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What Can We Stop Doing by Merilee Profit in Hanging Together – This is fairly old, but is something I’ve wanted to blog about for a long time and have realized that it’s never going to happen. Unless you have an influx of new money and people, in order to undertake new initiatives, you have to give up something. I really loved the quote in it from the President of the Getty Museum “‘If no programs are allowed to ever die, in the end you become captive to decisions from the past… Every now and then . . . you’ve got to step back and say, ‘Certain things have been very successful, but we should sunset them now.’” I think that the unwillingness to stop doing things is largely behind the failure of a lot of Web 2.0 initiatives, as people simply aren’t given dedicated time to make them successful.

Introduction to Online Pedagogy – This is a self-paced course designed by the WISE Consortium (a consortium of library schools that teach online and allow students to take classes at the other universities — SJSU is a member). It’s designed to prepare LIS faculty to design and teach effective online courses. Useful for anyone designing online instruction.

Customizable Library Portal Pages by Aaron Tay in Musings about Librarianship – Again, not a brand-new blog post, but Aaron showcases some libraries that are WAY ahead of the curve in developing customizable library home pages. I strongly feel that this is the future of the library website — users should be able to design their own library website experience based on what they actually need/want to use. After talking with our Systems Librarian about this idea, he started playing with Drupal to see how he could create a customizable library homepage. He’s still in the very early stages, but it’s already looking promising. Thanks for the nudge, Aaron!

So You Want to do Anthropology at Your Library? or A Practical Guide to Ethnographic Research in Academic Libraries by Andrew Asher and Susan Miller. Asher and Miller were the anthropologists involved in the ERIAL ethnographic study conducted jointly by five Illinois universities. They created this amazing PDF guide for libraries (like mine) that want to undertake similar research. Such great practical advice in here!!!

Patron Driven eBook Acquisition: Crab Legs vs. Spinach by Eric Hellman at Go To Hellman – A thoughtful post about patron-driven electronic acquisition, a topic near and dear to my heart these days as we prepare to go live with eBook Library in a few weeks. The post also contains some really useful links at the end if you’re interested in the topic. As we are a teaching university and our focus is on building a collection out students and faculty WILL USE, I am looking forward to seeing how we can make patron-driven acquisition a larger part of our overall book purchasing.

Making the case for a fully mobile library web site: from floor maps to the catalog by Laurie Bridges, Hannah Gascho Rempel, and Kimberly Griggs in Reference Services Review. This issue of Reference Services Review is all about mobile library services (with lots of awesome, awesome, awesome articles!), so if you are interested in the topic, I’d highly suggest reading the whole shebang. This article from librarians at Oregon State is a perfect read if you are looking to make the case to the powers-that-be that you absolutely should be mobilizing your library website.

Does Where You Work Define Who You Are As An Academic Librarian by Steven Bell at ACRLog – while I actually liked the title and the comments more than the post itself (not that the post was bad by any stretch!), it asks a very interesting question: Does where you work define who you are as a librarian? My answer? YES!!! To me, it’s less about prestige and more about the size and structure of the library. I think where you work early in your career can have a tremendous impact on your career path and on your work personality. I have gotten so accustomed to working in a small place with a very risk-tolerant and change-oriented director where we can move quickly on just about any project, that when I was offered a position at a pretigious ARL library, I turned it down because I knew I’d be miserable dealing with bureaucracy and moving SO SLOWLY on things (not that all ARLs are like that, but I knew this particular position would have sapped my passion and energy). After working at a small place, I really like to wear a lot of hats and work on a lot of different projects. This place really does suit my personality, but I often wonder how different I would be had I first worked at a large ARL with a lot of bureaucracy and a tenure track for librarians. I’ve had so much FREEDOM and CHOICE here and now I feel spoiled by it.

e-texts and (library) accessibility by Char Booth at info-mational – accessibility is a topic that I think most librarians and educators would rather not think about because it ’s just another thing we have to assess when considering new technologies and services. But try to imagine the person who can’t watch your screencast, can’t use your Meebo widget, and can’t use the Kindle you’re lending out. I’d much rather make text transcripts of my video lectures than potentially marginalize one of my students. This thoughtful post provides great insight into accessible (an inaccessible) design in the digital world and I can’t wait to see the e-text usability/accessibility rubric for librarians that Lucy and Char are going to create. Char is truly a force of nature, churning out one useful article, book, guide (PDF), report, etc. at a dizzying pace. She totally inspires me!

That’s why I find that some of the worst places for comments tend to be old-line media sites. In my opinion, the old-line media is really still stuck on the idea that it’s asymmetrical and that when people respond, it’s in the old “letters to the editor” sense. For a long time, they didn’t get and they still don’t get that instantaneous communication, if left unchecked or unmoderated, will quickly go down to a lowest common denominator of people yelling at each other. If you go to a newspaper site and look at the comments on any kind of article there, it’s usually toxic spew followed by toxic spew.

My experience with newspaper comments totally jives with Scalzi’s, but I think worse than not moderating comments is deleting comments in an effort to silence discussion on a specific topic. We had a big fire downtown on Memorial Day in a 100-year-old building. When I heard that the Mayor (who is also a prominent businessman) had recently bought the building, I jokingly said “must be arson!” Turns out, I was right. My local paper, the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus reported the story (and here) and, as always, had comments open on it. Discussions in the comments section of Times Argus articles tend to be very polarized and full of vitriol. I honestly don’t know why most of the people bother to comment at all, since it’s not like they’re dealing with reasonable individuals. Not surprisingly, a few people commented on the story and suggested that the Mayor had the building burned down. Others defended him.

All of a sudden, the comments disappeared and there was no space where people could post comments anymore. You could see on the front page that it was one of the most discussed stories, with 19 comments (the other had 17), but those comments had disappeared, replaced by nothing. No note explaining why they did it. The comments were just gone.

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I’ve seen some of the most horrible comments on this newspaper website. People blaming a mother whose three-year-old was hit by a car. People writing offensive things about gays and lesbians. People saying awful stuff about a teenager who’d just died in a car accident. None of those conversations were moderated in the least. In fact, I’ve never seen anything deleted from the comments. But now, instead of moderating a conversation about a fire that destroyed a local landmark, they simply make all of the comments (some completely innocuous) disappear. This is not how you treat your readers, especially your “super users” who probably visit the site many times each day. I can understand moderating comments that suggest that the mayor might have been involved in criminal dealings and lack any proof, but there were plenty of comments that suggested nothing of the kind. Also, if you get rid of any comments, you should be transparent about it — make it clear that you did it and (ideally) explain why. This isn’t moderation for the sake of creating a safe and welcoming community space (which should always be the primary purpose of moderation); this is censorship to stifle conversation about a topic they don’t want conversation on. I ends up looking like they have zero respect for their readers and that they’re simply paying lip service to social media. And I doubt that’s too far off from the reality.

This is a good lesson for anyone who runs an online community. Moderating comments is ok. In fact, it’s critical to moderate comments in order to create the sort of environment where everyone feels comfortable posting comments. But you want to be consistent. You don’t want to let offensive comments go on one post and then delete them from another. And you definitely want to keep comments open on everything, not just those things you’re comfortable having people discuss. When you do delete something, you want to explain why you did so — transparency is critical. While you might be the moderator, you’re not the boss. In fact, you exist to serve the community. You need to make participants feel like it’s their community; you need to show respect for them and keep the lines of communication open. Respect your users and they will respect the community. You might own the site and be paying for the server space, but if you treat it like it’s your community, you will never create the successful community you want.

This semester I got a lot of comments from students about their engagement level in this class versus other online classes they’ve taken. I thought I’d share some of them here for those who might be trying to figure out how the can better design their own online class/program:

“I wouldn’t have believed I could connect as well as I have with my online classmates as I did for this class… I feel that we all had the encouragement and opportunity to think critically and in depth about these technologies and their implementation in and ramifications for libraries.”

“The blog format feels less stilted than a traditional threaded conversation, and the comments list and the tweet list were wonderful additions that made the task of finding recent contributions very easy. ”

“Perhaps the most surprising thing about this class is how much of a personal feel it had. I felt familiar with everyone in a way that I don’t usually feel in online classes. A number of things contributed to this: subject matter, clear and organized Drupal classroom, engaged instructor, and awesome people who jumped right in to the discussions.”

“I loved using Drupal because it feels more personal, especially since everyone has a picture next to their posts. I felt like I was able to show more of my personality through and I feel closer to my classmates than I ever have in an Angel class. It’s closer to a real classroom experience, with the added bonus that we can all say as much as we want without running out of class time. I also thought it was really cool that a few people we mentioned in blogs dropped by our classroom site to see what was going on and to make comments. It felt like we were part of something bigger than just an ordinary class.”

“I have had a great time in this class, and I attribute a great deal of that to the interactive activity encouraged by the class blog, an active and engaged instructor, and the ability to learn from the experiences and insights of my classmates. Since I have been lucky enough to have had similar experiences in SLIS classes where we did use Angel or Blackboard, I’m a firm believer that it is not so much which technology the class uses, but how that techology is used, which makes for a good class experience.”

“It is amazing how just having an image attached to someone’s words makes them more identifiable and fosters a feeling of connectedness that I find mostly lost on Angel. The blog format makes it so easy to follow specific class members and review new posts in threads.”

“Holding class with Drupal instead of Angel had the feel of getting out of the classroom, like holding class out on the lawn during nice weather. It gave posting a little more of an informal feel… I think the biggest difference was the use of avatars. I think it’s easier to associate a poster’s voice with an avatar picture than with just a name. I found that I got to know the voices of more of my classmates and know them faster in this class than in my class that used Angel.”

“Our instructor was more involved in class discussions than any I have had so far. My classmates were more engaged, and everyone’s writing was thoughtful and thought-provoking. I loved the resource-sharing requirement, because I got just as much from that (our “hive mind”) as from our assigned readings. And, of course, the “classroom” itself was very well-designed. I think the designers of learning management systems like ANGEL and Blackboard could really learn a lot from instructors designing their own class sites on platforms like Drupal.”

“Drupal rocks, if every teacher used Drupal the program would be 1000X better. First and foremost I felt like I actually had an idea of who my classmates where. Second the blog format was a lot easy to track than the pain of Angel. Also the class material was organized really well, though that might be more Meredith than Drupal.”

It’s really flattering to hear that students got a lot out of the class, but also troubling that they’ve have had such lukewarm experiences in other online classes. So many stated that they’d never had the level of interaction with their peers or with their professor in other classes. That makes me sad, because I’d had the same experience myself in library school (with one class being the exception), and my main impetus for teaching was to design the sort of course I’d have wanted to take. I don’t feel like what I’ve done as an instructor was particularly extraordinary, and while I did probably do more work on the front-end to create the Drupal classroom and organize the content, I feel like this is something most people could replicate (even in some traditional course management systems). It’s not just about the technology. It’s about organizing the classroom in a way that’s inviting for students, where content is easy to find, and where conversations are easy to follow. It’s also about taking a constructivist approach to learning — playing the role of facilitator and supporter in the classroom rather than the sage on the stage. It’s about taking part in online conversations; not as “the authority,” but as a fellow learner. It’s about providing real constructive comments on students’ work in order to help them do better next time. It’s about having a passion for the subject matter and trying to instill that same passion in your students. It’s about making students feel like they’re part of a professional dialogue through reading current literature and taking part in conversations going on in the profession right now. Yes, it’s more work to make all this happen, but that’s our job. If we aren’t making students excited about being a part of the profession, we shouldn’t be teaching.

It’s frustrating to know that the tools and teaching techniques are out there to make the online education experience a positive one for students and so many faculty simply aren’t taking advantage. I know some faculty feel too busy to learn new tech or rethink how they teach and others just aren’t that tech-savvy. Still, I think a lot of faculty have simply come to accept that distance learning can’t come close to providing the sort of engagement and interaction you find in many face to face classes. One of my students put it so well in a comment:

It seems like the root of the problem lies not in the technology (ANGEL isn’t that great, but can still be used effectively) but in the assumption (however subconscious) that the online classroom is somehow subpar in comparison to face-to-face learning. And because of that, sometimes instructors and students bring less to the table, just assuming from the beginning that it can’t be as engaging. It’s just not true! This class was among the best classes I’ve taken, both on- and offline, so obviously online classes can be engaging and successful. It’s just a matter of understanding not only the limitations but also the opportunities.

I completely agree with his sentiment. It’s quite possible to make an online course an amazing experience, but too many faculty simply try to create an online version of a physical class. And what they usually end up with is a sterile, boring environment because they’re not taking advantage of what online tools can offer that you can’t get in a face-to-face environment. It reminds me of eBooks. The eBook market has been so focused on putting print books online and creating a good reading experience. When I first saw interactive books on the iPad I thought, this is what it’s all about. It’s just not about recreating the reading experience online, but about taking advantage of what’s possible in the online medium (interactivity, social reading and commenting, etc.) and transforming the reading experience. Reading an eBook is not going to be the same as reading a physical book, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a great experience. The same goes for online learning. We need to stop trying to recreate the face-to-face classroom and start rethinking what the learning experience should be like online. What would online learning look like if there never was face-to-face learning?

I know there are a lot of educators out there who are doing amazing things online, and it gives me hope. But there are too many instructors who aren’t willing to put in the time and effort necessary to do anything more than put their content and expertise into their classroom. Distance learning is not just a fad or something for a small portion of the population who can’t or won’t attend face-to-face classes. This is a major trend in education and the number of people taking advantage of online learning is growing exponentially. We absolutely need to be putting time, money and effort towards rethinking education in an online context and building our courses based on best practices for teaching online. Doing anything less is an insult to your students and a disservice to the profession, since we should be doing everything we can to help develop passionate and engaged librarians.

Ok, I’ll get off my soapbox now.

In a tight market like this, having a good cover letter and resume can mean the difference between getting a phone interview and ending up in the round file. I have served on four search committees in my five years at Norwich and chaired two of them. I learned so much from being on the other side of the job search experience that I wish I’d known when I was looking for a job. I made so many rookie mistakes when I was looking for my first professional position; mistakes that I’ve seen made time and time again when looking through other people’s cover letters and resumes. I’m writing out these tips in the hopes that others can avoid those mistakes when they’re applying for jobs. Keep in mind that these tips are just from my point of view and others may disagree with them, but they were definitely things that made me and my fellow committee members more or less likely to give the applicant further consideration.

Also, for those looking for information on professional online networking and using social media for career advancement, I’ve written three columns on the topic for American Libraries Magazine: “Your Virtual Brand”, “Finding Your Voice”, and “Dipping into the Stream.”

DO’s

• This first one can’t be stresesed enough — tailor your cover letter to the job you’re applying for. Most importantly, address the specific requirements in the job ad. You may be particularly proud of how you designed your library’s intranet, but if the job you’re applying for has nothing to do with any of the skills you exhibited during that project, it’s not worth detailing in the cover letter. In all of the committees I was on, we’d go through each cover letter and resume with a list of required and preferred qualifications and would see which ones the applicant addressed. If they didn’t show evidence of one of the required qualifications, they’d be out of the running. Period.
• Tailor your resume to some extent to the job you’re applying for. Highlight things that you’ve done or skills that you have that are on the list of required’s and preferred’s for that job.
• Tell me why you want to work here and why you want this job. When I see a cover letter from someone who clearly wants the job they’re applying for (as opposed to wanting a job), I am much more likely to want to interview them. When we were hiring for a distance learning librarian, I gave the most weight to people whose letters made it seem like they really wanted to be a distance learning librarian.
• Learn about the organization. This is important early on, but is especially important when you get to the interview. I remember having a candidate who asked me what my job was at the library and then talked about how we should do IM reference with a Meebo widget when we had one right on the front page of our website. I figure if they are too lazy to research the library and the search committee members, they are going to apply themselves similarly to their day-to-day work.
• Include experience outside of libraries that might be relevant (school, other jobs, etc.). I always made an effort to describe how the skills I’d developed as a psychotherapist were relevant to reference and instruction work. If you’re applying for a library job where you’re working with the public, retail experience is a great asset.
• Include any extra-curricular professional activities you’ve engaged in, such as speaking gigs, committee memberships, articles written, etc. Personally, I am jazzed when I see a new grad or soon-to-be-grad who has published, presented or otherwise contributed to the profession beyond their library schoolwork. It tells me that they have a passion for going above and beyond and that they’ll probably do that in this job as well. I want to hire someone who sees this as more than just a job; passion is a real asset in an employee.
• Express enthusiasm and confidence. Write your cover letter as if you know you’re the right person for the job (though don’t be full of yourself either!).
• Read the application requirements carefully. We once required that applicants send us a link to at least one example of a website they created. Many people didn’t send us anything, which meant we wouldn’t consider them no matter how great they sounded otherwise, since web design skills were a required qualification. It’s never a bad idea to take screenshots of web design work you’ve done, just in case it gets replaced in the future.
• Unless the reason is particularly sensitive, do explain gaps in your resume. Whatever the search committee will imagine is probably worse than your actual reason.
• If you have job hopped a lot, explain why, and for the same reason as above.
• If you currently work in a different library type (or have only taken coursework towards working in a different area) address why you are now applying for this job. We got a lot of applications for a distance learning librarian position from folks who were catalogers, were members of the Society of American Archivists, etc. Had they said “I’m really interested in getting more experience in online instruction” or something similar we would have given them greater consideration. Otherwise, it just looks like they don’t really want to work in that area and will bolt the minute something comes available that they do want.
• If there’s a reason why you want the job beyond the position itself (like you want to relocate to the area, you have ties to the area, etc.) do state that. It can let people know that you’re seriously interested in relocating. Just make sure it doesn’t sound like it’s your only reason for applying.
• Read over your cover letter and imagine what impression the search committee would get of you if that’s all they read. It should tell them without looking at your resume how you are qualified for the job.

DON’Ts

• Apply for a job you know you wouldn’t want (whether because of location, duties, hours, etc.) You’re not only wasting your time, but you’re wasting the time of the people who are reading your resume and interviewing you). And definitely make sure you are really interested in a job before you go for an in-person interview (especially if it requires travel funding). You don’t want to make enemies early in your career by wasting the search committee’s time (and the library’s money… especially during these lean years). There’s nothing wrong with realizing after interviewing that a place isn’t a good fit, but if you’re interviewing in a big city you’d never want to live in or for a job you’d never want, you’re wasting people’s time.
• Send a generic cover letter. Passing off a generic cover letter makes you look like you don’t want the job that much. And usually, it’s pretty darn obvious that a cover letter is the same one you’ve used to apply for 10 other jobs.
• Just list everything you’ve done in your cover letter. Specifically address what the search committee cares about — the required and preferred qualifications.
• If you’re applying for a job that requires technical skills, be honest about your level of skill. A small stretching of the truth is ok, but if it’s a big stretch, it’s likely that you’ll be found out. I remember one candidate talking about their amazing web programming skills, and one look at the websites they’d designed told me that they were grossly overstating their skills.
• Talk about your personal hobbies. I can’t tell you how many resumes I’ve seen that talk about people’s interests in gardening and genealogy, their involvement in the Boy Scouts, or their passion for yoga. All very nice, but unless these somehow relate to the job requirements, they don’t belong in a professional resume.
• Have a generic “objective” on your resume I personally never put an objective on my resume, but if you’re going to, make it meaningful or leave it off. I love ones that say things like to obtain a position where I can apply my knowledge, experience and education in the field of librarianship. How is this useful???
• Write well, but don’t use lots of big words to impress. Usually it’s pretty obvious and many applicants actually use those words incorrectly. I have seen this happen way too many times and it makes the candidate look dumber than if they’d just used terms they’re really familiar with.
• Apply for a job that requires an MLIS if you don’t have one or aren’t close to getting one. A few months away is usually ok, but if you’re just starting an MLIS program, don’t bother.
• Maybe it’s just me, but I hate when people write things like “My background and accomplishments seem to be a good match for your needs”. I’m not just looking for someone who has the qualifications I need; I’m looking for someone who really wants the job.
• Just list the positions you’ve had in your resume – also describe your duties and (in the cover letter) the skills that you gained in those jobs that will benefit you in the position(s) you now want.
• Unless the job requires specific subject expertise, I don’t want to see a list of the databases you’ve used. If you have general reference experience in an academic library, I’ll assume that you are competent at searching most databases and can learn the ones you’re not familiar with.
• List your GPA unless something in the job description asks you to address academic achievement.
• Make your cover letter over 1 1/3 pages and under 1/2 page. Personally, I prefer a cover letter that is exactly one page long.
• Just tell us generic things like you’re “detail oriented” or “innovative” — illustrate it in some way with things you’ve done.

Any tips you’d offer to folks looking for a position in libraries? Any egregious mistakes you’ve seen (or have made) along the way that you’d like to share?

I loved this comment he made early in the talk, “if you don’t promote yourself, you’re doomed to defend yourself.” Libraries suffer from the curse of high satisfaction. We do a great job, but as a result, no one talks about us, complains about us, or asks the powers-that-be for us to get more resources. Libraries don’t get rewarded for outstanding performance or even for poor performance. Libraries tend to be bad at presenting our data in a way that is persuasive. We need to look at how to present our data to the powers-that-be to get what we want and need. It’s not just about showing that demand went up, it’s about tying it to things that are important to the powers-that-be.

Leadership is about social influence rather than hierarchy. We all need to be leaders. Leadership is about building trust, building social capital and listening to others more than speaking. I really agreed with Ken when he mentioned that he prefers informal mentoring to having a formal mentor role. You should seek out people whom you admire to be your “board of directors” and be the CEO of your own life. You don’t have to ask them to be mentors; just get their thoughts on decisions you need to make. These people may not even realize they’re your mentors. This is exactly what I’ve done in my career – I haven’t asked people to be my mentors, but there are a number of people whom I consider mentors in light of the wisdom they have offered me over the years.

I also loved when Ken said that arguing for libraries on the basis of the public good is “so last century.” We need to argue for public value – what real value to we provide our patrons?

Ken talked a lot about advocacy. Public relations is all about us (“here’s what we do!”), but advocacy is all about our users. We need to learn what our users need and then give them what they want. Advocacy is planned, deliberate, sustained effort to develop understanding and support incrementally over time. Advocacy is really about respect and connecting agendas. We can’t just come to the door of the powers-that-be with our hand out. “You can’t make a withdrawal before you make a deposit.” We need to build relationships and connect with the values of the people we want to influence. We need to be at the table when the problem of the larger organization (University, municipal authority, state, etc.) is defined and offer solutions from a library perspective. This totally meshes with my thoughts on the promotion of information literacy – that it’s so much more persuasive when it’s tied to already existing university goals and initiatives. Ken recommended a book called “Yes…” that is definitely on my to-read list now.

One interesting tip that Ken gave is about personalizing the things – that a handwritten note on a report is going to get more attention on the report than if it just comes to them via email or something. I plan to start doing this for important things I want to make sure people read and respond to.

The last talk I went to was on Staff Development: Soft Skills, Firm Results, given by three of my favorite librarians: Janie Hermann of the Princeton Public Library and Mary Carmen Chimato and Colleen Harris of NCSU. The Princeton Public Library had never done a staff development day for the entire staff, but when they moved into their new building, it became necessary because people were on different floors and were more separated physically. They began to feel out of touch. PPL doesn’t have a full-time staff training coordinator – it’s sort of an “other duties as assigned” thing for a few librarians at PPL. This sounds familiar. They decided to do a library camp. They asked people to suggest ideas for birds of a feather sessions and had people vote on the sessions they wanted. They then picked the ones that got the most votes for that day’s discussions. They also had lightning talks. I love the idea of doing a Library Camp for a staff day and I really would love to create a Library Camp in Vermont.

Mary Carmen and Colleen (who run the Access Delivery Services department at NCSU) talked more about the how to develop shared values among staff (or “organizational clarity”) and how to correct staff behavior when norms were violated. The Access Delivery Services staff had a retreat to determine fundamentally what they do, how it fits into the larger library system, group norms, and what staff want from management. They found that staff wanted more communication, more responsibility, more risk taking, more “being given projects and told to run with them”, higher expectations for them, training and development, and recognition for their achievements. This jives with what I’ve read about what workers want. People don’t just want recognition, but they want to be trusted and given responsibilities and freedom to do things on their own. Having that freedom is a key component to feeling valued, because people who are micromanaged do not feel like their bosses think they’re capable of doing things without that level of supervision.

Staff also looked at what great customer service looks like, and determined some metrics for measuring customer service. Metrics included error rates, satisfaction surveys, compliments vs. complaints, service desk demeanor, and the claims returned rate. I think it’s important that customer service is not just thought of as “being nice” because you can be the sweetest person in the world and do a really crappy job, not help the customer properly, etc. I like that they are really thinking about how customer service is measured and making sure those measures are meaningful.

They then talked about how to deal with staff who are not meeting expectations. As managers we’re going to come up against the fact that not everyone is going to be able to learn what they need to keep up with the changing work of libraries. Sometimes the issue is that they have no interest in learning and changing and sometimes the issue is about ability. Punishment is not the answer with staff issues because there is too much uncertainty and inconsistency with that. You don’t want people to feel like they’re a target.

There are two reasons for a performance problem – lack of knowledge or lack of execution. With execution issues: make sure expectations are clarified (can your staff explain what you expect?), what obstacles your staff have, that you’re giving your staff regular feedback, and that you’ve arranged appropriate consequences. These discussions should be serious and planned and have a very specific goal. Be specific about the issue and make sure you know what the problem or problems are. Tell them what the desired performance is vs. what they’re giving you. Finally, gain agreement and determine consequences – they need to know what will happen if they don’t shape up (disciplinary or discuss). End on a positive expectation of change and follow up in writing.

After this session, I had to leave for the airport. This was my first trip away from Reed since he was born, and I wanted to spend as little time away from him as possible. I got home an hour and a half before Reed went to bed, so got to spend some cuddling and play time. While I had such a fantastic time at this conference, I am much happier to be home with Adam and Reed. I feel lucky to have the opportunity to be a mother and still be able to have my professional life and enjoy networking with amazing librarians. I also feel lucky to work in a profession with such passionate, caring and helpful people. Most of the people presenting at CIL weren’t doing it to get tenure; they speak because they genuinely care about sharing information with others. What generosity! Add to that the fact that most of the people I knew at CIL were wicked fun, and this made for a brilliant conference. Good people, good sessions, decent wifi, good food… a great first conference away from my family.

I try to never miss a talk that Rebecca Jones gives, and, as usual, I was not disappointed by the talk that she and Deb Wallace of Harvard Business School’s Baker Library gave on Critical Thinking: Getting to the Right Decision. Rebecca started with the seemingly obvious point that if you’re not willing or ready to change, don’t bother doing strategic planning. While I’d like to believe this is obvious, I know of libraries that have done strategic planning with no intention of changing in any meaningful way. Rebecca stated that critical thinking is not about being critical; it’s about decision-making. You have to challenge base assumptions. When people have to make decisions, they tend to do one of two things – they oversimplify the issue or they get overwhelmed by the decision and are like a deer in the headlights. To employ critical thinking, people must demonstrate clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, use sound evidence, have good reasons behind our decisions, be fair, and open-minded.

We need to be clear on the fact that when we are challenging assumptions we are challenging a situation, not people, but people may feel challenged by it. When making decisions, we need to look at our assumptions and how our views of things are colored by time/perspective/others. We need to look at statistics and trends with clarity and try to think about what they’re really telling us, rather than looking at them through the colored lens we usually employ to examine such things. I really like what Rebecca said about sunk costs and how people often stick with something that’s not working because they already invested so much in it. “When you find yourself in a hole, the worst thing you could do is keep digging.”

Deb works at the Baker Library of Harvard Business School, which is an iconic structure, but they’re trying hard not to be identified only as a building. They have an important role in educating leaders who make a difference in the world. Over the past few years, they have worked hard to connect all staff to the bigger picture of the library and how it can move forward, which was difficult with some staff who had rote tasks and were not really in the habit of thinking that way. They wanted people to look at the library with new eyes and ask themselves if they’re anchored in stuff that was done a specific way 35 years ago. When you erase the status quo, people actually have to exercise judgment, which can be scary for some.

Deb said a lot of profound things, but there was one thing that really stuck with me as the Head of Instruction. She talked about making clear the distinct capabilities we bring to the table that the faculty don’t have. The different roles should be clear to avoid butting heads when we collaborate. This has been a big issue at our library as we try to ensure that every freshman gets basic information literacy instruction. While we’d like to standardize this and do it through the library, some English faculty are really against this, arguing that it’s their role to teach information literacy (though some don’t do it or at least don’t do it well). So I’m really struggling to define what we offer that’s unique in this realm, when faculty can (and in some cases do) teach information literacy as well.

In the afternoon, I gave a talk with Joan Petit on Virtual Learning & Training: From Classrooms to Communities. I talked about how I use Drupal for my online class in SJSU’s SLIS program to make class more engaging, encourage reflective learning, and create a more constructivist learning environment. Joan talked about how she used blogs in a face-to-face information literacy class to extend learning and make the class more engaging. Joan was a last minute addition to the lineup as my original co-presenter realized on Friday that she couldn’t make it to the conference. In light of that, it was even more amazing what a great job she did. It was such an interesting session and we got a lot of good questions from the attendees. My slides are below and links to my classes also can be found on my presentation wiki.

I was so energized by the ladies from UNC Greensboro (Beth Filar Williams, Lynda Kellam, Amy Harris, Hannah Winkler) who presented on Instructional Technology: It’s a Team Thing (a much more detailed blog post on this session can be found on Heather Braum’s blog). Before the four women came together, instructional technologies at the library were not used systematically, and it was dependent on the individual instructor. One of them was tasked by her supervisor with trying to standardize the use of instructional tech to a greater extent. To that end, she asked interested members of the library staff to meet with her about instructional tech, and from that group, she assembled a team of four librarians to be the instructional technology team. They each have different skills/strengths and really complement each other. They brainstormed ideas for tech to implement, and broke them down into high impact/low effort, high effort/high impact, etc. to figure out what would net the most impact with the least effort. Those were the things they decided to try first. I was really impressed by how organized their meetings were, with very detailed agendas (with what/who, details, and time allotted for each topic). It’s something we really don’t do at my library and as a result, we often end up with overlong rambly meetings that veer off on various tangents. At the meetings I run, I think I’m going to start organizing meetings the way they do.

In April 2009, UNCG had a big budget freeze and had no money for anything, so they had to reprioritize what they wanted to do. They created tutorials, an assignment calculator, and several other things that they could do for free. Later on, when they had money, they could get things like clickers and a video camera and boom mic. These are all things I’d really like for my library too. The women also started a team blog to communicate amongst themselves and with the other staff members about what they’re working on.

In addition to their internal group, they also started an instructional technology group with librarians from other local academic institutions. This is something I’d really like to do in Vermont (or at least central VT). It’s so easy to develop tunnel vision or groupthink when you’re talking to the same people everyday. It’s really nice to get out of your little box and talk to other librarians on a semi-regular basis.

Stay tuned for Day 3!

I did not take my computer with me to sessions and did not use my iPhone to Tweet much. I instead took a notepad and pen and wrote down things that I found particularly interesting. My notes are not a play-by-play, but are the things I got out of the conference or the thoughts I had about a session that really meant something to me. I’m happy I was less connected during the sessions, since I feel like people can get really distracted when they’re tweeting and following tweets. I wanted to get as much out of this conference as I could, especially since I’m not traveling as much as I used to. It’s funny how most people have become more and more connected to social technologies at conferences and I am trying to be less connected. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but I think I found a perfect balance for me at conferences.

Like all ITI conferences, Computers in Libraries started with Lee Rainie’s keynote where he shared lots of statistics on how people use the Web today. While I love the work that Lee Rainie and the Pew Internet and American Life Project do, I have become a little cynical about the statistics he offers us in his keynotes, because I think a lot of librarians use statistics like these and from other think-tanks and organizations in place of actual research on their own user population. That’s great that so many people are using social tech, but how many of those people are library users? And how many of them are MY library users? Every library really needs to determine the technology use and behaviors of their own patrons, because your patron population is unique, and assuming that what is the case in one place is the case in your community is a huge mistake.

One thing I really enjoyed in Rainie’s keynote was the story he told about a vodcast created by a teenager and her mother where they discussed reality shows they watched together. It ended up becoming a very successful video series, with thousands of subscribers and even more people watching individual videos. The teenage girl ended up using the video to get accepted to a prestigious media studies program at NYU. I love examples like this, because they illustrate how people can build a brand online (while having fun!) that can help them to further their career. Rainie called it “building reputational capital” and this is truly an important currency these days.

I went to Chad Mairn’s talk on Information Fluency Strategies and Practices and got a lot of little insights and some technology ideas I’d not thought of before. I totally agree with him that students will not learn something well unless you have them do it yourself (rather than just demonstrating it to them). I had not heard before of TRAILS (Tool for Real-Time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills), which is an assessment for 9th grade students, but apparently also works well for college Freshman. I also loved the activity that he did where he had students use Diigo to bookmark articles and then highlight and annotate parts of the article to determine the main ideas of the article. The ability to distill meaning from an article/book/website is a critical information literacy skill that is too often ignored in IL instruction.

Chad also creates course pages in Facebook and uses static FBML to customize them. I really like this idea. He also uses an app called Vivox in Facebook to actually have audio conferencing with his students. I wonder if any other librarians are using Facebook for course-specific (or even program-specific) outreach. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to creating a Facebook page for myself as liaison to the social sciences, so this is something I’m really interested in.

Chad also suggests that instructors can use Yuuguu or LogMeIn Express to have students demo things through screensharing/screen control, or the librarian can take control of a student’s screen to demonstrate something. This would be fantastic when working with distance learners, but it could also be useful in the class to get students to demonstrate something you just showed them how to do from their own computer.

Next, I gave a talk on Achieving Organization 2.0. It had been almost a year since I’d given a talk in person, and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed speaking in front of an audience and engaging in discussions. This talk focused on why so many Web 2.0 initiatives at libraries fail and how libraries can be better structured and can operate better to effectively implement 2.0 tools and services. My slides are available below, with slides and links available on my presentation wiki.

I didn’t take great notes on the Developing Specific Fluencies: Case Studies talk I went to, but one of the data librarians there who had spoken about training CRS librarians on GIS said this, which stuck with me, “we don’t teach the tool, we only teach the task.” This is a very simple statement, but one that every teacher and trainer should keep in the forefront of their minds. We get so stuck on teaching specific databases or specific technologies, when that’s not what our users actually want. What they want is to be able to find an article or do some specific task. We need to focus in teaching on giving students/patrons/staff what they need to do the things they want to do, not what we think they should know.

A lot of the stuff discussed in the session on Innovative Applications of Federated Search Technology went over my head, but I really enjoyed Ken Varnum’s discussion of how he “made the wait [in federated search] worthwhile” for students. Ken is the Web Systems Manager at University of Michigan and also won the Deep Web contest that asked applicants to describe the best idea for federated search they could imagine (he even got an oversized check – I’ve always wanted one of those!). Ken described how at University of Michigan they developed a system for customizing the results shown to students when they do a search based on their academic level and major. The University has all sorts of data on what courses a student has taken, and this can be capitalized on by the library’s systems. The subject liaisons selected specific databases or journal sets to be searched based on a user’s major and level (lower-level undergrad, upper-level, etc.). So when a student does a search, the system will figure out what subset of the library’s online collections to search based on the courses the user has taken. I think they also do some personalization based on search history as well, but that was a little less clearly described IMHO. I was totally blown away by this idea, though.

Libraries are really bad at capitalizing on user data – search history, courses taken, borrowing history, etc. – because we’re so obsessed with privacy. But we’re at a point where it would not be so difficult to protect the privacy of our users while still using individual data to make our systems more intelligent.

More to come with Day 2!

For the way I like to get information, life was a lot easier before Twitter came on the scene. For the most part, the Web was asynchronous. I could visit blogs any time I wanted, read the content, and comment on posts. Especially with RSS, once I was subscribed to a blog, I would never miss any content coming from it. I would never miss a good conversation and I could do it in my own time-frame. With the growth of the real-time web, this has changed. It’s so easy to miss an important conversation or a useful link. With Twitter, the conversation is going on 24X7, and if you’re following more than a very small number of people, you can’t easily go back and see what you missed while you were busy doing other things. While I do know people who seem to spend endless hours on Twitter and/or FriendFeed, most of us just try to jump into the conversation (or the stream) when we can and have to accept that there will be things we’ll miss.

Twitter (and FriendFeed, and other microblogging and lifestreaming apps) has been an amazing boon to those looking for connection and conversation. Now, the playing field is so much more level. You don’t have to have your own blog or write long-form posts to make a name for yourself and become a part of a community. You can just follow people, start a conversation with them. I’ve become friendly with people I’ve never met in real life, but connected with online because we had something in common (babies, libraries, etc.). Maybe they commented on some of my tweets/posts or I on theirs, but over time, through those comments and back-and-forths you build connection. You build community. I know people who have created proposals for conference presentations with people they don’t even know in real-life through Twitter. And it’s very different than the blogosphere where each person had their own “home” that they controlled. Even when people can comment on your blog, you own the conversation because it’s your blog, your destination. While I do like having my own space too, I think there is a powerful draw to these real-time web spaces where everyone is welcome and anyone can jump into the conversation.

Many of my students commented — during the week they were required to use Twitter — that they were pleasantly surprised that Twitter was a lot more useful than they thought it would be. Some students had already used it before, and found additional professional uses for it through the week’s activities. Some students who had never tried it before are still using Twitter over a month later. Others tried it and realized that other social networks (mainly Facebook) were a better fit for them. It’s certainly not for everyone, but a lot of my students were pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t just all about what people are eating for lunch that day.

I know I’ve had moments where I’ve hated Twitter and found it pointless and frivolous and there is certainly a lot going on in Twitter that is less than useful. However, even beyond the personal and professional networking and community-building that goes on in these spaces, Twitter has a lot of utility for those who use it. Here are just a few ways that Twitter can be practically useful:

1. It’s great for querying the hive. When I was looking for examples of Facebook pages to share with my class, I asked people on FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter what Facebook pages they like the best. And I got a lot of great responses from people I knew and people I don’t who follow me in those spaces. I’ve gotten feedback on websites and tutorials I’ve created on Twitter as well.

2. It can be great for sharing knowledge. It’s so easy to post a useful link, tell people about a tool you used that you really liked, etc. in Twitter, and for other people to amplify those messages they find useful through Retweeting them (RT).

I use TweetDeck (an external Twitter client) to manage the people and organizations I follow, and I’ve separated them into the various subject areas I’m interested in keeping up with. I have a feed of library and tech-related people who share useful content, a feed of parenting-related stuff (shopping deals and safety info mainly), and I have a feed for Vermont-related info from news sources, people, and local stores I frequent. So many of the librarians I follow share useful blog posts, articles and studies that I’d probably have never discovered otherwise. One parenting Twitter feed shared with me the fact that several babies had died using a product we had for our son. It’s more than just hearing what people had for lunch or how cool the library is; it’s actually about getting useful news and resources.

While it’s a great medium for sharing knowldge, it’s not great for storing knowledge, since Twitter wasn’t really designed for doing anything with Tweets other than favoriting them (which isn’t exactly an effective way to store thousands of useful ideas you may want to save). Some sites and applications have been developed to help with this, but tweets are still so much more ephemeral than blog posts, which, as a librarian (and in light of some historic events that have unfolded on Twitter) concerns me.

3. It can be great for conferences. When you’re at a big conference, it can be difficult to find people and figure out which are the best sessions to attend. With Twitter, you could be walking around and hear about people who share your interests who are at a session that you realize would be perfect for you to attend. Or you could be in a session, tweet that you’re looking for people to go to lunch with, and have plans by the time you get out of that session.

On the flip side, this makes me worry about Twitter taking our attention away from the sessions and important learning going on at a conference. I think sometimes it does, and it can do worse, creating a distracting and hostile environment for speakers, as you can see in the case of danah boyd’s speech at the Web 2.0 Expo. I’ll be attending Computers in Libraries in just a few days, and I do not plan to use Twitter much, even if it makes me more “out-of-the-loop.” I’d rather be out-of-the-loop and get more out of the sessions I’m attending.

4. It can be a great advocacy tool. Libraries and non-profits are using Twitter to promote their services and get the word out about projects they’re working on, current needs, and the news on issues related to their cause. And people who support them can amplify their messages through retweets. It’s also a great way to join conversations happening among their community of users.

I think it takes time to figure out how best to manage the flow of information from Twitter and how many people you can realistically follow. Before Twitter Lists came out (which I haven’t really used) TweetDeck was a godsend for helping me to manage the stream of information. I could separate the people I follow by the reasons I follow them and also made a list of favorite people (most of whom I’m friends with) which is the list I keep track of the most.

I think how you feel about Twitter is all in how you approach it. I think some people still don’t like it because they feel like they’re always missing something. If you see it as something you can easily pop in and out of (as interest and time allow) without missing a beat, it’s a great platform. It took me a while to realize that it didn’t matter if I missed a big conversation, argument, useful link or clever quip — if it’s important enough, someone will retweet it or blog about it and I’ll see it at some point (can I just tell you how much I love Bobbi Newman’s weekly Top 10 Links on her blog? Awesomely useful!). For people who approach Twitter as I do now, it can be a great tool for learning that requires so little of you and allows you to be as social (or unsocial) as you want at your convenience. It’s an always-on social gathering that you can enter and leave at will. And while it messed with my Type-A personality for a while, I’m now getting a lot out of Twitter.

One of the commenters on my post wrote “where is a David to take down this Goliath?” In my mind, what we really need to take down this Goliath is another Goliath; specifically, a Goliath made up of a lot of Davids. Pretty much all libraries are members of consortia of some sort; local, regional and national groups dedicated to advocating for and supporting their member libraries. If these aren’t the groups that should be fighting unfair or unethical practices of vendors, I don’t know who should! It’s only in large numbers that we can actually make a difference in scholarly publishing.

We’ve certainly seen major Universities doing it, since it seriously impacts their bottom line. Back when I was in library school, I remember when a whole bunch of big schools like Cornell, Harvard, etc. boycotted Elsevier journals in response to bundling of journals, exorbitant pricing, and an unwillingness to negotiate fair deals. In addition, their faculty Senates made statements suggesting that faculty not support journals with exorbitant pricing by not publishing in them or serving on their boards. When we’re being faced with unfair deals or unethical behavior from publishers, we should get our faculty members involved too. We have three members of the Society for Military History on the Norwich faculty. I contacted them last week, as I thought they might be able to exert pressure on the Society. If faculty drop their memberships and stop publishing and serving on the boards of journals like this, the journals will have little choice but to change their practices (not that I think that will all happen, especially with historians rather than scientists, but one can dream, right?).

I’m not an expert on what consortia do by any stretch of the imagination, so maybe those of you with more experience can answer this. Are our consortia exerting pressure on vendors when they do things like this? I know the consortia we belong to get us discounts with vendors (and mainly seem focused on group discounts and training), but do they fight vendors when those vendors do things that are harmful or exploitative to their member libraries? I see that an International Coalition of Library Consortia exists and that they’ve made some statements about issues in scholarly publishing, but they’ve made so few over the years in light of the huge number of issues libraries have grappled with. Looking at the mission statements of a few consortia, they talk about group purchasing and a single point of contact for dealing with vendors, but I see nothing about actively advocating for member libraries.

So, if the consortia don’t fight for us, who should? ALA? ACRL? I always hear about how ALA has such a strong advocacy arm, but it seems to be all about advocating for libraries in the national and state governments, not with scholarly publishers and content providers. It certainly makes no sense for us to form separate organizations to advocate for libraries in this realm when we have these consortia that have relationships with publishers and are supposed to be negotiating with them on our behalf.

More important than making our dissatisfaction known to our vendors is to make our dissatisfaction known to the organizations that are supposed to represent and advocate for us. We are much more powerful in large numbers than we are alone, and we joined consortia in the first place to band together for our common good. It’s not just about getting deals and taking classes on cataloging and Web 2.0 technologies — it should be about collective advocacy. And if the organizations we give money to are not providing that for us, then we should pressure them to do so. Because we will not be able to create real change in the scholarly publishing and library technology landscape unless we act as a group.

I was less than thrilled with the way EBSCO has dealt with some of its customers vis-à-vis Harvard Business Review. I thought it was pretty evil that they signed exclusive deals for all of those Time, Inc. magazines. But what they’ve done now has really sent me through the roof.

We used to get online access to the full run of the Journal of Military History through a combination of JSTOR access and EBSCO (Academic Search Premier offered 2004-present in f/t). So, this semester, we noticed that our online access had disappeared completely from Serials Solutions. Obviously, at a military college that offers an online masters degree in military history, this is kind of an important title so we looked into it immediately. We come to find out that the Society for Military History signed an exclusive deal with EBSCO, which means that the Journal of Military History is being pulled from JSTOR, MUSE and ProQuest. Fortunately, for existing JSTOR subscribers, the backfile will still be available, though obviously it will not continue to grow and new subscribers will get nothing from this journal. Around the same time, EBSCO pulled that 2004-present full-text out of Academic Search Premier. Now why would they pull their full-text access to a journal they just signed an exclusive deal on?

The reason: their new products America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts Full-Text. These products have always been citations and abstracts only, but EBSCO has decided to offer a full-text add-on with full-text. This only sounds good on paper. As of now, the full-text coverage in each product is rather poor (you can see the coverage of each in PDF format: AHL, HA). We’d looked at them a while back and weren’t impressed, so we didn’t bother to even get a trial, much less subscribe. But now, they have their ace in the hole that will force any school with an online history program or any school that wants to offer online access to the Journal of Military History to spend many thousands of dollars to get that access. At first we though we could just subscribe to Historical Abstracts Full-Text (at a cost of around $3500 for our small academic library) and get access to the whole run of the Journal of Military History, but then we remembered that each database only indexes a subset of the journal, so we’d only be getting the articles that aren’t about the United States and Canada. To get both, we’d have to pay almost double that. So basically, we’d be spending close to $7,000 to get three-years’-worth of full-text content in one journal (plus some other stuff we don’t want or need). For a small school like ours, this is not an insignificant amount of money. And I can tell you that we won’t pay it.

To me, this feels like extortion. We’d be happy to subscribe to this journal online as a single title subscription, but EBSCO has made it clear that the only option for online access to this journal will be through AHL and HA Full-Text. I’m also very disappointed in the Society for Military History. I’m no expert, but I would think that having your journal be less accessible would decrease its scholarly impact. When you write for a journal, you want people to find your article and cite it. When something is in JSTOR, it’s indexed all over creation (Google, Google Scholar, WorldCat, etc.). To move to a situation where almost no one will be subscribed to your content online seems a step in the wrong direction. I can only imagine how much money EBSCO must have offered the Society for Military History to make this worth their while. I do see, though, that they’ll be providing current online access to their members through EBSCO, so I’d guess this is also a ploy to grow their membership.

While I know EBSCO is doing things that will almost certainly increase their bottom line (because they essentially force people to purchase their products or not provide access to things their patrons need and want), I think it’s only going to result in them becoming the most hated vendor in libraryland (good news, Elsevier!) and severely decrease the amount of choice that librarians have in making subscription decisions. If these anti-competitive moves keep happening, it will really change the e-resources landscape for libraries, and not for the better.