PLA Blog

Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum, the two very awesome guys behind the comic Unshelved, took a break from their booth duties on the ALA exhibits floor to do an interview with me. I used my Blackberry and placed a phone call to a service called Utterz (think Twitter but multimedia, with the ability to post pictures, video, and audio from your phone and your computer) to record the interview and post it directly to the internet. I’m *finally* cross-posting it here.

Press the play button below to listen to the interview:

I’d love to hear them speak at a PLA event someday.

The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) is asking librarians to share their opinions and policies on information privacy in an anonymous survey at www.privacyrevolution.org. The results will help shape the strategic direction of OIF’s new grassroots initiative to rally Americans around a set of information privacy standards for the 21st Century. (The campaign was recently kick-started with a $350,000 grant from the Open Society Institute.) On average, the survey takes seven minutes to complete and will remain open through August. For questions regarding the survey, librarians can contact Deborah Caldwell-Stone at .

The Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Bank of America Charitable Foundation are pleased to announce the 2009 guidelines for the American Heritage Preservation Program. This new public-private partnership will fund the preservation of endangered and fragile art works, rare books, scientific specimens, and historical documents (photographs, maps, deeds, etc.) held in small and medium-sized museums, archives, and libraries. To access application guidelines instructions, please visit www.imls.gov/collections/grants/boa.htm.

“It is through the preservation and care of our collective heritage that America’s communities stay vital,” said Anne-Imelda M. Radice, Director of IMLS “These grants are intended to assist institutions, as our nation’s stewards of cultural collections, with activities that ensure the safekeeping and care of these precious artifacts and with sharing the impact of these activities with their communities.”

The grants of up to $3,000 are aimed at completing stand-alone conservation projects that convey the essential character and experience of the United States. Examples of fundable projects are provided in the grant guidelines.

The partnership builds on IMLS’s Connecting to Collections: A Call to Action, a multi-year, multi-pronged initiative to raise public awareness and inspire action on the care of America’s collections. That initiative implements recommendations of an IMLS-supported study, A Public Trust at
Risk: The Heritage Health Index Report on the State of America’s Collections, which found that nearly 190 million objects in U.S. collections are in immediate danger of deterioration and need restoration or conservation.

For questions about museum projects, please contact Christine Henry, Senior Program Officer, at 202-653-4674 to discuss your questions. For questions about library or archival projects, please contact Susan Malbin, Senior Program Officer, at 202-653-4768.

The deadline for application is September 15, 2008. IMLS and Bank of America will notify applicants of final decisions in January 2009, with projects to begin no earlier than February 1, 2009.

To learn more please visit www.imls.gov.

The Public Library Association is offering a new, innovative educational opportunity to help its members become leaders in public libraries and excel in their careers. PLA Leadership Fellows offers PLA members who are public library managers a chance to attend executive leadership training at some of the best universities in the United States, including:
• Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, Senior Executives in State and Local Government;
• University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business, Leading Organizational Change;
• University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, Positive Leadership - Creating Spectacular Organizational Successes; and
• Columbia University, Business School, Leadership Development Program
Programs were reviewed and chosen by the PLA Leadership Taskforce because they focus on teaching management concepts not generally learned in a library school setting. According to PLA Leadership Taskforce Chair Luis Herrera, “Leadership and change management skills are vital for our public library leaders to understand in order to move their organizations forward. We want to extend unique learning opportunities to our members who want to broaden their perspectives, enhance their leadership skills, drive change in their institutions, and plan with a strategic vision.”

Each executive leadership program varies in length, as well as scope and focus. Once a candidate is approved by the school and the PLA Leadership Taskforce, he or she will be notified of his or her acceptance. The PLA Leadership Fellows program will cover the cost of tuition for the program, as well as housing and most meals. Transportation and any additional meals are the responsibility of the attendee.

Candidates must be PLA members who are management staff in a public library system with a minimum of five years experience in a leadership role. Anyone interested in applying should review each program to determine which one is right for you. Selected participants will be asked to share their experience at a PLA program and provide input to the Leadership Taskforce in an effort to help shape a comprehensive leadership development program for PLA. More information about the PLA Leadership Fellows, program dates, and the application process is available at www.pla.org.
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In my first PLA Blog guest entry, I mentioned my plans for the conference. How did I do?

I plan to talk to Tim Spalding about his ideas for revamping classification, because Dewey may not be the best choice for everyone. And to colleagues who are implementing faceted interfaces for their catalogs (Collingswood will be rolling out a Scriblio-powered website in the next couple of weeks).

I had a very good meeting with Tim, and I look forward to continuing our conversation via email in the near future.

I was also invited to join the folks from Darien Library for drinks and dinner. Quoting Kate Sheehan, they’re “an incredible group of people who are building not only a stunning new library but also the future of libraries and librarianship.” Or, as Darien’s John Blyberg wrote, “From rethinking our entire classification system to planning how to use a building that is wired to the hilt, to an RFID conversion, to a major web redesign, to some other things yet-to-be-announced, we’re about to enter a period of serious metamorphosis.” It was a wonderful evening. Their patrons are fortunate to have such warm and talented people working in their behalf.

I want to talk to the folks at LibLime and those who are using Koha to see how it might help us deliver better customer service.

I attended a meeting of the nascent Koha user group, led by Meadville Public Library’s John Brice and LibLime’s Josh Ferraro. Koha is making great strides, and I look forward to working with the software and the community in the near future.

I definitely plan to talk to OCLC about exposing our records in WorldCat.

Is it rude to collar Andrew Pace and Roy Tennant when they’re drink-in-hand? Because I did it to each of them. I got Roy at the WebJunction party, Andrew at the OCLC blogger salon. There’s no question in my mind that both of them would genuinely love to have small libraries’ collections in WorldCat, and, as both pointed out, Karen Calhoun has already written about this very thing. They hear us; they’re working on it. They need to hear from more of us; they need to make it a higher priority.

Some other thoughts:

Why is it so difficult to get a vegetarian meal in Anaheim?

LITA’s Top Tech Trends needs an overhaul. It managed to be interesting at Midwinter in spite of its use of technology. But, at least for me, the brilliance of last Sunday’s panelists and moderator couldn’t overcome the myriad problems introduced by trying to include virtual panelists and Meebo/Twitter-based audience participation.

LAMA (soon to be LLAMA) 101 was interesting. It’s a welcoming group, and I look forward to joining in the fun. One bit of strangeness: no one sat in the first several rows of seats. That’s pretty typical for library conferences in general, but I thought it would be different among leaders, administrators, and managers. I guess it’s all relative.

ACRL President, Jule Todaro, and keynote speaker, Dan Ariely, did a fantastic job at Monday’s President’s Program, as did my fellow panelists. Everyone involved was kind and brilliant and a joy to work with and get to know. I’m very excited about PLA and L(L)AMA and the folks who have become colleagues now that I’m working at Collingswood Public Library. But I’m going to miss having a formal relationship with ACRL.

Stephen Abram is a can’t miss panelist. He accepts, more fully than anyone else I’ve seen present at a library conference, that public speaking is theater, and theater benefits from the play of opposites, from presenters willing to play the foil. And so, last Saturday for the LITA Internet Resources and Services Interest Group’s “There’s No Catalog Like No Catalog: The Ultimate Debate on the Future of the Library Catalog,” Abram played Oscar to Joseph Janes’s Felix, Goliath to Karen Schneider’s David, goon to Karen Coyle’s Gretzkey, and Steve Ballmer to Roy Tennant’s Ray Ozzie. Which is to say, Abram affected boorishness, grandiosity, combativeness, and even defended proprietary code—in part because it brought out the best in his fellow panelists, in part because overstatement plays well in a crowded theater, and in part because well behaved librarians rarely make history.

The following are a few of the many highlights from this program. Listen to the MP3 for more.

What are catalogs good for? What are they not good for?

Coyle: The original card catalogs were the Google of their day. Now just 3% of all searches start at the library.
Abram: Catalogs are everything we want, nothing that users want. Librarians aren’t going to give you what you want, they’re going to give you what they’ve got.
Coyle: Why shouldn’t users discover library resources on Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, etc.? And why is the library catalog a dead-end, a place that has links to it, but no links out?
Abram: Why don’t you have a Meebo widget or another live Ask a Librarian option on every failed search?

What about WorldCat Local and the Open Library: the one big catalog in the sky approach?

Coyle: One big catalog is nonsense. All data should be exposed on the web, not as an inventory, but as a bibliography consisting of a million little catalogs, all resource-oriented. Do not start with place. And we need to let other people do things with the data, even things we don’t like.
Schneider: I envision lots of big catalogs. But sometimes place does matter. Sometimes you want to go into a building and check out a book.
Abram: WorldCat is not a catalog. It’s a registry for data.
Janes: WorldCat is a catalog. It’s the University of Washington catalog.

What should catalogers do going forward?

Schneider: We need to celebrate what is good about cataloging. So many techies end up reinventing cataloging.
Janes: I taught the class that resulted in the founding of the Internet Public Library. As it grew, we needed metadata and better organization. There was a computer science student in the class who handled the back-end. Basically, he ended up reinventing Dewey.
Abram: Catalogers have reinvented themselves over the past 20 years. They’re informing Google, Yahoo, etc. But not library interfaces.
Coyle: We’ve forgotten why we do what we do. For instance, why don’t we use title case? Are the things we’re doing serving our needs today?
Schneider: This is part of a larger problem. Libraries are dogma driven. Very little that we do is based on evidence.

What would you like to have happen in the library software market?

Schneider: I’d like it if every product were open source.
Abram: I’d like everyone to catch up with the latest release of the software they’re running. You need to upgrade every year.
Coyle: I’d like systems to separate library management from user services.
Janes: I wish the market were bigger, because greater demand would increase the supply of good stuff. Much of what we use feels homespun. Shouldn’t we merit major software players’ attention? I’m talking Apple. Nintendo. Our largest enemy is indifference.

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There are few subtleties in Abram’s panel performance. One is that he takes it and takes it and take it—occasionally pausing to defend his positions or his employer—but he never dishes it out. The other is that, until you read the transcript, you aren’t fully aware that, in the continuum of librarian attitudes, Coyle, Janes, Scheider, and Tennant are far more like him than not like him.

If there’s really an anti-Stephen Abram, it’s Martha Yee. Quiet and dignified, a cataloger’s cataloger, Yee can work an ALCTS room into a hand-clapping, foot-stomping frenzy by pushing up the sleeves on her cardigan or asking if anyone might like some tea. At least that’s how it feels. And when you’re sharing a stage with futurists like Jennifer Bowen, Dianne Hillman, Tim Spalding, and Roy Tennant (along with moderator Robert Wolven), as Yee did at last Sunday’s “Creating the Future of the Catalog and Cataloging,” sometimes you need someone who speaks for the people, who shares their past, who lives in the moment. However, while Yee is anything but a techno-utopian, she is also anything but reactionary.

Her presentation was on the Semantic Web. To her credit, she’s put more time into figuring out how RDF really works, instead of how it promises to work, than anyone else I’ve encountered. And she has questions—smart, thorny questions. They aren’t intended to derail the project, but to make it better. Her most important: Can all catalogers do be reduced to a set of pulldown menus? (Queue thunderous applause.)

Tennant presented on WorldCat, Bowen on the eXtensible cAtalog pRoject, Spalding on LibraryThing, and Hillman on how catalogers need to reinvent themselves as metadata librarians. Each presentation was strong, though in each case I’m sure you either already know about these projects/movements or you don’t much care. Rather than summarize, I’ll finish with a few highlights:

Tennant: When I’m looking for a library book, I want to know: How many clicks am I from having the book sent to my house?

Tennant: Data is a collective asset. OCLC is a membership collective for this data.

Yee: You need to tie the acquisitions budget to the processing budget or you get a backlog. Digitization only magnifies this relationship.

Bowen: We need to distinguish between granularity and complexity. We need to create interoperable granularity.

Spalding: The tag war is over. Tags are not better than subject headings, but they’re useful. We have ample evidence.

Hillman: The day of the ILS may not be entirely dead, but it’s on life support. We’re looking at the disintegrated library system. Discovery is the first piece that’s being dis-integrated. Soon metadata will be managed in different databases.

Yee: Good metadata is never going to be free. We have to figure out who is going to be paid for it.

I felt like I should show up for Saturday morning’s “Stretching Existing Staff” in disguise. Or, perhaps, in a bull’s-eye t-shirt with a “Kick Me” sign taped to my back. I mean, I know all too well that my colleagues are being stretched, and they know they’re being stretched, and they know that I know, etc. Why rub salt in the wound?

And yet, the allure of having library managers tell me how they do more with less was too strong, so I screwed up my courage, showed up as me, sat right up front, and here I am blogging about the presentation. Because it was a great one. Worth the price of admission all on its own. That great.

The big takeaway from “Stretching Existing Staff: New Service Delivery Models,” is that it’s extraordinarily important to work smarter, not harder. Of course you know this already. Even I already knew it. But it’s far, far more important than you or I realize. Smart is hard. It’s often counterintuitive, and sometimes we have to confront our own limitations and mistakes. But it’s worth it, because two good things happen when you do things that make sense: your colleagues become a lot more productive and your neighbors—the people who make use of the resources you steward—begin to like you even more than they do already.

The PLA group that sponsored this session, the Workload Measures and Staffing Patterns Committee (which is related in some way, I believe, to the Issues and Concerns Cluster) selected a great group of presenters:

• Ruth Barefoot, Manager, The San Jose Way, San Jose (Calif.) Public Library
• Valerie Rowe-Jackson, Deputy Director for Public Services, Richland County (S.C.) Public Library
• Anne T. Haimes, Branch Group Manager, Atlanta-Fulton (Ga.) Library System
• Dale McNeill, Director, Community Library Services Department, Queens (N.Y.) Library

One very cool thing: they didn’t futz around with a moderator. Instead, the speakers provided very brief introductions for each other. Another cool thing: two of the presenters used PowerPoint presentations that consisted almost entirely of photographs (brava!), another told his story without the hindrance of a deck to distract us (bravo!), and the fourth, though she used a fairly typical PowerPoint slideshow, was very good about using the bullet points as textual cues for the audience, not as her script (brava!).

San Jose’s Ruth Barefoot

• Reinvent your environment: get the good stuff—your “gold”—off the shelf and put it in the marketplace where your customers can find it more easily. San Jose particularly emphasizes the first ten feet of the library, which has a bookstore look and feel in order to win people over immediately.
• Emphasize self-directed services, such as self-checkout, renewals, and holds, and also paying fines online. This is all part of their goal to teach customers, because they want “to learn how to fish.”
• Simplify your policies: all checkouts are for three weeks, except movies, which are one week; everything has a $.25/day overdue fee; customers can check out as much as they want; they display DVD’s and CD’s in their cases.
• Provide customer service training for everyone on staff, and train everyone to mentor elementary school students and teens. This is part of empowering staff to put customers first: the phones on San Jose Library’s floor don’t ring when there’s an outside call, which means floor staff working with customers aren’t distracted. People working in the office answer the phone and can ring floor staff when there’s a call they need to take.

Richland County’s Valerie Rowe-Jackson

• When their bookmobile became too dangerous to operate, they opened a branch in what had been a convenience store, which they renamed The Link.
• They parked the bookmobile outside while The Link was being set up, to help their patrons make the transition, and they employed their librarian/bookmobile driver in The Link once it opened. The pictures of The Link look great: all the best aspects of a small library combined with all the best aspects of a small bookstore.
• To provide better service, save space, and make better use of existing staff, they provide reference via dedicated videoconference from the Library’s main branch.

Atlanta-Fulton’s Anne Haimes

• When they renovated the 15,000 square-foot South Fulton Branch, they merged their two reference desks, Children’s and General, into a single desk.
• They made the desk more visible and accessible, and in so doing freed up space for public programs.
• They cross-trained their reference staff, which meant that fewer person-hours need to be spent staffing the newly combined desk. This fostered teamwork and freed up time for programs and outreach.

Queens Public’s Dale McNeill

• You need to know your community, your staff, and your buildings. What’s big in Texas, what plays in San Jose, may not befit Queens.
• When they realized just how much social work librarians were doing, they asked themselves, “Do we really need librarians to do this work or could someone else do it better?” So they hired social workers to work in the libraries not as librarians, but as social workers. Some of them even do home counseling.
• They have converted 20 of their 60 branches to self-service only. Patrons don’t have an option of going to a circulation desk; it’s self-service only. The self-checkout machines take cash, credit cards, and checks, as well as payments, and they’re multilingual. They also provide a receipt for check-in of materials: patrons wanted proof that they’d returned items.
• Some changes are rolled out slowly, such as self pick-up of holds, which was introduced over two years.
• It’s important to have clear expectations for staff and to make sure everyone knows what the positive and negative consequences of their actions will be. When retraining is required, it’s best to have someone model good behavior, though that someone may not be a manager; it might make more sense for it to be someone at the same level as the person who would benefit from retraining. And be sure there are rewards associated with growth and change, even if it’s just a pat on the back. People need to have their effort acknowledged and appreciated.

This was a discussion forum Monday morning primarily attended by Collection Development managers of various public library systems. Discussion topics were proposed by attendees as they introduced themselves, and floating collections was one of the big topics. Several libraries had implemented floating (including mine), and we were able to share some best practices. Other topics included AV vendors and downloadable media. Recommended e-mail discussion lists were

publib http://lists.webjunction.org/publib/

Urban Libraries’ list (must be a member of Urban Libraries Council) http://www.urbanlibraries.org/join/index.html.

 

While I was occasionally able to share information about my library system, this forum wasn’t useful for branch staff, such as myself, who are more interested in sharing best practices of day-to-day collection maintenance and development. When I asked about a better forum for such discussion, I was referred to the publib discussion group. After the session, I was able to connect with a few other attendees who were like-minded, and we are planning on sharing weeding guidelines, training, etc.

This session on Sunday afternoon was a discussion forum sponsored by the RUSA-MARS division of ALA. It’s subtitle was “Best practices for managing and serving public computer users.” The facilitators created a list of questions to promote discussion that fell into 3 broad categories: technology, patron behavior & needs, and policy. 

 

Technology questions focused on whether you offered automatic or manual sign-up, commercial or homegrown solutions, guest logins or not, wireless access, and Microsoft Office or other productivity software. Patron behavior/need questions focused on how patrons login, what they do on the computers, how long they stay, with what do they need the most help, what services do they request that you don’t offer, and are there questions about the priority of one patron’s tasks over another’s. Policy questions focused on levels of access, ability to download files and software, whether or not you filter/block some sites, policies for problems with patron behavior, and policies about priority of patrons’ computer tasks.

 

We were seated at round tables and discussed the answers to these questions with folks at our table. Near the end of the session, we reported on our table discussions to the larger group. While the discussions were useful in some cases, it was up to each individual to jot down any ideas for use back at his/her home system. From the title of the session, I had thought that I would be given a handout with best practices to take home with me. My library system already has automated sign-up for computers and several policies in place for dealing with many of the issues that came up so perhaps other librarians found this session more helpful.

Today I had the pleasure of watching the author/actor/mother/multi-tasker/closet organizer Jamie Lee Curtis speak at the PLA President’s Program. She made all the room laugh with her hilarious jokes (she offered to organize everyone’s closets) and saved the best for last, a storytime from her latest book, Big Words for Little People.

(picture taken by Laura Kortz)