Help Wanted, No Bullshit by Sekimura / CC-BY

This week we decided to do a “collective wisdom” post about job hunting mistakes. This is an issue affecting every librarian, whether you’ve got a job, you’re in the market, or you’ll begin looking five years down the road. We’ve all made errors in selecting jobs to apply for, drafting our cover letters and resumes, and during interviews. Once we realize what we’ve done, we promise ourselves never to repeat them again and create strategies that work for us. Many of us have also been on the other side of the table, interviewing great candidates who are amazingly well prepared, and also some applicants who fail to put their best foot forward. This group post is our way of pulling together our collective experiences as both interviewees and interviewers and offering up some practical advice to our readers. We welcome your thoughts, advice, and questions.

Plan Ahead!

Before you look for a job, while you’re still in school or if you’re getting curious about another facet of the library profession, it is most advantageous to you to schedule informational interviews. Ask engaging and meaningful questions to show your curiosity about the institution/organization. Ask about work duties, ask about the organizational culture. Really get a feel for the place and decide if it’s something to keep on your list for a place of employ in the future. When it’s all said and done, write thank you notes to the people who took the time to speak with you. They will remember you when you return for an interview and in the future you can talk about this experience in your cover letter. If it’s not some place you want to work, you can still occasionally email these people and “update” them on your professional life. You never know, they might have some inside skinny about jobs in that area. Currently, I am employed in a library where I conducted an informational interview two years before I eventually landed an actual interview at the institution. Colleagues with whom I work everyday are people who received thank you notes from me while I was still in graduate school. -Emily

As You Consider Applying

Don’t worry about your inexperience. While many hiring employers look for applicants with experience in the job for which they’re hiring, some don’t. I, for one, would rather hire someone who demonstrates the desire and capacity to take on a new job. They bring a fresh perspective and an eagerness to learn that those hired laterally often don’t. -Joan Bernstein

Don’t apply for a job for which you have no qualifications. You are wasting the time of the people reviewing resumes and your own! They may remember you, and when they do it might be a time when you are qualified. Sadly, by then you may have annoyed the wrong people. -Derik

Along those same lines, think hard before applying for a job for which you are extremely overqualified. Many libraries won’t hire someone with an MLS for a non-Librarian position. There’s less of a danger of inciting quite as much ire, but it’s still a waste of their time and yours. -Ellie

Don’t go out for jobs without learning about the organization first. For the most part, the people who have hired me, and, to some extent, the people I’ve hired, are people I know. It isn’t that I’ve ever benefited from nepotism, at least not that I know of, or hired folks because I knew them, but the dynamics of filling open positions, even in the best of times, encourages employers to be risk averse. There’s usually high demand (many current and potential applicants) and low supply (usually just one or two open positions), and there are significant opportunity costs associated with making the wrong decision. The way to reduce a potential employer’s sense of risk is to get to know them in advance, or, at the very least, make sure mutual acquaintances advocate in your behalf. I look back at the times I attempted the job application equivalent of cold calling and shudder. -Brett

Don’t forget about your needs. Focus on yourself and your future working life. If you know you don’t want to commute an hour and half in the car each way to work every day, don’t apply for a job that would require this commute. Likewise, if you know you are qualified for a position but it sounds like you’ll hate the work, don’t apply. It’s tempting to make these sacrifices, especially in our current economy and with the seeming scarcity of library jobs in certain markets (like Portland), but it’s just not worth it. You’re better off poor and happy rather than miserable at your job or hating your commute. (I’ve done both and have vowed never to do either again.) -Emily

Don’t develop an emotional attachment to a job listing. This seems to have occurred most often for me when I applied for a job that seemed perfect, usually because I hadn’t done my networking, so I romanticized the position and employer. Emotional attachments also seem to accompany the reach applications, the feeling of, “it would be great if they hired me,” rather than the, “I’m going to be really great at this job the moment I start.” -Brett

Application Materials

Don’t use valuable space in your cover letter to summarize the job description/announcement or rehash facts from your resume. The people reading the letter know what they are looking for, so you should focus on why you are the person that fulfills those qualities. Show them how, with narrative that won’t be found on your resume: details, story, analysis, anything that might be relevant, interesting, and positive. -Derik

I agree with Derik that it’s a bad idea to summarize the job description in the cover letter, but on the other hand if you don’t address every job requirement listed in that description and explain how you meet it, you’re also missing out. Your search committee members may be reviewing one hundred or more applications, so you can imagine how tempting it is to look for excuses to eliminate candidates from the pool. The cover letter can easily be a make or break element in that initial application review. If you don’t manage in the first page of the cover letter to make it clear how well you fit (and hopefully, exceed) all the requirements of the job in question, your application may get tossed into the backup pile pretty quickly. -Kim

But don’t bank on your cover letter either. Personally, I read every cover letter that comes in and place an extreme amount of importance on applicants’ writing skills. I barely skim the resumes. But I know others who do the opposite. Make sure your resume is just as perfect and tailored to the specific opening. Don’t bank on your beautiful resume formatting either. Chances are you’ll have to put it through some terrible online form that will destroy it. When that happens to me I always clean it up as much as humanly possible for the form, which usually means removing all of the formatting, and then email a PDF. Speaking from the hiring side, I’ve only ever received the ugly forms, so either no one else is sending a follow up email or HR isn’t forwarding them. Take the time to make the online submission look as nice as you can. -Ellie

Don’t pretend it’s all about you. The “cold call” application also seems to lead to other mistakes I’ve made myself and see all the time in others: telling employers why you want a job or how it will benefit you rather than demonstrating how well you understand the organization and how useful you’ll be in helping the organization achieve its aims. If they don’t know you already, it’s natural to try to introduce yourself (see also: the only thing I’ve ever learned from Seth Godin). In my opinion, introducing yourself is almost always a mistake. Don’t say anything about yourself until you’re asked, in person, and you’re sure they’re really interested. And then keep it brief, something I’m not good at, especially when I’m nervous or eager. -Brett

Don’t overestimate your qualifications. One of the strangest resumes I ever received came from a plumber who applied for the Head of Reference position. I guess “MLS degree” didn’t mean anything to him, so he thought it couldn’t be important. While this is an extreme example, I think it’s important to not over-analyze your qualifications. Obviously, you should be in the right ballpark, but even if you’re not sure you’re the perfect applicant, go ahead and give it a shot. It’s the employer’s decision who to interview; don’t do that job for him by ruling yourself out. -Joan Bernstein

Don’t lie or exaggerate (excessively) in your cover letter. You may get called on it and look the worse for it. If you claim something is your research interest, be ready to answer questions about that interest with some modicum of intelligence and enthusiasm. -Derik

Don’t write application materials in times of emotional duress. This might seem pretty simple to most people, but I recently had the experience of submitting a job application at a very emotional time. In my case a family member had just passed away and the application deadline, which I had been keeping in the back of my mind, got completely forgotten. I awoke one morning (the day before the deadline) and gasped as soon as I had opened my eyes remembering in shock that I hadn’t yet drafted a cover letter for the position. Hurriedly I pieced together a draft over my lunch break and spent my evening hours “refining” the cover letter before I printed the application then drove it to the institution in order to get the application in on time. Two days later I revisited the materials out of curiosity and was ashamed to see what I had written. Sentences in my letter were missing prepositions, sentences were incomplete. To make a long story short, I should have passed on this job application opportunity and taken care of my emotional self over hurriedly applying for a job. At the very least, I should have had someone else read the cover letter before I pressed “print.” -Emily

Don’t use the same resume without revisions. Your resume should be tailored to the job that you’re applying for. It’s critical to take the extra time and attention to showcase how your skills and experience meet the job requirements as described in the position description. And remember that the job requirements are usually ordered from most critical to least critical in terms of reviewing applicants as a good fit for a position. So, if strong communications skills is a requirement that is listed first, make sure you pay particular attention to showcasing what you can bring to the position in terms of your ability to communicate effectively orally, in writing, and in interpersonal communications. If the position description requires experience or expertise with certain programming languages or software and you have that experience, be sure it makes it onto your resume. If your qualifications match the position requirements, then you’ve made it that much easier for the search committee to identify you as a qualified candidate. Make sure that there are no spelling errors, that you’ve elucidated each acronym (where appropriate), and if you have gaps in your work history, be sure to clarify why they exist in the cover letter. -Hilary

Don’t experiment with unusual organizational schemas in your curriculum vitae or resume. The search committee is going to be reviewing a whole lot of resumes and it helps them to be able to easily identify your educational background, work history, and other qualifications. If you decide that, say, grouping your past jobs by state sounds like a good idea, you’re going to drive them nuts unless there’s a really good reason to do so. And that’s just not a good foot to start out on. -Kim

But don’t be scared to try something different if it really makes sense in your particular situation. I came to librarianship from another career and with no library experience. I included a paragraph towards the end of my resume highlighting how my prior experiences explicitly related to the current position’s requirements, then briefly listed the job titles and dates. As I gather more library experience, that will come off, but at the time it showed that I was an experienced professional already and eager to apply those skills to a new field. -Ellie

Once you’ve decided to apply, here are my tips, based on my experiences from the other side of the table:

• Don’t get the name of the library wrong. Hint: use the name as shown in the job posting.
• Don’t be late! Apply on time—by posted end date.
• Don’t ignore instructions. If asked to apply by e-mail, don’t show up in person with your resume.
• Don’t omit a cover letter. Cover letters are important. Include one. It shows that you are literate (hopefully) and it spotlights the strengths that make you suited for job. You, not the hiring manager, have a stake in identifying what sets you apart from other applicants.
• Don’t generalize. Make the cover letter, and resume, position-specific. Generic applications don’t show much commitment on your part, and they communicate laziness.
• Don’t randomize your resume. List most recent experience first. The hiring manager wants to know what you’ve done recently, as well as seeing a pattern of career progression.
• Don’t be vague. Be specific about your past responsibilities and accomplishments. Don’t exaggerate, but don’t be too modest, either.
  -Joan Bernstein

Screening Phone Call with HR

Don’t ignore HR. This is where you have an opportunity to ask questions about the position and the timeline of the search committee process. And this is where you show who you are and your enthusiasm for the job. The people who call you are typically going to be very skilled in listening for how easy you are to talk to, how forthcoming you are with answers to questions, if you’re nervous or if you’re holding back. They bring this information along with your expressed level of interest back to the search committee. If you’re in a hurry to get the phone call over, it will be noticed. Be genuine, be honest, be open, and be cheerful. -Hilary

Phone Interviews

Don’t be concise! If your phone interview runs less than a half hour, chances are you didn’t give your interviewers a good flavor for who you are. It’s incredibly difficult to make conversation with invisible people you’ve never met, and it’s doubly difficulty to put the required energy into selling yourself to them on top of it all, but if you don’t you’re going to find yourself back at square one. Think of the phone interview less as an interview where you get grilled by the search committee and more as an opportunity to state your case. Prepare your message in advance: identify two or three main points you want your interviewers to remember about you and fit those points into whatever questions you get. Make the phone interview do what you want while still answering the questions. It’s extremely challenging, yes, but if you can pull it off you’re likely to stand out. -Kim

Don’t freak out. When the people interviewing you on the other end are all in a room together with a speaker-phone, its downright freaky. There are awkward pauses and sometimes you can’t tell whether you’ve lost the phone connection. And you wonder to yourself if they are making faces at each other based on your responses. In my dark, dark past, I royally screwed up a phone interview and I will probably never apply to work at that organization again because of it. I under-prepared and got lost in my responses. However, I learned from it and modified my approach. First, don’t plan on conducting the phone interview in a setting where you’re worried that you’ll be disturbed (is someone likely to knock on your office door?, is it possible that the fire alarm will go off?). Stay home or go someplace where you are sure you’ll be left alone. If you’re using your cell phone, make sure you’ve got solid battery life. Second, take the advice in the section on “Interview Preparation” below and practice responding to interview questions. Write out your responses and practice them out loud and get them so well-ingrained that you can spout them out at a moment’s notice. I was so scarred from my previous horrible phone interview experience that I wrote my responses on single sheets of paper and color coded them based on the topic so that I couldn’t lose track of what I wanted to say. I practiced these backward and forwards, and on the morning of my next phone interview I taped them up on the walls of my apartment and practiced them again. This phone interview went super—I had a new method that worked and I had regained my confidence in being able to conduct a great phone interview. Bottom line: over-prepare for phone interviews. And remember, the people on the other end of the line also probably hate phone interviews too and those awkward silences are because they are writing notes to themselves or are trying to negotiate who responds next without talking over each other. -Hilary

Interview Preparation

Don’t be a generalist. Look up the mission statement of the library and/or institution of which it is a part. Be prepared to answer why you want to work in that particular type of environment specifically (e.g. academic, public, community college, etc.), not just libraries in general. Ask for the names of the hiring committee, find out what you can about them, and whenever possible apply what you’ve learned. Some academic hiring committees will have non-librarian faculty on the hiring committee. A particularly impressive applicant tailored her information literacy presentation to a specific assignment on that faculty member’s syllabus. Even if you aren’t able to get that specific, be sure to tailor your presentation to the appropriate audience. A presentation on advanced search techniques in a mostly graduate level science database is not going to score you many points with a community college committee. I also have to agree with the others who have mentioned preparing questions for the committee, and not just logistical questions about benefits or when you’ll hear back. You want to know if you’re going to like it here, too. Ask them what they enjoy most about coming to work each day at this particular institution or what they think the biggest challenges facing them are in the next year or so. -Ellie

Don’t interview cold. This is important: you must, absolutely must, review the materials that you sent in with your application (resume, cover letter, references, etc.) and make sure that you have the key points about each experience or qualification ready to leverage to answer the interview questions. Just as it is vital that you know your own resume and cover letter forwards and backwards, it’s also critical that you know the job requirements and that you have prepared key talking points about how you meet each of the requirements. There are tons of librarian interview question sets on the web (Google “librarian interview questions“): use them to prep yourself. Write out your responses to the questions, then say your answers out loud. Practice with a trusted friend or relative. Be prepared to use examples from your past work/classroom experiences to help illustrate what you can bring to the position or to help you answer a question. If you’ve got a list of the people you’ll be meeting on your interview, do a little investigative work on the web and see what projects and initiatives they’re involved with both at the organization that is interviewing you and in the profession as a whole (e.g., are they active in LITA, ALA, Code4Lib, SLA?). Knowing a little bit about each person will give you some insight into what is compelling to them and that will give you an edge in how you respond to interview questions and what kinds of things to chat about when you are walking with a search committee member between sessions or over lunch. And, by all means, prepare questions to ask—write them down and take them with you (Google “questions to ask in an interview” if you need ideas). You will be asked if you have any questions during your interview and if you don’t have any questions for them, then it tells your potential employer that you’re really not that interested. -Hilary

Seconding Hilary here, in particular—have answers prepared for all the standard questions along with an example from a real life situation. There are a chunk of questions you are almost guaranteed to be asked, don’t let them be the ones that stump you. -Ellie

Don’t treat every library as if it were the same. Do your research about each place you interview, and know at least a few unique projects or initiatives that characterize them. If you can drop specific references during your interview you’re going to impress the heck out of them. Wow, they’ll think, this person really wants to work here. And that’s what your interviewers want to find—the person who fits their position and their organization. -Kim

Interviewing

Don’t wing it. Look sharp—business casual or suit attire are expected. Iron your clothes or get them pressed. Wear kick-ass shoes. Get a fresh hair cut. You need to feel good about how you look and on an interview day, this is absolutely critical. Get sleep so that you have energy. There’s nothing worse than having to interview a candidate who looks tired, acts tired, and is slumping in their chair. Shake people’s hands and be confident when you do so. You want these people to like you so you need to offer them a genuine, welcoming, warm handshake. Shake everyone’s hand in the room, or at the very least, give recognition to everyone in the room. Have a pencil and notepad ready if you feel you need it, but don’t write in it excessively while you’re being interviewed. And don’t write down everyone’s name when you’re introduced to them during an interview session. You can always request a list of the people that you met with from your HR contact at the end of the day if you really need to have an inventory of the folks who interviewed you. If someone asks you a question, look them in the eyes when you respond. If your gaze is all over the place or is focused on the paper in front of you, that tells the people who are interviewing you that you either aren’t confident in your response or that you have poor interpersonal skills. If you’ve practiced what you’re going to say and how you’re going to present yourself, then you should be able to look each person in the eye and express your genuine self. Never, never denigrate or complain about someone at your current or former place of employment. Seriously, this is a red flag to your potential employer that you have no tact, no professionalism, and no respect. Thank each interview group for meeting with you and smile at them! It’s surprising how often nervousness will cause a candidate to keep their face unwelcoming and “frowny”—if you smile, they will smile back at you and you will feel good. Simple as that. -Hilary

If you are doing a presentation as part of your interview, don’t make boring slides: lots of text, lots of bullet points, ugly pre-made templates. Often, a presentation is a time during your interview when you will be seeing the largest number of people at once. Catching their attention is important and that won’t happen if you are reading bullet points off a long sequence of slides. Show creativity, if not originality, or at least steal from someone who shows creativity or originality. -Derik

Don’t be shy! The interview is the only chance your interviewers get to see you in action, so pull together all your reserves of extroverted energy and make the most of the opportunity. Be prepared with a list of questions and topics for small-talk to ensure that there is no dead air during your meetings. And for goodness sake, show interest in your interviewers! The easiest way to fill up awkward pauses is by asking them about their jobs and projects. -Kim

Don’t tell the committee you’re nervous. Of course you are, everyone is, you don’t need to draw attention to it. If your nerves are acting up so badly that you’re stumbling over the questions excessively, ask to take a moment to collect your thoughts, take a deep breath, a sip of water and continue. -Ellie

Don’t be late. If you are chronic late-runner, the interview is not the time to let that quality shine through. -Emily

Here are my tips for when you are called for an interview:

• Don’t come in unprepared. Study the institution’s Website. Google the institution and the person who’s interviewing you. This will demonstrate that you prepared for the interview and will distinguish you from other applicants.
• Don’t act disinterested. Be ready with good questions. You are a better candidate if you are able to engage the hiring manager in discussion. I always appreciated questions that I had to think about before I answered. This showed interest in the position and depth of thought—two definite pluses in a candidate.
• Don’t ever badmouth past employers in an interview. I always thought that if I hired that person, maybe someday he’d be saying that about me!
• Don’t forget to follow up with a thank you note. It’s common courtesy, and also an opportunity to reemphasize your skills and interest in the position.
  -Joan Bernstein

References

Don’t only keep in touch with your references when you need their help. Your references will be more willing and able to provide good information about your work if they have a personal stake in your well being. Send them an e-mail at least a few times a year to let them know how you’re doing, what projects you’re working on, etc. even when you’re not looking for a job. -Emily

Don’t leave your references unprepared. Obviously, you want to ask people who you trust will say good things about you to be your references. When you apply for a job and you send your references’ names and contact info as part of your application, make sure to tell your references that you’ve just applied for this job. Better yet, tell them before you send in your application materials. Maybe they have colleagues at the organization to which you’re applying and can give you some insight to help you better craft your resume and cover letter. By all means give your references the heads up and make sure they have the resume (and maybe even the cover letter) for the job that you’re applying to as well as the job description. Tell them why you’re interested in this particular position. You want to prepare your references for being interviewed about you! Don’t leave them empty-handed or surprised when they get a call from an interviewer. Imagine the kinds of questions that they could be asked (Google “references interview questions” if you can’t imagine what these would be) and feed them potential responses by telling them about how you qualify for the job, what you like about the job, and what you like about the organization to which you’re applying. -Hilary

Don’t give lame references. If the people you list on that page are not past supervisors, professors, or other professionals who can really speak intelligently about your strengths and skills, you’re only hurting yourself. The people on your references list should easily match up with your education and work experience listed on your CV or resume. -Kim

The Offer

Don’t underestimate your value. That’s one error I hope never to make or have to deal with again: not knowing your price. Knowing an organization and its expectations doesn’t just mean knowing that you’re going to be an asset, it means knowing how much of an asset you’re going to be. It means getting a starting offer for what you’re worth (and accepting it happily) or being willing to walk away if you don’t get an offer that meets your demands. There’s nothing worse than colleagues who whine about their salaries except, perhaps, being the one who’s doing the whining. -Brett

After You Land the Job

You’ve just landed a plum job. A nice little bump in pay, something more aligned with your interests, a city you’ve always wanted to live in. Time to file the resume away and unsubscribe from all of those pesky jobs RSS feeds that were taking up all of your time?

Nope.

Odds are, this isn’t the last job you’ll ever have. And if you wait until two weeks before the application is due to get yourself ready for the next job, you’ll find you’ve got a lot of last minute scrambling to do.

Many library job applications include essays and a brief window of time in which to apply. Prepare the basics in advance, and when you’re ready to apply you can focus on customizing your application. Have a master resume on hand, something that you update every few months with new accomplishments (while you still remember them). Rather than including a general summary of duties, pull highlights from your monthly reports that reference specific projects.

It’s a good idea to keep an eye on job postings, even if you’re not on the market. You’ll be in a better position to identify trends, compare salaries, and track which skills potential employers are seeking. You’ll also have a better sense of what you’re getting yourself into. A month or three of scanning the want ads when you’re searching for a new job gives you a snapshot of the current atmosphere. With a year or two of trend watching under your belt, you’ll spot signals that are more subtle or nuanced. Why does McLargeHuge Library repost the same position every eight months? Why does TinyTown Library have such high turnover?

By keeping your ear to the ground, you’ll be in a position to act on a good opportunity when it catches your attention, rather than settling for the best you can get when you’ve realized it’s time to move on.  -Heidi Dolamore

Guest contributor bios

Heidi Dolamore lives in San Francisco with her cat, bicycle, and unpaid library fines.

Joan Bernstein recently retired as director of the Mount Laurel Library (NJ). She has spoken, written, and consulted nationally on subjects including the merchandising of public libraries and privacy protection in the library. She served as the president of the New Jersey Library Association from 2006–2007. She can be contacted at joanbernstein@verizon.net.

Photo Credit: Andy Snow Photography

Welcome to a special audio edition of In the Library with the Lead Pipe. Ellie Collier talks to Char Booth, E-Learning Librarian at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Informing Innovation: Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies at Ohio University, a book length research report recently published by ACRL and available as a free download.

We’ll be talking about Char’s path to librarianship, the importance of mentors, the process of writing and publishing her book and much more. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Transcript:

Welcome to a special audio edition of In the Library with the Lead Pipe. I’m Ellie Collier, reference librarian at Austin Community College and I’ll be talking to Char Booth, E-Learning Librarian at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Informing Innovation: Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies at Ohio University, a book length research report recently published by ACRL and available as a free download which is linked to in the transcript.

We’ll be talking about Char’s path to librarianship, the importance of mentors, the process of writing and publishing her book and much more. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Ellie: For starters, can you tell us a little bit about your background? Your path to librarianship? What you maybe did with undergrad or other jobs or interests that sort of took you here?

Char: Sure, my path to librarianship was actually kind of short in a way. I left Texas to go to Reed College when I was still pretty young. I got a history degree up there. It’s in Portland, Oregon. And, like many people who graduate from liberal arts colleges, I had no idea what I was going to do. So I spent about a year just temping at Portland State University, trying to figure out what I was going to do. And my mom and I have this really good relationship. She’s a smart lady, and I was trying to figure out what to do and she suggested “Why don’t you look at library school?” And I thought, “Uh… No.” But then I looked into it and it was actually a strangely perfect fit. Sshe was just trying to get me back to Austin and the iSchool at UT Austin is where I ended up going. So, that was basically my path. I wish it was more dramatic, but that’s it.

Ellie: That’s a very direct route, yeah. I just read that great post you wrote on advocacy on info-mational, which included your plans to sort of let that genuine passion you have shine through whenever you’re talking to faculty. So where along that very brief path did that passion develop?

Char: What I was talking about is that I think a lot of librarians who work in higher education have … it’s not necessarily an inferiority complex, but we sometimes get a little bit self conscious when we interact with faculty in terms of how we advocate for libraries. We usually go about it really practically, “I can do this for you, I can do this for you.” But some of us feel a little bit shy about talking about our convictions as librarians. I think that most of us have very strong convictions about being librarians. We might feel a little bit of vulnerability around that, but I recently have had some conversations with professors, faculty members, and graduate students at Berkley and elsewhere that have really let me know that showing people the veracity of my passion about librarianship and my advocacy for it really can help them get insight into what brings people to academic libraries, what we can do for them, what we can do for students – the real breadth and depth of our profession as opposed to people’s impressions of it, which are never correct. They’re just not complete, they don’t have enough depth. So, anyway, all this passion really came from my experience at Reed College with the research culture there and the library culture there. It’s an extraordinary undergraduate library. It supports students. Kids at Reed are invariably super nerds and we’re really self-interested researchers. We all have to do these really intensive senior theses and we live in that library. And they’re really sweet to us. The librarians are extraordinary. They let people drag cots in there. And when we all graduate we burn copies of our thesis in front of the library and it’s this crazy revelry. It just really instilled this idea of a research culture and libraries supporting students and I’ve never forgotten that. It’s what I aspire to.

Ellie: That’s fantastic!

Char: Oh my god, yeah. It really is. It’s amazing, I miss it.

Ellie: I’m one of those anomalies, I think, that I managed to get into library school having almost never entered any school library. And I’m in community colleges now, and I love it, but yeah, I think I went into my library twice at Penn State, ever, the whole four years.

Char: You know what’s funny, I was always in the library at Reed, but it was really the place of it that I loved. I didn’t take enough advantage of the reference librarians there, which I find really ironic now, but I was just, “Oh, I know it all. I can do it. Whatever.” And then I realized how ignorant I was. It’s kind of incredible how much I didn’t know at the time. So that’s really filled me with this desire to help kids know that they don’t know everything, especially smart kids. And I’m at Berkeley now, and they think they know what’s going on, but they totally don’t.

Ellie: So you went and got a second masters in instructional design. So what led you to that degree and what’s that brought in to your work as a librarian?

Char: Oh so much, so much. I’m so glad I did that honestly. I got a second masters, it’s a Masters in Education, and it’s focused on instructional design and Computer Education and Technology, so this idea of bringing technology into education and how you teach that and how you learn about that and all those things. I got that degree at Ohio University in their College of Education while I was working as a reference and instruction librarian there from ‘06 to ‘08. Ohio University is an extraordinarily supportive library system in terms of professional development. They’re excellent. They basically paid all of my tuition, save maybe…

Ellie: Nice.

Char: …5-10% of it. Very nice. And I just worked really hard on it. I discovered that I’m really fascinated by learning theory and pedagogy and all of these things. And it gave me a lot of practical skills: in flash design, in instructional design, and all of these things that, had I known they existed in library school, or had they been subjects that were available in my program I really would have gone after. But I just didn’t know that’s what I needed to do. I also met a lot of K-12 educators who are full time teachers. They have a lot of strategies on how to motivate people. They have a lot of insight into how people learn. I just realized that I had not been taught enough about teaching to be a librarian. I think that’s an endemic problem in library education. We’re not taught to be educators even though that’s what we are. I think that in order to thrive we’re going to have to focus more on that in general.

Ellie: And that ties back too, to what you were saying about talking to faculty and I think it was Emily that commented on your post too that being able to speak their language just helps so much.

Char: Oh my god yes, totally. Totally. And librarians are really good at speaking other people’s language. That’s what we do. That’s what we do at the reference desk. That’s what we do when we catalog books. That’s what we do when we design all these different information products. We’re very good at having insight into other people’s interests, research cultures, disciplinary vernaculars, all of these things. We’re adaptable to that. And tying that with the educational missions of libraries is very natural. And it helps us advocate for what we do because we can couch it in terms that are understandable, not only by different disciples, but different levels within those disciples. Higher education institutions are giant complex hierarchies and you’ve got to be able to get at each level of that hierarchy in order to really be useful, I think.

Ellie: So speaking of Ohio and of all these sorts of different areas we pull through, I know that you are a Texan at heart. And so now you’re been off in rural Ohio, now you’re off in Berkeley. What’s it been like going such different places? What sort of culture shocks, if any, have you run into?

Char: Have I run into culture? Yeah. Are you kidding? No, there’s no difference between Ohio and Berkeley, I’m sorry. [laughter] Yeah, totally! I think a lot of us who are kind of early career librarians, you know, will go, get our first job and it might be somewhere interesting where we never thought that we would live. Case in point, Ohio? I didn’t really know much about Ohio. Or the University. It was a job that I got and man was I lucky because it was a perfect fit. It taught me an extraordinary amount about my own interests, how to be a good librarian because I was supported and mentored by everyone I worked with. Extraordinary place. I cannot say enough positive things about it. It’s a model institution. I also really had the opportunity to get outside my urban self. And learn that there’s really no sense in thinking that one can only live in one kind of place. It’s that same kind of ethic of adaptability. I ended up adoring living rurally. It’s been actually a bigger culture shock moving to this urban area where, apparently everyone wants to live, but it’s a real challenge. It’s a very competitive culture out here in general because it is so desired. The opposite was true in this odd way in Ohio, but it was so wonderful to live in a place that was really built on community and making relationships that lasted and were supportive and it was just such a friendly and kind place to live. And it was just gorgeous. And institutionally every university has a different institutional culture and I’m really fascinated by that. And just the idea of regionalism in general. So, I really am interested in the places that I work and my goal is always to love my job, so I only go places that I truly believe that I can do that. I think in terms of development in one’s profession, it’s excellent to work for different types of places because it gives you such a better perspective on what you can offer, the kinds of problems that can develop, the kinds of things that can develop to address those problems and it’s good, not always to move too much, but different types of experiences are really important. But, in terms of comparing things to Texas, I mean, there’s really no comparison.

Ellie: Of course, of course. So, switching gears, you were named a Mover and a Shaker and you were selected for the first class of ALA’s Emerging Leaders. What motivated you to try for those opportunities?

Char: When I applied for Emerging Leaders it was super early on in my career at Ohio University. I decided to apply for it because I’m the kind of person that just goes for professional development opportunities because I like to learn about stuff and I’m really a very collaborative person and I thought it would be a good way to get insight into the hugeness of ALA, which can be really inscrutable when you’re getting started. ALA’s this giant organization, you don’t even know where to turn in it if you want to get involved. So I applied for that. I was encouraged to apply for Emerging Leaders through a couple of different mentorships that I’ve had. I’m also a person that really believes in forming professional connections and being mentored. I naturally gravitate towards mentorships, in terms of me being a mentee, because I really respect the knowledge of people who have been around the block a few more times than I have in terms of their careers. It’s really, really important to perceive how we can create mutually beneficial professional relationships. And I’m not talking about some kind of noxious ladder climbing here. I’m talking about getting good work done, learning from people and having that be a really validating personal relationship builder in your career. And, I don’t know, I’ve got really good manners so people tend to like that in the folks that they work with. So, anyway, I think that one of my strongest mentors from library school, Dr. Roy, who is ALA past president, I think she encouraged me to do it, which is great. I like to have an impact on the things that I care about. he way you do that is by taking those kinds of opportunities when they come to you. Emerging Leaders was a really good experience for me. And of course it’s always about the people that I end up meeting. I was able to meet and work with Jenny Levine, who writes The Shifted Librarian and who’s an amazing person and one of my closest librarian friends now. She was one of my project groups’ in Emerging Leaders contacts within ALA. So that was awesome. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you do things like Emerging Leaders or you get nominated to be Mover and Shaker. At the reception at the Mover and Shaker thing I met Michael Stevens and Meredith Farkas. I work with them both, I love them both. And that’s how it goes. So it’s all about making personal connections out of professional opportunities and doing so in a way that is genuine and respectful and intent on the greater good. I think that’s really, really critical.

Ellie: I want to second what you were saying about networking, not in that awful way.

Char: Because it sounds all circuit boardy. It makes people seem like implements that have these connections that may facilitate things and make things happen. But really it’s another aspect of enjoying the work that you do and making the work that you do have more impact.

Ellie: Yeah. And, I mean, I would even call probably almost everyone that I’ve met in those opportunities and remained friends with, friends, so to me, even though, I know that it is networking, it never feels like it at the time, it never has any of those sort of negative connotations. Yeah, I just sort of want to replace that with the idea of friendship.

Char: Absolutely, and when you’re getting started, networking is a terrifying concept. I would hear the word networking, I’d be like, “Oh my god, I don’t know how to do that. I don’t even have business cards, how am I supposed to network with anyone?” Networking, all it is, is building relationships that originate in your genuine interest in what you do.

Ellie: Well said.

Char: and finding other people that can help you do that. And that you can help do that. And it’s awesome. So, I’m all about that. You have to learn how to communicate well. It’s about being nice and not being opportunistic.

Ellie: Yeah. So you do tons of stuff. You’ve had all these presentations, the Cyber Zed Shed, you Skyped into a presentation, I’m sorry I don’t have which one in front of me…

Char: Oh man, that was scary.

Ellie: You’ve done ACRL, Computers in Libraries, Future of Libraries. I’m sure I’ve missed some. How did you get hooked up with some of those? How have they impacted your career?

Char: I just applied for them. A couple of the presentations I’ve done have been invited but most of them are the kind of thing where you submit your proposal and they accept you or reject you. And I’ve got plenty of rejections. It’s about, does your idea fit the program and do they have space for you and all that stuff. And I’m weird, I like to present. I really, really like it. I hated it when I started. I was as nervous as anybody else, but I’ve just grown to love being in front of people in a way that is challenging to me and hopefully engaging and interesting for them in terms of the content that I’m talking about. It’s a great challenge and that’s really what it’s all about. So most of them I applied for, a couple of them I’ve been invited to. It’s amazing to watch a good presentation and I try really hard to give a good presentation. And it’s an excellent way to kind of develop my skills in presentation technology and different ways to try to express ideas. I’m really interested in visual design too, so when I make a presentation I like it to be pretty beautiful, I try. So it pushes you forward. And again, it’s a great way to connect with people and hear really good questions and think about the things that you’re doing in ways that you wouldn’t have ever thought about because you get this feedback from other institutions. You talk for 20 minutes about something that happened at your place and then 10 people come up asking questions through their institutional lens. And [you realize], “Oh my god, that’s a completely different working culture, I never anticipated that problem. In that context it would work totally differently.” It’s so important. Presenting is very fun. It was never something I had to do for tenure. It just kinda happened. But you do have to have that professional development support. It’s expensive to travel. One of the reasons I was able to do that, I should just mention this again, is that OU gave such extraordinary travel funding. As long as you’re involved, as long as you’re presenting, as long as you’re active in the things that you are doing, they would fund you. The same is true at Berkeley, maybe to a lesser extent. OU is really out of the ballpark in terms of what they do or did for people. The funding situation all over the country is a little dicey right now, so I may be speaking of things that are not quite the same. But that was a great opportunity for me.

Ellie: Do you have any favorite conferences or presentations you’ve given?

Char: I like ACRL a lot. My first presentation, the one that really gave me the idea that I could enjoy presenting professionally at conferences and that it was a thing that I wanted to continue doing, was Cyber Zed Shed back, I think it was in, was it ‘06? ACLR ‘07? It was the first thing I ever presented and I was scared out of my mind but it went really well and I enjoyed it. I like the vibe at ACRL. I gave a presentation at the last one in Seattle. It was extraordinary. It was excellent. The audience was great. I cracked them up the whole time, which was rad. I like ACRL. I do.

Ellie: Nice. So also speaking of all of the stuff that you do, how do you stay sane? Do you make an effort to divide your personal and professional life out? Do you blend it all together?

Char: You really want to know what I do? I get up at 4 or 5 in the morning every day.

Ellie: Oh my goodness.

Char: That’s what I do. So I don’t really work much at night. That’s how I divide my personal and professional life. I don’t work at night, but I certainly work at 4 or 5 in the morning. I write a lot and if I have a presentation I’m doing or something, that’s when it gets done. The early morning hours are really good for that because there’s really no other distractions. It’s very quiet, it’s a very focused time and I’m obviously a morning person. So that’s good. You can’t be happy professionally if you’re not happy personally. So, you can’t just privilege one and not the other. Yes, I work very hard, but I also have a lot of interests and I care a lot about librarianship. I care a lot about what I do. So it brings me great personal satisfaction and joy and I’ve met a lot of people in my profession that are true friends and that do what I do, but I have plenty going on outside of that. And that’s good.

Ellie: So you’re getting up super early in the morning, is all of the sort of stuff we’re talking about stuff you take care of during that time or is any of it on work time?

Char: I’m really busy at my job. I have an amazing job. I do a lot of really interesting things and a lot of them involve a lot of networking and outreach and meetings and building different collaborative partnerships at Berkeley. It’s difficult to do anything but my job at my job. That said, I am encouraged to work on the types of writing things that I work on when I can. It’s not discouraged by any means. I have a lot of support from my administrators, from my bosses and I work for some pretty awesome people at Berkeley. So, if I have the time, it’s not like the time is not mine to work on professional stuff, but I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire. That’s what important at my work, but yes, I am supported in my professional activities as well.

Ellie: Excellent. So talking about writing, ready to transition into the book a little bit, can you talk about the process of writing that, a whole book? And was that one part of your work at Ohio or again, sort of totally extracurricular?

Char: The book that I just published through ACRL, it’s available as a free download with a sample research instrument, a sample questionnaire, if anybody wants to download it and try to do the same environmental scan about students and technology, that’s available. You can also purchase a hard copy, but it’s definitely meant to be accessible to the widest possible audience.

Elile: That’s fantastic.

Char: That project originated as local research at Ohio University. I was on this technology team and I worked with my manager, another mentor of mine, Chad Boeninger, who’s an extremely smart librarian. He has a blog called Library Voice that’s really excellent. He really had this idea that we should get better grounded in the technology and library culture of our actual institution in order to develop better technology products and I completely concurred, so spearheaded this long term research project and the report that I produced for that. I was also simultaneously working on it as my master’s report for my education degree. Those two documents merged, and then I expanded them a lot and ended up writing on that for another 6 to 8 months and published that as the actual book/research report through ACRL. So, it was a document that had a long life span and a lot of different iterations that really helped me get excellent insight into what I was trying to say. It’s local research findings, but it’s couched in this language of how to research your own institution to understand what it’s trying to tell you about what it needs from its library, not just in terms of technology, or this kind of minimum insight into the students that you’re serving. “Do you like the library? Yes or no?” It’s about really getting a handle on the culture in which you exist because that’s the culture that you serve and it’s different than any other library culture on the planet because that’s the way it works.

Ellie: I think that’s fantastic.

Char: What I’m trying to do is inspire people to couch themselves in that culture. You reflect it, those are your people. Don’t stop looking at national studies, read the national studies and then use their research instrument to inspire your own research. See if your people are a reflection of those people, or if they’re not a reflection of those people. Then you can build products that respond to their requests. It’s very important.

Ellie: I think it’s great that you touch on that. I find that a lot being in a community college setting, where they talk about, well, incoming freshman this… I’m like, mmmm, yeah… not my audience… So yeah, thank you for that.

Char: Part of the reason I wrote this report in such detail and tried to really show how specific the library culture at Ohio University was is because people arrive at different institutions of higher learning based on a variety of different factors, their class privilege, their prior academic performance, their location, their region… It’s this really complex demographic and social and cultural admissions process. So that creates these little microcosms that are completely unique and that libraries can learn to respond to. And work with. And understand. Instead of just saying, “We’re the library. You need some help?” Being a person that’s interested in that kind of regional, institutional, organizational culture, I think we should learn how to gain better insight into it. And ongoing insight, not just a one shot survey, but figure out how to figure out your context.

Ellie: Mmmhm. And so, moving on with the process of the book, what was the publishing process like? Did you approach ALA? Did they approach you? What was the timeline for publishing? We already talked about writing, but…

Char:  I’m working on a different book project right now on instructional technology, pedagogy in libraries, reflective practice, all of those different things. That book I was approached by ALA editions to do as a consequence of being named a Mover and Shaker, which is something that I think is a common experience for folks that get that award. They get a lot of publication opportunities out of it. Which is great. But, for the research report, I just cold called Kathryn Deiss at ACRL. Cold emailed I guess you could say. I had met her through Jenny Levine and I thought maybe the project might be of interest to her. I had the good fortune to also be edited in that process by Joan Lippincott, who’s really an amazing thinker in our profession in terms of these issues of technology in libraries and integrating our institutions into the institutions that support us and things like that. So, it was a really serendipitous process. The entire publication timeline, I guess was about August to April. So however many months that is. I can’t count very well apparently. But I had already been writing on it a while, as I said. A document existed, it just needed to get shipped into shape so to speak. So, I revised it, I worked on it. Did a lot more analysis. Formatted the document itself. And they let me design the whole thing. Which is an incredible experience by the way. Cover to cover. I designed that book. And it was wonderful. Thank you Katherine, thank you Joan. Thanks to Dawn Mueller at ALA. All of them were great during that process.

Ellie: So you designed it into the PDF too? How did it come about that they offered the free version?

Char: Well actually, I pretty much insisted on that. I always imagined it as a free download. I didn’t even think that it was going to be in a print publication version, but one thing led to another and it ended up being a good length for a soft cover research report. So, that’s fine, but I always imagined it as a free download. I really considered that it’s primary form. And of course it’s great that it’s available in a different format, but in my mind it originated as a web based document, download.

Ellie: Alright, so, moving on. I know that the TechSource people are going to cover a lot more of the content of it, so I just want to latch onto the one idea that sort of struck me, which was that one of the most interesting aspects of that Skype project was your open, transparent reporting on the decision to sort of reevaluate the service. And I really like this shift towards publicly discussing and learning from projects even when they might be deemed failures. At my college we’ve been doing an IM pilot through Meebo, and we’re considering dropping that for various reasons. Can you talk about the decision to reevaluate the service and who all’s involved in that and what sort of feedback it was met with?

Char: Sure. What you’re talking about is this experimentation that we were involved in at Ohio University with Skype, using Skype for different forms of public service. We created a video call kiosk and did a pilot with that and we also set up what we called Skype In Reference on our reference desk, so people with Skype accounts could call and talk to a librarian that way or chat with them. The survey project came out of the fact that we were able to do so much experimentation at OU. The working culture is really supportive, a lot of people with a lot of creative energy in terms of creating library services that are worthwhile and innovative and just trying out all these new products, it was really fun. But at the same time, the more products you create, the more time it takes to staff them and the more that you want to make sure that they’re actually working out for you. And the Skype project was basically the first thing that we had done that was … You might call it ahead of it’s time, you might call it misdirected, you might just call it too much. So, it was a lot of work to create and staff, and it drew on our relationships with the systems department and it was a great experiment, but at the same time, the video kiosk wasn’t used consistently enough to really merit us being on it all the time, in terms of our talking heads on the screen. Our decision to reevaluate the service is this idea that a lot of people talk about, having things in constant beta and changing them up. It’s really about the flexibility to address the inevitable problems that come up. The fact that we are able to do that so transparently at OU is what gives us the motivation to talk about it and say, look, this is how we changed things, and this is how we tried to address the fact that the service wasn’t used enough. This is the model that we took on to try to mitigate those problem. When you work with emerging technology in libraries or in higher education or wherever, you’ve got to be able to switch gears when things don’t work right. We’re all treading new ground, not only in the technologies that we’re using, but like I said with the specific institutional cultures, different types of IT relationships. You can’t rely only on the testimonials of others. You’ve got to figure out your own context before you know how to make something work. So that was really where this idea of gaining more insight into people and what technologies would work and what would not work. That’s where the idea originated. To stop creating services from the seat of our pants and start trying to do it from a more informed vantage point. And the service being reevaluated, it’s an ongoing process. More people continue to adopt Skype and they’re still offering the service at OU in different forms, but they’re reevaluating having Skype be the element on that information kiosk that is called when someone says “ask a librarian.” They might just switch it to text chat because it’s easier for people. So it’s really you want to triangulate what’s the way people want to be able to contact you and go there instead of just the thing you think is cool at the moment.

Ellie: Amen. That was my last official question for you, other than sort of, what’s next on your list? Do you have any latest technology thoughts? Something that’s caught your interest that’s fun? That you’re working on now?

Char: So much actually. I mentioned before that I’m writing another book on library education. A lot of what I used to do at OU had to do with emerging reference technologies and now I have a lot more to do with teaching and learning and technology in those areas and those aspects. They all kind of blend together, but I’ve been really doing a lot more instruction and a lot more training and thinking about how to get people to use different types of learning technologies in libraries and how to connect the research mission of Berkeley with the Berkeley libraries via different technological means, so that’s on my mind right now in a lot of ways. In terms of what I’m doing outside of my immediate job, I’ve been thinking a lot about different types of interactive technologies. The iSchool at Berkeley is really excellent and it’s not really in the library paradigm anymore, but there was an exhibit on tangible user interfaces, student projects, this kind of hyper interactive type of design that involves a lot of immediate user feedback and very tangible, very kinesthetic technologies and they’re very interesting. I’m interested in seeing where that type of design goes for classroom interaction. I’m going to be keeping my eye on that for a while. Also, a colleague of mine at UCSD, a friend and colleague and also my perennial editor, Lia Freedman, and I are talking over this project that we want to call Bibliovox, which is this idea that it’s important to tell library stories in a way that retains our institutional memory and does what I was talking about earlier about talking about our passion, exposing a little bit more of our personality rather than just this caricature that a lot of people have in their minds about who librarians are and why we’re led to this profession. I think that we’re a profession of people who care deeply about what we do and about each other and about our patrons and about information and knowledge and research. And we are good people and there’s a lot of stories that need to be told. So what we’re thinking about is creating this online podcast archive if you will. Maybe a blog that people can call into, answer a specific question, or create podcasts of each other talking about their memories about libraries, their inspirations about the profession, how they think it’s changing. It’s kind of inspired by that project StoryCorps that you’ll periodically hear on NPR. So that’s another long term idea. And I really would like to try to think about how to replicate the research I did at OU across the University of California libraries. Who knows if that will happen, but it seems like it would be a really valuable project. I guess that’s another professional thing that I’m interested in doing and hopefully achieving. So, yeah, there’s a lot of stuff going on. But that’s the way I like it.

Ellie: Excellent. Is there anything else you want our readers to know that I didn’t ask?

Char: I’ve talked a lot about different types of working cultures and how I really think it’s very important to try actively to enjoy your job and to create a positive working culture at the place that you find yourself. I feel like this is worth mentioning because I talk to a lot of people right now who are getting out of library school and are having a really hard time finding jobs. I think a lot of us are getting funding cuts. A lot of us are worried about freezes and layoffs and all those types of things. During this type of time it can get pretty hairy inside academia and it can get really fierce and it can get kinda ugly. I think that this type of crunch time is a really good opportunity to try to foster more supportive workplaces and workplaces that give a lot of opportunities for internal professional development and collaboration. If you can’t go gallivanting around the country, see lots of different conferences, there’s plenty of stuff you can do locally to train each other and work with each other and build the relationships that make workplaces pleasant as opposed to unpleasant. Maybe this is just my cult of manners thing, but I really believe in it, why go to work at a place that doesn’t feel good to go to work at? It doesn’t make sense to me. I really think that people should cultivate an ethic of professional, collaborative, supportive collegial ethic. I think it’s absolutely essential. So mind your manners basically. Thanks mom!

Ellie: Indeed. Well thank you so much Char, this has been fantastic!

Char: Thanks for the interview. You’re a friend of mine, so it’s kind of funny to be in this situation. I’ve been really fortunate to work on projects that I really really care about and have had the opportunity to think really hard about and it’s awesome to be able to talk about them. If anybody reads the report and has any questions about it, just please let me know. I’m a nerd and I love talking about research. Just hit me up, my email’s in the back. All right?

Ellie: Thanks for tuning in and as always, we welcome your comments.

Photo by Flickr member grewlike

If you want to start a passionate conversation, ask a past Emerging Leader (EL) about their experience in the ALA Emerging Leaders program. Created by former ALA President Leslie Burger as one of her presidential initiatives in 2007, Emerging Leaders was initiated to put new librarians “on the fast track to ALA and professional leadership” (learn more on the wiki). If you talk to any of the roughly three hundred participants in Emerging Leaders so far, you are likely to find that they have a powerful opinion on the subject. Some loved it, some hated it, and some express profoundly mixed feelings. A very few are neutral. In this blog post I will be exploring those differing responses from past Emerging Leaders as part of a critique of the high-profile program.

Emerging Leaders is intended to recognize and train approximately one hundred outstanding new librarians each year and guide them toward becoming leaders within ALA and the profession. Participants are selected in part by their accomplishments and leadership potential, and in part by the desire to have a geographically and culturally diverse class. The program involves a one-year commitment and requires attendance at that year’s Midwinter and Annual Conferences (a full day workshop takes place at each), plus unmeasured time working on a group project in the interim. ELs spend the six months between conferences working in small groups on an ALA-related project. The EL projects vary widely and are introduced into the program by individuals or committees from across ALA.

Disclaimer and admission of bias: I was an EL in 2008 so my experience serves as the impetus for and subtle bias of this post. I’m writing from a blend of personal experience, anecdotal evidence, and survey data. Though I strive in this post to maintain an objective distance, my own Emerging Leaders experience is best described as a roller coaster ride full of high points and deep frustrations. I applaud the program’s goals but I believe that there is a significant gap between the inspiring, boundless encouragement given to ELs to reenvision ALA and the reality of how change might actually happen within the organization. I am proud to have been an Emerging Leader and I hope that this post may be the start of some small movement to improve what is, at its heart, a truly impressive initiative.

Literature Review

While the talented new librarians you will meet in Emerging Leaders are generally very willing to say what they think, I was unable to locate even one written critique — either positive or negative — of the program by a participant (if you know of any, please post them in the comments below). Very few have written about their experiences except to post the occasional non-evaluative summary of the program events and workshops. In fact, other than a tongue-in-cheek blog post by The Annoyed Librarian (who has not been an EL) and a well-rounded slideshow report by Rachel Vacek, there is little in any published medium other than PR and related announcements.

From this we may draw one of several conclusions: (1) Past ELs don’t have any opinions about the program one way or the other; (2) Past ELs don’t write much or aren’t interested in writing about the program; or (3) Past ELs are, for some reason, uncomfortable about critiquing their experience in the program. Based upon a variety of personal email exchanges and in-person conversations, I am going to immediately rule out the first possibility. I have met ELs from every year of the program and all have been vocal about what they see as its strengths and weaknesses. In truth, their energetic praise and criticism played a large part in my decision to tackle this topic in a blog post. As for the second possibility above, a few quick searches will show that many past ELs are prolific writers and bloggers. While it is possible that they simply don’t have any interest in discussing their EL experiences in their writing, I find that unlikely.

I find the third possibility above to be the most plausible, and offer my own feelings as evidence here. First of all, this is a high-profile program that is quite attractive on resumes and CVs, and the library world is very small. Writing a critique about Emerging Leaders, and being willing to accept any potential negative feedback from such a critique, takes courage. On the other hand, among those I know who have been through the program, I have heard more than one admit to feeling too emotional about the experience to put their thoughts on paper. Personally it took me nearly a year to gain the distance and perspective required to approach this post, and even after much encouragement and feedback from others, I still offer it with some hesitation.

Survey of Past Emerging Leaders

In order to write about the Emerging Leaders program with some authority, I gathered feedback and opinions from as many past ELs as possible. Accordingly, this post is based not merely upon my own experience, but upon the insights of nearly fifty past ELs who took the time to complete a survey about their experiences in the program. Admittedly this is a self-selected sample, and it is likely that ELs who had strong feelings about the program were more likely to respond. I conducted the survey in Google Forms and distributed it to the listservs for the 2007 and 2008 ELs, a pool of approximately 220 librarians. I omitted 2009 ELs from the survey because they have not yet completed their program.

The survey was composed of eleven questions, six of which were open-ended with a box for unlimited text responses. The remaining questions were multiple choice or ratings (see Appendix below for the list of questions). None of the questions in the survey were required, and respondents were encouraged to pick and choose those they preferred to answer.

Results summary

There were 46 respondents, divided roughly by year with 57% of respondents identifying as members of the 2008 Emerging Leaders class, and 43% from the 2007 class. Overall, the results to the ratings questions were positive. When asked to rate the value of their experience on a 1-5 scale, with 5 being highest, 60% of respondents rated the program as a 4 or 5. When rating their experience based upon how much they enjoyed it the ratings were slightly lower, with 43% rating the program as a 4 or 5. However, an additional 41% rated the program at the midpoint level of 3. As an additional indicator of the perceived overall value of the program, 61% of respondents indicated that they would recommend Emerging Leaders to others. 78% (36 respondents) felt that the program made a difference in the trajectory of their career and/or ALA involvement. The great majority described a positive impact; only 3 of those respondents indicated a negative impact in that the program discouraged them from continuing in ALA.

The responses to the open-ended questions were far more mixed, and will be described in the following sections of this post.

Worthwhile aspects

Overwhelmingly, survey respondents pointed to networking as the most rewarding part of their Emerging Leaders experience. Out of 38 who answered the question, “What aspects of the program did you find worthwhile, if any?,” twenty-five referred to “networking,” “making new friends,” and/or “meeting people” as a positive result of their participation. One respondent described “meeting other enthusiastic librarians” as a worthwhile part of their experience. Another simply answered, “Networking, networking, networking.”

Similarly, an additional seven respondents pointed to their group work, in terms of having the opportunity to work with and get to know a small group of people, as a worthwhile aspect of the program. One respondent explained it this way: “Working in small groups was a real plus. I probably would never have met my groupmates through any other channel, and it is great to see them at conferences and catch up.”

Eleven respondents indicated that the most worthwhile part of Emerging Leaders was the doors the program opened for them in terms of committee work, recognition, and resulting presentation and publication opportunities. In the words of one respondent, “The recognition I received from other conference attendees because of my EL ribbon on my name badge was surprising to me…. Just wearing the ribbon served as a conversation starter and the networking opportunities are there for the taking. The opportunity to continue working at the national level upon the completion of the program is the greatest benefit.”

Another respondent commented that it was “a great way to become more involved when getting your foot in the door seems intimidating.”

I agree strongly with these assessments. Being handed the opportunity to meet so many like-minded librarians who share my passion and desire to make positive contributions to the field was a stunning experience. Granted not every EL was quite that driven — I do know that a few dropped out along the way — but the vast majority of the librarians I met through Emerging Leaders are impressive individuals, and I have continued to stay in touch with many of them through email, Facebook, and this blog. I cannot overstate the value of the Emerging Leaders networking experience.

Disappointments

Out of 39 who responded to the question, “What aspects of the program did you find disappointing, if any?,” eighteen indicated some aspect of the conference workshops, and another fourteen pointed to their group projects. Specific comments about the workshops varied, although many expressed the wish that there had been less lecture, more interactive sessions, and more advanced leadership training. “Really expected to have more ‘leadership’ training,” said one respondent, “similar to ARL’s leadership workshops, with in-depth discussion and activities around aspects of leadership in a library organization. Found that it was little more than ‘here are 5 qualities of good leaders.’” Others described the content of the leadership training workshops as “rudimentary,” “weak,” or “trite.”

Additionally, several respondents felt that those facilitating the workshops were not responsive to their ideas and feedback. As one respondent explained, “The ALA leadership that spoke to us regarding what can ALA do to enhance or encourage more participation by newer librarians – when we provided feedback and comments in an open forum – I got the distinct impression that there was not an interest in new ideas. Rather they were looking for confirmation that what steps they were already taking were satisfactory. There wasn’t an opportunity for a free exchange of ideas between the old guard and the new guard.”

Another observed, “You have a room full of folks who are energized and the energy didn’t go anywhere.” This sentiment was repeated throughout the survey responses.

A large number of respondents felt that their group projects were “busy work” and did not see that their efforts were providing any results. “Emerging leaders participants do a lot of good work for the projects,” said one respondent. “I was disappointed that the work was not used more within the ALA system. While doing the project for project’s sake provides good training experience, the outcomes can be useful for the organization.” Others compared the projects to “another library school assignment” or evaluated them as “not all that engaging or useful.”

Overall, my own greatest disappointment in the program was being encouraged to offer creative ideas and feedback in the interests of effecting change within ALA, and then watching the bubble burst over and over again. Whether it was a conversation about how to make ALA more responsive to new librarians, or the “World Cafe” events in which we brainstormed what the ideal organization would look like, our collective vision was praised, collected, and (I imagine) filed away at the end of the session, with no opportunities to further develop or pursue it.

Alternative visions

In response to the question, “If you were asked to take over the Emerging Leaders program, or to create a new program to foster leadership among new librarians, what would it look like?,” past ELs had a variety of relevant ideas and suggestions. Regarding the content of Emerging Leaders workshops, respondent comments generally focused on three primary issues they would address. First, they would emphasize interactive leadership training as the program’s primary goal and reduce the emphasis on generating greater ALA participation. As one respondent stated, “it would have a larger goal than putting participants ‘on the fast track to ALA leadership.’ I think it should focus on helping participants attain their personal and professional best and how ALA can help them get there.”

Second, respondents disliked the current lecture-based format and many indicated that they would incorporate active learning exercises and guided small group discussions moderated by experienced ALA members. Third, many would add a variety of inspirational and “Mover and Shaker”-type guest speakers from within and outside of ALA whose experiences and knowledge would be relevant to ELs. Several suggested creating venues to facilitate free and open discussion among and between Emerging Leaders and those at various levels of ALA leadership. One respondent had a clear vision of a potential format they would institute: “Instead of posing organizational change questions to the group as a whole I would offer Issues Discussion Tables, letting participants choose the issues most important to them and to which they feel they can offer definite courses for change. Issues Tables might include: ALA Structure, ALA Student Chapter Solutions, Virtual Membership, etc. A 1.5 hour session with a mentor/moderator could provide real, progressive ideas.”

In terms of program format, many respondents would develop intensive training programs that included week-long retreats or a year-long, involved program with multiple meetings at each conference and ongoing virtual participation. One respondent summed it up, “It would have to be more involved. More than just 2 meetings. More virtual participation, discussion.” Many respondents thought an ideal class size for a leadership program would be small (one suggested a class size of 50 participants). Consistent with this, many felt that such a program should be highly selective, accepting only candidates with the clearest leadership potential.

Some respondents favored incorporating a mentoring program, possibly by having past ELs mentor subsequent participants or groups, or by holding “tours” of high-level ALA meetings for participants. Many emphasized the need for communication and community building activities among EL participants and alumni, such as an online community and/or regional meetups for ELs (or projects assigned by region) that provide networking and development benefits without required conference attendance.

Among those who would include group projects, respondents indicated that those projects would be designed to have clear relevance, impact, and purpose within ALA, and provide room for innovation. “I’d give the young/new librarians more room to innovate in their projects instead of assigning them grunt work from the various divisions,” said one respondent. Some suggested models in which ELs identify and design their own projects, are fully integrated into existing committees, or are employed as interns at high levels of ALA structure. Others believed that group work interfered with the leadership training goals, and could be omitted altogether in favor of other activities.

An alternative vision proposed that differed somewhat from the others was stated thus, “Why have the program if the only benefit is to get a committee appointment? Just have a program to get people on committees.” Others mentioned BIGWIG and an unspecified AASL program (perhaps the Collaborative Leadership Institute?) as models they would draw on.

From my experience in the program, I can attest that there was quite a bit of grumbling amongst the ELs during the full-day sessions at each conference. The majority of ELs are borderline or full-fledged Millennials, and being “talked at” is not a way we effectively learn. And while we can learn through lecture if we must, the content in our sessions assumed that we knew very little about leadership or interpersonal skills in general, which was largely untrue. A higher level of content and more skill-based activities would have greatly enriched the sessions for many of us.

Discussion

Clearly Emerging Leaders is generating widely differing reactions among participants. Some of the responses are extremely positive, and many past ELs express gratitude and pleasure for having had the opportunity to participate. One respondent asserted, “being an EL has changed my life…. It was a great way for me to get involved in a career that I truly love.” Others made similarly glowing statements. Meanwhile, other past ELs say they have become “embittered” and describe the program as “a waste of time.” My personal response to the experience was mixed; as a whole I found the experience rewarding but like many others I was frustrated by some of the elements of the program that didn’t fulfill my hopes for what it could be.

At its root, much of my own and the survey respondents’ frustration with Emerging Leaders may derive from a discrepancy between our expectations and the reality of the program. Comments from many of the respondents indicate that they began the program with the hope of making a difference by bringing their new ideas and energy to ALA, but felt that they were not offered an effective venue to do so. One respondent acknowledged that discrepancy, saying, “I would recommend the program with a huge qualification regarding expectations and outcomes.” Implicit in this comment is an indication that their expectations for the program were too high, at least compared to the reality of the experience.

From what I have seen, there is a direct connection between those individuals who are most passionate about making a positive difference in libraries and those who are most frustrated by the Emerging Leaders program. The frustration is a product of feeling that their EL experience was something akin to standing in a doorway, enjoying a spectacular vision of the future, and having the door slammed in their faces. Said one respondent, “I felt a great disconnect with the leadership of ALA and have concerns for the professional organization and what current leadership is doing to pave the way for new ideas.” Another respondent echoed those concerns and took a step further: “I am not sure…that we are making much of a difference within ALA. We had many ideas, but nothing has been done with them. Perhaps we need to extend the program to a post piece that deals with the ideas that we’ve come up with and creating a strategic plan on how to implement them.”

If one were to make change to the Emerging Leaders program based upon this feedback, there are two potential paths that could lead to a more satisfying experience for participants. The first is to simply remove the elements of the program that give participants the impression that their creative ideas for remaking ALA are welcome and to focus on the skills specific to leadership instead. Discussions and brainstorming sessions about how to improve the organization could be removed from the program in favor of an increased focus on leadership overall. This approach would eliminate the disappointment caused by ELs feeling that their creative ideas were invited and then discarded.

The alternative path is far more complex but arguably more exciting. It would require the organizers of Emerging Leaders, and the ELs by extension, to become more aggressive in seeking out opportunities in which ELs might share their creative ideas with those in ALA who are best positioned to consider and respond to them. It might involve having a group of ELs write a proposal to ALA Council on some pressing issue. It could tie certain ELs to current ALA presidential initiatives, or other high-level committees and task forces. Or perhaps at the end of each program year, it would involve ELs presenting a list of ideas and/or proposals to representatives of current ALA leadership. Perhaps ELs could work on more meaningful, longer-term projects they would hand off each year to the next group of participants. Above all, it demands enabling ELs to begin putting into motion some of the creative ideas they are generating in workshop sessions. There are many potential ways to offer ELs the sort of exposure and feedback that survey respondents indicate they are seeking; the point is to start building those bridges.

What do you think? I invite my fellow ELs to add your insights and comments below. In this post I am only beginning to dig toward the root of the issue, and maybe with your help we can bring it out into the light. Perhaps the true movement toward change that comes out of Emerging Leaders doesn’t have anything to do with the program at all — perhaps it is made by those of us who have come together out of the program inspired, furious, motivated, and passionate with a network of colleagues who feel the same way. After all, that is the spirit behind In the Library with the Lead Pipe; it is not a coincidence that five members of our blogging team are past ELs. And as we move forward in our careers we carry with us that nearly religious belief in change, and the knowledge we need to make it happen. Perhaps, in the end, we are the change we wish to see.

Appendix: Survey Questions

• What year were you an Emerging Leader? (multiple choice)
• Please describe your overall experience in the Emerging Leaders program. (open-ended)
• Please rate your experience in the program, in terms of how valuable it was to you. (rating, 1-5)
• Please rate your experience in the program, in terms of how enjoyable you found it to be. (rating, 1-5)
• What aspects of the program did you find worthwhile, if any? (open-ended)
• What aspects of the program did you find disappointing, if any? (open-ended)
• Has the Emerging Leaders program made a difference in the trajectory of your ALA participation and/or your career? (multiple choice)
• If you answered “yes” to the previous question, how has it made a difference? (open-ended)
• If you were asked to take over the Emerging Leaders program, or to create a new program to foster leadership among new librarians, what would it look like? (open-ended)
• How likely are you to recommend the Emerging Leaders program to others? (rating, 1-5)
• Is there anything else you’d like to share regarding your experience as an Emerging Leader? (open-ended)

Many thanks to everyone on ItLwtLP for help in crafting the survey and drafting this post, to the many ELs who took the time to respond to the survey, to Latanya Jenkins for her thoughtful feedback on a draft, and to Derik Badman for reviewing multiple drafts and providing me with some small (but needed) kicks in the butt.

]]> http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/all-dressed-up/feed/ 31 http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/why-we-should-adopt-alaconnect-a-brief-review-and-rumination-on-alas-new-online-community/ http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/why-we-should-adopt-alaconnect-a-brief-review-and-rumination-on-alas-new-online-community/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 11:00:06 +0000 Emily Ford http://inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=1331

ALAConnect's Home Page © ALA

So ALA has joined the ranks of two point oh. Last month it rolled out ALAConnect, a service influenced by Ning, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Docs, and other online networking platforms and shared work spaces. Despite the hoopla about the system I hadn’t even heard of it until one of my working groups was asked to use it. Being an online networking junkie I was intrigued and decided to log in and, consequently, to write this post. After my first look around the site I was a bit pessimistic, but after taking a deeper look, I have come to hope that ALAConnect will be able to reach individuals who haven’t been able to attend conferences and engage with their colleagues about ALA-centric issues. If ALAConnect can draw this constituency to use it, then the tool might mean some real changes for ALA.

Currently, ALAConnect, which aims “…to engage in ALA business and network with other members around issues and interests relevant to the profession” (ALA, 2009) is in Phase 1 of its launch. This means that not all functionality has been implemented and future enhancements are planned for the site by the end of 2009. These include an advanced search for members and a mentoring network. (Check out the ALAConnect Roadmap for more details.)

At first glance the system seems to have tools that we librarians have been using for a while from many different places and systems. It offers the ability to create and modify shared documents, host chats, and sponsor polls and votes all in one space! In many ways this fills a very real need for ALA committees that have been struggling to work virtually. Instead of chatting in a Meebo room, on Gchat in your Gmail, AIM, and using Google Docs or e-mailing documents back and forth, these groups now have the opportunity to conduct work in one community space.

Before I begin to discuss the social context and implications ALAConnect has on ALA politics and the organization’s evolution, I’d like to discuss some of the more apparent and concrete issues surrounding this technological implementation.

Usability

As with any system, some basic usability problems are apparent in ALAConnect. Most of the issues I point out have something to do with the structure of the system in place, in this case, Drupal. Some of these issues will be fixed in time with future Drupal releases, but right now they pose some usability issues.

One of the first things I attempted to do in ALAConnect was build my social network. I quickly discovered that it takes too many clicks to add a new friend. After you have found a friend to add and successfully add that friend, the system returns you to your profile instead of the “My Network” page.

Next, I tried to do some searches to find relevant communities to join. Being the librarian I am, I clicked on “advanced search” but was confused that this did not take me directly to the advanced search interface. Instead, I had to click a few more times to get there.

Another seemingly simple usability issue that I noticed is that in the left navigation toolbar, the drop-down arrow next to menu items isn’t functional. While it does tell you that there are more items to view under that navigational category, it does not work to drop down the structure. Instead, you have to physically click on the link and load a new page to see the sub-navigation levels.

Again, these problems will likely be addressed as ALA gets more feedback or as Drupal’s developers make further improvements to the software. Either way, these are basic usability issues that, in the future, might be improved.

Privacy

Privacy seems to be another issue with the system. In fact, Jessamyn West was one of the first to comment on it. (You’ll notice from the comments in that blog post that ALA staff was quick to respond and fix the issue!) I get the feeling that they are getting a lot of privacy based questions because of the existence of the Privacy FAQ page and the many posts in the forum related to privacy. There are some pretty robust features for privacy in ALAConnect, but it’s hard to figure out what’s what without doing your research. You can choose to keep your membership in communities private, but your official ALA work will display to members. You also have options to control your privacy for each community you join. See the FAQ for more information about these details.

The first thing I saw on my profile, shockingly, was my (personal) phone number. Why? Well, the answer is simple. First, my personal phone number is the phone number with which I joined ALA. (Being an unemployed librarian at that point it was the only number I could give and I haven’t yet updated my information with ALA.) Second, this piece of contact information was imported with other membership information when creating ALAConnect. (Why we need a phone number to display in an online social networking tool is beyond me.) Upon further investigation I discovered that phone numbers display only to people you call contacts, but this overlooks two simple questions: Who is going to call me when they could shoot me an email, and why was this piece of data even imported into ALAConnect?

ALAConnect's Online Now Box ©ALA

More disconcerting to me, however is that ALAConnect displays who recently logged in on its homepage, even to the public. At first I thought I had the ability to opt out of this, but it turns out I don’t.

Going into my profile I disabled the ability for people see my online status in my user preferences, but this status only relates to IM and chat gadgets embedded in your profile, not the entire portal.

While displaying whether I’m online might be inconsequential, it still gives me the heebie jeebies to know that anyone can find out that I’m at a computer logged in to ALAConnect. Furthermore, what utility does this function add? How will the information that I’m online be used by other members? There is no internal IM function (except for chats in member communities and groups) to which it can link. I’d be more forgiving if there were some utility to this part of the interface, but there doesn’t appear to be any.

ALAConnect Privacy Options for IM © ALA

Functionality

Unlike usability, functionality is one of those things that is harder to change after a system has been implemented. While I think the functionality of ALAConnect is quite rich, I did have some basic questions and frustrations about it. For instance, when creating my profile I wanted to include all of my schooling, not just one school.

ALAConnect Profile Education Display ©ALA

I would also like to be able to show that I have two master’s degrees, and I know there are many many people out there who are in the same boat. Moreover, I would like to be able to connect with people who are alums of my same college, which seems to be a logical way to network. For example, I belong to a group on Facebook called Reedie Librarians, which is a way for me to connect with Reed College graduates who are also in the library profession. (This functionality has been marked in the ALAConnect Roadmap as a future improvement.)

There are some additional items in ALAConnect that might prove to be useful. Using tagging and being able to “favorite” a post or group is really helpful, if you use this functionality. Though if you’re anything like me, you might never look at your favorites again. ALAConnect also boasts the ability to create RSS feeds to read content of interest. (I did not try to create an RSS feed so I cannot say if this is easy to do.) Additionally, the system embraces some other, but not all, social networking sites such as Flickr and Delicious. These sites will show up as gadgets on your profile if you include them. The following image is of Aaron Dobbs’s public profile.

User Profile on ALAConnect with Flickr and Delicious Gadgets ©ALA

Even though users can embed some gadgets in their profiles, some might want better interoperability between ALAConnect and their other networking tools. ItLwtLP blogger Derik says,

“My big issue is that I want interoperability with my other social networks. If ALA Connect would connect up with Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, etc., maybe I could see a use. That interoperability is where we get into OpenSocial, Facebook Connect, and Google Friend Connect, all different ongoing projects to make the social network portable.”

I have a feeling that many people agree with Derik. Why would I join another networking site if isn’t interoperable with the other things that I’ve been using for online networking and work? The problem here is that ALAConnect is not supposed to be a social networking site. Rather, it is intended to be a professional networking site. This is an important distinction to note, but I wonder if it is a distinction that users will make.

Finally, one of the best features and functional pieces of ALAConnect is its ability to host user-generated content. Users can create groups, join groups, post comments, etc. This kind of content is one that I feel has been lacking within the ALA structure, and creating this functionality may open the doors to increased organizational participation and meaningful online discourse about professional issues.

I’m sure there are other functional things within ALAConnect that I haven’t yet been able to explore. If you know of any, please comment on this blog post!

The Social Context

I’d like to move from the concrete portion of this review to looking at the social context of ALAConnect. As was ingrained in my brain in graduate school, no technological implementation exists in a vacuum. In fact, the social context surrounding a technological implementation will most likely determine how well the system is adopted and used. (See Kling, Rosenbaum, and Sawyer’s 2005 book, Understanding and Communicating Social Informatics for an easy to read summary.)

ALAConnect might be able to offer ALA members the networking and virtual space to engage in discourse and other community-based activity that has been taking place in other virtual spaces. There is no doubt that online networking and use of webapps are part of a computerization movement which is particularly useful for information professionals and librarians. (For more about computerization movements, read a piece by Susan Iacono and Rob Kling in Yates and Van Maanen’s 2001 book, Information Technology and Organizational Transformation.) The question is: for ALA members who feel disenfranchised and disenchanted, can ALAConnect be a democratizing factor? Can a social movement form in this virtual space to give ALA members what they need from the organization? I think it’s possible, but whether this happens will be determined by the system’s users.

Browsing ALAConnect ©ALA

There are a few things in the ALAConnect interface and system that show its surrounding social context. You will notice that ALAConnect’s structure is based on ALA’s scary, unwieldy, and seemingly unnavigable political structure. Notice in the following screenshot that to browse ALAConnect you immediately have to understand the structure of ALA. This is not all that helpful to those who don’t quite understand it. One the one hand, this system must reflect that structure. On the other hand, this could prevent many users from joining and using the system, simply based on its parent structure.

I tried to look at how to create a group (see the screenshot below), and was left wondering what the “ALAConnect” subject headings had to do with the group I was going to create. For instance, we are asked right away to place our user-generated content into an organizational hierarchy (ALA’s) that is hard to use. However, like any classification, this function will help to make groups more findable. You can also request to add a new subject heading, which is a great service.  (See the Member Chair FAQ for more details.) This model isn’t ideal, but it seems to address the issue of how different users might find the groups they’re looking for.

Creating a Group on ALAConnect ©ALA

It is impossible for a system like ALAConnect to be devoid of social context. The real issue here is the tension between the “networking” part of the system and the part that is tied to offcial ALA committees and structure.

The Verdict

Despite some of the criticisms I’ve discussed in this article, I think it is a tremendous resource with great potential. Content, including communities and discussions, can be user-generated. Structures and conversations can center around an issue, not around a division, something that ALA desperately needs in order to be able to involve a larger community, to make the ALA structure more open, and to make the association’s work more relevant to today’s librarians. The fact that the system is part of the ALA structure may dissuade some users, but there is a growing online community of non-ALA members who have created ALAConnect accounts and are using the resource.

ALAConnect offers everyone in libraryland (not just ALA members) a way to get involved in professional discourse, to engage in professional networking, and to create their own professional communities online. What we need to do is to join ALAConnect en masse, create groups, engage in communities, and make ALA what we need it to be. ALAConnect is just a starting point, but I honestly think that if we start there, the sky is the limit. It’s up to us to make sure we use the system in a way that is meaningful to us.

Teapots In a Tempest by GaijinSeb / CC-BY-NC-ND

Only a few information technology organizations predict the future by inventing it.¹ One of the canonical examples is Xerox PARC, which in the early 1970’s produced the first mouse, pioneered Graphical User Interfaces, invented Ethernet, and developed the first laser printer, along with dozens of other innovations. Among contemporary organizations, the inheritor of this lineage appears to be Google.

The Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago during its early years is probably the most widely accepted Xerox PARC analog within librarianship. If libraries have a Google equivalent, a contemporary organization that is both synthesizing the best work in the field and shaping its future, it’s North Carolina State University Libraries. Under Susan Nutter’s directorship, NCSU Libraries became the first university library to win the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Excellence in Academic Libraries Award and received the American Library Association’s Library of the Future award; Susan Nutter was Library Journal’s Librarian of the Year in 2005; and it places someone in LJ’s Movers & Shakers list pretty much every year. Observe NCSU Libraries from afar and you can’t help but be impressed. Study it up close, as I did two years ago this week, and you get a sense of what it must have been like to work at Xerox PARC or, I expect, what it’s like to work at Google.

Two years ago, I was a library school student enrolled in Steven Bell’s Academic Librarianship course at Drexel University. The major assignment for the class was to conduct a field report on a library, and Susan Nutter allowed me to spend a day interviewing her management team, mostly individually or in small groups. One of the major themes I noticed was how fortunate they felt to work with each other. They believed they were working more hours than their colleagues at peer institutions, but they also believed they were having more fun (in my experience, both beliefs seem to be accurate). As complimentary as they were toward all of their colleagues, when they began listing the colleagues who they most admired, who drove them the hardest, who made them feel like what they were doing was important–and just about every member of the management team cited just about everyone else by name–inevitably they started that list with Kristin Antelman.

The sense I got of Kristin, in part from our conversation, but mostly from hearing her colleagues talk about her, was captured by Steve Yegge, a programmer at Google, in a post entitled Done, and Get Things Smart:

“At first it’s entirely non-obvious who’s responsible for Google’s culture of engineering discipline: the design docs, audited code reviews, early design reviews, readability reviews, resisting introduction of new languages, unit testing and code coverage, profiling and performance testing, etc. You know. The whole gamut of processes and tools that quality engineering organizations use to ensure that code is open, readable, documented, and generally non-shoddy work.

But if you keep an eye on the emails that go out to Google’s engineering staff, over time a pattern emerges: there’s one superheroic dude who’s keeping us all in line.”²

The trait Kristin shares with Yegge’s coworker at Google is that she excels at understanding how decisions made today—or left unmade today—can impact the future. And she insists on looking at reality as it is and seems likely to be, not as people might wish for it to be. As NCSU’s Associate Director for the Digital Library, one of her major initiatives over the past few years was to lead the group that first introduced faceted browsing to library catalogs, using the Endeca software that was previously used only on commercial websites like Home Depot’s. After rolling out the catalog at NCSU Libraries, she and her colleagues worked with their peers in the Triangle Research Library Network to create an Endeca-powered union catalog (in addition to NCSU, the network comprises the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, and North Carolina Central University). In an article for the April 2009 issue of College & Research Libraries News she co-authored with TRLN’s Mona Couts, they emphasize the ambiguity inherent in the project:

“TRLN librarians were in agreement that our catalogs were bad, and that what NCSU had in its Endeca catalog was, if not the answer, at least an improvement. The harder challenge is that the very concept of the catalog is in transition. Implementing a “next-generation” catalog doesn’t answer the question, what should a library catalog be anymore?”

When I learned that a group of Assistant/Associate University Librarians and Assistant/Associate Directors (AUL/AD) in academic libraries, known as the Taiga Forum, issued a series of provocative statements on the future of libraries, it was no surprise to me that Kristin Antelman was on the steering committee that helped create the document. And when I read the statements themselves, I was sure I detected some of her ideas.

Over the past few weeks, I had the good fortune to interview Kristin about Taiga, the statements, and the future of libraries. Although during the course of our conversation we chose not to dissect the Taiga Forum members’ creation or discussion of each statement individually,³ we encourage you to use the comments section that follows this article to share your thoughts on the statements themselves as well as the other ideas Kristin shared.

Why did you agree to join the Taiga Steering Committee and to moderate a session? What was it about Taiga that appealed to you?

I got involved with organizing Taiga 4 because I had attended the first three Taigas and found them to be great meetings. They were unlike any professional meetings I had been to; we spent a whole day talking honestly about big and difficult challenges facing academic libraries. At the end of Taiga 3, I felt I wanted to have some input in how the next one was done.

The Taiga meetings were conceived as a venue for people at the Associate University Librarian/Associate Director level in academic libraries to get together and discuss common challenges. We tend to have few peers in our home institutions and, sometimes, in smaller institutions, none at all. The premise of Taiga was that, while directors had venues to talk amongst themselves, there was no such venue for administrators below the level of director to talk frankly about issues across functional lines and with colleagues from other institutions.

The first year saw the development of ten provocative statements. Those statements ended up serving as the basis for lively conversations not only at the first Taiga meeting itself, but in academic libraries across the country for years afterward. I think they struck a chord because they dared to express fears and forebodings about our collective future that many of us were feeling but that we may not have had the courage (at that time anyway) to speak freely about. Taigas 2 and 3, very successfully in my opinion, employed the “open space” approach to participant-defined meetings. You could even say we were ahead of the curve on the “unconference.”

The aspect of Taiga 4 that has received the most attention was its revised “Provocative Statements” document. What was its purpose?

For Taiga 4, which was held this past January before ALA in Denver, the steering group had the idea to revisit which (if any) of the original provocative statements were still valid, and then to add to them. The new statements would be focused around the theme of this year’s meeting, “Organizational Change: Professional Identity and Personal Commitment.” We asked the Taiga community for feedback and took those responses into account when we wrote the new statements. As it happened, we did not carry forward any of the original statements, but incorporated a lot of the same themes in the new ones. The statements were written by a subgroup of the steering committee over several phone calls and wiki work. They were then commented on and edited by the full steering committee, and were distributed to the people who signed up to attend the meeting.

We then asked for volunteers to do “lightning talks” on the statements at the Taiga 4 meeting. Those talks were each followed by 10 or so minutes of discussion, which planted many seeds for conversation for the rest of the day. At the end of the meeting, we reviewed how we felt about the statements. That recap resulted in minor changes, including deleting statement #3 (about the dominance of Google) as not very provocative.

One of the misconceptions about the statements has been that the Taiga meeting participants believe that these things will happen, or, more interestingly, should happen. Actually, their purpose is largely rhetorical. We hoped the statements would inspire conversation—and resistance!—at our meeting. We very intentionally meant to say that we feel that research libraries are facing serious challenges to core areas of what we do and that we want to talk about these challenges without presuming any answers. I would also add (and here I’m speaking for myself and not the group) that I think the statements also explicitly confront superficial optimism about how academic libraries—and librarians—will transition into new roles.

The subtext of many of the statements is the as-yet-unknown impact of a potentially prolonged period of tough budget times, which was just becoming evident when these were written. How libraries build collections and are staffed now is a product of many decades of pretty robust growth. It remains to be seen what path libraries will take when budgets are shrinking, but ideas like realizing we cannot support a hybrid print/electronic model indefinitely, or cannot continue to work around underperforming employees, are a couple responses to these pressures that we explored.

Are the reactions you’ve seen—the ones that respond to the content rather than the context—in any way satisfying, even if their writers appear to be dismissive of the ideas expressed within the statements? Do these librarians’ strong reactions mean the statements are doing what they’re supposed to do?

Any reaction means the statements have had an impact. Response to the statements’ content and their context have been quite intertwined, however. Having made the decision to send the statements out into the world, we made a mistake in distributing them in a static way, with a lack of transparency about their context (who did this? what was the purpose?). We were rightly criticized for that.⁴

Apparently, the Darien Statements might be a response to Taiga, although they don’t claim that.⁵ Aside from being both being list-like and appearing around the same time, I don’t see too many commonalities. Except, that is, in the section called “as librarians, we must…”, where the Darien Statements have quite a bit in common with the spirit of Taiga, including their own expression of some of the points made in the provocative statements.

One aspect of the responses that does concern me is that there seems to be a pervasive, and enthusiastically embraced, gap of trust with administrators. While maybe that’s just something that always has been and always will be, it concerns me because these divisions weaken us. Those of us who are currently AULs or ADs are not MBA-types dropped into libraries; we have spent most of our careers working in various non-administrative librarian jobs. In fact, my impression is that a significant number of AUL/ADs attend Taiga soon after arriving in their positions.

Another criticism I’ve seen is that we’re too negative, that we don’t propose answers. It’s worth noting that, while most of the statements themselves don’t propose answers, the discussion at the meeting did very much address answers. How libraries address the challenges facing us often gets back to organizational culture. Acknowledging the need, and then adjusting what we do and who does it, sometimes in significant ways, is not an easy task for any of us, whether you are a front-line library worker, a manager, or an administrator. A couple colleagues and I have been working on a project to find out more about what future library leaders are thinking. This dovetailed with the Taiga 4 theme, so we prepared a little video of interviews with some of these librarians that we showed at the beginning of the meeting.

Will there be a Taiga 5?

Since Taiga is not a formal organization, we see where it takes us year to year. Thanks to the continued generosity of our sponsors, Innovative Interfaces and R2 Consulting, a Taiga 5 meeting will be possible, but what form it will take remains to be seen.

Time for some non-Taiga questions. What do you think library schools should be emphasizing? Requiring? Or, put another way, what are the abilities you consider most important in potential NCSU Fellows?

Library school programs are becoming increasingly differentiated it seems to me; and they have to in order to survive. Distance education will make it possible for prospective students to find the program that best meets their needs. These are both positive developments. I think that internships are even more critical than ever. Every recent MLS we hire tells us that they learned more in those experiences than they did from their educational program. Separating the Masters coursework from learning library practice would also help address the theory/practice identity crisis characteristic of MLS programs.

In terms of skills, I like to see librarians who have the ability to think through problems in a systematic way, who can learn independently, who are fearless and enthusiastic about technology. It’s critical that they be able to communicate effectively, including in writing, and that they show leadership qualities. They should be focused on the big picture and be pointed toward the future, thinking about what libraries are for, not what we do, because what we do is changing very quickly. I’m very encouraged by the graduates I’ve seen in recent years. The applicants to our Fellows program just seem to get stronger every year.

What are the most useful things ALA can do for us as a profession?

I think ALA is most effective when it works as an advocate for public libraries, promoting the contribution that public libraries make to communities across the country. Our public libraries are a tremendous achievement of this society, really unique in the world, and yet one that we cannot take for granted will always be there, especially as local governments are hard hit economically.

ALA and its divisions also serve as a valuable professional development opportunity, where people can find leadership and other opportunities even if their jobs do not offer them the chance to develop in that way.

Are there any other professional associations or consortia that are more important to you than ALA?

Actually, ALA is pretty important to me. LITA is my primary home in ALA, and I try to stay involved with LITA committees, etc.

Closer to home, the Triangle Research Libraries Network is an important professional connection. TRLN is very active both in developing shared services and sponsoring information sharing and professional development events for staff at the TRLN libraries.

The Digital Library Federation (recently folded into CLIR) and the Coalition for Networked Information have been important associations for me as well. Both organizations hold semi-annual meetings where members can share ongoing work.

What data do you wish you had available to you in figuring out how well the library is meeting its constituency’s needs?

Data about fast-changing areas, such as discovery, would be useful to have. I’m concerned that we understand only in a sketchy way how our different users are finding the information they need, and where and when that leads them to library collections or to library-provided tools.

Two or three years from now, what will be the minimum requirements for a really good library website/catalog? What will its users expect it to be able to do?

I anticipate users will expect to have to interact with the library website or catalog much less, or hardly ever at all—which, I note, is hardly a provocative statement! The library website will continue to lead our users to information about our spaces and services, but our goal should be to make its footprint as minimal as possible in our users’ lives. The resources they can get to by virtue of their institutional affiliation should be seamlessly linkable from course sites and search engines. For this to happen, linking technologies, like OpenURL, will have to work even better than they do now. But we also will have to make this vision a priority—from negotiations with information providers to how we make local investments of our staff time and development resources.

Do you foresee anything changing the dynamic between libraries and information providers?

One frustration for me is that we have not had much success in buying/licensing just data; providers will only offer data in the context of their products, their interfaces. Had libraries been able to buy metadata for scholarly articles, for instance, we could have conceivably developed reasonable metasearch solutions. But that time is passed, now, with Google Scholar. Good data to support reference linking services is still hard to get, and it hurts our services. Quality metadata to drive OpenURL-based services for ebooks is also an area where the information ecosystem has a ways to go. Ebooks themselves have all kinds of platform restrictions that create challenges for libraries. But whether libraries have now, or will ever have, the leverage to get access to more open content is debatable. As the market consolidates around Google and a handful of major publishers, we will likely increasingly be at their mercy, in terms of APIs into their content and services. Even if that’s the case, though, there’s much that can be done with those tools; I think libraries by and large underutilize those opportunities to develop integrated services that are already made available to us.

What could we be doing to better utilize the available tools?

Just looking at the catalog, there’s no reason that any library should be running a last-generation ILS OPAC interface. There are open source and relatively low-cost commercial options that can give your library a current, faceted interface with good relevancy in keyword searching. There are also a range of APIs from Google, OCLC, LibraryThing, etc. that should be employed to make searching the catalog a richer experience, better integrated with the larger information environment.

Is there anything we could do to that would keep us from being at the mercy of Google and the major publishers?

I’m much more concerned about being at the mercy of publishers than Google. Google has advanced access to information worldwide far more than libraries ever could dream of doing; where they encroach on our area they are changing the paradigm for the better (for example, full text-based rather than metadata-based discovery of books).

Scholarly publishers, operating in an increasingly consolidated market, will continue to raise prices beyond inflation and restrict libraries through complex big deal licenses. They do have us at their mercy. Open access may be the eventual solution (and I think it is) but, in the interim, the detrimental impacts of their dominance (smaller market for monographs, for instance) will continue to be significant. One thing libraries can do—and many have done—is never again enter into big deals, where flexibility is traded for cost savings. Another thing libraries can do is to be less fixated on collecting for posterity. Scholarly work is increasingly preserved beyond our walls: a significant percentage of the best articles are already openly available on the web (and this segment is growing), while another significant percentage is made openly available by publishers after an embargo period. Libraries, collectively, will have to be less dogmatic about licensing (and replicating) complete and official versions of the STM (scientific/technical/medical) literature. At risk are two dimensions of our mission that have historically (and justifiably) defined us as research libraries: developing collections of significant breadth to meet the needs of all our constituents and maintaining the capacity to invest in new services.

If a large library had to make big cuts, what are the first expenses that should go? What are the programs/positions, etc. it should absolutely protect?

This is very much a local decision and depends on where the library has already had to cut back and where its strengths lie. While downsizing is an opportunity to be strategic about positioning our organizations for the future, I don’t think we’re yet in a climate where our parent institutions will tolerate unbalanced cuts, i.e., cuts that too disproportionately affect either collections or services. One of the provocative statements (or perhaps two) addresses the need to reduce speculative spending;⁶ I think that will have to come to pass, and sooner rather than later. I also think we’ll have to get out of the local catalog business within a couple years, and that has significant implications for our technical services staff. Digital library development is still starved in most institutions, resulting in the poor discovery tools and websites that we see now. How each library faces these challenges, both the process they take and the outcome, will reveal much about the character of an organization and its leadership. I also see that libraries will have to focus somewhat less on serving the broader library community and community of future scholars, and much more on their mission within their own organization.

For libraries with limited resources, there’s often a tension between serving the broader scholarly community and meeting local needs. How do you see this playing out?

This question gets at what I think is a big challenge for us. Our special collections may be where we are unique, and can make the greatest contribution to the cultural heritage community at large, but they will never be where we will make the greatest contribution locally. And the path forward (digitization) is expensive. So the question arises, why would—or should—our universities fund that work? One of the Taiga statements mentioned that these efforts would be privately funded, and I think that will have to be the case, although this will result in organizational inefficiencies and relatively slow progress overall.

But special collections are not the future for most academic libraries. The future that we all share is becoming much better integrated into campus life, and closer to teaching and learning (there’s a Taiga statement about that, too, the “blended librarian” idea).

Let’s finish on a positive note. What have been some of your most pleasant surprises over the last five years? What’s happened for you professionally, for NCSU Libraries, or for the profession as a whole that’s far exceeded your expectations?

As far as NCSU Libraries goes, the biggest surprise has been that the state legislature funded a new library for NC State University. The $126 million library, the James B. Hunt Jr. Library, is currently completing the design phase and is scheduled to open in 2012. Librarians who have lived through retrofits and add-ons to existing buildings know how constraining that can be in terms of creating new spaces for users. The opportunity to participate in the design of new learning, collaborative, and research spaces, rich in technology and good design, has been a huge thrill for me. If we do this right, it will serve as a model for what an academic library can be going forward.

In terms of the profession as a whole, I would return to the topic of the new graduates that our library schools are producing. I would say that, without question, the graduates of the last five years are more well-rounded, smarter, and better prepared to make immediate contributions than at any time since I’ve been a librarian. These people are, by definition, our future. It’s up to us to give them the tools they need and the latitude to realize their potential within our organizations. If we can do that, libraries will have a bright future.

Thanks to Kristin Antelman for her thoughtful responses and her generosity, and to Stephanie Atkins, Beth Picknally Camden, Claire Stewart, and Hilary Davis for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

1. The full quote by Alan Kay: “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!” He said it during an early meeting of PARC members and Xerox planners.
2. Yegge writes later in the essay: “Incidentally, they hired plenty of other brilliant seed engineers who were equally responsible for Google’s great technical infrastructure. I’m just using this one guy as an illustrative example.” I’m doing the same. A lot of people are responsible for making NCSU, in my opinion, the best library in existence. But I got the sense, from my conversations that day, that they credited Kristin with keeping them all in line.
3. As Kristin noted, “I’m uncomfortable speaking for the group in that way, i.e., interpreting the meaning behind the statements or characterizing the discussions of the day (I couldn’t even accurately recall such, even if we didn’t tell people they were confidential).” I think this makes a great deal of sense, especially once you understand how Taiga works and the reason the statements were drafted.
4. Some of the writers who have been involved in the conversation inspired by the 2009 provocative statements include: Steven Bell (ACRLog); John Dupuis (Confessions of a Science Librarian); Meredith Farkas (Information Wants To Be Free); Steve Lawson (See Also…); Dorothea Salo (Caveat Lector); and Roy Tennant (Library Journal Digital Libraries).
5. The official version of the Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians is hosted at John Blyberg’s blyberg.net. For more on the Darien Statements, see posts by Cindi Trainor at Citegeist and Kathryn Greenhill at Librarians Matter.
6. Statements 2 and 7, which read as follows:

   2. In five years collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron-initiated. Ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. The only collection development activities involving librarians will be competition over special collections and archives.

   7. In five years libraries will have abandoned the hybrid model to focus exclusively on electronic collections, with limited investments in managing shared print archives. Local unique collections will be funded only by donor contributions.

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome another guest
author, Steve McCann! Steve is a Digital Projects Librarian specializing in information architecture, usability studies, and data analysis.

In 2008, when I was visiting Anaheim, CA, for the ALA Annual Conference, I had a rather unpleasant experience renting a car. I had a reservation for the least expensive vehicle available (gas at that time was priced around $4 a gallon), but the salesman was insisting I upgrade to something larger. What sticks out in my memory was the tactic he was using, an influence technique called Social Proof which I had been reading about. His gambit was to point to an SUV on his pictorial list of available cars and emphatically state that “this is what everyone is renting here in Los Angeles.” This put me in an awkward position, since the idea that 100% of car rentals in LA were oversized SUVs was something I simply hadn’t considered previously. I found myself in a state of insufficient information and was suspicious that he was trying to take advantage of this. In fact, he was claiming authority on the subject of correct LA car rental procedures, and I could either accept his authority or go against “everyone” and rent a subcompact. It was a strange situation for a librarian to find himself, since I am, in general, much more likely to be navigating a state of “information overload.” If I had thought of it, I could have consulted my Internet friends via my cell phone and gotten a plethora of advice, but, in the end, I knew the whole idea was silly so I declined. Undeterred, he said his piece again, only this time much more loudly as if I couldn’t hear him. After declining a second time, I received a remarkable look of disgust, reminding me strongly of someone biting into a lemon.

I bring up this story because of the visceral power of this type of coercion. For me, it was patently obvious that he could not back up the claims he was making so, in a sense, I had it easy. His assertion lacked credibility at a gut level, and I really didn’t need to consult with anyone else. Reflecting on the situation, however, it became apparent that standing at the rental counter surrounded by unfamiliar people and asking for a vehicle was, in a way, analogous to the experience a patron has when visiting a reference desk for the first time. They obviously have an information problem and are looking for an authority of some kind. The main difference is that a reference librarian is trained to help patrons locate credible authorities in spite of a thicket of federated searches, Library of Congress call numbers, subject terms, and the spectrum of “article – journal – database” resources, among countless other difficulties. The librarian is an authority in her own right on the subject of research and generally recognized as such. The question this article seeks to ask is: to what extent can the library website framework, with all of its catalogs, vendors, guides, etc., become recognized as an authority in the subject of research? The assumption I am making is that library websites are not automatically deemed authorities by patrons in the same way that librarians themselves are. First, many of our patrons consult with more recognized authorities in the form of Google services, the home pages of journal titles, or even, maybe especially, other patrons. In this article I propose that what library websites are missing is evidence of “social proof.” I will then introduce a commercial service that is taking steps in this direction with regard to weblogs and finally brainstorm the type of changes that would be required to supply this evidence.

How We Recognize Authority

“What we’re dealing with now isn’t information overload [...] it really is a filtering problem rather than an information [problem].” (Shirky, 2008)

“One of the criteria we use to filter information is credibility, or believability.” (Wathen, 2002)

Patrick Wilson (1983), in his book Second Hand Knowledge, makes the distinction between two types of authority, administrative and cognitive. The first has power to command, but the second has power to influence one’s thoughts. Thinking back on the earlier example of the rental car salesman, the reason I wasn’t influenced was because he simply wasn’t credible. As it turns out, credibility is a major component of cognitive authority along with trustworthiness, reliability, scholarliness, “officialness,” and authoritativeness (Rieh, 2002). If a person, entity, or idea can achieve an impression of quality in any of these six areas, then that entity can act as a cognitive authority. The important point is that credibility and authority are both perceptions: a recognition of a quality which, once made, will allow a person to place her trust in a figure of perceived authority.  Once placed, that recognition labels a person or idea as someone who “knows something we do not know” and who “knows what they are talking about” (Wilson, 1983).

The question then becomes what factors influence this perception of cognitive authority? In the following list, Wathen and Burkell (2002) summarize the variables related to perception into five factors affecting credibility:

1. Source material
   1. Expertise / Knowledge
   2. Trustworthiness
   3. Credentials
   4. Attractiveness
   5. Similarity
   6. Likeability / Goodwill / Dynamism
2. Receiver of material
   1. Relevance
   2. Motivation
   3. Prior knowledge
   4. Involvement
   5. Values / beliefs / situation
   6. Stereotypes about source or topic
   7. “Social location”
3. Message
   1. Topic / content
   2. Internal validity / consistency
   3. Plausibility of arguments
   4. Supported by data or examples
   5. Framing (loss or gain)
   6. Repetition / familiarity
   7. Ordering
4. Medium of the material
   1. Organization
   2. Usability
   3. Presentation
   4. Vividness
5. Context of the information
   1. Distraction / “noise”
   2. Time since message encountered
   3. Degree of need

What is striking about this list is that it is an awfully large number of judgments for a student to make. Working on the reference desk, it’s not uncommon for a student to say he or she has a paper due that day and needs three authoritative sources. The student in this situation is not going to conduct a systematic search but rather resort to a more primitive form of decision making, Social Proof.

The Power of Social Proof

“The individual can be conceptualized as a social actor, and information-seeking activities take place within a social community whose knowledge, characteristics, expectations, and norms are internalized within the individual. This may be especially relevant for young people, whose information seeking and learning is inherently social given the importance of social ties and networks during adolescence and early adulthood” (Rieh, 2008).

In Cialdini’s (1988) Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion, he talks about the enormous power of Social Proof. Here’s the cartoon version found on page 120 (it may remind you strongly of how Digg, Delicious, and other social tagging systems work):

Figure 1: The Powerful Affect of Similar Others on our Behavior (Cialdini, 1988)

According to Cialdini (1988), what’s going on in the image above is the “awesome influence of the behavior of similar others.”  In other words, one important tool we use to decide how to act in a given situation is to look at what other people are doing. It may be that this is an evolutionary byproduct. For example, if someone stands up calmly in a crowded library computer lab and yells “fire!” and then sits down again, the chances are good that you will work your way through a checklist of credibility factors. Is the source credible? Is the information relevant to me? Is the message plausible? Was the presentation convincing? Isn’t this just juvenile noise? If the student who yelled goes back to work, then his credibility is suspect and evacuation is unlikely. However, if the two factors of uncertainty and similarity are at play, then credibility is judged very quickly. Uncertainty can be described as the state “when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous[.] When uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct” (Cialdini, 1988).  Are people starting to leave the computer lab? If yes, then the perception of credibility just got a big boost. This perception is especially strong if the other people in the lab are viewed as similar to ourselves.

This behavior transfers quite well to the web. For example, in eye-tracking studies of marketing materials it is consistently shown that people look where other people are looking. The following heatmap images from a eye-tracking study shows this quite clearly (Breeze, 2009):

Figure 2: The Effects of Social Proof in Advertising

“Here’s the same 106 people looking at the second image for the same amount of time [...] Notice how many more people are actually reading the text that the baby is looking at in the above image? Not to mention the increased attention on the brand!”

The reason this behavior is significant is because studies have shown people will read, at most, 28% of the words on a web page (Nielsen, 2008). The author of the above eye tracking study is saying that people are actually reading the text, but it’s clear that they are not reading the entire text. They are just skimming and keying in on certain keywords such as “chlorine-free” and “clinically.” In an eye-tracking heatmap like the one above, the more concentrated the colors over a text, the more time is being spent looking at that area of the screen. In short, marketers are able to manipulate the effects of social proof to force people to stop and read their copy.

But let’s return to the subject of library websites. How can we convince users to pay attention to factors of credibility? Library interfaces are largely text based. Take a look at most OPACs, and it’s clear that this type of short-circuiting of credibility judgments is not happening. Instead, libraries are relying on the users taking a laborious and systematic approach by judging between multiple credibility factors. In a sense this is wholly correct; librarians are invested in supplying the user with texts that are not only gratifying but also appropriate. Librarians are also invested in teaching the careful evaluation of the credibility factors of those sources. On the other hand, in the image above the marketer asserts the text the baby is looking at is the right text; the brand being presented is the right brand to satisfy the consumer’s information need.  Librarians would not make such a claim because we recognize more than most the immense number of contextual variables involved. In this way library websites are largely designed around a contradiction: on the one hand we assert that a solution to an information need can be found within our domains; but on the other hand we refuse to make any judgments regarding the credibility of texts for our users. The question then becomes is this attitude a mistake? Is it not possible that some form of visual credibility ranking could be found to bridge this gap?

The PostRank Model

One company is combining the principles of social proof along with a more formalized approach to the ranking of credibility. The way they are doing it is instructive for librarians, even if the amount of data processing involved is daunting. As of this writing they are currently ranking the social proof for nearly 900,000 RSS feeds. The total number of individual weblog postings comes to approximately 1.6 million per day. For each of these feeds, they then track the social performance of each post relative to other posts within the same RSS feed. The social metrics used to calculate this performance they are calling the “Five C’s of Engagement:” Creating, Critiquing, Chatting, Collecting, and Clicking. The theory behind this is one of social proof: the more an individual weblog post is interacted with socially, the more attention it probably warrants. Figure 3 is an example of the PostRank score for recent articles published in Smashing Magazine, a usability and design weblog. Notice that low-scoring posts are grayed out, the good-scoring post is light orange (score = 5.6), and the best-scoring post is a dark orange. “Credibility” is immediately recognizable in the second post which scored a 7.3.

Figure 3: Smashing Magazine articles filtered to show only “Good” postings.

When the user hovers over this score they are presented with a visual breakdown of the component factors that go into this credibility ranking (figure 4). Each factor represents a social activity score from PostRank’s “5 C’s of Engagement.”

Figure 4: Breakdown of component factors that combined to create the PostRank score.

The implementation of PostRank scores is highly volatile, which has caused some to question its usefulness. For example, after checking the three PostRank scores 24 hours following the image capture of Figures 1 & 2, the scores had already changed. The company uses a moving temporal window in which all posts are calculated one against the other. An example of the effect this causes is if your weblog publishes a single post that is then “slashdotted” (i.e., suddenly wildly popular because of a mention in a high-traffic website) then all other posts in that temporal window will suddenly score extremely low because of the difference in social activity between the postings. This scoring discrepancy will remain until the temporal window passes the high-performing post, or until the low-performing posts themselves are supplanted by a new higher standard of performance. While this may or may not make sense from a business standpoint, from the user’s point of view rankings that jump around frequently affects the perceived “trustworthiness” of the ranking system.

Elements of Social Proof for Library Websites

If library websites were able to develop such a tool with which to rank the credibility / cognitive authority of all the intellectual content within their domains, what would it look like? Because of the librarian’s calling to provide access to, but not judgment of, the individual texts, it would have to take into account the credibility factors identified above. To work in the highly social environment of the web, the library website would also need to put the power of social proof into play. The website would need to be designed in a way as to allow patrons to quickly and visually identify the attention of “similar others.” In other words,the true cognitive authorities within any given subject. To meet these conflicting demands, the tool would need to provide feedback in the two areas where social proof is strongest: Uncertainty and Similarity.

To combat a user’s “uncertainty” when navigating between multiple source materials, our tool would need to show elements that assist in snap judgments. This would involve data that is superficial to the content of a work, or, according to Tseng & Fogg elements of presumed credibility and surface credibility (Tseng, 1999).

• Uncertainty Data Elements
  • Citation counts and/or incoming links to a work
  • Number of times a work was checked out or read
  • Number of works an author has published in her career
  • Number of comments attached to a work
  • The attractiveness, likeability, and/or usability of the work’s format

To determine “similarity,” our tool would need to show elements that assist the user to make a judgment as to the cognitive authority of a work. This would involve source labels such as “PhD,” the title of the journal, the name of the publishing company, etc. Other similarity scores might include the experience other scholars had with the work or even personal ratings like what is seen in GoodReads. According to Tseng & Fogg, these elements would be composed of reputed credibility and experienced credibility factors.

• Similarity Data Elements
  • Source impact factors of a title or journal
  • Source rejection rate of a journal title or publisher
  • Whether or not the work is refereed
  • The total number of critical reviews
  • The calculated quality of works citing the work in question
  • The Library of Congress subject terms associated with the work
  • Temporal groupings; an example might be a 10 year, 100 year, or adjustable window that affects all element calculations
  • Total number of syllabi listings
  • Total number of subscribers to a periodical title or holdings calculation for other works
  • A user generated “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” ranking

The series of calculations involved for each title in the above factors could then be represented within a library OPAC or a periodicals database in a way similar to that of PostRank’s system. If it was built correctly it could be used to quickly and easily “drill down” to relevant cognitive authorities within any given research context. Of course there is a potential downside. The first is the immense amount of data that would have to be managed on an ongoing basis. The second, and perhaps more pressing, would be the problem of unintended consequences. Just because a piece of information is socially dynamic, doesn’t mean that it is correct or even helpful. A cautionary tale from the world of finance involves the below chart highlighting the financial bubble which peaked in 2006/2007. In figure 5, the analyst Barry Ritholtz (lower left) recognized early on that the fundamentals of the economy did not support the high valuation of stocks. He was proven correct, but not until the market collapsed in 2008/2009.

Figure 5: Herd Mentality Shown Among Analysts

This type of herd mentality is a hallmark of social proof. To make matters worse, there is no proof that the elements I’ve selected above would be the correct ones for the researcher’s information needs. It is uncertain whether such a credibility ranking system would lead to more harm than good.

Conclusion

In this article, I’ve attempted to brainstorm a method for raising the profile of library websites to the level of authority that individual librarians enjoy. To do this, multiple credibility factors will need to be addressed and social proof feedback will need to be implemented in some way. Despite its flaws, the PostRank model may provide guidance on how this could be accomplished. It would be calculation intensive and require iterative research to make sure it was not skewing patron’s sense of credibility within subject areas. But regardless of the difficulties, it may be helpful to remember what a statistics professor has said about relying upon models for guidance: all models are wrong, but some models are useful.

Bibliography

Breeze, James. You look where they look | UsableWorld – James Breeze’s Blog. 3/16/2009 [cited 4/9/2009 2009]. Available from http://usableworld.com.au/2009/03/16/you-look-where-they-look/.

Cialdini, R. 2004. The science of persuasion. Scientific American Mind.

Cialdini, Robert B. 1988. Influence : science and practice. Glenview, Ill. Scott, Foresman.

Cope, William W., and Mary Kalantzis. 2009. Signs of epistemic disruption: Transformations in the knowledge system of the academic journal. First Monday; Volume 14, Number 4 – 6 April 2009. Available from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2309/2163.

Eastin, Matthew S. 2007. Toward a Cognitive Developmental Approach to Youth Perceptions of Credibility. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning -, 29-47.

Eysenbach, Gunther. 2007. Credibility of Health Information and Digital Media: New Perspectives and Implications for Youth. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning -, 123-154.

Flanagin, Andrew J., and Miriam J. Metzger. 2007. Digital Media and Youth: Unparalleled Opportunity and Unprecedented Responsibility. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning -, 5-27.

Harris, Frances J. 2007. Challenges to Teaching Credibility Assessment in Contemporary Schooling. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning -, 155-179.

Ito, Mizuko, et al. 2007. Foreword. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning -, vii-ix.

Jadad, A. R., and A. Gagliardi. 1998. Rating Health Information on the Internet Navigating to Knowledge or to Babel? Jama 279, no. 8:611-614.

Lankes, R. D. 2007. Trusting the Internet: New Approaches to Credibility Tools. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning -, 101-121.

Metzger, Miriam J., and Andrew J. Flanagin. 2007. Introduction. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning -, 1-4.

Nielsen, Jakob. How Little Do Users Read? (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox). in useit.com [database online]. May 6, 2008 [cited 4/9/2009 2009]. Available from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/percent-text-read.html.

Rieh, S. Y., and N. J. Belkin. 1998. Understanding judgment of information quality and cognitive authority in the WWW. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 35, 279-289.

Rieh, Soo Y., and Brian Hilligoss. 2007. College Students’ Credibility Judgments in the Information-Seeking Process. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning -, 49-71.

Ritholtz, Barry. Cult of the Bear, Part 1. in TheStreet.com. 2006 [cited April 14 2009]. Available from http://www.thestreet.com/_tscana/markets/marketfeatures/10260096.html.

Savolainen, R. Media credibility and cognitive authority. The case of seeking orienting information. Information Research: an international electronic journal 12.

Shirky, Clay. 2008. It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. Web 2.0 Expo 2008. New York, NY ed.O’Reilly Media, Inc. and TechWeb. Available from http://www.web2expo.com/webexny2008/public/schedule/detail/4817

Sundar, S. S. 2007. The MAIN Model: A Heuristic Approach to Understanding Technology Effects on Credibility. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning -, 73-100.

Wathen, C. N., and J. Burkell. 2002. Believe it or not: Factors influencing credibility on the Web. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 53, no. 2:134-144.

Weingarten, Fred W. 2007. Credibility, Politics, and Public Policy. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning -, 181-202.

Wilson, P. 1983. Second-hand knowledge: An inquiry into cognitive authority. Greenwood Pub Group.

Workman, M. 2008. Wisecrackers: A theory-grounded investigation of phishing and pretext social engineering threats to information security. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59, no. 4.

Courtesy of Flickr member cambodia4kidsorg

“The indicators that served as benchmarks in the past, such as number of volumes and number of journal subscriptions, are no longer sufficient because of the more expansive role that the contemporary library has assumed” (Weiner, 2005).

“The measurement of quality will come back to the questions of who are the users, what are the inputs, what are the outputs, do we produce the outputs in a way that meets the needs of the users, and what do those outputs contribute to the productivity and accomplishments of those users?” (Pritchard, 1996).

It’s almost a sure bet that your friends, family and colleagues are looking at ways to save money and, in general, are tightening the purse strings a little more these days. The post on January 14, 2009 in this blog reviewed the state of libraries during recessions and pointed out the growing news pieces that remark at the huge surge in library usage. People are realizing real savings by relying more and more on libraries. Ask yourself how much do you spend at bookstores and music shops such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble each year? Magazine subscriptions? Internet service? Entertainment like movies and concerts? If you had to go without one or more of those services, think about how much you could save by relying on your local library to provide access to those services and content streams. At the same time, libraries of all types are faced with the inevitability of budget cuts due to the recession and must justify the use of existing funds for programming, staff, services and collections. Take a second and google ‘return on investment and libraries’ to get a sense of the importance of demonstrating library value.

In order to have the financial ability to continue providing those services and content streams, libraries need to prove to their funding sources, whether tax-payers, private donors, universities, governments, schools, or corporate parents, that those services, programs and collections are meeting users’ needs. Moreover, libraries must prove without a doubt that the funds provided to libraries to develop those services, programs and collections provide a good return on investment.

While there are many metrics for assessing library value (e.g., LibQual, circulation trends, gate counts, usage statistics trends, ARL Annual Statistics, etc.), this article aims to explore the return on investment (ROI) approach used by libraries to demonstrate value.

What is Return on Investment (ROI) and how is it used by libraries?

Return on investment (ROI) is how much you get back for what you put into something. Strictly speaking, ROI is based on dollars and cents. So, you need to be able to quantify how much money was invested in something and then you need to compare how much money is gained or lost as a result of how the investment was handled. There are two kinds of questions that ROI is good at answering. One is: how much money will be gained by investing in a particular financial asset? The other is: will putting resources into a project or service yield a measurable benefit? Let’s take a look at a quick example using a baseball card. If you bought a baseball card in 2000 for $50 and now in 2009, it’s worth $500, what is your return on investment?

In libraries, ROI is measured in many different ways. ROI can be used to measure the costs (investment) and the outcomes (the return on investment) from the perspective of library users, the parent organization, or from the perspective of the library itself. Costs are typically dollars spent on a service or resource and/or time spent to provide or access a service or to acquire or use a resource. The returns on an investment can be either outputs (the result of a service or resource such as expanded journal collection), uses (how the service or resources are used), or outcomes (indirect results of the output or the use such as time saved) (Jose-Marie Griffiths, 2007).

Motivations for using ROI in libraries

ROI can be an integral part of the process for evaluating a library’s services, collections, staffing levels, planning for new services and resources, or measuring how valuable your library is to your community and stakeholders.

For example, for libraries supported with public tax dollars, one way to use ROI is to measure tax dollars (the investment) against the benefits (savings by not having to pay elsewhere for the use of library materials and services). Library ROI studies consistently suggest that public libraries give a high return on investment, providing anywhere from $2 to $10 in return for every tax dollar received.

• In Florida: for every $1.00 of taxpayer dollars spent on public libraries, income (wages) increases by $12.66
• In South Carolina: In return for an investment of $77.5 million, public libraries pump $347 million into the state’s economy
• Can you say your library users derive more than $4.00 in benefits for every $1.00 spent of taxpayer money? St. Louis Public Library can!

[From Trustee Blog: Library ROI - What's Your Community rating]

Strategies for measuring ROI in libraries

Calculating a return on investment may seem straightforward until one considers the kinds of costs and returns associated with libraries. Measuring returns first requires that the organization have a clear sense of its mission and objectives. It is not possible to measure benefits unless one can identify the value an organization aims to provide. There are several classes of returns, direct and indirect, and individual and collective. In general, direct, individual benefits are easier to measure and quantify than indirect and collective benefits. This poses a challenge for libraries, as many of the benefits libraries provides are indirect and collective, such as the value of having a better-educated citizenry.

Jose-Marie Griffiths has conducted several return on investment studies in public and special libraries. In a presentation at the Special Library Association Annual Conference (2007), Griffiths outlined a method for calculating ROI in special libraries that demonstrates the kinds of factors that should be taken into consideration. Costs are generally straightforward, and include overhead and the costs of the users’ time associated with utilizing the library, but returns are trickier. Griffiths argues that libraries should use contingent valuation for assessing benefits. Contingent valuation is a method for evaluating goods and services that are not priced. It involves assessing the effect of taking the service away. This could mean attempting to calculate the costs that would be borne by users if they could not use the library. Griffiths also notes that changes in productivity and information needs that would go unanswered should also be considered.

Using ROI, libraries can try to place a value on the services they provide and the collections that they make accessible. For instance, many ROI studies compare the cost associated with borrowing an item from the library versus individuals having to purchase that item on their own. Consider the costs associated with the library providing a DVD that is worth $20 that circulates 50 times in a year. If each library user had to purchase that item, the collective cost would have been $1,000. Of course, there are additional costs borne by the library for providing the DVD than just the $20 investment, including staffing, storage, and preservation.

Courtesy of Flickr member allaboutgeorge

Examples from different library contexts

Public libraries

Most ROI studies in libraries have focused on public libraries. A fantastic inventory and review of value-demonstration methods and metrics is available from the Americans for Libraries Council: Worth their Weight: An Assessment of the Evolving Field of Library Valuation (2007). We will highlight a few examples here.

The “Public Library Benefits Valuation Study” conducted by the St. Louis Public Library in 1999-2001 used cost-benefit analysis techniques. First, they calculated a comparison between local taxes invested in library services and direct benefits provided to users. Across the five urban, public libraries included in the study, for each $1 of annual taxes invested in the library, library users received between $1.30 and $10 in benefits. This varied widely among the libraries in the study. Second, the study looked at returns in terms of capital investment. This compares the total investment in a library’s capital (buildings, vehicles, furniture, and other assets) with the benefits received by users. Annual returns on capital investments ranged from 5% to 150%, again varying widely among the public libraries in the study.

The State Library and Archives of Florida conducted a taxpayer return on investment study of Florida public libraries. Overall, the study found that for every $1 invested in the library at least $6.54 is returned. Other findings show that for every $1 invested in the library the Gross Regional Product increases by $9.08 and wages increase by $12.66. They also estimate that for every $6,488 invested in the library, one job is created. Statewide, the study estimates that the Gross Regional Product is increased by $4 billion as a result of taxpayer investment in Florida public libraries.

Many other public libraries have reported return on investment information, including New York public libraries, Pennsylvania public libraries, South Carolina public libraries, and Wisconsin public libraries, among others. Return on investment results from these studies ranged from $2.38 in Indiana to $5.50 in Pennsylvania. Among the five states with published ROI studies, Indiana, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Florida, the average ROI is $4.99 for every $1 invested.

Another approach some libraries have taken is to provide calculators on their websites that let users estimate how much value they are getting from the library based on their own use of its services (e.g., Rhode Island).

A potential hazard of ROI studies is that they produce what appears at face value to be a simple metric that can be compared across libraries.

Courtesy of Flickr member msmail

For ROI library metrics, the point isn’t that putting more and more money into libraries will yield ever increasing returns. The point is to show that libraries are providing value for the money that is invested in them. Those investments should be commensurate with the needs of the communities they serve.

Academic libraries

University libraries have fewer models to emulate. In 1996, Sarah Pritchard described the problems associated with assessing the value of academic libraries. She claims that the lack of standards and repeatable methods for demonstrating value (such as support of accreditation reviews, educational assessment and outcomes, ranking of graduate programs, success of job attainment after graduation, success in attracting donors, and faculty research productivity as measured by grants and publications) makes it impossible to conduct studies that compare library value across institutions.

A recent study (Luther, 2008) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign addresses some of Pritchard’s concerns about demonstrating ROI in academic libraries. Unlike public libraries, which focus on the value of services, the Illinois study examines the library’s contribution to revenue-generating activities of faculty by examining the role of library-sourced citations in grant applications. The model for the study is that the library’s investment in materials increases researchers’ productivity. This increase in productivity produces a measurable increase in grant receipts due to increased citations, as well as recruitment and retention of productive faculty.

To calculate the dollar value returned to the University of Illinois in the form of grants due to investment in the library, the faculty was surveyed to determine the importance of citations in securing grants, the percentage of faculty who use citations in grant applications, and the percentage of citations obtained through library-subscribed resources. The model also accounts for the proportion of grants that are funded. The study found that for every $1 invested in the library, $4.38 in grant income is generated for the university. This model purposefully avoids attempting to measure the social value or increases in productivity attributable to outcomes from use of the library resources.

Special libraries

Special libraries such as those found primarily in the government and corporate sectors tend to focus their ROI metrics on time saved for employees by using library resources and expertise, increases in revenues, decreases in research and development expenses, productivity gains, and cost savings. Roger Strouse, Director of Outsell, Inc., writes extensively about the value and application of ROI studies for special libraries. Outsell conducts studies of market trends in the publishing, education, and information industries. In its 2007 study on corporate, government, and medical libraries, Outsell found that the average time saved for users was 9 hours per library visit/interaction. They also reported that not only do corporate libraries save $3,107 per use of library resources and services, but also that $6,570 worth of revenues were generated with the aid of library resources and services.

“Being good at what you do and at the services you provide is no longer good enough. Very good information centres will be cut, and may be outsourced or offshored, not because of their inability to provide good services, but because of their inability to demonstrate an ROI or provide evidence of the impact they make on their organizations” (Boyd Hendriks and Ian Wooler, 2006).

Outsourcing remains a serious threat to many special libraries. Integrating and aligning the work of special libraries with the risks associated with the parent organization is one of the key recommendations of corporate library strategists. Collaborating on the reduction of risk, delays, and workplace injuries is seen as a way to position a library as a value-added partner and a key component in the success of an organization. Strouse (2003) provides an example survey for special libraries to use in measuring ROI that includes questions about types of projects for which library services and resources were used such as patents, new technologies, new product acquisitions, and changes in marketing strategies. The Special Libraries Association maintains a summary of articles and presentations on ROI metrics and value-demonstration strategies (the full bibliography is available to SLA members).

A Few Caveats

There are some reasons why ROI might not be the best tool for demonstrating library value. In some cases, a strict ROI metric may demonstrate that a library is not providing a good return on investment. Elliott, et al. (2007) describe the pros and cons of conducting an ROI or cost-benefit analysis. Many of the benefits they describe are covered earlier in this article. However, one of the disadvantages of ROI or cost-benefit analyses described by Elliott, et al. is that these metrics cannot be used for peer-comparison. The metrics are created using value systems and context-sensitive data that pertain to individual libraries. Pritchard (1996) echoes this problem in the realm of measuring academic library quality and effectiveness:

“The difficulty lies in trying to find a single model or set of simple indicators that can be used by different institutions, and that will compare something across large groups that is by definition only locally applicable—i.e., how well a library meets the needs of its institution.”

Elliot, et al. (2007) also warn against applying these kinds of metrics to small libraries: “Efficient operating costs do not appear to rise proportionally with cardholder population and collection size. Thus, benefit-cost ratios for well-managed larger libraries tend to be higher, in general, than those for well-managed smaller libraries. Larger libraries also are more likely to be able to accommodate the expense and technological requirements associated with a CBA [cost-benefit analysis] study.”

There are more subtle reasons to not rely on ROI metrics alone, and to be careful about interpreting ROI. Organizations need resources to survive. Not-for-profit organizations, whose missions are based on soft values or moral ideas rather than monetary profit, must be supported by private donations, government, or by the organizations that they support. The values of the library—ubiquitous access, preservation, and organization of information—are prone to differing interpretations of importance. Put bluntly, the library must show that the Internet has not rendered it obsolete. Libraries will be stronger if they can demonstrate their value in terms which those that provide its funding understand. In the culture and time in which we live, “value” is understood most readily in monetary, economic terms.

Making it even more difficult for academic libraries to demonstrate their worth, the mission of the library is tied to the mission of the university at large. Academic libraries must demonstrate their contributions to the mission of the organization of which they a part. And they must also attempt to make a long-term argument about preservation of information and investment in human capital to an audience that is focused on the present bottom line. Can we articulate the importance of what we do in terms that non-librarians can understand? If we cannot articulate what we are doing then we must first go back and redefine what our mission and purpose is, clearly and succinctly, before we can attempt to measure our effectiveness and value.

It is, however, essential to remember that there is a reason why libraries do not operate for a profit (with the possible exception of libraries that charge back to users for services), and that they came into being for reasons other than generating monetary wealth. There are also good reasons to be skeptical of measurements of library quality, performance, and relevance presented in purely economic terms. Discussing the role of non-profit organizations in general, Eikenberry claims:

Because of their inherent value, it is extremely important for nonprofit organizations to focus on their organizational missions…They are more than just tools for achieving the most efficient and effective mode of service delivery; they are also important vehicles for creating and maintaining a strong civil society. (Eikenberry)

Libraries must strike a balance between focusing on their mission and on their desire to prove worth in terms of high performance and ROI. For many libraries, ROI simply doesn’t measure the indirect benefits they provide.

Librarians must be particularly creative in the ways that they think about how their libraries perform and what they contribute to the populations they serve. For example, does having an appealing library make a university more appealing to potential students? One study suggests that libraries have a significant influence on students’ decisions to go to a particular university—53%—second only to “Facilities for Major” (e.g., labs, studios, etc.) at 73%.

U.S News and World Report’s rankings of colleges and universities, has transformed the way students select schools. Traditional ROI studies do not account for a library’s impact on the reputation of its university or college as a whole, but a study by Weiner in 2009 makes a case for the library’s contribution to the reputation of the university it serves. The study finds that library expenditures are a significant predictor of institutional reputation.

Weiner argues that this finding means that, in fact,

“the disintermediation caused by the rapid increase in online access to information does not seem to have displaced the library. These results suggest that libraries in the doctoral institutions included in the study may have adjusted and found solutions to unprecedented external pressures.”

Weiner sees the libraries’ position as one of “boundary spanning,” meaning that it brings together researchers and students from across the campus in ways that no other organization on the campus can. Studies such as this one are vital for libraries, as they give evidence that libraries contribute to their parent organizations in unexpected ways. By contributing to an institution’s overall reputation, libraries also impact real economic outcomes from that reputation: such as attracting better students, retaining top-notch faculty, and attracting donors. Being able to articulate this kind of impact may help university administrators listen a little more closely.

It is vital that libraries demonstrate both the monetary value and as well as the social value of their services. ROI is one part of a suite of tools librarians can use to demonstrate performance and value. Relying on ROI alone to communicate and demonstrate the value of libraries may very well undermine the core purposes libraries serve and the indirect benefits they bring. Libraries undertake many tasks that are invisible to the casual user. They handle licensing of journals, negotiating with vendors and publishers for access to content, selecting resources. Libraries also contribute to the prestige of the institutions they serve by helping to attract top researchers, faculty, and students. Academic libraries and public libraries, especially, serve as unique third places within their communities, where people who would otherwise not interact come to work and learn in the same space. It’s up to us to convince our users and our sources of funding that we’re worth it. ROI studies aside, one of the best things we can do to show our worth is to provide great services that help our users work more effectively.

We hope this post will generate some lively discussion about the role of ROI in libraries, and also generate ideas about what libraries can measure to demonstrate their value. What has your library done to measure its value?

Thanks especially to Brett Bonfield, Greg Raschke and Katie Wheeler for their comments and for reviewing and editing various drafts of this article.

Conferences, Seminars, Upcoming Events on ROI and Libraries

• Computers in Libraries – Track E (Planning and Managing): What’s the Return on Investment for Your Library? April 1, 2009
• ALA Annual Conference Surviving in a Tough Economy – An Advocacy Institute Workshop July 10, 2009

Further Reading

• Abram, Stephen. 2007. The Value of our Libraries: Impact, recognition, and influencing funders: http://www.sirsidynix.com/Resources/Pdfs/Company/Abram/ArkansasLA_Value.pdf
• ALA. 2009. Articles and Studies Related to Library Value (Return on Investment): http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/ors/reports/roi.cfm
• Cain, David and Gary L. Reynolds. 2006. The Impact of Facilities on Recruitment and Retention of Students. Facilities Manager, March/April: http://www.appa.org/files/FMArticles/fm030406_f7_impact.pdf
• Eikenberry, A.M. and J.D. Kluver. The Marketization of the Nonprofit Sector: civil society at risk? Public Administration Review, vol. 64 (2): 132-140.
• Elliott, Donald S., Glen E. Holt, Sterling W. Hayden, Leslie Edmonds Holt. 2007. Measuring Your Library’s Value: How to Do a Cost-Benefit Analysis for Your Public Library. ALA Editions (978-0-8389-0923-2)
• Hendriks, Boyd and Ian Wooler, 2006. Establishing the return on investment for information and knowledge services: A practical approach to show added value for information and knowledge centres, corporate libraries and documentation centres. Business Information Review, v. 23 (1): 13-25.
• Holt, Glen E., Donald S. Elliott, Leslie E. Holt, Anne Watts. 2001. Public Library Benefits Valuation Study (St. Louis Public Library): http://www.slpl.lib.mo.us/libsrc/valuationc.htm
• Imholz, S. and Arns, J.W. 2007. Worth Their Weight: An Assessment of the Evolving Field of Library Valuation. Americans for Libraries Council: http://www.bibliotheksportal.de/fileadmin/0themen/Management/dokumente/WorthTheirWeight.pdf
• Lance, Keith Curry and Ray Lyons. 2008. The New LJ Index: Why these measures matter. Library Journal, http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6566452.html
• Luther, Judy. 2008. University Investment in the Library: What’s the Return? A Case Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/lcn/0601/lcn060103.html
• O’Hanlon, Nancy. 2007. Information Literacy in the University Curriculum: Challenges for Outcomes Assessment. portal: Libraries and the Academy 7, no. 2: 169-89.
• Pritchard, Sarah M. 1996. Determining Quality in Academic Libraries. Library Trends, vol. 44 (3): 572-594.
• SLA. 2009. Additional Value Resources: http://www.sla.org/content/learn/members/ipvalue/additionalValue.cfm
• Strouse, Roger. 2003. Demonstrating Value and Return on Investment: The Ongoing Imperative. Information Outlook, v. 7 (3): 15-19. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FWE/is_3_7/ai_99011610
• Strouse, Roger. 2007. ROI for libraries remains high: http://www.outsellinc.com/store/insights/3538
• Weiner, Sharon Gray. 2005. Library Quality and Impact: Is there a Relationship between New Measures and Traditional Measures? Journal of Academic Librarianship, 31(5):432-7.
• Weiner, Sharon. 2009. The Contribution of the Library to the Reputation of a University. Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 35 (1): 3-13.
• Yackle, Anna. 2007. What is Your Library’s ROI? (NSLS): http://www.nsls.info/articles/detail.aspx?articleID=137

by Flickr user foreversouls

In researching this piece I found that much has been written about librarian/faculty relationships. I found articles on working with faculty to build assignments and even whole courses from the ground up. I found articles on the importance of collaboration and establishing positive relationships. I will not be reiterating those well made arguments.

Instead, I will be asking (and answering): what do you do after that student walks in, assignment in hand that you know just isn’t fair to them? I’m writing not as a veteran, but as a new recruit, someone who, until a few months ago, never even considered the possibility of talking to faculty about their assignments. I had heard of librarians providing assistance in designing library related assignments, but never offering unsolicited feedback.

I remember both the assignment that opened my eyes to this possibility and the one that was my personal tipping point. The eye opening experience occurred at my moonlighting gig at a four year institution. We kept getting students who had the same (admirable) weekly assignment: find and read a newspaper article covering the event they were studying that week. The article (or possibly other primary source document) had to have been written during the time of the event and from the perspective of the people involved. We had been doing fine helping them find historical and foreign papers as needed, until they came to the Ottoman Empire. And it didn’t stop there. The class was a survey of world history. They continued to have topics that simply might not have ever been documented by the people involved, unlikely in newspaper article form, certainly not in English, and may not have ever been translated into English if it did manage to get written down and preserved. African events were also particularly difficult. One of the other reference librarians called the teacher to explain that for many of these events it was going to be exceedingly difficult if not impossible for students to find the required articles. In the end, the faculty member agreed to allow the students to use international English language papers if necessary.

This was a revelation to me. The moxie! The nerve! The courage! Who was she to tell a faculty member there was a problem with her assignment? Course assignments are the purview of the instructor. How did she have the self-assurance to consider it her place? How did she have the skill to affect change and the finesse to do so without offending? And yet when the librarians told me the assignment had been modified they said it as though this were an everyday occurrence, that they discuss assignments with faculty all the time and the faculty are usually responsive. This wasn’t covered in library school and it isn’t common practice at my day job, so I was struck in particular that the librarians did not think this was anything special. To me it seemed incredibly liberating to take action rather than be silently frustrated. The seed was planted.

My personal tipping point happened when a student came in to me at my community college job and needed to have at least one print article. I started with my usual, “the library databases have the same articles and still totally count,” but she interrupted me. No, actually, her teacher had specifically said that those do not count. She had to physically touch the original source. At my college we have almost completely transitioned to online versions for our articles. Luckily it turned out she just needed one print source, it didn’t have to be a journal article, so I was able to help her find a suitable encyclopedia article.

I had encountered the “must have a print source” requirement before, but this was the first time I had a student tell me that the teacher had explicitly said the library databases did not count. My first thought was to assume the requirement was an attempt to force the students into the library. Personally, I was more impressed that the student had already found a number of scholarly articles in our databases. But then I wondered whether this was another case of lumping everything “online” into one category of “to be avoided” and perhaps not realizing that it is the same article regardless of format.

I sent out requests to my librarian friends and asked “How do you talk to teachers about their assignments?” Read on to find out. I’ve amalgamated their responses and organized them around some of the typical problems I’ve encountered to provide you with readily adaptable scripts which you are welcome to use. (Note: You will see some repeated sentiments as many of the arguments can and do overlap.)

The Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger hunt assignments are frustrating for everyone. Looking up trivia is not the same as conducting research and without a meaningful application of the process of using the library anything they learn through the scavenger hunt is less likely to stick.

“Resentment toward rather than appreciation of library research is the likely result of these assignments. Library assignments are more meaningful if students use the information they find for an authentic task related to the topics covered in the course.”¹

Outdated scavenger hunt assignments are even worse. Here’s one way to approach a faculty member with an outdated scavenger hunt assignment:

We had some of your students in the library today working on your scavenger hunt assignment that familiarizes them with library resources. We are excited that you are giving out an assignment like that, but some of the activities in the assignment are a little dated, since the scavenger hunt seems to be from 2004. Some of the paper handouts referred to in the assignment are now online. One of my librarians, [name], said she’d be very happy to get with you to help you update the assignment so it would be a bit more useful for your students. You might also want to look at the Info Game on the library web page. It’s something you could use as well. Library Services tries to get away from the scavenger hunt concept and I think [name] could help you come up with some excellent alternatives. She’s one of our most imaginative young librarians! You can reach [name] at [email] and [phone number]. We are very happy that you are using the library with your students!

In the interest of full disclosure, that email did not get us a reply. Being more comfortable with email myself, it tends to be my default communication method, but most likely a phone call or office visit is the better approach. However, I think the script is still worth sharing. The general tone and sentiment shows appreciation that the faculty member uses the library and lets her know that some of the questions are no longer applicable. It also offers assistance in the updating process. And as one of my respondents told me, “It doesn’t always work.”

“No Online Sources”

This is a nuanced declaration and a number of the headings below touch on some of the different aspects. Setting aside online library resources for a moment: a flat ban on anything found online not only eliminates a large number of incredibly useful sources (census data, CDC info, LOC historical documents, etc.), but it also discourages using and developing critical thinking skills.

In college, we try to focus students on *critically thinking* about authority and appropriateness. We’ve found that limiting students to print resources hurts their ability to find the resources they need, and they are not able to support their research project as well as they could if they were able to use the best sources regardless of format.

Of course there is always the question of what exactly the faculty meant by “no online sources.”

“The Internet” vs. Web Based Academic Resources

Often the student, the faculty, or both don’t differentiate between the free web and resources that the library has purchased, but are available electronically. The argument above about the value of allowing use of the free web notwithstanding, it may be necessary to clarify the instructor’s definition of what constitutes an “online source” and to ask that faculty member to assure his or her students that the library’s electronic resources are allowed.

I was helping one of your students recently who needed a print resource for an assignment and I thought there might have been a misunderstanding over the definition of what constitutes an “online source.” My understanding of the definition you’re using is that you exclude sources found in library subscription databases, not simply those found on web sites through Google or another search engine.

I’d like to assure you that the online articles and ebooks found through library databases are content that the library has purchased and are indeed the exact same content found in the print versions. As you may know, libraries are increasingly receiving journal subscriptions only electronically and discontinuing expensive print subscriptions. Among the many reasons for the current trend towards receiving these articles digitally is that it provides a better value for our students – one purchase makes all of the content available at all of our campuses and extension sites, rather than having to purchase separate print subscriptions for each of them. We are also able to provide access to a vast number of resources that we wouldn’t have physical space to store.

Because of this, students will often find the full text of the article in the database but we will not have a current print subscription of the same periodical title. In addition, as students are learning to evaluate information and sources, they may be confused as to why a scholarly source in a subscription database does not meet the assignment requirements. Finally, there is no easy way to lead students to print-only articles because our databases serve as indexes and many of them contain or link to full-text online.

With all of this in mind, I wondered if you would be willing to expand your definition of an acceptable source to include sources found in library subscription databases.

“I want to be sure they’re using the library” or “I just want them to have the experience”

As more and more resources go online and as libraries push to create virtual branches and online portals, physically coming in to the library becomes less and less necessary to complete a research paper. While my knee jerk reaction is frustration towards holding on to nostalgic perceptions of library as place, in reality, these are exactly the faculty that I should most appreciate. They value libraries and want to pass that on to their students. They’re on our side! Unfortunately, requiring a print source doesn’t necessarily achieve the intended goal. Instead, it often just means grabbing a source, any source, as long as it’s print, after the paper has already been mostly written.

We hear from many professors who are thankfully concerned that their students learn how to use a college library. If you want to be sure that your students use library resources, we have had a lot of success with students creating annotated bibliographies explaining why they chose each source, or alternately writing down the steps they took to find an article online through the library website and what qualities make the article appropriate for their paper for at least 1 of their sources. That way students are forced to think about process and quality of resources.

or

I am guessing that one reason for requiring print is to encourage students to visit the library in person. I completely understand that you want your students to learn how to use the library and critically think about authority and appropriateness. We do too! However, in many cases we’ve found that requiring a print resource can actually be counterproductive in this regard. Students wind up not being forced to use the critical thinking skills we’re requiring of them. They may use something that doesn’t work very well just to fill the requirement and they aren’t forced to consider authority, appropriateness of content, etc. Also, because most libraries are moving or have already moved to all online journals we’re concerned our students know what to expect now and in the future. We want them to leave here knowing how to use a library, including the subscription databases, and to have a clear understanding of the difference between articles found online through the library and those out on the open web.

or

It’s so important that students learn how to find authoritative journal articles. We want our students to be prepared for (grad school/work/4-year) and most (four year universities/schools with grad programs/corporations) have moved to all online journals. They may even be getting rid of their print archives and replacing them with online archives! We’re concerned our students know what to expect now and in the future. We want them to leave here knowing how to use a library.

This is also the place to offer an in library instruction session or a specialized assignment to accomplish the goal of getting the students in to the library.

We could also create a brief assignment which would require students to visit the library to find out about the resources and services available.

Sometimes the information just doesn’t exist.

I’ve already mentioned the newspaper articles from the time of an event, from the country where the event took place, when it took place in the distant past and in a country with a different language. Another example would be peer reviewed journal articles on an extremely recent event.

In this situation you can ask the teacher whether they have specific resources in mind. It is always possible that they know of a source that you don’t. Of course it is also possible that the library no longer has access to something the faculty member was accustomed to using in the past, or that a new faculty member simply isn’t familiar with your library’s particular collection yet and is making assumptions based on his or her former institution. This opens the door to discussing collection development and acquiring new resources to help support the curriculum. If neither of those are the case you can fall back on explaining types of information sources and why that information just isn’t readily available. One of the first things I ask students to do when beginning their research is to ask themselves who would have collected the information they’re looking for and how would they have then made it available. This is particularly helpful when trying to find statistics. But it is also helpful here in explaining why we’re not necessarily going to be able to find a newspaper article, in English, from the 1700’s in Turkey talking about a specific war from a specific side.

In the case of the peer reviewed journal article we can explain the peer review process, that it takes time, and that for this topic, perhaps newspaper articles from large papers or government publications could be considered authoritative. I want to leave you with a perspective that particularly struck me:

“The berating of faculty for not being intuitively information literate, or for not taking the time to become information literate is a puzzling attitude – particularly given librarians’ professed mandate to guide users and provide instruction in the use of information resources. … The images of troublesome, arrogant faculty, who have little understanding of librarians’ roles, point to a problem at the core of the relationship issue; that until librarians embrace faculty as clients themselves, deserving of the same level of respect and support afforded undergraduate and graduate students, IL librarians may continue to fight an uphill battle to bring faculty members onside. Why do librarians, for example, assume that faculty should necessarily understand what they have not been taught, or necessarily understand how to use information systems that are not user-friendly? Do librarians ask this of other users?”²

The further reading section contains a number of links to pages that various libraries have created to provide tips for instructors who want to create library related assignments. Some of the wording could be a tad friendlier in places, but the content is good. There are also links to a best practices discussion and a model program.

I hope that librarians who have been frustrated by what they felt was an unfair assignment feel both empowered to contact faculty and prepared with some tools to use. I hope that librarians who have been there and done that will share their stories of what to do and what to avoid in the comments.

Further reading:

• Share Your Teaching Tool Kit: Best Practices in Library Instruction Topic: Teaching to a Bad Assignment (Notes from ACRL IS Discussion)
• Mosley, Pixey Anne. “Creating a library assignment workshop for university faculty.” Journal of Academic Librarianship 24.1 (Jan. 1998): 33-41.
• Effective assignments using library and internet sources (From the University of California Berkeley)
• Creating Effective Research Assignments (From the University of Maryland)
• Designing Effective Library Assignments (From the University of North Carolina Wilmington)
• Integrating Library and Information Literacy into your Assignment (From St. Cloud State University)

Thanks to Liane Luckman and Meghan Sitar for sharing their strategies and to Andrew Shuping and Emily Ford for reviewing and editing.

1. From the University of California at Berkeley’s Effective Assignments Using Library and Internet Resources
2. From Julien, Heidi and Lisa M. Given. “Faculty-Librarian Relationships in the Information Literacy Context: A Content Analysis of Librarians’ Expressed Attitudes and Experiences.” <u>The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science</u> 27.3 (2002/2003): 75-87.

To resolve this In the Library with the Lead Pipe will be moving to a biweekly format starting next week. You can expect our posts to come less often, but with the same high-quality content and fresh, boundary-pushing angles that you’ve come to enjoy.

Sound good? Please use the comments to share your thoughts on our new schedule.

And while I’ve got your attention: In the Library with the Lead Pipe is opening our doors to guest post proposals from our readers. See the submissions guidelines page for more details.

Image by the author.

While personal information is often thought of as only the documents, emails, and other pieces of information that people receive or retain for some potential, immediate, or future need, William Jones, in his Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management (Morgan Kaufmann, 2008), expands the field to include information about “me” or owned by “me.” As our online identities, information about us online, expand, how can we manage that information to put our best face (identity) forward?

My online life has proliferated greatly over the past years. What once was an email account that I accessed through a text-based interface and was primarily a way to communicate with a few friends I knew “in real life” has become multiple blogs, websites, social networks, comments, micro-blogs, status updates, photos, drawings, links, presentations, and more. Each one is a new profile and another place people might find my content (or at least something about me).

Perhaps I’m lucky in that I have an unusual name. I can Google myself and go through 100 results without finding a hit that isn’t me (also an indication of how active my online life is, I guess). Take a look at the first page of results on my name in quotes. On examination the results reveal a few points of interest. Seven out of ten feature my name in the page’s title. Six of the ten have my name in the URL. The top result is my home page, which has my name in neither title nor url, but is in the header of the page and the metadata and probably a lot of links go there referencing my name. The remaining result is my profile on my library’s LibGuides, which simply features my name 10 times in a very small amount of text.

When you are trying to find out about someone online, a lot is based on names in titles and urls and links from one site to another. That is no problem if you have a rare name (at least, rare online) and your name ends up in titles of pages or urls. But many services don’t put names in page titles; maybe they just put your username, which is often not your name or even close to your name. Maybe your name only appears once on a page, but it’s a single important occurrence (table of contents of a book, praise in a newspaper article or blog post). How will people find you (if you want to be found)? How will people find what you want them to find (the good stuff)?

Even more problematic is the case of someone with a name that is shared by others who also have some kind of online life. Confusion can easily occur to the casual searcher. I have a friend who has not only someone with the same name as her but who is also in the same profession. This lack of difference in basic identifiers (same name, same occupation) can increase the chances of confusion and a mingling of multiple identities. In the case of my ITLWTLP colleague Emily Ford, a Google search on her name does bring up her author page at this site (result nine). But it also brings up Emily Ford the author of a book from the “Erotic Print Society”, Emily Ford the marketing manager, Emily Ford who posts about restaurants in the San Francisco area, Emily Ford the rowing coach at Oregon State, as well as Emily’s in Alaska, Massachusetts, and North Carolina. Some of these might be the same Emily–does author Emily live in San Franscisco or coach rowing, did Emily from North Carolina move to Massachusetts–, but they might also all be different.

In a world full of Emily’s, how does our Emily associate herself with her content and not someone else’s? If she is looking for a job and someone Googles her name, the Googler should easily realize that these are not all the same Emily, but he or she may make wrong assumptions about certain content. He may think ITLWTLP Emily also writes erotic fiction–our Emily may not want people thinking that. He may miss positive content that Emily would want others to see. There are no easy answers to these problems, but a number of sites and tools have been made to help aggregate online identity and make connections between the sites you want people to see.

ClaimID, created by two doctoral students at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science, was designed as an online identity manager. You create an account to manage your ClaimID page (you can take a look at mine) which serves as a kind of home page. For the many people without a homepage, who use Facebook or Twitter or Blogger as their primary online home, the ClaimID page offers a single page to aggregate your personal information. This page is used as a repository for your links: links about you, links by you, as well as links that people might think are about you (so you can say “not mine!”). By putting your name in the URL, the title, and the metadata, ClaimID hopes to make your page rise in search results. By linking back to your ClaimID page from your various online profiles, you can help raise that profile (most search results use inbound links to increase relevancy). With ClaimID you can stake a claim to your online identity, tweaking it as you see fit by adding or not adding content.

ClaimID makes use of a few emerging (already emerged?) tools for making social/identity connections online. Of relevance to gathering personal information about yourself is “rel=me”. This is a subset of the XFN (XHTML Friends Network) microformat. A microformat, as succinctly described by Microformats.org, is “designed for humans first and machines second, …a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” Basically, it is a way to embed data that is both human and machine readable. XFN is used to embed social relationships into links. If I have a link on my blog to another blog, I can use XFN to note that the owner of that other blog is a “friend” or a “colleague” or even that I have “met” them. These relationships are marked using the “rel” (short for relationship) attribute of link tags in HTML. If a normal link to my friend’s blog looks like this:

<a href="http://someblog.com">A Blog I Read</a>

A link to my friend’s blog, where I am using XFN, may look like this:

<a rel="friend" href="http://someblog.com">Blog I Read</a>

This would allow XFN aware applications to know that I consider the owner of the “Blog I Read” to be a friend.

For online identity, the value of “me” can be used for the “rel” link attribute to represent a link to another page about/by the same person. The use of “rel=me” is already in place at a number of web applications and sites. Take a look at the html of any Flickr profile page where the user has filled in the “homepage” field, and you will find a “rel=me” link. Similarly, the “Web” field of a Twitter user’s profile is also linked with “rel=me”. These links make an assertion of identity between two sites. Ideally, a user would be able to create reciprocal “rel=me” links to loosely verify the relationship. In other words, if my Twitter page has a “rel=me” link to my home page, my home page would also have a “rel=me” link to my Twitter page. This reciprocal linking shows that I have control over both sites, thus verifying their connection as “me.” Verifying who “me” is, is another problem all together. If someone else made a Twitter account and linked as “rel=me” to my home page, there would be an ambiguous relationship, because I, in control of the home page, would not link back to someone else’s Twitter account with “rel=me.” These links are not about establishing who someone is, rather they are about relationships: saying that this account and that account are the same entity.

These links are what would be considered “semantic links”. The idea of semantic links is that the link itself helps explain the relationship between the two ends of the link (in this case, people relationships, but it could also be other types of relationships). Of particular importance is the ability of machines (other computers) to “read” these links and understand the relationship.

Google’s Social Graph API is one application designed to read these semantic links using the “rel” attribute and XFN. The Social Graph is not yet widely used, but it points to the potential for these types of tools. For the time being, it’s interesting to use the Social Graph to see how one’s own accounts and sites are connected. One can peruse a few example applications of the Social Graph including the Site Connectivity demo.¹

You can type one or many websites into the Site Connectivity box and it will track down “rel=me” links, both one way and reciprocal. See the results for my homepage here. The results show how my various sites/accounts connect to each other through “rel=me” links. The first section, “Info on Your Connected Sites” shows sites connected by “rel=me”" links. The sites in the left column are those linked from my homepage. The right column indicates the strength of the connection. Sites at the top of the table with green numbers are reciprocally linked with “rel=me”. I’ll admit it’s not all completely clear to me. The “Possible Connections” sections show sites that link to one or more of my other sites. I’m not sure why my home page appears down here. I do know that a few of my ITLWTLP colleague’s Twitter accounts appear in this section because they have this site in the “Web” field of their accounts. Because I am also pointing at the same page, the Social Graph thinks we might be the same entity.

You’ll note that I’ve actually got a number of reciprocally connected sites and profiles. This is primarily because my home page links out to a number of my profiles with a “rel=me” link. When those sites (Twitter, Flickr, etc.) are also using “rel=me” a reciprocal relationship is created.

Even if you don’t have your own home page (or a ClaimID page) linking out to all these services, you can create a networked identity by linking your profiles to each other. Tools able to identify and follow these semantic links can follow chains of links to create an aggregate. If you put someone’s Twitter URL into the Site Connectivity demo at Google, you can often immediately find that user’s profile in various blog platforms, Flickr, Friendfeed, Technorati, and other sites. Try it for yourself. If we put Aaron Schmidt’s Walking Paper website URL into the search we end up with a list of potential connections to FriendFeed, Flickr, Yelp, Technorati, and LastFM².

Do these connections, publicly discoverable as they are, offer a threat to privacy? I would say, “no.” The type of information tracked by the Social Graph API, all of these links, are based on information published by the people in the links. I choose what I put into my Twitter account web field. I choose what goes into my Flickr profile and all my other accounts. If I don’t want these pieces of information to be discovered, I shouldn’t make them public or at least not link them together.

By choosing which connections you create and how you label them, you can create multiple online identities. If I had wanted to, in the past, keep my librarian self separate from my comics blogging/drawing self, I could have made a concerted effort to not link those profiles, to use separate home pages, separate usernames, separate commenting identities. It might not have been a perfect separation, but it would have helped a lot in separating the two identities. In my case, those both becoming ever more public identities, it does not behoove me to do this. I want the connections to be made.

One should be aware that any information that gets out there publicly could be put to use by sites and users outside the original context. This gets done already; think about the white pages that spread across the internet and the sites that aggregate them. In the past I’ve found sites that list my last four or five phone numbers and addresses all at once. This is being done with our social networking information. Going through the Google results on my own name (above), I found results at the site Delver. There were two pages for “Derik Badman.” One seems to be drawing on my Flickr information (and links to my now deleted MySpace account), showing my profile, connections, and thumbnails from that site. The second seems to be drawing a limited amount of information from Facebook, including a small subset of my friends (perhaps those that had public profiles?). Why are these two profiles separate? As far as I can tell, this is because my public Facebook page had no links to any of my other accounts, thus keeping the site from making the connection between the two.

So what does all this matter to librarians, that is, beyond a personal interest in their own online identities? Information literacy, educating our patrons, is more than just about finding, using, and evaluating information made by others; it is also about our own information and our own personal information space. And personal information is more than just the stuff we keep on our computers. Personal information is also the information about us that others might find, use, and evaluate. If we are aware of these issues, we can advise patrons to manage their online identities. Tools that automatically create these connections will only increase over time. People should be aware of their online identities as they look for jobs (don’t you Google candidates?), while those with a public personality, or who want to have a public personality need to be even more careful of the identity they put forward. For self-promotional reasons, being able to manage and connect all one’s various profiles, content, and networks can aid in creating exposure for creative endeavors. Younger users can benefit greatly from being aware of these issues before their online identities proliferate, allowing a great control of these identities from the start. Some of us are stuck with what’s out there, and all we can do is manage the results.

Thanks to: Emily Ford for comments and the use of her name, Ellie Collier and Hilary Davis for comments, and Lianne Hartman for editing, comments, and the title. (Edit: And thanks to Lianne for noticing my typo in the title, which you can still see in the url.)

1. The use of other “rel” values can be used by this system to works towards a “distributed social network.” This article by Ben Ward is a good introduction to the topic.
2. I should note that none of this is private information. It’s all based on publicly viewable links.