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.

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Post tags: departure, goodbye, librarianship, me

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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.

© Andrea for LibraryTechtonics, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: librarianship, technology, womenwhotech, wwt

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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!

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Post tags: conversants, innovate, librarianship, me, mls, social networking, technology

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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.

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Post tags: librarianship, technology, work

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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!

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Post tags: ALA, conference, librarianship

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The Listen @ Your Library ® is targeted towards audio book listeners, with particular attention to the digital aspects of audio books, and the recognition that MP3 players are so popular, with a Listen logo that resembles equalizer bars. Nice.

The new Teen Tech Week ™ campaign focuses on attracting teens to the library to use the technology resources. Thankfully, there are no terribly cheesy posters, but more hip-looking, colorful posters that focus on creating, playing, and surfing at the library, along with branded CD case and Cordman, and your standard other fair (pens, pamphlets, etc.). Currently, the Teen Tech Week poster is number 2 in the top 5 online bestsellers for the ALA online store. Kudos to YALSA on such an excellent job with the new program.

I’m impressed. The recognition of the importance of technology is really important, and a welcome attitude from ALA.

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Back in July, Lorraine, Nancy, and I participated in the Me and My Shadow program, sponsored by NMRLS (Northeast Massachusetts Regional Library System), and funded by the H.W. Wilson Library Staff Development Grant. The basic premise is a librarian exchange program, where librarians visit each other’s libraries, are given tours, and meet with their counterparts in the name of professional development.

While no one came to shadow me (in theory, everyone plays the part of shadow and host), I did visit Memorial Hall Library in Andover. As a participants in the exchange program, we were all asked to write little bits about our visits to the libraries, which are all documented on the Me and My Shadow blog.

I’m hoping that they can continue the visits somehow, even after the grant runs its course. The visits were much akin to a mini-conference in terms of meeting and learning from other librarians, with the added benefit of extra one-on-one time.

In the spirit of the program, here’s and open invitation: if anyone (librarian or not) is ever in the neighborhood of Reading, MA, and would like to drop by RPL for a tour and chat, definitely drop me a note and let me know.

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I proceded to have mixed feelings about it.

See, at my library, we don’t have fines, except for the Express items, which are free for the first two days, and $0.25/day after that. We don’t do computer sign up, because while our computers are often occupied, we’ve never had a problem with making sure everyone has a computer when they need it. Printing costs $0.10/page, but we collect that at the circulation desk, and while we’ve pondered the use of a print management system, it’s not something we could put in the budget until next fiscal year, if we wanted to pursue it. As for patron information updates, we can do those at reference or at circulation, and most people ask us to do that in passing, or by logging into their account in the catalog system.

So while I know that there are libraries that use *all* of these features, and would probably love a OneStop as an easy consolidation of tasks and processes, I couldn’t bring myself to be interested in it, even conceptually. After some pondering, I thought that maybe the infomercial aspect of the webinar really bothered me. I mean, it does make perfect sense that SirsiDynix would use a free webinar to do a little sell on one of their own solutions, given that so many of their other webinars cover other interesting topcis in librarianship, and are so generously free. And I’m sure the webinar would be immensely helpful for libraries that want more information but can’t physically go to such a presentation, even at a regional level. I think maybe it would interest me more as a comparison presentation, how the OneStop measures up to other systems like it, as a starting point to compare and contrast the solutions.

Further ponderance revealed that I was also bothered by the idea that this was touted as a tool to “empower the users with self-service.” As far as users are concerned, they are empowered with self-service without libraries or fancy library tools. Users are empowered by their own curiosity (”I wonder what happens if I click on this…” behavior), their need to just get things done (the “How do I just…?” questions we get all the time at my library’s reference desk), and their ability to perform independent online searching even on a basic, button-mashing level (”I just typed it into Google…”), and are becoming moreso all the time. They may not have the *best* information, they may not get the answer right the first time on their own, but they are more than able and *willing* to make a go at serving themselves.

I’m not sure how much libraries can empower users if we can’t get ahead of the societal learning and knowledge curve, as well as the societal innovation curve (not just in technology, but in the way people think about processes and their philosophies on what constitutes “customer service.” Libraries have spent a history telling people how to do things and how things are generally done (the process and usability nightmare that is the philosophy of library cataloging is a case in point), as opposed to asking them what they want or following how the way people are doing things changes, and changing with them, so the concept of patron empowerment, to me, is more of a necessary philosophy change profession-wide, and not a hardware fix like a self-service kiosk.

Don’t get me wrong, I know where SirsiDynix is coming from. I know their just promoting the OneStop as a tool that lets patrons help themselves. It’s catchy, and strong, and effective, and evokes positive feelings of productivity. But in a profession where libraries have been captive (or have let themselves *be* captive) to vendor ideas and methods, it just makes me think that it’s not acceptable to let little bits of marketing like that go unnoticed.

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I remember sometime back going to a session about online card sign ups at a conference, but I’m guessing things have changed a bit. A quick web search of libraries that offer this service fall into several broad categories:

* Fill out the form online, show proper ID at the library, pick up your card

* Fill out the form online, get a temporary card number, show proper ID and pick up you card or have it mailed

* Fill otu the form online, get a temporary card number, pick up the card or have it mailed (no ID necessary)

I know that the Williamsburg Regional Library somehow manages their online card sign up process through their Horizon catalog, which is interesting because I haven’t seen it before. You can obtain a temporary number (there seems to be no geographic limiter, I registered under my home address) that allows you to place up to 5 requests until you pick up your permanent card. I could use some, but not all, of the library databases with the temporary number. I’m not sure that this is possible through Millenium, I need to do a bit more homework.

Most of the other applications do have some level of geographic limiting to them, so I didn’t want to fill out too many forms with junk information just to see what would happen (at least, not without permission first). I’m most interested in the systems where a temporary library card number with an expiration date is issued, and the real card is issued later somehow (mail, pick up, or both). If your library does this sort of thing, could you leave me a comment or send me an email with your experiences?

© Andrea for LibraryTechtonics, 2006. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: librarianship, technology

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One of the niftiest parts of talking to Jeanne about library stuff is that we share a specific flavor of technology experience, one that includes coding and shell access and database planning and information architecture and all sorts of dirty techie fun. In a lot of ways, being techies in our first lives then librarians in our second lives gives us a sort of enhanced uberpatron outside-looking-in approach to librarianship, as well as steeped-in-culture view. We see inherent possibilities where librarians of other specialties may not because of the way our brains are programmed to think, as well as because we love libraries so much that we don’t want to see them go into the ground like a freakin’ dart.

I had the privilege of hanging out with my friend Jeanne this past weekend, and boy did we *talk*. Thinking back on our conversations over the past few days, I see a few of the stumbling blocks I’ve been experiencing lately in my blogging in a new and different light. I feel like I don’t know my readership well enough, and since not everyone moves at the speed of technology, so it’s hard to figure out whether or not it’s “too late” to post something due to lack of relevance, or whether or not it’s something that everyone already knows, where I’d be beating a dead horse. I know I’m good at piecing things into bite-sized chunks (or so my patron/students insist), but I don’t feel like I have a good enough sense of what constitutes bite-sized for my readers. I’m not trying to make or shape a readership niche, I’m trying to understand better my readership niche.

Jeanne gave me lots of great feedback and ideas. I realized that it was feedback that I craved, and now I have a really firm, new sense of going in the right direction. I’m definitely going to incorporate some of her suggestions, schemes, and comments in my bloggage (and she gets full credit for being the greatest librarian muse *evar*), but because it’s all so big and wonderful, I need to make bite-sized chunks of my own to get it going, but I definitely won’t be afraid to go beta and just start tossing it out there. And, any feedback you might have is heartily encouraged and appreciated.

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Post tags: librarianship

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