LibraryTechtonics

It’s been very quiet around here, because I’ve been doing lots and lots of thinking.

Out of that thinking came a decision: I’m leaving.

So wait, what does that mean?
I’ve given a month’s notice at my library. My last day is September 5, 2008.

What are you going to be doing next?
Something different. My goal is to head towards some sort of client or project management role, in the Metro Boston area, with a preference for technology and social networking/media/software. But really, I’m open to just about anything that strikes my fancy, pays a decent wage, and excites me intellectually (I have a few irons in the fire already). In an ideal world, I’ll be back at work somewhere as early as October, since I’m looking forward to a month off before I do anything real.

But why?
After a long, hard assessment of my professional life, I’ve found that library profession is not a cultural fit for me. I’m a lifelong patron and a fan of libraries, but I’d like to be in a different work culture where people are truly, deeply tech- and geek-minded, because I miss that a lot. I’ll definitely be able to apply the valuable skills I’ve acquired from my 5+ years in the library world to future professional endeavors.

Is this a permanent goodbye to libraries?
I’m not sure yet. We’ll see.

What will happen to your blog?
I’m still thinking about that. I am interested in using it to launch a social networking experiment to help me find a job, much like this one, since this is a shift that might be interesting to carefully and diplomatically document. Other than that, I’m not sure if I’ll just keep posting to it as-is, leave it up as an archive somehow, move myself to a new domain altogether, or hand it over to someone else. Figuring it out will be its own adventure.

I’m feeling confident about my decision, and I’m looking forward to what the future will bring. I’m in a debt of gratitude to the people who helped me throughout my decision making and exit strategy formulating process, which has been many months in the making. You kids know who you are, and you rock my socks. I’m also hoping to keep in touch with the many colleagues who have become friends.

I can’t even tell you how awesome it was to spend the day at the Women Who Tech Telesummit, digitally hanging out with, talking to, and listening to some truly geektastic, strong, mighty women. You might think that just kicking back in my comfy Poang chair all day with my laptop on my lap was an easy day, but really, it was as intense as it was awesome. So many ideas flying back and forth, between what the presenters brought to the table and what the attendees were sharing amongst ourselves, it was a brainiac time.

Much of this is not new to me (you may have heard me say some of these things before here on the blog, in person, or on Twitter), although not all of it is old hat. All of it was listening to, and sharing.  I’ll try to be brief and frontload, but it won’t be easy…

• The key to all things tech right now is building relationships. You cultivate relationships with key local bloggers, organizations, and supporters of all kinds who might be interested in your message to get your word out, then maintain those relationships for continued success. This also applies to relationships with contacts on LinkedIn, “friends” on Facebook and MySpace, and anywhere else you (or your library) hangs out online. It’s not a one-way application, it’s a two-way relationship.
• Everyone has a personal brand, outside of one’s employer. Managing your personal brand means managing your career, your professional relationships (inside and outside of your profession), and your image. If you’re doing it right, you are living your brand, but you’re also still being true to yourself and who you are to get what you want, which mean picking what you do best and doing that. In one of my tweets about the session I noted that it’s no wonder that the librarian stereotype persists when we still have so many people who live the stereotype: the stereotype has become our brand, and we really need to work to change that. One way to do that is to allow the librarians in the profession who are being held back from really succeeding to flourish, and another way is to recruit people who are truer to the brand that we want to project.
• Letting go and sharing is one secret to success. The more you allow other people to, say, create and share their own applications/campaigns/online social networks in support of your organization or cause, the more your constituency and supporters will love you. It’s the way of success in the world right now, especially online.
• Participating where your voice adds value is a way to promote your brand, personal or professional, as well as keeping your brand from getting stagnant. Get outside the library blogs and hit other blogs that are related to the kind of work you do, where your comments can be heard, and post stuff. Join other groups on Facebook, hit other types of professional development workshops that can add to your repertoire but aren’t librariany.
• When it comes to social capital, research shows that women prefer the bonding capital flavor, which focuses on close-knit, safe ties in a predominantly homogeneous group. Meanwhile, men find bridging capital, which tends more towards making connections and forming relationships in many different types of groups, tastier. Hidden within bridging capital is the delicious, rich, creamy center of growth, and that’s where the magic happens. That growth leads to progress, change, great relationships, and multifaceted skills. Librarianship needs a healthy helping of bridging capital.
• The open source community of developers tends to be aggressive, confrontational, and direct, which might explain why there are so few women in the open source community overall, nevermind in the coding realm. However, don’t let this put you off; a woman’s tendency is to back off and walk away in these situations. Don’t. Get strong, stay in! And, even if you’re not a coder, there are plenty of things you can do to help the movement: write documentation (coders don’t generally like this part, and writing the docs can help you understand what’s going on), help with usability, or design, or wrangling projects, or learn to code, or whatever needs doing. It’s an excellent place for librarians to help; for example, who better to help wrangle documentation archives?
• Text messaging is apparently the next big thing in promotions and communication. It’s needs to be entirely opt-in, but being able to send messages, alerts, news, and calls to action via SMS is really, really big. It’s one of the best ways to make something go viral; just add the “forward to a friend” link to a message, and it moves along like buttah. If you’re new to the text message revolution and you want some tips and guidelines to see if it’s a good direction for you or your library, getting started, and staying sustainable, check out MobileActive.org and the Mobile Marketing Association.

It may seem like I spilled all my beans, but really, it’s just a nibble of what the day was about. I don’t want to take the fun out of listening to the *free* podcasts of the archives that will be up on the site shortly, because really, you should listen to them. All of them. I’ll be listening to all of the sessions I missed during the day, especially since it was really hard to choose one of the two sessions in each time slot. Why? Because we have a lot to learn from other industries who capitalize on the use of technology, as well as a group of women who overcome adversity everyday by being a minority in their field (I know how it is, I used to be one of them).

Want more? Check out the tweets tagged #wwt, the Women Who Tech tweeters they follow page, the Women Who Tech site (podcasts will be up soon!), and the Women Who Tech Facebook group. And, I’d love to hear what you think.

Conversants (ISSN: 1940-5022), “a limited-run, open-access journal about participatory networks,” did a soft launch on Friday, with Participatory Librarianship rock star R. David Lankes at the helm as editor. When Dave emailed me just after ALA Midwinter and asked me to write an editorial on “how library school can be better” for the new journal as a from-the-field view of what technology should be included in library school education, I was more than happy to oblige. As you’ll read, my article isn’t just about knowing about the latest social networking site, or having the latest tech toys in the library; it’s a more holistic approach to technology that keeps service and customer behaviors at the forefront.

The articles in Conversants are on the academic side, but are not limited to the academic library point of view. They raise interesting questions, and I hope they’ll promote interesting discussions about the truly conversation- and sharing-based nature of the web and emerging web technologies. The journal also sports an interesting comments format, and I’m interested to see how it works out: readers can leave comments on individual paragraphs as well as on the entire page.

It’s an innovative publication with a comparatively unique approach to the technology side of things, examining the human element more than the toys, bells, and whistles. I can only hope that smart library school professors will include this journal in their class readings, and library school curriculum developers will take notice!

In response to my posts about the geocaching program at my library, I received an email this morning from a librarian who, upon sharing the geocaching presentation with another librarian, was greeted with, “What are the literacy outcomes of geocaching?” in a sort of “don’t we have better/more important things to be worrying about?” kind of way.

Her question to me was, “How do I respond to this?”

Here is my response (with a few links added for the post), with permission from the correspondee. It’s not short, but I think it’s a quick read:

Hmmm. I’m trying to think of a concise way to respond to this comment, but it sounds like there needs to be a backstory for this person to go beyond the “books == literacy” mentality. So here’s me thinking out loud; feel free to use whatever you like in here to help your response.

Geocaching teaches problem solving skills, environmental awareness and conservation, health and exercise, treading lightly on the earth, and using the internet and gadgetry (quickly becoming an everyday fixture in people’s lives). Geocaching is *information* literacy as much as it is a fun game.

At Reading Public Library, the caches placed by the Children’s Department are part and parcel with the myriad activities offered as part of our summer reading program that make it so popular that people from surrounding towns come to register for *our* summer program instead of with their home libraries (you can check out the calendar on our site and the children’s section of the site for information about our program, which changes every year).

The caches help make kids and parents aware of town forest lands they never knew existed, gets them outside on a nice day, and gets them excited to come *back* the library to announce triumphantly, “We found it!” And, if you look at the pictures of the presentation, the kids totally dig the hands-on and toy gadgetry part of it, and it changes the image of a librarian from a funny duddy to someone they think is smart, cool, and someone they can relate to.

People see articles about geocaching in the newspaper (like, say, this very recent article in the Boston Globe
), and they want to know more. What better place to go than the library, right? Alas, most people don’t even think to call the library to borrow a free book, so the likelihood of them calling us, unless we let them know we actually know something on what appears to be a very technological topic, is minimal.

All too often, libraries are focused on, and known for, one very specific type of literacy: reading, books, education. While this does meet the needs of a specific audience that shouldn’t be ignored, it pretty much ignores the rest of the constituency, which can’t possibly find a reason to go to the library in the first place. We’re a public good for all of the public, not just the neediest.

As a case in point, I have a Question up on my Facebook account right now that asks:

Be as pie in the sky as you want: What product or service would encourage you to visit and/or use your local public library (especially if you don’t use your library now)?

I’m getting answers like “space to play D&D,” “career info,” “proximity to where I am” from the elusive 25-40 year old group. Now, granted, this isn’t a very wide sampling, but one of the things you don’t see in the answers, and something I don’t often hear from non-library friends when we chat about it, is “more books”. Most of these people buy their own books, get Netflix delivered to their door or computer, download music instead of borrowing CDs, and (used to, before I entered the profession and changed their minds) think that librarians were mean and not worth talking to.

While libraries are focusing on the traditional values, the world is passing us by. The world is *far* from traditional anymore. Grandparents send email to grandkids, kids need help finding a better supplement of information on their papers than Wikipedia, and social networking sites are binding the next generation of internet users to each other for information networking,
leaving librarians who don’t get involved knee-deep in the culture (as opposed to just, say, networking with each other) out of the loop. Bringing in the 25 to 40-somethings (and their kids, if they have them), who have the motivation to make change everywhere else in their lives, might motivate action in them to save libraries, because they’ll suddenly see that there’s a public good in it for them, too.

And, besides all this, what about fun? Can’t there just be fun at the library? Fun and games are an integral part of learning, and libraries are only just now catching on with gaming in the library, and even that’s not enough. Our loud children’s room, with it’s baskets of crayons, toys and books everywhere, DDR for little kids to learn at their own pace, story times on laps and in pajamas, movie showings, and never *ever* a quiet moment, is a testament to how fun is what really brings kids to the Reading Public Library. If they just wanted books, their parents would come in without them.

If we’re going to make that successful transition from an irrelevant institution to a place people care to save, we need to stop just warehousing books and start interacting in the new information economy. Which, heaven’s forbid, might include fun.

While I was at ALA Midwinter in Seattle, I attended the Libraries We Love reception hosted by BookExpo and Berkshire Publishing at the Seattle Public Library. I wasn’t there with anyone, it was just my tired self and my backpack, and it made for interesting mingling, between the vendor types and the librarians in clusters noshing and chatting.

It was at this party that I bumped into a candidate for ALA Council for whom you must vote. I actually met earlier at a Council meeting, and I happened to be her last signature on her petition to run for Council, so it was very cool and serendipitous.

We got to talking, and, well, she’s awesome. She’s well spoken, understands technology, is a real thinker, is very action-oriented, and has the best interests of librarians in mind. Not long after, I caught Joe Eagan working the room, a fabulous man I’d interviewed for a PLA Blog podcast, who also happens to be the guy in charge of new Council member orientation, and I introduced Amy to him, and mentioned her campaign. After some chatting about how no one gets elected their first time out on the ballot, and how it’s mostly about name recognition, Mr. Joe Awesome starts working Amy around the room, campaigning her a bit. We also managed to run into a few other people I’d met earlier in the conference, and I made a point of mentioning her run for Council, working that name recognition.

I am now all about getting Amy elected to Council. She’s young, hip, smart, and totally what Council is looking for, according to Joe (and what Council *should* be looking for). So I’m working her name recognition as much as I can.

Here’s Amy’s platform, as she tells it (it’s still a work in progress, and a great place to start):

• There are too few members attending Council sessions. I would like to foster better communication amongst members whether it be through live streaming or downloadable video and/or podcasts.
• I would like to propose that all ALA accredited institutions are required to have practicum programs in place for all MLS/MLIS students. Too many graduates are being churned out of programs without any experience. I would propose that this would be a requirement to graduate at any ALA accredited institution. This program would be requirement as part of the ALA accreditation process.
• I am also an ALA-APA committee member and would like to see ways that the ALA could create a program that would highlight what library workers do in order to demystify and enhance the status of libraries. While the ALA cannot work/lobby for library workers, stressing the importance of the people behind the libraries would hopefully help elevate what we do.

If you’ve been reading my blog a while, you can tell why this resonates so well with me. I don’t think I’ll be the only one, either.

So yes, I’m officially endorsing Amy Harmon for ALA Council! You should, too!