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.

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.

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.

My current favourite things:

• Mobile email for road tripping good times (aka “I love my Nokia N95”).
• Plug- and play-ability (aka “I just plugged in my new Airport Express and it JUST WORKED” – on my MacBook, at least. The PC is yet to be tackled).
• My MacBook (inextricably related to plug- and play-ability, but I love my MacBook SO MUCH that it gets its own mention).
• My new digital photo frame. I’m actually looking forward to going to work on Monday, so I can set it up on my desk (thanks everyone!).

What I’m not loving right now:

• There is unpacking mess everywhere, and I mean everywhere (flickr photos to come). The poor dog cannot find her way around the house because she’s foiled at every turn by boxes, extra tvs, and half the contents of my pantry.
• Self-assembly furniture (but also loving my sister, who is the guru of self-assembly furniture, and who always saves me from myself with this one - ditto on the flickr photos!).
• The ridiculous amount of blog reading I have to catch up on, having been somewhat preoccupied for the last week.

Thanks for all the emails and Facebook messages… I’m safely installed here on the GC, and revelling in the amazing weather (high of 17, low of 8 today, and sunshine abounds!). And yet, I still miss Canberra… go figure!

Tomorrow is my last day at mpow. I have mixed feelings about moving on. In the professional environment, I love change. Libraries, as they currently are, need it; librarians, as members of a dynamic profession, should be advocates for it. So the idea of moving on to new challenges, in a new sector of the profession, in a different (but familiar) city, is certainly exciting.

But I’ve had a few amazing years in my current organisation. I’ve had lots of great opportunities for professional development; I’ve worked with engaged, inspired and innovative colleagues who genuinely love the library and want to use their smarts and their passion to build on the great things we already do; I’ve had the chance to play with new and emerging technologies, which has given me a whole different set of professional interests from those I had when I first stepped into this library. This is an organisation that is forward thinking, and I have greatly valued the small role I’ve had to play in the work we do.

So it follows that I’m a little sad to be leaving, despite being very happy to be going where I’m going!

With change in the air, this seems like a good time to climb up on my soap box and start spouting my opinion on all things online librarianship. I’ve been pondering the idea of blogging for a long time. I’m an avid reader of blogs - library technology blogs in particular - which makes the idea of starting my own blog more than a little daunting. There are so many great voices out there in the biblioblogosphere, and in the grand scheme of things, mine is very small…

For the last year or so, I’ve worked in a team where professional banter is the name of the game. I’m hoping that some of these colleagues will come along for the blog ride, and continue the discussions we routinely have via IM or at our staff meetings here in the comments thread. Well, they certainly better! (Fire up Google Reader guys!)

So ski ya Canberra, it was fun (and cold) while it lasted.