LibraryTechtonics

Blake at LISNews asked me to be a part of a conference call panel commenting on the WI situation where librarians now have new titles and pay cuts after a somewhat controversial restructuring, and that conversation is now available as LISten episode 12. Our panel of three (I was joined by Aaron Schmidt and Nate Hill) clocked in at around 17 minutes of talking, which is pretty good given that we covered a few angles of the story, and we had a really interesting discussion which is totally worth a listen. However, this story still rubs me the wrong way, and probably not for the same reasons as it bothers most other librarians.

This story is a tangled mess of issues that exemplifies our profession today:

• a library board director doing it by the numbers
• the library offering reduced-pay positions just to keep the positions and pay for rising health care costs
• librarians feeling pushed around and powerless
• an almost invisible community (at least, from the way this story plays in the press)
• everyone misunderstanding what librarians actually do
• what librarians should be able to do
• what librarians should get paid for their skills
• assumptions, assumptions, assumptions
• stereotypes about the internet, its users, libraries, and librarians

It makes me think about library culture, and how completely fuzzy it is, and how that part of the meta problem that keeps us from making any progress. Library culture, for a long time, has followed a “we tell you how do to it, and you do it” structure, and I’m surprised it’s worked this long. Library culture, like user-centric design, is not and cannot be entirely determined by libraries, librarians, boards, trustees, and parent organizations. It’s about being what we need to be and learning what we need to learn to serve our users. It’s following paradigm shifts (read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions!), getting ahead of trends, learning to innovate in every area of what we do, NOT just technology. It’s about changing up our business model, to create better service models, to provide customer service that is taylored to our communities.  Because only the strongest, smartest, and most relevant paradigms survive.

I think libraries and librarians need to prove worth everyday, with every service, at every service point. Librarians need to understand people, understand their communities, to provide the right services, and to change minds. I believe firmly that the reason librarians can’t always get their head around new technologies is that they don’t understand the user behaviors of the people who use them, and how those user behaviors bleed into the real world, intentionally and unintentionally. Usability isn’t just a components of technology sciences, it’s about the everyday world, and user-centric design isn’t building something *for* users, but working with the community to build what works for them, digital or not.

Until we see and start to affect this paradigm shift in thinking, in education, in professional development, in everyday practice, and on the very meta level of library culture as not truly, selflessly focused on users and still too focused on controlled environments, we will continue to see stories like this as just another unfair blow against libraries and librarians, or just a problem with library education, or just a problem with technology use or non-use in libraries. It’s time for real change. It’s time to step up the game and innovate (in all areas), or die.

Tags: culture, innovate, libraryculture, LISten, me, paradigmshift, usability