Feel your inner ‘NO!’

I’ve been embroiled in an ongoing debate with a friend of mine about saying “No” to co-workers. It all started when I sent him a link to a post on the Brazen Careerist. I sent it to him because he is always telling me how busy he is.  I specifically wanted him to see the part about saying no. Last week he wrote a blog post about our exchange.

The interesting thing to me about his post was that he had equated saying ‘no’, which to me is about managing your workflow and your time at your job, with denying someone else something he had.  At work, what he would be denying his co-workers is his time, which seems to be in short supply. Still he insists that in order to keep things running smoothly at work, he can’t ruffle any feathers by telling them no.

The thing is, he does tell them no all the time - he just doesn’t use the word. He tells me, he tells his co-workers, “Not now, we’ll talk about it later.” This reminds me of a talk by Mary Pergander. One thing that she said that has stuck with me, is “feel your inner NO”. She recommended let it really build up inside before you deliver a calm, but forceful “No.” Her point was that there are a lot of times we mean “No!” but feel that, like my friend, we can’t just say “no”. So we offer a weak response, like “I’ll try to get to it later.” or “Send me an email about it.” and hope it will go away.

This creates several potential problems for you. First, an honest “no” saves everyone time in the long run. I once had a co-worker call me 4 times in a hour, just to follow up on something I told her I would look at. She only relented when I finally told her that no, I couldn’t do it now, that she would need to work with my boss to add it to the priorities. My friend tells me that in similar situations he would call a meeting to discuss the proposal. I find it very difficult to believe that he has a meeting for every proposal people bring to him - but that could explain why he is so busy.  Not to mention that I’ve known him long enough to know that he is very capable of delivering a “no” without uttering a word.

Which brings me to the next problem. When your mouth says “yes” or even “maybe”, but the rest of your body and your subsequent actions say “no”, you may not be communicating as clearly as you would like or as clearly as you need. If you are saying, “I’ll look at it later” and hoping the issue will go away, you may find yourself back doing the same duck and weave with that person next week or sooner. You may also find yourself involved in a project that you simply don’t have time to work on.

If you still aren’t comfortable with saying “no” at work. William Ury, the author of Getting to Yes, has more recently published a book, called The Power of the Positive No. In it he explains how to give a positive no. It’s been awhile since I read the book, but I’ll sum it up as:

1. Understand why you are saying no. Is it time constraints? Are you stretched too thin at work? Do you have a vacation coming up that will interfere with progress on the project?
2. Be graceful about your no. Work is political. You can’t just say no - and in most cases it is completely inappropriate to use the classic “it’s not my job.” At home we use a modified version, “I thought you could do that.”
3. Make your no a consensus no. Get the person on your side. Although you have to say no, try to negotiate an acceptable no for both people.  

Ury calls this process a Yes, No, Yes.  First you say yes to yourself and your reasons for saying no, then deliver the no, and finally you negotiate the other person’s yes to your no.  For the third step, it may be necessary to provide alternatives, like “I can’t do it this month, but I will have time next month.  Can you wait?” or “I can’t do it, but I heard that so-and-so is interested in a project like that.”  Of course, these alternatives need to be sincere.  Deflecting work to someone who isn’t actually interested is only going to make more enemies.

Saying no is an important tool.  Everyone has more to do than they will ever get to. To take control of your job and your career you need to make active choices about what you will and won’t do.  Which is not to say that we should only do what we want to do, just that we need to know why we are doing something.  We need to know that it is moving us closer to our goals.

 

Chinese Periodicals and the state of the conversation on cataloging

I started my professional librarian career as a reference librarian - well, actually I was a Serials/ILL Librarian for the first 2 years, but the place was so small that everyone staffed the reference desk. After 5 years as a reference librarian, I moved into a systems position. For the next 5 years I worked with the library’s catalog. When I had worked in reference, I was a believer in information literacy and the library’s role in education. I was not really concerned too much with cataloging. When I worked in Systems, I was stuck between the need for technical services to quickly and efficiently process items and the reference librarians trying to find those items. It was clear that neither side understood the issues facing the other.

Now I follow the discussion and debate around the future of cataloging and I get concerned that neither side understands what the other is saying. When I had just started working in systems, some of the reference librarians came to me to complain about this or that in the catalog (why can’t we browse publishers? why do I get these results for that search? etc.). I tried to explain it, but the reality was they weren’t interested - they just wanted it fixed. The problem was of course, that nothing was broken. Choices had been made and these were just the consequences. To “fix” it, different choices would need to be made - with their own consequences.

One complaint I had from a reference librarian was that she had difficulty finding journals in Chinese for a student who was looking for something to use to practice reading the language. I considered the many pitfalls that could have caused her difficulty. 1) The language codes are sometimes not applied consistently in the records, and when they are, there are still some problems with how the catalog indexes them. 2) The code for serials was also problematic and inconsistently applied. 3) Maybe it was corruption in the database, or more likely the index - it was temperamental. Wow, our catalog does suck!

So I tried to recreate the problem. I typed “periodicals” in as a subject term and “chi” in as a language code (yeah “chi”, live with cataloging long enough and you’ll be surprised what you absorb). I got 117 results. When I asked the librarian if that is what she saw, her response was “how did you get that?” I described what I did. She had no idea that there were ways to search by language. In fact, there was an option to limit by language, so she wouldn’t have needed to know the cryptic code “chi”. In addition to not knowing about the options to search languages, the librarian hadn’t thought to use the subject term “periodicals” - apparently she was trying to search for a Romanization of the Chinese word for journal.

I thought about this example when I was reading Thomas Mann’s essay “The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries“. I thought about the level of service that he demonstrates in his example in the essay and I wondered if the rest of us are getting the most out of the tools that we have. For our catalogs, are we making the data the best it can be, or are we just waiting for computers to fix it - or at least be able to decipher it? Do we know how to use our catalogs to find the things that we, and our users, are looking for? These are the questions we need to ask ourselves. And I think that too often, not always but too often, the answer is no.

Our catalogs have a lot of room for improvement, but the value that is added by libraries is in the role played by people that making our stuff available for the library’s users. For the catalog, a large part of the value is added by the catalogers who describe the library’s stuff. The better we describe our stuff and the more useful (and usable) that description is, the more value that is added. On the other end, reference librarians add value by assisting in the retrieval of the stuff. Ideally, the reference librarians have worked with the catalogers to leverage the data in the catalog and create a reasonably intuitive interface. And ultimately, the reference librarians will serve as the user’s guide to finding what they are looking for. When the reference librarians don’t understand the catalog, the catalogers are limited in ways they can leverage the data, and the catalog suffers.

For the 5 years that I was supporting the library’s catalog, there was increasing energy behind the “OPAC sucks” crowd. And more and more energy given over to adding tagging, reviews, faceted browsing (”guided searching”), etc. to the catalog. I wholeheartedly support the experimentation with these features, but I think we could have made more improvement to our catalog by giving our reference librarians a better understanding of how cataloging (and by extension the catalog) works and by giving our catalogers a better understanding of how the reference librarians (and by extension the faculty and students) were using the catalog.

 

Web 2.0, SunRocket, and the library brand

SunRocket, the second largest VOIP phone service provider behind Vonage, recently, and suddenly, went belly-up. I was one of the 200K plus victims of phone service that was there one day and gone the next. I talked to my parents on Sunday night (7/15). Monday night (7/16) I noticed that the usually green light on my SunRocket “gizmo” (their name for their analog telephone adapter, or ATA) was red. On Tuesday, when I logged into WordPress, their highlighted post was about how SunRocket was dead and gone. There was no word from SunRocket and I was left to figure out for myself what was next; should I go with the local phone service provider, should I jump on one of the offers from SunRocket’s competitors, or wait for SunRocket to tell me where I should go next. I ended up sticking with VOIP and going with a competitor that had been one of my early choices.

Suddenly I was one of 200,000 people scouring the web for for any hint of what was going on. Reading posts from laid-off employees. Obsessively following the news, trying to figure out what I should do next. For VOIP providers, 200K new customers were suddenly ripe for the picking (assuming that they didn’t feel so burned by SunRocket that they went running to Ma Bell or Verizon - or whichever monopoly is your local provider). There were press releases picked up as news stories about how this or that provider was going to “save” SunRocket’s abandoned customers.

Some of the offers seemed too good to be true. After all, I had chosen SunRocket for how cheap it was and paid for a year’s service (actually 15 months with my 3 months of free service for signing up! I really should have gotten the free phone instead). I looked up reviews to see who had a go reputation - although clearly financial information would have been a better basis for a decision. I looked at 3 websites that allow users to post their reviews of VOIP providers. Reading the reviews, something was clearly wrong. The reviews varied wildly for any one provider.  One reviewer would describe the service as “the best they’ve had” and the next would tell a horror story of hidden fees. And if you read long enough you would eventually come across reviews for one company accusing another company of padding their own reviews or sabotaging their competitors.

How was I to interpret these reviews? How was I supposed to choose a VOIP provider (if you are considering VOIP for your phone service I would recommend getting any financial data you can and see if you can get information on their strategy for acquiring new subscribers)? What I needed was someone to tell me who I could believe.

This made me think about recent focus groups we had conducted in order to redesign the website at MPOW. In those focus groups it was evident that the only reason that some of the students used the library’s website at all was because of the library brand. They were told by their instructors that they needed to use “academically valid” websites and the easiest way to accomplish that was to use websites with the libraries imprimatur. I really could have used someone who would have told me where to look for good information about VOIP providers.

When I was in library school, we were taught that users rely on the library to sort out the quality stuff from the chaff. These days it seems that this is a forgotten role of libraries, at least in the discussions.  For books, at academic libraries the approval plan dictates much of what the library buys, assuming there is money in the budget to buy books.  For journals, “the big deal” drives the library’s purchasing decisions.  For everything else, users - including librarians - turn to the web, where both need to evaluate the resource on a case by case basis.

This is my frustration, I want one place to go that has good information about VOIP providers.  Consumer Reports is a source for good information, but thre is too much lag in the information available there (the last review of VOIP providers appears to be in the January ‘06 issue).  I see this as somewhere the library can still intervene.  That we can still collect good information, so people (me, myself and I) don’t have to cross their finger and hope what they are reading is reliable.

 

What the Hedgehog knows

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” - Isaiah Berlin, based on a Greek parable.

In the supplemental material to Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, called, Good to Great in the Social Sectors, he suggests that the social sectors adopt not the language of business, as some people have done, but the language of greatness. One of the concepts employed by Collins is the Hedgehog Concept. The Hedgehog Concept is about attaining the best long-term results and having the discipline to stick to it.

The Hedgehog concept defines three key parts: finding what you are passionate about, finding what you are best at, and finding a way to pay for that. The idea is similar to Conceptual Integrity. In libraries, we are passionate about information - organizing it and connecting people with it (well, at least I hope we are). What we are best at may be a little more challenging - and will vary from library to library, but for sake of discussion let’s say that we are best at evaluating and organizing information while preserving it for future generations. Collins says that we need to tie our “resource engine” to those two answers. All three of these things need to be tied together and reinforce one another.

Finding the resource engine is the tricky part. Collins says, “the wide variation in economic structures in the social sectors increases the importance of the hedgehog principle–the inherent complexity requires deeper, more penetrating insight and rigorous clarity than in your average business entity.” Most libraries rely on their parent institutions (universities, cities, businesses, etc.) for their primary source of funding. In turn, those institutions have to have a resource engine: business revenues, tuition, taxes, etc. or some combination.

To go from good to great the resource engine must be closely tied to what you are best at and what you are passionate about. That is, your resource engine should reflect the overall mission of the organization. The example is a homeless center that specialized in giving people the tools to support themselves. For Collins, it would be inappropriate for the center to rely on government subsidies for their funding. Instead the center gets the bulk of its funding from small donations from individuals who support the mission of the center. Using resource engines that are not closely tied to what you are passionate about and what you are best at, will cause the mission of the library to stray and eventually dicate what the mission is.

This is where I see the similarity to Conceptual Integrity. Employing the Hedgehog Concept or Conceptual Integrity involves staying focussed on your goal and not following resources that don’t support and integrate into your goal. For libraries, this may mean that they turn down offers from campus IT to collaborate on an Information Commons, resources from the Gates Foundation, or E-rate discounts. It could also mean that you don’t buy more copies of the latest Harry Potter even though you know circulation numbers will go up. Of course, it may mean that you do all of those things, the important thing is to be disciplined about evaluating the resources.

 

A Clean Towel is a Clean Towel

Last week I came across a post by Emily Clasper about her life as an overachiever and her realization that not everyone shares her passion to be the best. I really appreciated her enthusiasm and her positvie approach. But, like some others that read her post, I found the tone of some of her comments to be condescending, “The world (and that includes LibraryWorld!) needs people who don’t necessarily want to be the best. In fact, that’s very beneficial to those of us who do.” But more than that, I was struck by how out of step this was with the discussions in the circles that I move. In the blogs I read and on the email lists I subscribe to, the talk is more frequently about letting go of the idea of getting things perfect.

Wikipedia says the Principle of Good Enough “is a rule for software and systems design. It favours quick-and-simple (but potentially extensible) designs over elaborate systems designed by committees.” But the principle can be applied in areas beyond systems design. If something is “good enough” then it serves it purpose, so we need to look at what is gained or lost by going beyond the requirements. Of course, there are many times that we want to excel beyond the requirements; whether it’s to stand out among the competition, because of individual pride, to anticipate future needs, etc. But that needs to be weighed against what is lost:

• Is the time and effort put into being the best worth the improvement? What’s the Return on Investment (ROI)?
• Are you alienating your coworkers?
• Are you missing another opportunity while you are putting your effort into this project?
• How do you know when you’ve reached the best? Isn’t there always room for improvement?
• What about projects that fall short of the best? What happens to them?

I recently read a management article (don’t remember where) about applying the POGE, that had excellent example that I’m sure we are all familiar with. We have all had the experience of sending some text to colleagues or supervisors for feedback and having it come back marked up in red ink, highlighting minor errors that are at best grammatical changes, but more frequently, they are style changes. I know because I do it myself. You assume, they asked me to look at it, they must want my opinion. But unless you have something to say that is going to make a significant difference in the outcome of the message, it is always best to let the author know that is it fine. In most cases that’s all they wanted, reassurance.

Emily quotes Seth Godin, the author of The Dip, as saying, “People settle. They settle for less than they are capable of. Organizations settle, too. For good enough instead of best in the world.” However, even Seth Godin admits that sometimes good enough is, in fact, good enough and “a clean towel is a clean towel“.

 

Being business-like: the path to mediocrity

Lorcan Dempsey’s post today about libraries being run “like a business” struck a chord with me. If you persevered through my earlier post on Bob Sutton’s No Asshole Rule, you know that I don’t subscribe to the idea that libraries should run more like a business. That is why I was excited to hear someone making the case that the idea that libraries should operate “more like a business” is “well-intentioned, but dead wrong” and should be rejected.

At a former place of work, being “more business-like” was a very popular concept. In fact, it was so popular that during strategic planning activities “being more like a business” was listed as the organization’s number one “value“. It was one of the many things that suggested that the library and myself were not a good fit. I alway puzzled over how being “business-like” could be a value. I’m not even sure what holding “being business-like” as a value means. I think the idea came from people who were frustrated with the way decisions were made and thought that being business-like meant streamlining the process. I’m all for streamlining processes, but you can do that and remain “library-like”. In addition, the people calling for the library to be more business-like ignore the fact that businesses can be just as poorly run as libraries. As Jim Collins writes, “Most businesses - like most of anything else in life - fall somewhere between mediocre and good.”

I haven’t read the book/essay by Jim Collins, Good to great and the social sectors, yet. We don’t have it in our library, but I found it at the local public library and will be checking it out as soon as I can get down there.

 

Disposing of the Disposable Librarian

There has been a lot hand-wringing and blogging about a recent article in the New York Times, along with an earlier article in the New York Sun. The gist of the complaints is that the articles trivialize librarianship, may be sexist, and ignore the fact that librarians have been “hip” for a long time. If you missed it you can get started here. I think it is much ado about nothing. Around the same time, the American Association of School Librarians blog had a post about Disposable Librarians. The gist of this post is that school librarians are leaving their jobs, to take new jobs or retire, and their positions are not being filled. According to the author of the post, disposable librarians are partially to blame for these positions not being filled, or being filled by people who are not degreed librarians.  The post focuses on issues specific to school libraries, but it isn’t difficult to see similarities in other libraries. In short, these are librarians that are not adding value to their libraries. I’m sure you know them. They enforce rules for joy of enforcing rules. They are afraid to do any assessment, unpleasant truths are best left in the dark. And things worked fine before all this technology, why should they waste their time learning it.

These disposable librarians are a bigger problem for librarianship than an article in the style section of the NYT. Every disposable librarian makes it harder for the rest of us to do our jobs. They perpetuate the stereotype that librarians sit around all day and read. They give librarians a bad name. As a result we end up fighting against perceptions of librarians. If we had confidence in our colleagues, that they weren’t disposable, we wouldn’t feel the need to defend ourselves. Of course, if there weren’t so many disposable librarians, we wouldn’t need to worry about it.

The good news is that people are fighting back against the disposable librarians. For example, Laura Cohen, at Librarian 2.0, has written a Librarian 2.0 Manifesto. The contrast between the disposable librarians and the librarians follow the manifesto is easy to see. One point that stood out to was: ”I will validate, through my actions, librarians’ vital and relevant professional role in any type of information culture that evolves.”  It really hits the nail on the head.  This is how we avoid becoming disposable librarians. But I can’t help wondering, is it really a 2.0 phenomena?

The manifesto is a useful tool for librarians to read and think about how they are providing services. Am I putting the library before the users? Am I holding on to practices that are no longer applicable? Am I moving my library forward? But are these things really something new. Shouldn’t librarians have always asked themselves these questions? Haven’t they?  Shouldn’t the manifesto apply to Librarian 1.0, 3.0 or even 0.1. I don’t think you need to be a librarian 2.0 to move your library forward or to show the value of librarians. Is it really that important to get your administrators to blog? (For that matter, are there really people that fear Google?)

On Library Garden, Tyler Rousseau had a post that asked, “Why do we have professional librarians who refuse to keep up with the professional and technological requirements?” Laura’s response lists 3 possible causes: “our culture of optionalities”, “2.0 is a great leap”, and “the speed of change”. I won’t dispute that change is quicker, but I don’t know that if change were slower, people would be any more comfortable with it. Two point oh is a big change. Big enough that sometimes I really don’t get some of it (Twitter? Really?). The biggest change is that for much of the 2.0 stuff to work, you need to have a substantial community of users.  To see an example of what happens without the community, check out this post on fauxonomies.  And, truth be told, if my friends were on Twitter, you could bet I would be too. For that reason, a lot of it may never touch the majority of people. Which is to say, I think this 2.0 stuff looks bigger when you are part of it. And it looks like it came out of the blue, but these things have been creeping up on us for decades. Lack of agreement in our standards is a major problem. But it isn’t the “aspirational standards” that are holding us back, we wouldn’t want everybody moving lockstep in the same direction anyway. It’s baseline standards. What is the minimum level of service a library should achieve? What do we expect as a minimum requirement from out librarians? I started this post talking about disposable librarians. We need to enforce a minimum level of competency, so there is no such thing as a disposable librarian. So that when a librarian is changing jobs or retiring, their administrator begs them to stick around to train their replacement.

So this is my answer to Tyler’s question: we need to not allow disposable librarians in our institutions. How do we do that? First, we should look at the quality of the graduates of our library and/or information schools. Are schools exchanging a diploma for the cost of the tuition? Next, we need to look at management. Does management treat it’s employees as professionals by both giving them professional responsibilities and expecting professional results? Lastly, we need to look at ourselves and our colleagues. Do we have the support and the training to move the library forward? Do we have the interest and the will? Ultimately, it up to us to keep setting the bar higher so that our colleagues will join us in providing services that users need and want; our management will give us the leeway to do what we think is right and expect that we will get results; and our library and/or information schools will need to produce graduates who can keep up. And no one will need to worry about disposable librarians or how hip the librarians are in Brooklyn again, because our actions will speak for themselves.

 

Admitting You’re an Asshole is the First Step

I have just finished reading The No Asshole Rule: building a civilized workplace and surviving one that isn’t by Robert Sutton, PhD. Dr. Sutton uses 2 questions to test whether someone fits the description:

1. After talking to the alleged asshole, does the “target feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself?
2. Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

I was surprised to find that when I applied this test to various people I have worked with over the years that they fit the description more than I would had thought. I recognized many former co-workers in the stories that Dr.Sutton shares in the book. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Research shows that assholes are everywhere.

Bad for business

The main point to take away from the book is that assholes are bad for business. Organizations are much more productive when they are not wasting energy dealing with these people. To start with 20-30% of an organization’s workforce is likely to leave the job to get away from the jerk. That doesn’t include the time spent dealing with, recovering from an attack by, or avoiding the person. There is also the opportunity costs that are lost when the employees in an organization spend more time covering their asses than doing their work or coming up with new ideas. In short, organizations can’t afford to hire assholes.

What about me

For the individual, the message of the book is that we all potentially meet Dr. Sutton’s criteria, some of us may temporary assholes, while others are permanent. Sutton’s advice to avoid falling into this category is to “treat the person right in front of you, right now, in the right way.” It sounds easy, but as Dr. Sutton points out, assholishness is a communicable disease. When you work with assholes, it is easy to start acting like one. If behaving like an insensitive jerk is rewarded, the temptation will be strong to act like one. And if the people around you are acting that way, then it can look normal. It is important to keep on your guard, so that you don’t join their ranks. You can check to see if you are a “Certified Asshole”.

Framing

Framing is one technique that Dr. Sutton offers to avoid becoming an asshole. To not catch the disease, Sutton suggests that you resist the urge to frame situations as “I win, you lose”. The book gives examples of how framing a situation in a certain way can influence the outcome. When people are told that they are in a competition, they are more like to act like competitive jerks. Another example that Sutton gives is an experiment where one group was told that they were playing the “Community Game” and the other was told it was playing the “Wall Street Game”. People who were playing the “Community Game” were noticeably more cooperative.

This got me thinking about past jobs and people who were always trying to make the library “run more like a business”. I started to think about how does this frame impact how people work together? Why are these people interested in the re-framing the workplace? Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of business processes that libraries should adopt. And there may even be aspects of running the library that should be framed in business terms. But I think most of “be more business-like” crowd want to bring competition into the workplace. I’m sure that many would not even dispute that. The problem is that we are not in competition, especially not with one another, and, as Dr. Sutton points out, competition in the workplace breeds assholes.

So, why do some people want to frame the library as a business? They could really believe that there is something to be gained by being more business-like. In fact, there could. But as I read The No Asshole Rule I couldn’t help thinking that many of these people were trying to frame the workplace in way that would benefit them. That these people were trying to spread their poison. Maybe I am being too hard on them. Maybe they came from places that were more business-like or just lousy with assholes. But most of these people never have a real plan for bringing business processes to the library. Too often, they seem to want to create a workplace where it is OK to belittle and harangue their co-workers when they don’t get what they want.

The No Asshole Rule

Life is too short to spend it with assholes. Life is also too short to be an asshole. Dr. Sutton’s book is plea to implement a No Asshole Rule, where they are not allowed in the workplace or if they are in the workplace, that they are contained. We can’t control what other people do, but we can enforce the rule by not being one ourselves. We can also work to keep them from being hired. If they are already in the workplace, we can punish their behavior and to isolate them. But if you are dealing with them in your workplace, there may be little you can do beyond trying to not be one yourself.

 

ALA’s 2007 Annual Conference

Last weekend was the American Library Association’s annual conference in Washington, DC. It was the usual mixture of good things and bad things. I was sorry I didn’t run into more of my colleagues while I was there. But I did make it to a few programs that were more interesting than the usual fare.

The first program I attended was The Balanced Scorecard: the Results Please. I am always interested to hear about what libraries are doing to gauge the effectiveness of their services. While the Balanced Scorecard(BSC) approach was not really a revelation (and businesses and other organizations have been using it for years), it was interesting to hear libraries talk about how they had implemented it. There were speakers from UVa Libraries and Georgia Lomax from Pierce County Library System (Tacoma WA). Georgia Lomax told an interesting story about when her library was looking into getting their DVDs from their vendor preprocessed, so they wouldn’t need to barcode, label, etc. the DVDs when they arrived. The decision had been held up by competing concerns within the library. When they started to implement the BSC approach, they took a step back and asked, “how will this impact our users?” By reframing the question they were able to easily answer the question. If they chose to get their DVDs from the vendor already processed, they would be able to make those DVDs available to the library’s users the same day the DVD was released to the public. Although it would cost more per DVD to get them preprocessed, they determined it was worth it for the improvement in service.

I like this story for 2 reasons. First, it shows that if you aren’t asking the right question, you will never get the best solution. Second, it frames the question the way that it should be framed, “how will this change impact our users?” All too often we make our decisions on what is best for the staff and completely ignore what is best for our users. Sometimes we don’t do new projects because they mean extra work. Sometimes we do new projects because the staff or the administration thinks it is a really great idea, but no one has thought how it will really impact the users. Both of these approaches miss the point that we are here for our users and our business decisions need to made based on their impact to the users, while taking into account budgetary concerns.

I also we went to the Do Libraries Innovate? session. I have to admit, I was hoping for a livelier session. For the most part everybody was on the same page - although, I’m not sure what page that was. Something that was glossed over - and I wish had been addressed was the role of either Library (and Information Science) Schools or the vendors in innovation. There was a little bit of finger-pointing in both of those directions, but nothing ever heated to the point of what I would call “debate” as the program had been billed. Joe Janes did mention that fewer application essays focus on how the applicant likes to curl up with a good book - and made a point of how he didn’t work at a library school anyway - it’s an “Information School”. Both of which duck the question of whether library schools are graduating the kind of students that are going to make libraries innovative.  You can hear the podcast over at LITA.

Perhaps the most interesting theme to emerge was Steven Bell’s returning to the “culture of victimization” that he saw as pervasive throughout libraries. I do agree that low self-esteem is rampant in librarians and that we seem to be fixated on the negative things that happen to libraries. Doesn’t this point back to the kind of students that are graduating from our library and/or information schools? Too often the bar is set very low, so most libraries don’t even know what they are capable of. Low standards in the library profession is a topic better saved for a later date.

On Sunday, I attended the Building the Next Generation Public Library Web Site with Drupal program. What I appreciated most about the presentation is that they had a clear view of what they wanted to accomplish and how it would be achieved using Drupal. I also appreciated John Blyberg’s discussion of why they chose to use a Content Management System, because it “invites participation and elicits contribution.” He was referring mostly to staff participation, but it also included the participation of their users. This is where we need to take our library websites. You can see the slide here.

I stuck around Monday morning to see Peter Morville speak at the ALCTS President’s Program (see the PowerPoint). Two things stuck out about Peter’s talk. First, he talked about the “User Experience Honeycomb“. Peter pointed out that there is more to the user experience than usability. The honeycomb consists of six cells: useful, desirable, accessible, credible, findable, and usable; around a single cell: valuable. Peter emphasized the cells that are often overlooked. That although usability is a necessary part of website design, being a desirable, attractive website is also important. Take a look at usability guru, Jakob Nielsen’s website to see what a usable site looks like when it sacrifices desirability. Libraries still enjoy a great deal of credibility with their users, so that wasn’t really addressed. Findability, as you can tell from the title of Peter’s recent book, is his passion. His example of the importance of findability was the website of the National Cancer Institute. The website had lots of great information for patients and the family and friends of cancer patients, that information was not easy to find. Searches on Google only returned articles from the NCI website deep in the results list. So the information was effectively hidden from many of its potential users. Lastly, on top of the honeycomb is the all too often overlooked, useful. It is important that the website does something that the user wants. Morville stated some law about the relationship between how much effort the user will put in vs. the pay off - I don’t recall it right now ( I even searched for it a bit and still couldn’t find it). The gist was that users will only expend their energy in relation to the perceived reward. In the end, all of these pieces of the honeycomb make the website valuable to the user. It is a good lesson to keep in mind.

 

Bad Bosses and Whiny Employees

Recently I came across a post from The Other Librarian about institutional reluctance to implement technology initiatives. I think the author has some good points and certainly does a good job of voicing the frustrations of techies. But, I can’t help but think that all the energy he is putting into his frustration with management wouldn’t be better used moving his plans forward. To quote the Brazen Careeerist, “There are no bad bosses, only whiny employees.” [If you haven't read it, Daniel Chudnov had an excellent post on One Big Library about the frustration some techie librarians are feeling. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it, even if you aren’t a techie librarian. I think it applies to anyone trying to promote new ideas in their library.]

First, let me commiserate, I have been the person at work trying to get the library to embrace technological change. With regard to those changes, I have had mixed results getting them implemented. Some were never implemented, some were, and some were implemented after I had left. I have even implemented some and lived to regret it. Having gone through the frustrations that Ryan is expressing, I totally agree with much of what he has to say.

Technology is not a threat to librarians. Really it is something we need to be embracing and most librarians are. Public libraries are still the only access to information for a large portion of the population, especially when that information is online.

You don’t need to wait for the perfect solution to start applying technology. Technology is changing rapidly — and more and more rapidly all the time. Choosing a technology and going for it, even when the technology isn’t quite ready can still add value for your users. As Ryan mentions the rapid development of software may solve the problem by the time you are implementing. But even if it doesn’t, the increasing interoperability between systems is making it easier to ditch one system if it doesn’t meet your need and move to another one. And, …

Projects that fail can still be valuable. A lot can be learned from failure for the individual and for the institution. Hopefully, the first lesson that is learned is that the failure of most projects won’t mean the end of the world. Shortly after I had started at a FPOW, we were discussing upgrading the OPAC. Almost everyone at the table expressed a concern about how faculty would receive any changes to the OPAC. Being younger, and less wise, I ranted and raved about “changing it every month until they got used to change” while pounding my shoe on the table Khrushchev-like (well, the shoe stayed on my foot, but the table-pounding happened). I learned later that the previous upgrade to the OPAC had gone poorly and some faculty did, in fact, still harbor a grudge about it. But, even in this case, the only way past those hard feelings is to show those faculty members that you learned from the last time and wouldn’t make the same mistakes.

The main flaw in Ryan’s post is that he says, “Technology has reached a stage that any idea to implement a technology ought to begin with a “yes.”,” but he doesn’t make the case why technology deserves that “yes”. What “stage” is it where you can assume a yes? Wouldn’t we like all of our ideas to receive a “yes”, whether or not they are technology-related? What is different about technology that it should be given a ‘”yes”? Shouldn’t all new ideas start with a “yes”? Don’t the people who want to bring new ideas into reference deserve the benefit of the doubt also? It seems the focus is on technology because that’s where the author works. And for that reason, technology ought to get the benefit of the doubt.

Unfortunately, there are many good reasons to give a “no”. So, it is probably not reasonable to expect a yes. I’m not trying to say that there aren’t bad “nos” out there. I do wish that more managers started from, “Sounds good, what do we need to do to make it happen.” But the reality is that it is safer, quicker, and easier to say “no”. So it is up to us, the techie librarians to make it easier to say “yes”. This is the other problem I have with Ryan’s post, it gives up too much responsibility to management. Instead of taking responsibility for showing how “sexy, in-demand and turning heads” his ideas are and creating a “yes”, he complains that management is “telling us we are fat in our jeans.”

Managers are people too. I think it is easy to forget that managers are people too and are under a lot of the same pressures that you and I are under. This was pointed out to me in one of my first professional jobs out of library school. Many of the younger librarians were frustrated about the management team because it would strike down ideas for what often seemed like arbitrary reasons. We wasted many hours grumbling about the management team. One day, I was grumbling to a friend of mine who was a member of the management team. After listening to me complain about how management won’t do this, but they should because of that, he said to me, “They don’t know that. You need to tell them that.” It was eye-opening. How could they not have known? But of course they didn’t know. They are concerned with completely different issues. I was the expert in that area.

The point is that we can’t expect a “yes” – we can’t even expect that they will understand what we are talking about. Not because it is hard to understand, but because they are not the people who are knowledgeable about this stuff, we are. They are worried about demands from reference, from special collections, from patrons, from faculty, etc. They want to do what’s best, but they don’t have all the background knowledge that you do. If you want to move forward with a project, it is up to you to take responsibility for creating the “yes”. That’s what looks sexy to management.

In addition, because managers are people, they don’t want you to tell them that they are fat in their jeans either. Penelope Trunk from the Brazen Careerist tells the story of when she worked for someone who refused to learn how to use a computer. She even did some of his word processing (‘He once said to me, “You’re such a fast typist!” And I thought, “You’re such a complete idiot!”’). Instead of expressing that thought, she realized that there was a lot she could learn from him and that his shortcomings gave her an opportunity to show her talents.

The fact is that it is not about “nay-ers” who want to plan versus “yeah-ers” who see the value. I consider myself a “yeah-er” who wants to plan, because I see the value. I also see using my experience to help plan as somewhere that I can contribute. So the next time that someone makes a point about planning, test them out. See if it is an offer to help with the plan. Draw them in, “Hey, you are right, we do need to consider some issues. You seem to have some real insight, can you help me out?” To be frank, it probably won’t work, but at least they’ll know that you care about their issues and you value their input. Hopefully, at least you will at least gain someone who is on your side.