publications or presentations) over service.

I thought about trying to give some advice on how to choose where to get involved, but thought better of it. Ultimately, being professionally active looks different for everyone. Ideally, it should be guided by the issues and ideas about which you feel passionately. Practically, it should make the best uses of your energy, resources, and talent. So I came up with four questions for you to ask yourself. You know yourself better than I know you, so let those answers be your guide.

Four questions to help you decide where to direct your professional efforts:

1. How many of your resources are you willing to part with?
When I say "resources," I mean: time, energy, and money. Some activities have rigid participation requirements that ask you to contribute a significant amount of time. Some activities require you to attend conferences, a task that your library may not be able to support financially. How much of your own dime are you comfortably able to part with and how much time can you comfortably give? Tailor your activities to that, and know that it's okay to choose not to be active in ways that require a lot from you.

2. Are you okay with giving your time to a large, bureaucratic professional association?
Even the smallest professional association is often a bureaucracy. If you choose to volunteer in one of these associations, you will probably be placed on a committee. Most of these committees do rewarding work, but some of them do work that doesn't provide an immediate payoff. And some of these committees do work that doesn't really feel rewarding at all. It's also worth noting that these associations often require that volunteers pay dues before joining committees, which may also serve as a barrier to your getting involved.

3. Do you prefer to act locally?
There are probably organizations in your community that could use your help and you have quite a few skills as a librarian that can help them. Volunteering at a school or for an on-campus organization is just as worthy an activity as being on a committee buried deep within the organizational structure of a professional association. Your efforts are often more immediately felt and helping people accomplish things they couldn't do without you is unbelievably rewarding. And not having to attend conferences or pay dues means that these acts of service are easier for people to do. It's also possible that you can find other areas of your library beyond your own department in which to be active. If you're in cataloging, consider doing reference hours or teaching a class.

4. What are you most passionate about?
In the end, the ideas and issues you love are where you should give your time, talent, and resources. Are you passionate about information literacy? Great! Are you passionate about library website usability? Right on! Are you passionate about making libraries inclusive spaces? Awesome! Identify what matters most to you and figure out where the people who also value that thing are. Often, that's where you should be, too.

A final thought:
This post presumes that you have the time and/or money to be professionally active. The truth is that some people don't have the luxury of giving away their time or their money. If you're lucky enough to have the time or money to spare, don't be a judge-y jerk about what other people are (or aren't) doing to be active in librarianship. Instead, direct that energy into finding ways to remove the barriers to entry for professional activities for other people who want to be active but can't.

Stay positive,
Erin