Let Drupal Drive Your Web Site

Below are my notes for the Poster that I will be presenting at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago on July 13, 2009.

The data and charts that accompany these comments are available for download.  As is the raw survey data.

Who was surveyed and when?

• Libraries that are using Drupal for their web site or planning to use Drupal for their website were surveyed from May 1, 2009 to June 15, 2009.
• 71 libraries completed the survey.

Type of Library

• Academic libraries represented the largest group with 37 University, College, or Community College libraries responding.
• 26 Public Libraries responded.
• The remainder of the libraries were made up of a vendor, a consortium, Government, Special, School, and Medical Libraries.

Before Drupal

• More than half of libraries were using Static HTML with some dynamic content for their web sites.
• Libraries using only Static HTML or Static HTML with dynamic content make up more than two-thirds of the libraries that responded to the survey.
• Libraries using a homegrown CMS were the next largest group.

When was Drupal implemented?

• Of the libraries that responded, the bulk of the libraries were either still in development or had implemented Drupal more than a year ago.
• Libraries who responded could be broken down into 3 nearly equal categories:
• Libraries who had implemented more than a year ago.
• Libraries who had implemented during the previous year, and
• Libraries still in development.

Functionality

• CCK and Views, Classification, Search, and Syndication/Aggregation are the most popular functions according to respondents to the survey.
• Public and Academic libraries generally agreed about how popular each function was.
• Notable exceptions
• User-contributed content which 8 public libraries had implemented versus 3 Academic libraries
• Multi-user and Personal blogs (14 Public v. 6 Academic)
• Rich text editing (20 Academic v. 10 Public).

How hard were these tasks?

• “Learning Drupal”, “Changing the site’s look and feel”, and “Module Selection” were reported as the most difficult tasks in Drupal.
• “Creating and marking up content”, “Configuring access rights”, and “Installing Drupal” were reported as the least difficult tasks in Drupal.
• “Getting help in the forums” and “Contributing to Drupal” were also rated as relatively easy.
• “Finding skilled Drupal Developers”, “Finding skilled Drupal Designers”, and “Finding good documentation” were reported as challenges.
• In general, Drupal was rated relatively easy
• No task was reported as difficult by more than 50% of the libraries.
• 3 tasks (“Creating and marking up content”, “Configuring access rights”, and “Installing Drupal”) were reported as easy by more than 50% of the library.
• Close to 80% of the libraries reported “Creating and marking up content” as easy.

Who is responsible?

• The Academic libraries who responded to the survey split almost evenly between having a single person responsible for the use/implementation of Drupal and having the Library’s IT department take responsibility.
• Public libraries were more than twice as likely to have a single person assume responsibility for the use/implementation of Drupal over having a Library IT department take responsibility. This may reflect the availability of an IT department in the library more than any preference.
• Similarly, assigning responsibility to a Committee or Task force was nearly twice as likely in an Academic library than in a Public library.
• Assigning responsibility to a Committee/Task force was reported by one-third as many Public Libraries as reported that a single person had responsibility.
• Academic libraries reported assigning a Committee/Task force responsibility half as often as an individual.

Challenges

• The steep learning curve of Drupal was the by far the most frequently mentioned challenge in implementing and using Drupal.
• Concerns about staff resistance, staff understanding of the new architecture, and lack of communication were also common themes in the responses.

Benefits

• Decentralizing the content, ease of updating content and freeing up the time of the programmer/webmaster were frequently mentioned as benefits of using Drupal.
• Many libraries also mentioned increased functionality for their web site as a benefit of using Drupal.

 

Why Johnny Can’t Research

According to the Association of Research Libraries, the number of face to face reference transactions declined by more than half between 1995 and 2006 (1995 Average – 210016.76; 2006 average – 90522.1226). This trend is generally blamed on the expansion of electronic resources during that time and a shift away from traditional print reference tools. But don’t people who are using electronic reference tools need help using them? Is using Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature in print that much more difficult than using the electronic version? And was the purpose of the Reference Desk simply to instruct people how to use the print indexes to do their research? Isn’t there more to the job than that? Aren’t the reference librarians there to help with research? Shouldn’t the kind of questions that made up reference transactions still need to be answered? With the explosion of information, shouldn’t people need even more assistance developing their research strategies?

I believe that the students and faculty really do need our help, but for some reason they are not using our reference services. Stephen Francoeur lists some reasons why students may not ask for help in his post Why don’t our students ask for help? Interestingly, all of the 8 reasons listed could be addressed through better marketing of the reference services:

• They don’t want to ask a “dumb question” or appear incapable of doing the research themselves.
• Libraries and research make them anxious.
• They don’t know they need help.
• They’re overconfident.
• They really don’t need our help.
• They forget that reference services exist.
• They don’t know that reference services exist.
• They had a bad reference experience elsewhere that turned them off the service.

If students don’t know or can’t recall that reference services exist, then clearly the word is not getting out. Since students (and faculty) do need our help, we clearly aren’t communicating or demonstrating the value of our services very well if they still believe that they don’t.

One thing that is missing from Stephen’s list is the librarians themselves. All of the reasons listed talk about what the students do or don’t do, but to solve the problem of anxious students, librarians have to do a better job of making the students feel welcome and comfortable asking whatever questions they have. And bad experiences (elsewhere of course, because they never happen here) can only be countered by ensuring that all the experience that students have dealing with the library are good experiences.

During the most recent ALA Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia, I angered 2 colleagues of mine when I suggested that the number of reference transactions is falling is because we aren’t doing a very good job. If we were doing a good job, people would be lining up to use our services. The best marketing tool is the satisfied user. I believe that students need the help of professionals who can help them formulate a research strategy and execute it. When reference statistics go down, it means that fewer people are getting the help that they need. And if that is the case, then libraries are definitely not performing their job very well.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

 

Conceptual Integrity

The email lists that I am subscribed to have recently been inundated with discussion that can be characterized as “traditionalists vs. modernists.” The reality is that it has been hard to tell what the discussion is about because too often each side is talking past each other. The basic debate is similar to the debate about user-centered design. One side says the Library needs to be responsive to what the user wants. The other side says the users that users don’t always know what they want. The problem with the debate is that these things are not necessarily at odds with one another. In fact, in most cases they are 2 sides of the same coin.

The library’s responsibility is to its users. So, clearly they need to be responsive to what their users want. The problem comes from a slippery definition of what the word want means. You’ll have to pardon the philosophy major in me, I know semantic arguments are out of vogue, suffering from Bill Clinton’s torturing of the word ‘is.’ In the debate the word ‘want’ is used for everything from “I want to do research to write a paper” to “I want to be able to tag books.” Both of these are perfectly reasonable requests that the library should respond to. However, I would argue that one is central to the mission of the library, while the other is a means to that end.  It is disingenuous to view them as equivalent.

To be fair, many people in the debate believe that the library should respond to all its users wants equally.  If your users want to be able to tag, then you should provide tags. It is appealing customer service model. It looks like it is making people happy. And relieves the library from the having to come up with a plan to serve its users better. The ultimate problem is that it generally doesn’t make people happy.  The more immediate problem is that once your job is simply to respond to user requests, you are no longer a library. You are what your users think you are. As a result, if your users think you aren’t important, then you aren’t. This is how libraries end up being closed by their constituencies.

A successful library will define its contribution to its users. This is particularly important for libraries because they are often not in a position where they can define their value through revenue.  In Alan Cooper’s book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, he talks about “conceptual integrity,” a term originally coined by Frederick Brooks. He puts it this way, “The customers, no matter how well meaning they might be, don’t have the ability to think of your product as a single, conceptual whole.” Cooper is talking about designing software, but demonstrates that it applies to service industries. His example is a consultant, who when he is starting out, is selling his “brains,” people hire him for how smart he is. As he builds his reputation, his clients start to hire him for his experience, his “gray hair.” When he is hired for his experience, he is doing work he has already done and stops learning new things. From there it is just a matter of time before the lack of new and different projects causes the consultant to fall behind the cutting edge, until he is no longer able to get work. Cooper calls this the “death spiral.”

Libraries are just as susceptible to the death spiral. You could argue that libraries are already in the death spiral. Instead of defining what they are, having conceptual integrity, they are scrambling to catch up to users wants. As a result, people are going to Amazon to find books and Google for everything else. Because our users are going to Amazon for books and Google for the rest of their information, libraries think they need to be like Google and Amazon. The reality is that we are not in competition either Amazon or Google, but since we lack conceptual integrity, we don’t even know that. I’m sure most of us have heard of a user who instead of using the library to identify a book, uses Amazon to find the book and comes to the library with an ISBN. It is a sad story about the state of libraries.

The cause of this sad story is a lack of conceptual integrity. Many libraries don’t know or don’t understand their role, what they are trying to accomplish. This brings me back to the modernists vs. traditionalists debate. The debate is fueled because many people on both sides don’t understand the ultimate goal of what the library is trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, this confusion is understandable as librarianship as a profession has not done very good job of communicating what it is all about. This is compounded by libraries that don’t maintain a sense of conceptual integrity, and if the library has one, it isn’t communicated to the staff.  The divide between technical services and public services also prevents librarians from seeing the conceptual whole 9in fact the debate on the lists is often TS vs PS or either of them vs systems.

If librarianship, or the library, had a strong sense of what it is, then the debate would not be about whether it is our job to tell people what they should want or whether we add tags because someone asks for it. The debate would be about how these things relate to our missions. Do tags help users meet their library-related goals? Are there resources that are better than Google at meeting certain user goals? By having conceptual integrity, we could have a conversation where we are all on the same page.

Earlier I said that Amazon and Google were not in competition with libraries, but if our users are going to Amazon instead of coming to the library, then aren’t we in competition. I say we aren’t in competition because we aren’t in the businesses that those two companies are in, but there is overlap. The overlap is actually to our advantage. This, however, is a discussion for another time.

 

User-centered design vs. User-driven design

Recently, I have been involved in some discussions regarding “user-centered design.” It is a very hot topic in libraries, well at least in the parts of libraries where I work. In that discussion, user-centered design was described at various times as “embracing their ever changing desires” and “making iterations so small, the feedback-loop seems seamless”. The problem with making your design decisions based on your users’ desires is that you lose what you are trying to accomplish. If you are designing something, you are presumably trying to meet a goal of the user(s) – even when the only user is yourself. When you start chasing their “ever-changing” wishes, you inevitably lose sight of the user goal you were working on solving.

User-Driven Design

Alan Cooper, in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, draws a distinction between user-centered design and user-driven design. User-driven design can be compared to the “embracing their ever changing desires” described above. In this kind of design, we make our design decisions based on what our users are asking for. The example given to me, if library users are asking for tagging, we should give it to them just because they are asking for it. Whether or not library users are asking for tagging is a discussion for another day, but should the library be responding to all requests from their users?

What could be the harm in giving people what they want? Certainly they know what they want and if the library gives them what they want, they will think well of the library and everybody wins. As noted above, this is often not the case. For example, the vendors for our integrated library systems (ILS) have been striving to meet our ever-changing desires for decades. The result has been that they haven’t been able to either meet those desires or to give us what we really needed to manage our collections and provide a discovery tool. To confirm this all you need to do is think back the last upgrade of your ILS. Maybe you got some things, functions or features, you wanted – probably some library somewhere did. It is just as likely, if not more likely, that you actually were no longer able to do things that you had come to rely on for your business. And you are probably still waiting for that upgrade to course reserves, online booking, or some other function that causes you to pull your hair out. Now, think about advances in ILS, have they come from your vendor, or did they come from other places, such as Endeca or Evergreen from PINES.

User-Centered Design

Endeca and Evergreen come from very different places. Endeca lists among its clients Wal-Mart, Boeing, IBM, many other large corporations, and North Carolina State University’s Library.  It is a profit-driven company, looking for new markets to sell its technology.  PINES, the developers of Evergreen, is the public library automation and lending network for 252 libraries.  The very nature of their product is very different from Endeca.  Where Endeca is in the process of patenting their technology, PINES has developed Evergreen as an open source project.

The thing they do have in common is that they identified a need, a goal, and developed technology to solve that goal.  To better understand the goals of their users, they talked to their users about those goals and their needs.  Once they understood those goals, they could formulate a way to provide a product that would help their user meet their goals.  For Wal-Mart, the company’s goal is to get people to locate and purchase merchandise.  For PINES, the consortium’s goal had many facets, from facilitating interlibrary lending and book processing to making it easier for the library users to find the materials they needed.

User-centered design focuses on the goals of the user, not on what seems to them like a good idea at the moment.  To have a successful design, it is necessary to keep focus on that goal.  That is how we center our design on the user.  This does not mean that we take the approach that we know best  – the user always has a better grasp on their goal.  But it may mean that we have a better way to reach their goal.  Think of it this way, you could give yourself an appendectomy, but you probably will go to a doctor because they know more about it, they have experience doing it, and they have better equipment for doing it.

So user-centered design should be a process informed by the user, but ultimately designed be a professional that can apply their knowledge to assist the user in reaching their goals.

Golly, there is so much more to cover: how this fits into your mission, “conceptual integrity”, user testing, “goals” vs. “needs”, etc.  Those topics will have to  wait until a future post.