LibraryTechtonics

My husband just shared this with me, so I, naturally, had to share with you.

Dear Reader Takeaways:

1. Don’t treat social networking like collecting business cards. Seriously, Social != (does not equal) Business [sometimes, maybe, but certainly not all the time].
2. Social networking is a [slightly] obnoxious term. Most hoity toity terms for things are, indeed, hoity toity. Not taking them so seriously is healthier.
3. LJ is full of “self-indulgent maxi-musings.” I agree, and it’s just not my scene, which is a big part of why I’ve all but abandoned it. It’s got it’s own culture, see?
4. Sometimes it’s better to be out rescuing a baby from a burning submarine than being online all the freakin’ time (I say, typing away at midnight on a Saturday… hey! Whatever, see, cuz I was out last night for shabu shabu then 2 hours of mead sampling, at work all day today, and I’m going to a craft/artist market tomorrow with Yelpers and then craft night with a whole other set of friends, so it’s my social night off this weekend!). Go out, get some sun, and talk to real people.
5. Random hash brown batches make interesting tweets. Especially to nomPr0n freaks like me.

Preach it, friend.

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.

Reflecting on my ALA Midwinter 2008 experiences, I find that I’m running up against the same issues I’ve seen before, but haven’t quite been able to articulate, about new technologies and libraries. I had a really good time talking out these issues with the likes of John Klima and Heidi Dolamore at conference, as well as with my helpful husband, and I think I’ve narrowed it down to a specific seed problem: context.

I find that, when I talk about technology and social software with new media peeps (because, you know, general technology and social software can be the same, but can also be separate topics), there is a deep level of reasonably assumed and understood cultural context, especially since many of these people are helping to build and grow the social software and technology of today and tomorrow.

However, when I discuss the same topics with librarians, there are only a handful who really have the proper knowledge context to discuss the issues without having to backtrack and explain. I find that even librarians who get the idea of social networking sites, social media creation, mashups, sharing, gadgetry, don’t quite have the cultural understanding behind the technologies in discussion. However, it’s very difficult to add the context to a blog post of ideally front-loaded content without making it super long and cumbersome. Thus, my writer’s block on the subject.

This is why, whenever I speak on the topic of social software, I emphasize culture. How and why a specific audience uses something is more important than how you want to apply it, essentially. Case in point is the session I blogged from Saturday morning for PLA on social networking and reference. In their efforts to perform “outreach,” librarians thought it was a good idea to try to figure out how to get around Facebook’s built-in messaging system… which was trying to prevent them from essentially spamming Facebook users. People who understand Facebook’s user culture know that this is *bad* and it shouldn’t be done, but these librarians thought they were doing a good, clever thing by trying to circumvent the system.

Beth Evans also presented in the same program, and mentioned that she was encouraging all users to “friend” the library. I know that there are other librarians who are encouraging users to “friend” them as individuals, and who “friend” everyone back. I don’t think that all librarians have considered the social networking and relationship ramifications of doing this (I’ve touched on this topic before): is their account just for work, or are they using it for work and personal sharing? Are they sharing the same information with all of their “friends”? Do they only log in from work? When they log in from home, do they really want to be at “work” on their profile as well? Are librarians contributing to the decline in value of the real-world meaning of friend by encouraging everyone to just add them indiscriminantly, or adding people back just to be nice? What does nice mean for the future of social networking?

I was in the middle of drafting this post when I saw Kate Sheehan’s post float up as a tweet on Twitter. I commented that her paraphrase of me is spot on, as this post reflects, and further eggs me on to say that librarians need to study the fine art of anthropology when it comes to social networking. That’s the true key to user-centered design in the library world: it doesn’t start with us and our wants and needs, it starts with them. As I paraphrased David Lankes from the Saturday presentation:

As librarians, you shouldn’t “define your mission by cool features, do it by core principles,” thinking carefully about how and why people use these online spaces. We need to stop chasing all of the innovators and making second-hand copies of everything, and really create something innovative to meet our patrons needs.

I’ve been away for a few days (a fabulous little birthday/anniversary vacation in CT and NY with The Husband), and sick for about a week before that, so I haven’t really been up on the news or anything. Catching up with my work email my first day back at work (today), I saw a link to the Boston Globe article “Libraries move with times, discover niches” from Monday, October 22.

While the photo for the article highlights the latest craze in gaming, reading the article reveals the true secret to success in libraries these days: variety.

It’s not just about bringing in teens with gaming, or using the latest technology in every way, shape, and form possible.  It’s expanding into the various niches available to us in all age groups, really understanding the community, how it uses stuff, and how we can be a part of that.  It’s video collections and ILL that rival justifying the monthly cost of Netflix, it’s Playaways (we just got a bunch of these, and they’re *awesome*) that make portable audio so very easy and completely solve the iPod/not-iPod dilemma, and events at the library that really make it feel like a real night out and not like an embarrassing place to be seen.  A little something for everyone, depending on who your everyone is.  It also highlights that libraries that depended on books as their mainstay actually ended up reducing hours and closing this past year.

Sometimes I think that these things go without saying, but other times I feel like librarians need to reminded that not only is change good, it’s a necessity.  I confess that do see the changes happening, but just making the effort at change, or just making progress, sadly, isn’t good enough. We need to be in it for the long haul, and our profession and professionals need to be flexible enough to not just make changes, but to be in a state of evolution.

Librarians: What is your library doing these days to evolve?  Are there particular problems that you or your library are facing going beyond “making a change” into flexibility?  What kind of help do you forsee needing to get over the hurdles, or what tips can you share with others?  Have you done a survey lately to see what your patrons really want in the library?  What are they asking for?  How is it different from what you do now, or is it (perhaps a more subtle evolution is in store for many libraries)?

For all the patrons out there: What evolution is do you want to see in your libraries?  What are your libraries doing well, and what could use improvement?  Are the changes in your library obvious to you, and what can libraries do to make the changes more obvious to you?