virtually a librarian

There’s been plenty of talk around the Library 2.0 theme on the idea of evaluation or assessment. At Information Wants to be Free, Meredith Farkas says what she wanted to see come out of Library 2.0 was a greater focus on assessment. I certainly want to see libraries have a greater focus on assessment, too, and I want to see them publishing about it. (Particularly public libraries. We just don’t publish enough.)

Why aren’t we (libraries in general) publishing about the success (or failure) of our 2.0 projects? Why is there virtually no data to be found that quantifies some of the outcomes of 2.0 projects? We’ve been on this 2.0 bandwagon long enough for studies and assessments and evaluations to have been undertaken.  For a movement that’s intrinsically tied up with quick publishing channels like blogs and wikis, it seems strange that there is a real dearth of published studies on 2.0 projects. Why is that?

Walt Crawford had this to say in a recent post on his two blog survey books:

Maybe there’s a clear desire not to know how library blogs are doing in the real world, other than a few cherry-picked examples. I’d like to think that’s not the case. It would be unprofessional to tell people about how wonderful library blogs are, and encourage them to create such blogs, without giving them honest and broad-ranging information on what’s actually happening with such blogs.

I’d like to think that’s not the case, too. But I wonder. I wonder a few things:

• Is the lack of publishing indicative of a lack of success? (And a fear of talking about it?)
• Is the lack of publishing indicative of a perceived lack of success, a perception that might be formed because we’re not collecting the right data? (eg. How are we measuring ROI? Do we just count comments on blog posts? Or do we look at exit links, time spent on the page, holds on titles blogged about, impact on online resource usage stats…? I certainly hope all of these metrics and more are informing libraries’ evaluations of their blogs, because if we’re just relying on comments to measure user engagement, then we’re not seeing the full picture.)
• Is the lack of publishing indicative of a lack of evaluation? (And if so, why aren’t we evaluating? Because we don’t know how? Because we don’t have time? Because we don’t want to know?)
• Or, is it just that we’re not publishing about our evaluations?

I’ve got a blogging project in the pipeline at mpow. It’s germinating quite slowly, because I want to see it well planned. We want a well planned implementation, but also a well planned, multi-faceted evaluation. If it works, I want to know about it, and I want us to be able to reflect on what we did and make links to what worked. If it doesn’t work, I want to know about it just as much (if not more), because I want to be able to reflect on what we did, look for ways we could improve, and ultimately, pull the pin if that’s what we need to do.

Blogs (and all things shiny and 2.0) are just great. They’re fun for staff to work on, and have huge potential to engage our users. But none of us have time to run services that don’t work. If we don’t evaluate, we have no ability to know whether

We know that “because we always did it that way” is not a good reason to keep doing the things we’ve always done, whether they work or not. But neither should a failure to evaluate be the reason we keep on keeping on with our 2.0 services.

If you have evaluated your 2.0 service, publish about it! And if you have published, I’d love to receive some links.

A participant in a Learning 2.0 program recently posted on his course blog and to an ALIA elist about libraries’ use of free, commercial web 2.0 services. He analogises that libraries’ use of free web 2.o services like Blogger, del.icio.us, YouTube and the like is “privatisation by osmosis” and he is concerned by the lack of debate about this issue.

He’s right - there hasn’t been a great deal of debate in the biblioblogosphere, but I’m sure this is an issue that many libraries and librarians have grappled with on a local level.

There are a few points I’d like to make on this issue… But first, I should point out that I agree that (where possible) libraries should be developing infrastructure to support their 2.0 services. So, onto my stream-of-consciousness response…

Libraries as content producers

The author of “It’s the Queen of Darkness, Pal” suggests that libraries’ use of commercial providers might mean that they don’t see themselves as content producers to the same degree as they have historically:

It seems to me that libraries used to see themselves as content providers, actively providing tools for finding information. At the moment, it feels more like we have resigned ourselves to using the services of the private sector.

I’d like to suggest that libraries’ use of third party providers doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t producing content or don’t see themselves as content producers. In fact, in some ways, I think use of free third party providers can free us up to produce content, because we spend less time maintaining the back end of the systems that house the content. Indeed, libraries’ quick up-take of content-based technologies like blogs seems to me to indicate that we are very concerned with developing content.

Sure, we mightn’t want to rely on third party providers to maintain a record of our business transactions or our content for the purposes of records management. I would suggest that any library using a third party provider for any 2.0 (or 1.0) service should be exporting content for archiving in their local records repository. But I’d also suggest that a library with, for example, a blog hosted on their own server, should also be doing this.

Yes, libraries should build and host their own infrastructure for 2.0 services, but…

The author asks why libraries aren’t hosting their own web 2.0 technologies, and he also suggests an answer:

The superficial answer is, of course, that libraries don’t have the funds. The deeper underlying answer though is that, really, our society has decided that it’s information is best entrusted to and run by the private sector on an advertising funded basis.

Do we (as in society) really think our information is best entrusted to the private sector? I’m not so sure about this. I know that I personally am often a little nervous about entering or display personal information in/via web apps or tools. I think it’s more that it’s very easy to entrust our information to the private sector, and the private sector seems to be very good at providing tools that work for people. I think libraries have been so quick to use commercial web 2.0 services for exactly the same reasons as individuals have: they work and they’re easy to implement and use.

Should libraries be hosting their own 2.0 services? Absolutely! It would be awesome if, for example, a library offered a social bookmarking tool that their customers could use as an alternative to del.icio.us. But as the author of “It’s the Queen of Darkness, Pal” acknowledges, there are hurdles libraries need to jump in order to be able to do this sort of thing. It’s not just about money - we all know there are robust open source options for a lot of the technologies we’d like to implement. There are many other issues, too, which impede libraries in building 2.0 infrastructure, such as:

• lack of library staff with the technological expertise to allow for implementation and maintenance of the technologies
• the need to respond to new technologies and user demands quickly often dictates that we need to find fast solutions, and hosting the technologies locally can result in time lags between identification of demand or need and implementation - an externally hosted commercial service might be a great interim solution in instances like this
• the need to work with and within in-house enterprise architecture requirements
• cultural and organisational factors, including policy, procedures, history

Some libraries are in a position to independently develop their own Web 2.0 infrastructure. Some are in a position to work with their parent organisation’s IT services to work towards the development of such an infrastructure. But some do not fall into either of these categories.

As one response to the recent thread on this topic on the NewGrads elist pointed out, it’s technically possible to buy a domain name and host your library’s virtual services entirely separately from your parent organisation’s web presence and without any input from your local IT people. But many libraries are not in a position to do that, often for the same reasons as those listed above.

Is commercialism really an issue?

Consider the other commercial services libraries make use of every day - particularly those that involve data hosting and end-user service provision. We purchase subscriptions to online resources from third party vendors. Many libraries also use “software as a service” models for external hosting of their LMS or other systems. How do these two examples differ from, for example, delivering a blog via a free service such as WordPress? Other than the fact that the first two cost money while the latter is free, I’m not sure that there is a great deal of difference… Or is there? Is the fact that the Web 2.0 services are free an issue? Is the fact that they are mainstream (ie non-library) services an issue? How about a service like LibGuides? Where does that fit in?

Scattering the breadcrumbs

I think there’s one other very important reason that libraries use commercial Web 2.0 services rather than build our own infrastructure, and it’s a reason that means a lot of libraries will continue to use these commercial services: we’re attempting to meet our users in their own space. We’re “scattering the breadcrumbs” and placing our services where the users will see us - that is, in the spaces they inhabit. If we hosted our own services, would we be able to do this as effectively? If we created a social network space on the library’s website, we might create a space in which those users who actually come to our websites could interact with each other and the library, but we wouldn’t be reaching out to, for example, the users of Facebook who’ve never even contemplated visiting the library’s website.

Should libraries be using free, commercial Web 2.0 services?

The answer? I don’t know if there is one. Perhaps it’s that where possible, libraries should use a combination of local infrastructure or locally hosted services and commercial tools that can position us in the user’s space.

But I think what must be acknowledged is that, as it stands right now, there are some libraries for whom implementing their own locally hosted services or infrastructure is just not a possibility, or not a possibility that will be realised any time soon. For those libraries, free commercial services are their only option, if they’re to make use of Web 2.0 tools at all.

Finally…

I’m really glad that there is finally some debate happening on this topic. I hope it continues and some other people weigh in. This is something I’ve been pondering at length recently, and I’d really like to hear others’ thoughts.

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…

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

Kathryn Greenhill at Librarians Matter posted this week on how the ‘newness’ of Library 2.0 is the power shift(s) it represents. This is a spot-on response to the Library 2.0 ‘dissenters’ who argue that L2 is just about a swag of new tools, and that the user-centeredness that Twopointopians champion is, in fact, nothing new (they’re right, it’s not).

Greenhill summarises the shifts in power balances as she sees them:

• The power of the user to choose
• The power of the librarians to control code
• The power of the user to create their library
• The power of librarians to speak with our own voices
• The power of librarians to be in our users’ space
• The power of librarians to risk
• The power of librarians to collaborate
• The power to use our library buildings in a new way

So, the unique, new, innovative thing about Library 2.0 is that it has caused a realignment of all sorts of power balances, for and between all groups of stakeholders (users, librarians, vendors…).

This is a definition of L2 that really works and is certainly a valuable addition to the L2 discourse. Read the whole thing, it’s good stuff.

Then, go check out Casey Bisson’s response for an interesting analogy. He ends with a question all libraries should be asking themselves in order to avoid going the way of the trains: “Who are you competing against?”

Roy Tennant analogises about the recent war of words triggered by a post from the Anonymous Librarian on twopointopians.

Tenant starts out his post on this topic by admitting to his tendency to stay out of the way of religious wars. Indeed, the fervour illustrated in both the comments on the AL’s post (all 52 of them) and all the counter-posts on other blogs does indeed smack of the kind of fervour that often springs up around religion. And the terminology? Cult. 2.0 gospel. Manifesto. Sacred. Mantra. There’s a thesis here in the language choices, alone, let alone in the play out of the us vs them polarisation.

Anyhoo, the real point of this post was to comment on what Tenant alludes to as Meredith Farkas’ voice of reason. I actually read Meredith’s post in response to the AL’s before I read the AL’s post, so I came to it with no real understanding of what inspired it. What resonated for me, then, wasn’t how well Meredith had responded to the whole thread, but just how well she articulated the fact that every service we implement, every Web2.0 initiative we embark on, must be informed by a need:

I have dealt with a lot of people who are like kids in a candy store when it comes to these technologies. Like someone who told me the other day that Flickr is the logical next thing libraries should have after a blog (never mind whether there’s a need for either of them or not, I suppose). I used to be one of those kids in a candy store. I remember when I came to Norwich over two years ago, eager to implement blogs, wikis, etc. And a lot of the initial things I tried to implement failed. Why? Because I put the tool before the need…

Hallelujah! I’m the first to want to play with shiny new stuff, but as I’ve said before, the need has got to come before the tool.

Library2.0 (or twopointopia) is about creating user-centred services, and, where appropriate, harnessing technology to help us do it. It’s not about the technology.

This is the most insightful blog post around Library2.0 I’ve read in a while. It should be mandatory reading for all Library/Learning2.0 programs. It’s certainly something I’ll be sharing with my colleagues, as we think about the services our users want from us and the tools available to us to deliver them.