virtually a librarian

Innovation has been a big theme in the library literature and the biblioblogosphere since I first entered the profession, and with the development of the discourse around Library 2.0, the theme has picked up momentum. Indeed, the need for innovation, and having the space in which to innovate, are the things that get me excited about my work.

But innovation is also tough. It’s gotta be daunting to be constantly operating out on the leading edge (but no doubt exciting too), and not just because the process of being creative and carrying out change is a big task. Part of the challenge is the sheer abundance of opportunities we have to innovate: lots of things could be done better, reimagined, scrapped, reinvented, started from scratch. Just how do we get it all done? Which bit do we tackle first? And how do we overcome the obstacles?

In my experience, it’s relatively easy to come up with a vision or an idea for what we want to achieve. The tough part is actually defining the actions we need to take to achieve the innovation, and then executing those actions. How do we move from idea to action to realisation? How do we get other people fired up about having the opportunity to innovate? How do we create and inhabit a culture of innovation? These are issues I’ve been pondering at length in recent weeks.

So it was with great interest that I read a post on innovation from Jack Martin Leith’s blog, which I was alerted to via Stephen’s Lighthouse. This post outlines a number of the author’s propositions related to innovation. As self-defined propositions, rather than truisms, I guess these statements are open for discussion and debate. Which is good, because debate brings refinement… In fact, if you read the full post, you can see the refinement/debate process at work.

On a first reading, I wasn’t sure that I agreed with all of these propositions - some of them felt a little idealistic and a little unattainable. The more I read them, though, the more I can see the gold. Sure, it’s probably not realistic to expect that we can model each and every one of these propositions in our professional lives. But there is a whole lot in this post that warrants some careful thought, and a whole lot that I’ll be looking to apply in my own professional practice.

Some things I took away from this blog post:

• The desired present: Think of the now, not the future. We can execute change now, so we should stop imagining innovation as a future achievement and start living it and working towards it in the now. This proposition has a lot to offer. What can we do right now to affect much needed change?
• Articulate the problem in a way that allows it to be solved. Leith say if “we want to be effective problem solvers, we must develop the ability to define the problem in such a way that it is solvable, and design a minimalist intervention that creates a rapid and irreversible shift from the current state of affairs to the desired state.” How often do we feel that we are banging our heads against brick walls? I wonder how much of this has to do with the way we articulate and approach the problem? This idea was a bit of a revelation for me. Have I been guilty of setting myself up for failure by articulating problems in a way that makes them seem entirely unsolvable? Perhaps it’s time to go back to the drawing board and redefine some of the problems I’m working on.
• Take a minimalist approach: assess which small actions will have the biggest effect on the achievement of the desired present, and take those actions. For example, there seems to be general consensus in the biblioblogosphere that OPACs leave a lot to be desired. Scrapping them totally is not on the cards, at least in the short term, but what small action could we take to improve the situation? (I’m thinking LibraryThing for Library’s widgets - a small action that could dramatically improve our users’ experience of the OPAC).
• A leader who wants to see innovation should model creative behaviours.
• Conversation is key: don’t send one way messages, but rather provide opportunities for people to engage in conversations. I feed off conversation; I think out loud; I generate ideas by hearing about other peoples’ and by bouncing thoughts backwards and forwards. So this proposition rings very true for me. For more thought: how do we create an environment that supports conversation? How do we get conversations to happen across the organisation? How do we accommodate different peoples’ preferred communication styles in order to involve them in the conversation?
• There is no neat and tidy, one size fits all methodology for innovation. Innovation cannot be constrained within the confines of a business process, but rather should be allowed to organically grow.
• Play. Test. Try out something that isn’t quite ready. Then use pilot results and feedback to modify, start again from scratch, reimagine.
• Take responsibility for your ideas; nurture them, champion them, preserve their essence throughout the refinement process. Leith calls this being their godparents.
• Leith suggests that if you take the needs of all stakeholders into account when designing the actions you will take to realise innovation, then resistance to change should be non-existent. He suggests that if you encounter resistance, you should head back to the drawing board and design an action that will be ‘irresistible’ to all stakeholders. While I’m not sure that it’s possible to make every action irresistible to every stakeholder, I think there is a lesson here. If we encounter a lot of resistance, then we should go back and rethink, taking into account the needs of all our stakeholders, because the solutions we come up with will only improve as a result of this process. But I don’t think it’s entirely realistic to suggest that it’s possible to redesign and redesign and redesign to the point where everyone is happy. Surely there will be times where you can’t please everyone?
• Collaborate. Collaborate. Collaborate.
• “Join in”, not “buy in”: “Buy in” implies a sense of predetermined-ness; the idea that it’s going to happen with or without the support of stakeholders; an attitude of “we’ve made this decision, now how do we get them to agree?”. What we really need is people to get involved in the innovation process right from the start. “Join in” is about getting people involved from the very beginning; it’s about developing and executing the idea together. It’s intrinsically bound up in the concept of collaboration.
• Leith also addresses the idea that is something of a soapbox for me: abandonment is not a dirty word. We cannot continue to add new initiatives to our line-up without reassessing what we already do and abandoning those things that need to be abandoned. Abandonment is healthy and necessary.
• Intuition has a role to play in decision making. This is a tough one for us to grapple with as a profession. We are a profession that adheres to rules, researches problems, works towards logical conclusions. This is a tough one for me personally to grapple with, because I am a strong supporter of evidence based practice. But I have to agree with Leith: intuition does have a role to play in the innovation process. It might be that that role extends no further than to the formation of the initial idea from which an innovation will evolve, but instinct is relevant. My personal feeling is that it should be backed up wherever possible with hard data, but sometimes, you do need to go out on a limb.

This is a thoughtful post that certainly provides stimulus for thinking about innovation. I think it’s really useful to spend time thinking about the processes that occupy so much of our time.

Highly recommended reading.

David Lee King posts about his library’s techie toybox - a set of tech gadgets bought specifically for library staff to play with.

What an awesome concept! I am coveting this box of tricks.

Not only is it unbelievably cool that these resources are there for the staff, but just look at David’s open-minded approach to play: check out his tips for how staff might want to use them. His suggestion for what to do with the camcorders?

Dump videos into the library’s YouTube account. Do something original… Start a weekly “what’s going on at the library” video magazine…

A casual suggestion to start a video magazine. I love it. Way to set your library up as a breeding ground for innovation.

As I had hoped, the SLQ Unconference got me thinking a bit more about the shape of online services at MPOW. Coming away from the unconference, I made notes to myself to pursue a few ideas:

• LibX: I’ve been trying to think of ways to take our services to the customers. Of course, I’ve considered all the obvious possibilities (social networking sites, blogging, e-newsletters and so on), but, as an avid toolbar user, the idea behind LibX really appeals to me.
• del.icio.us: I love what QUT Creative Industries faculty are doing with del.icio.us tag clouds in their subject guides. I’ve been pondering this idea for a while (triggered by some work I did at the NLA on a developing core set of web links for AskNow operators using del.icio.us - the AskNow crew have done some great work populating their del.icio.us account - add them to your network!). At MPOW, we’re currently reworking our online resources interface and are about to start taking a more proactive approach to selecting free web resources for inclusion in our online resources page. I’ve been pondering del.icio.us as a means of compiling links and generating tag clouds for inclusion in the interface. Now I’ve seen QUT’s implementation, I’ve got some firmer ideas on how this might be done (eg I think we’ll need a separate account for each subject area, because I’m not sure that it’s possible to generate a tag cloud for bundles of tags).
• In-service events for ground-up implementation of L2: At the concurrent session on getting staff on board, there was a bit of discussion about the importance of direction coming from front line staff rather than administration staff. I’ve never seen my role at MPOW as an administrative one. I see it as a service-driven, user-centred role, but it suddenly occurred to me in this session that maybe other people might view it differently. I’ve tried to take a proactive approach to getting staff input and buy-in to what we’re trying to do with online services. I really, really want our online service portfolio to be driven by the needs of customers as identified by the staff they interact with on a daily basis. But am I using the right channels to engage staff? It was suggested that in-service events might be the way to go. I’d like to spend some time thinking about this idea.

To my mind, the one constant theme throughout the SLQ unconference (besides technology) was change. It’s undeniable that if we’re going to get 2.0 (in the ethos-sense, not the technology sense) libraries need to change in a lot of ways, and most of them are to do with our culture. Some things that were identified as necessary changes during the course of the day really resonated with me:

• We need to embrace the concept of perpetual beta. People, internet users, our customers, do not expect perfection, but we persist with this culture of perfect. It’s no good waiting until we’ve perfected something to put it out in the public sphere - we need to let our services evolve. If Google, a company with so much invested in meeting users’ needs, can deliver services that are perpetually in beta, why can’t we? (And no, this doesn’t go against the idea of putting the need before the technology. I’m just advocating that once we’ve chosen the right technology, we shouldn’t get hung up on achieving perfection.)
• We must start taking risks. Carefully assessed risks, for sure. But take them we must. I’m a big believer in risk management strategies, but we need to focus on the management, and not so much on the risk itself. We can’t let the presence of risks stop us from innovating, from serving our customers as best we can. We just need to work out how we can minimise the effect of the risks that inevitably come with trying something new. And, moreover, we need to weigh the risks, their likelihood, and their manageability against the risks associated with not taking the ‘risky’ action. Because to fail to be a responsive, innovative organisation is a huge risk in itself.
• Embrace radical trust. And accept that trust is really not that radical. People are smarter than we give them credit for. We need to get over ourselves a bit and just give our customers (and our staff) the chance to surprise us.
• Accept that abandonment is a healthy practice. If we’re going to add new services, we must let go of some of the old ones. Certainly, we’re not going to (and indeed we shouldn’t) abandon everything we currently do: as Kathryn Greenhill says, we can keep the baby when we throw out the bath water - Web 2.0 is an adjunct to the services we already have, not a replacement for them. But we are very good at taking on more and more and more, and we must stop doing this before we stretch ourselves so thin that we’re no good to anyone. We should assess the services we currently provide and see where there’s room to rationalise. Moreover, it’s not just the ‘old stuff’ we should be abandoning: if we try a new “L2″ service and it doesn’t work, there is nothing wrong with abandoning it. In fact, if we give something new a good try and it doesn’t work, we’d be crazy not to abandon it. Abandonment is not admitting defeat. Rather, it’s tantamount to admitting just how astute we can be.
• We must see online services as core business. The things we do online, the services and collections we deliver online, are not just pretty little adjuncts to the ‘real’ work we do in library branches.Our strategic directions and goals, and indeed management support, should reiterate this. There is a very real, growing group of users who want to access our libraries from the comfort of their lounge rooms (or their offices). These users are just as legitimate as our in-person users, and our online services are just as much a core part of what we do as those services we deliver in-branch. The library website is a branch of the library. Every member of staff needs to understand that.
• Scatter the breadcrumbs. We’ve traditionally been focussed on the library website and OPAC as a single point of truth. This model may not be the right model for these times. We should scatter the breadcrumbs in places where our users hang out online. As one attendee said : “the perfect, all-in-one swiss army knife may not be a reasonable expectation”. We just may not be able to do everything we want to do or need to do within the constraints of the library website and/or OPAC. And maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. I personally have been hung up on trying to figure out how to bring our sometimes dis-integrated services together. Maybe it’s not that big a deal.

Sometimes, I come away from library-related events mulling, in a not-quite-positive way, over some of the thoughts that were articulated. I guess these can be described as my “uh-oh” moments: they’re instances when someone (or even many someones) comes out with something that perplexes me. They can also be instances of silence when I don’t think there should have been silence; that is, when something important goes unsaid. I had two of those moments at the SLQ Unconference, one of the unsaid variety, and one of the said.

Need before the tool
First of all, and perhaps most importantly, I don’t know that there was quite enough reiteration of the fact that the customer’s need, or the service imperative, must, must, MUST come before the technology. We cannot adopt an attitude of “oooh, shiny new thing, let’s give it a try” - at least, not in developing services for our libraries. In our personal and extra-curricula lives, and even within defined work-play situations (like Learning 2.0 programs), it’s fine to play with technology for the sake of it. We shouldn’t, though, grab at new technologies and attempt to deliver services using them just for the sake of it. There must be a defined need for a service, and we must carefully evaluate the tools we have available to us to deliver it. We must think through the options, and those options should include our full swag of tools, not just the Web 2.0 ones. If a static HTML page or a database driven interface would work better than a blog, we must be prepared to let go of our techno-lust and get back to basics.

Wikipedia (and the web?) are never going to be as good as our collections
I heard a couple of times, from a couple of people, this idea that “the information we have in our collections is always going to be better than what our customers find online”. No, no, no! This is not what Web 2.0 is about, people!

(Aside: Interestingly, the phrase used was, I’m pretty sure, ‘find online’, not ‘find in Wikipedia’. I can kind of, almost see the rationale behind our fear mongering about the quality of information in Wikipedia. But to use the generalisation ‘online’? Hmmmm. If I had the time to spare, I’d hyperlink every word in this paragraph to a quality online resource on a different subject, just to prove my point. Maybe they meant Wikipedia by inference. Maybe they said ‘Wikipedia’ and I heard ‘online’. I’m going to cling to the idea that one of these two scenarios is true, because the suggestion that the information we have in our collections is necessarily better than anything that can be found online is just so bewildering that I have to hope that’s not what was meant.)

We go on and on about how user generated content is wonderful. “Let people tag our catalogue records”, we cry! “Let people comment on our blogs”, we argue. Why, then, do we insist that what we have in our collections is absolutely, necessarily better than what can be found online, simply by virtue of being in our collections? I’m not sure that I see a great deal of difference between letting users tag our catalogue records (or even pulling data from Library Thing into our catalogues) and the authorship model for Wikipedia. If we continue to tell our customers “Wikipedia bad, library good”, we’re going to set ourselves up for a fall, because no matter what we do, our customers are going to use it. And not only our customers, but our staff: if I need some basic information on something techie-ish, my first port of call is Wikipedia, because the information I get there is consistently good and more up-to-date than what I get anywhere else. Wouldn’t it be better, then, to teach our customers about using Wikipedia wisely, and about how they can contribute to make it a better resource, than to try and stop them from using it?

Everyone’s an expert: that’s a basic tenet of this Web 2.0 world we’re operating in. And you know what? It’s true. Wikipedia facilitates the documentation of the knowledge everyday folks have stored in their minds on every topic you can think of. It’s democratisation, globalisation of the knowledge sharing process like we’ve never encountered before, at least not to this extent. Wikipedia allows you and me to document that which we are experts on. As a result, there are information artifacts in Wikipedia that are pure gold, and that are simply not published anywhere else.

Yes, let’s focus on making our resources as easily discoverable as Wikipedia articles, because our resources are good (and our discovery services often aren’t that great). But Wikipedia has its place, and sometimes it’s going to be able to supply more up-to-date, more detailed (dare I say better?) information than what’s in our collections.

[the virtual librarian steps down off her soapbox]

On Thursday, I spent the day at the State Library of Queensland Library 2.0 Unconference. This was my first unconference experience, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.

The reality was a day of dialogue. The most useful part of the day for me, given that I am new to public libraries, was to sit and hear front line staff talk about Library 2.0 and Web 2.0: their excitement, their anxieties, their thoughts on impediments to change (and on administration and administrators), their passion for delivering responsive services.

I did a fair bit of talking, so my notes from the day are quite sparse, but I want to take some time here to reflect on the ideas and issues that resonated with me on the day. A few posts on this topic coming your way…

Always, always on the money, Meredith Farkas has a great post on the training-wheels culture that seems to pervade library-land. Check out the post and read the comments. This is good stuff. Meredith’s post was written in response to a couple of others, from Nicole Engard, Dorothea Salo and Emily Clasper - also great reading.

Culture is everything: it enables, and it inhibits. So much about the culture in libraries is awesome (like how willing everyone is to share information, expertise, time). But some aspects of the culture (like our fear of getting it wrong, or breaking stuff, or not knowing everything about something before we start talking about it) have the potential to be incredibly frustrating, especially when you’re a change-loving, technology-obsessed, give-it-me-now Gen Yer. Or a trainer. Or a project manager. Or any manager. Or an employee. Hey, it’s gotta be frustrating for a whole lot of people. (Not to mention our customers.)

The key message behind Meredith’s post, and the message we should get used to putting out there: try. Just push the button. Do a quick and dirty Google search. Learn by making mistakes. It might take some effort. It might be a little scary. But it is so satisfying to give it a go.

And maybe even more important is this second message: if you do try, and you still need (or want) to ask for help, you’re not admitting defeat. You’ll make someone very happy by showing you are interested enough to have given it a shot.

I think this ‘give it a burl‘ attitude is what makes the whole Learning 2.0 idea so fantastic: yeah, it might eat up a bit of your time; it mightn’t skill you up to be an emerging technology evangelist; it might make you realise that your library can get 2.0 without the need to pick up all these new fangled things. But it sure does encourage people to give new things a try. And that’s incredibly valuable.

If you don’t subscribe to Information Wants to Be Free, you’re seriously missing out. Go forth, and get the feed.

Looks like my move to WordPress probably won’t happen until next weekend, although I’m still hopeful that it will all be smooth when I do flick the switch. Stay tuned.

The 2007 LITA forum is happening right now in Denver. There are some good summaries being posted, many on the LITA blog.

Check out these in particular:

• Paper from Edward M. Corado on evolving his institution’s 1.0 library website into a 2.0 site
• Numerous summaries (and another) and a podcast of David Lee King’s keynote on Web 2.0, change and the future of libraries (I want a job title like DLK has!)
• Follow the conference tag on Technorati

Just a quick post to say that I’m in the process of moving web hosts and migrating this blog to WordPress. If all goes to plan, there should only be a short down time, my feed should remain the same, and all external links to archive posts should be ok too.

Evidently, I’m feeling optimistic today! Fingers crossed.