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.

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.

---

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.

In the past two days I’ve attended two presentations, spanning six hours, on The Catalog. In that time, no one talked about one of my major concerns: users can’t search for the articles in our collection, which means they can’t find them without our help. Perhaps this is such a big issue that it’s not worth mentioning, or maybe it’s so small that no one else cares, or maybe it’s just a dead issue and I should stop caring. Or maybe the panelists have never worked reference.

Anyway, that’s why it was such a pleasure, last night over dinner, to talk to someone who works for one of the larger serials/database vendors.

Me: How are librarians as negotiators?

Not bad. Some better than others. But many are surprisingly good.

Me: Has anyone really impressed you? Not just as a negotiator, but as someone who’s just really smart and informed about what patrons want.

Rick Anderson at Utah. Mark Sandler at CIC. Beth Bernhardt at UNC Greensboro. And there are a lot of really smart people at the California Digital Libraries.

Me: What do you think about open access?

No effect. What really matters right now are consolidation and consortia and everyone’s shrinking budgets. It’s harder and harder for anyone to make money.

Me: Which vendor has the best patron-focused database interface?

Reed Elsevier’s Scopus is really nice. Not that anyone uses it, or any of the competitors’ interfaces for that matter. Nor should they. Google’s better than any of them and it’s what people use to find articles. Then it’s just a question of accessing them.

Seth Godin wrote recently that “if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.” The idea being that you market yourself by doing good work, not by writing lists of bulleted declarative phrases, formatting them in professional-looking typefaces, and printing them out on quality paper.

I just walked by the LibraryThing booth, which is located at the far end of the exhibit room in the ALA equivalent of the nosebleed seats. The booth is decorated with a small sign, a single table, an inflatable rhino (natch), and nothing else, just a laptop, pointed at the aisle, and Tim Spalding, with his back to the aisle, typing and mousing away. Oh yeah, it has one more thing: a bunch of librarians surrounding Tim, peering over his shoulder at the screen. Maybe that LibraryThing’s onto something.

Okay, here’s why I love ALA. Keep in mind that I’m shy and also still very new to the profession.

While waiting for the shuttle to take me from the airport to my hotel, I met Judy Luther, a former academic librarian in Florida, now working as a library consultant in Philadelphia. It seems that sometimes you have to fly across the country to meet your neighbors.

After check-in, I had lunch with Nancy Hinkel, a publishing director for Knopf Books for Young Readers at Random House Children’s Books. If you want to find out which public libraries are doing really cool stuff, talk to a publisher or a vendor. They work with a lot of libraries every year, so it takes a lot to impress them. Fortunately, it seems, a lot of libraries are doing impressive stuff. I hope to write a post on that later.

After registering, I went to a WebJunction party where I met up with PLA Blog coordinator, Andrea Mercado. Andrea introduced me to a soft-spoken information professional at the University of Kentucky who, like me, is a recent library school grad who’s married to a yoga instructor (I wish he had business cards, because I’m spacing on his name); Walt Crawford, who was every bit as kind and thoughtful in person as he seems in his blog; Howard Besser, who’s doing fantastic work at NYU in film and video preservation, and who just landed a landmark grant from IMLS; and Roy Tennant, who’s helping to do the kind of stuff at OCLC that I’m really, really glad is happening at OCLC. In my little checklist of Things To Do at ALA, I’ve got a dot next to “Figure out how to expose the Collingswood Public Library’s records in WorldCat at a price we can afford,” though I’m hoping that dot becomes a check by Tuesday. Added to my to do list: become very familiar with everything the amazing Karen Calhoun writes on her new OCLC blog.

After WebJunction, I ate dinner with Andrea, Steve Roskowki, LJ’s Library Paraprofessional of the Year, ALA Council member Heidi Dolamore, and Laurel, a way-cool Oregon-based librarian and fellow Drexel alum. Along the way, I also ran into some of my favorite colleagues from Penn and Temple, and a colleague at PALINET who’s been helpful in helping me get my bearings at Collingswood.

Again, this isn’t a post about how I’m so popular and cool, because I’m neither; no one’s going to be dropping my name on their blog or with their colleagues. The point is, through conversation which each of these people, I learned how I can be a better librarian and how Collingswood can become an even better library. And the conference is really just getting started. This all took place a day before the opening general session. I cannot wait to see how the rest of the conference goes.

I live maybe ten miles from the Philadelphia airport—I was through security and waiting at my gate this morning less than an hour after leaving my house—and I’ve lived in the Philadelphia area most of my life. Yet from the air, on take offs and landings, it’s almost impossible for me to tell where I am; the familiar seems completely new from thousands of feet in the air. I think it’s the shift in perspective more than the effects of speed, because jets don’t give the impression of moving all that quickly.  Looking out from my window seat, the ground seemed to sort of meander along, even though we were covering 3,000 miles in just a few hours.

This isn’t a travelogue, this is a metaphor for libraries and my relationship with them. I enrolled in library school less than two years ago, and I graduated in September. While in school, I worked at the University of Pennsylvania’s Lippincott Library of the Wharton School, then worked at the libraries of Temple and Saint Joseph’s Universities after graduation. In May, I began working as the director of the Collingswood Public Library.

I thought, before all this began, that I knew libraries pretty well. As with driving, food, and website design, when it comes to libraries we all think we’re experts. Of course, I had more to learn that I could imagine, and library school was a great place to start. I’m particularly grateful that Drexel’s faculty helped me apply what I already knew (I’ve worked as a web developer, fundraiser, and nonprofit manager) to our profession, a field that seems to meander along, and yet manages always to cover a tremendous amount of ground with startling rapidity.

With that in mind, I’m attending this year’s Annual so that I can do my job better. Like our colleagues in Borough Hall, at the Police and Fire Stations, and in Public Works, our job at the Library is to make Collingswood a better place to live. So 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 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. And I definitely plan to talk to OCLC about exposing our records in WorldCat; Aaron Swartz has already agreed to include our records in the Open Library, with links back to our catalog once our Scriblio instance permits us to produce stable URLs, but I’d love to let people who are interested in our collection access it from as many sites as possible.

Of course, that’s just the beginning. I have a lot more planned, and I also hope to be open to the sort of serendipitous moments that ALA fosters. For those who are following this blog from Anaheim, please say hello. And for those following it from home, let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to investigate on your behalf.

Press credentials in hand, I headed down to the show floor (a.k.a. The Exhibits), which was still under construction, with Kathleen Hughes (Manager of PLA Publications and Editor of Public LIbraries magazine), to drop off booth stuff. John Chrastka was busy setting things up, and showed me the brand-new ALA libcast podcasting booth:

and I got to give it a whirl:

Hear all about it:

(if the player doesn’t appear, click here)

Recently, reader Sean Aragon wrote in and asked “Where are some good places to eat around the Conference Center?” If you’re heading to ALA yourself, you might be thinking the same thing.

I’ve never been to Anaheim, so I don’t *personally* know what’s good, but here are a few places you can check out to help plan your food itinerary.

• The ALA 2008 Conference Wiki does have a page on eating options, and I think they are mostly taken straight from the recent conference preview issue of American Libraries.
• If you don’t want to eat alone, check out the Dine-Around program, also listed in the conference wiki. Several restaurants are listed for each night in varying cuisines, and interested parties can sign up to be a part of the big table experience. These dinners are not free, but there is the added benefit of a) not having to make your own group dinner plans, and b) being able to share big dishes with colleagues.
• Need more than a map of restaurants in the area? Check out reviews on Yelp for restaurants near the convention center, and filter the results to suit your cost, cuisine, or rating needs. Not near the convention center? No problem. Just enter what you’re looking for (Yelp offers reviews of more than just restaurants), and put your address in the “Near” field to really get super local to you (especially if your accommodations are not so close to the convention center). If you need more personalized advice for all things local, post your queries to the Food Talk section of the site. Don’t forget to post reviews, too!

Happy eating!

What are your food plans? Any recommendations or must-tries on your list?