I thought it would be interesting to see if I could duplicate the map on Google maps – and for the fun of it see if I could create a simple way to update the map.  The first thing I needed to do was get a handle on KML.  KML is a flavor of XML that Google uses to encode data about maps.  Once I had a handle on KML, I needed to find a way to get the information to populate the KML.

Like most university libraries, my library uses OCLC to facilitate lending between other libraries and us.  Additionally, the library uses ILLiad to manage that work.  Unfortunately, I don’t have direct access to the data in ILLiad, I’m not even 100% sure what data I could get out of it.  But I could get our ILL Librarian to get me a list of OCLC symbols.  And this is where things start to get interesting.

In order to get information about a library, I used the WorldCat Registry API.  From the registry I can get the name of the parent institution, name of the library, address of the library, the latitude and longitude of the library (very important for Google Maps), and a host of other information.  Pretty much everything I needed to populate my KML data.

So I wrote up a little php script that read through my list of OCLC symbols and searched the WorldCat Registry API for each one.  Fairly quickly I realized that many more symbols were failing than should.  Most often this was a result of a symbol  having more than one location to choose from.  So I tweaked my script to go through each location returned and make its best guess at which one was correct.  Which pretty much meant the first record that had a reasonably complete address.

Now I had a way to get the information about the libraries my library had been engaging in ILL with, but how was I going to get it into Google Maps.  At first I just crammed it directly into KML format.  In my hopeful first days the script generated live data.  However, as you might imagine, this resulted in considerable lag time and ultimately Google just ignored my data.  Next I output the KML data into a separate file.

Outputting the data was all well and good, but ultimately posed some challenges for updating the data.  I had always intended that the data would be able to be updated.  Entires needed to be added, deleted or changed.  I could just periodically run a new list of OCLC symbols through my script and overwrite the old file with new, updated data with any new entries and minus any that needed to be dropped.  However, I still had some failed WorldCat Registry searches that needed to be handled.  And not all of the ILL from my library goes to places that have an OCLC symbol.  So I was hoping to be able to manually enter data, when necessary,

My first solution was to update the KML file using the XML support in PHP.  While this was fun as a mental exercise, it was pretty obvious that I needed something a little more flexible and easy to deal with.  I went about moving my data into a MySQL database.  However, around this time I saw someone talking about Google’s Fusion Tables.  Fusion Tables seemed like a perfect fit for my project.  Fusion Tables are built to work with Google’s other products, like Google Maps.  Fusion Tables are smart enough to know when they are dealing with location data (most of the time) and you can import the data into a map without converting it to KML.

Ultimately, I didn’t go with Fusion Tables.  I wasn’t sure that I ultimately wanted to host this library data in my personal gmail account.  And I suspected that other people in the library would have some issues around managing the data this way.  So at first I stuck with my MySQL database.  But then my university contracted with Google for Gmail accounts with Google Docs and Sites and …  No Fusion Tables.  But I could access a Google Spreadsheet through the API.  And I could easily share the document with others in the library without having to ask for a personal email.  It was worth a try.

Ultimately, I ended up storing the data in a Google Docs spreadsheet.  I have a script that initially populated the data and two other scripts.  The first script lets to put in an OCLC symbol and have the data automatically added to spreadsheet.  This script handles the multiple WorldCat Registry entries with more subtlety, allowing the user to select the addess that they want to use, even providing a map as a visual aid.  The other script allows someone to manually enter an address and add it to the spreadsheet.  Again, with visual aids and the whole nine yards.

I should mention, that I found the latitude and longitude data in the WorldCat Registry to be less than reliable.  It was frequently absent.  Sometimes it was transposed, so the lat was the long and vice versa.  Sometime, I don’t know where it came from.  So I started using the Google Maps API to get latitude and longitude coordinates based on the address in the WorldCat Registry.

For the sake of my presentation here, I moved the data back into Fusion Tables.  Here’s how it looks:

It’s not clear that WP is playing nice with Fusion Tables right now, so I’m not sure that is going to show up, so here is the link – https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?snapid=S285421YrX2

Reference librarians are whiny and demanding.
Systems librarians are arrogant and rude.
Users are clueless and uninformed.

I started my library career as a reference librarian, but have spent the last 9 years working in systems.  During all that time, I have been an active library user.  So I guess that makes me whiny, demanding, arrogant, rude, clueless, and uninformed.  I’m sure I could find someone who would call me any of those things.  We all probably experience moments where we exhibit those unattractive traits.  It does little or no good to classify our colleagues and our users that way.  But response to the post makes it clear that those labels resonated with people.

So, why do we feel this way?  I’m sure there are many things that contribute to this feeling, but I want to focus on one issue, how our systems department interact with the rest of the library.  I currently work in a department called “Library Systems Support“.  This sense of support defines how the department interacts with other library staff.  While I don’t think about it from day to day, it still shows up in the interactions with staff members and in decisions that are made by management.  It makes the library staff view systems as people who work for them.  And it makes the systems department view the library staff as a drain on their resources.

I believe that working in partnership between systems and the rest of the library will help us break down the barriers that breed the hard feelings expressed above.  Of course, many library system departments do work in partnership with their colleagues and most or all probably do at times, but many libraries do still view their systems department as the ”back office” operation which supports the “front office”, reference and special collections, operations.  And that dynamic fosters relations where not only is it likely that departments will have problems communicating, but it is often in the departments interest to not communicate.

When systems works as a partner with other departments in the library, both players can focus on the users and on the businesses processes of the library.  When systems serves as support for other departments and is not involved in the business of the library, the needs of the users and the definition of business processes becomes a negotiation.  The end result is that neither the user or the library is served.  Instead, the individual departments are served.  The things that the staff think are important are preserved.  The things that don’t directly impact the staff are the first to go.  Working as a partner changes the game.  Instead of starting from either department’s goals, both parties can work from a common goal.  Sure, that’s a bit idealistic, but the likelihood that focus is kept on the end result, rather than on who’s going to do the work, increase significantly.

It isn’t all milk and honey.  Working as a partner with other library departments is going to make more work for systems.  It will probably make more work for the other departments as well.  But working together will break down barriers between the departments.  So Systems will see Reference as more than whiny and demanding.  And Reference will see Systems as something more than arrogant and rude.  And we’ll realize that the users aren’t clueless and uniformed, they just need our help.

So what is the confusion about librarianship?  I think Rory’s post hints at it, but I see it more pronounced on some of the email lists that I monitor.  People talk past each other on a topic because they don’t start out with the same assumptions.  To go back to Rory’s post for a minute, as someone points out in the comment, Rory talks about the fields of “web designers, information architects, web searchers, information scientists, user experience experts” belonging to other professionals, but then claims that librarians should acquire greater knowledge about “scholarly communities, the research into reading behavior, learning theory, media studies”, although those are fields that also belong to other groups.

I think the division created by Rory is informative, and relevant to the failed connections I was talking about earlier.  On the one hand is the a list of “technical” disciplines we should be wary of and on the other is a list of “pedagogical” disciplines that we should embrace.  The same dichotomy influences discussions on the mailing list mentioned above.  Arguments about what machines can/will do to make human intervention unnecessary versus how our users really use the machines can go on for weeks and usually only make both sides dig in more (Although, I do think recently it seems like there has been a little give on one or both sides).  The sad thing is that, for the most part, librarians aren’t experts on either the technical or the pedagogical issues.  We flounder around grabbing for whatever is popular (web scale!!!) or what catches our fancy (active learning!!!) without the training to back it up and without the research to show that it is worthwhile.

So, what is librarianship?  I can’t say that I know, but the idea I have been mulling around in my head since reading Rory’s post is that librarianship is about making sense out of the world of information.  Making sense in the broad sense in terms of defining the information universe, creating ways to describe the information in the universe, and developing ways to identify and access information.  And also, making sense in the micro sense, such as teaching information literacy to a class (or a single student), cataloging a book, building a local collection, or making a web site that helps users find what they are looking for.

To make this sense out of the incredible amounts of information out there and make it available to that person who walks in the front door or surfs over to your web site, you do need all the skills that Rory listed: an understanding of scholarly communities, the research into reading behavior, learning theory, media studies and you also need to be web designers, information architects, web searchers, information scientists, user experience experts.

The first point was that simplicity exists only in your head – the world is always complex.  The example used in the presentation was the Unix command prompt.  To the experienced Unix administrator this is a familiar and comfortable place.  A place where the experienced administrator can make magic happen.  For the user who has limited, or no, experience, it isn’t simple at all.  In fact it may send them to the local bookstore, or Amazon.com, looking for a book to tell them what to do next.  In contrast to the apparently simplicity of the Unix prompt, Dr. Norman showed a picture of the cockpit of an airplane. The cockpit of the 747 in the image to the right seems very complex to most of us – at least those of us not trained to fly a 747.  For those who are trained as pilots, the set up is fairly easy to understand.  First, many of the controls are duplicated to accommodate the co-pilot.  Additionally, controls are grouped according to how they are are used.  Navigation and control are in one area, while communications is in another area.  The layout of the cockpit makes it easy for the pilot to understand the controls.

While it’s never been compared to a plane’s cockpit, the most frequent comment I get from staff at my library is that the home page is too complicated and too busy.  To me, however, the complexity and busy-ness should function like the airplane’s cockpit.  It should be laid out in an understandable fashion that gives the user not only access to the complexity buried beneath the home page, but an understanding that there is a complexity.  That there is a wide range of information available.  To find just what you are looking around, you may need to poke around a bit.  This is not to say that everyone should have to poke around, there needs to be express lanes for users doing the most common tasks on the web site, but hiding the complexity of library only makes it more difficult for the user.

Current approaches to representing that complexity are far from perfect.  And new solutions that provide a single index that searches many of the library’s resources can help filter some of the complexity.  However, even these solutions mask the complexity more than they cure it.  To deal with the complexity of its results page Google gives you search options that narrow the scope of your search (Scholar, Blogs, Images, etc.).  However, those categories still fail to represent the complexity or give us enough options.  So we are left to hope what we are looking for is in the first few pages of results – to Google’s credit, it often is.

Library web pages lack one of the strengths of cockpit design – standardization.  Pilots can move from plane to plane and expect similar layouts.  In libraries, for now, our users have to learn a new interface every time they come to a new library home page.  And the incentive in libraries is to come up with something new rather than make user experience uniform from interface to interface.  It creates a challenge for our users and it creates a challenges for the librarians who maintain web pages.

Dr. Norman also pointed out that there are many things we don’t expect people to be able to do intuitively, such as driving.  We expect people to spend some time learning to drive, perhaps even taking classes.  Although it may be unfashionable to say in some circles, doing research is a skill that has to be developed over time.  Obviously, the stakes (usually) aren’t as high as they are when you are driving a car.  But being able to identify and meet your information needs is valuable skill that we spend all of our lives practicing.  Unfortunately, research doesn’t have the clearly defined rules and standard tools that driving does.  This makes it even more complex.

I want to be clear, I’m not coming down on the side of librarians who I have known who thought our users just need to learn how to use our stuff.  Users do need to learn how to do research, but librarians need to work towards making our tools more consistent and easier to use.  To go back to automobile example, manufacturers keep making better cars; standardizing the order of the gear shifter, anti-lock brakes and now cars that park themselves.  Just because the user has a responsibility to learn, does not relieve librarians of the responsibility to make better tools for research – or to teach users how to do research.  Ideally, librarians would develop a tool that would teach its user how to do research while .  I’m sure someone somewhere is working on these issues, but I don’t see it mentioned frequently in the Library literature.

The library domain is a complex one.  The array of resources that libraries make available to their users is staggering.  We need to do a better job of getting our resources in the hands of our users.  To do that we have to work WITH our users to help them understand what information they need and how they can use it.  We can’t abandon them to the single search box of Google or Bing!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.