I’m sure anyone working in an academic library has already heard that the JSTOR interface was changing this summer. Well, how nice that they wait to finally make the change live the week that students are coming back to most schools. One of our librarians attended a webinar on the new interface and reported about it to the rest of the staff so we were pretty prepared for what was coming in terms of the interface change. But the thing that’s a really big deal is that JSTOR is now going to display everything in their collection by default. That probably doesn’t matter to a large University that subscribes to every JSTOR collection known to man, but for libraries of small to medium size that only subscribe to maybe 4 or fewer collections, your students will suddenly be seeing a lot of results in JSTOR that they can’t access. I did a search on World War II and Poland and out of the first 10 results there were only 2 that were in the JSTOR collections we subscribe to. If a student clicked on one of the eight of ten results that did not have a green check mark to the right of it they would see this:

What’s interesting is that we actually have many of these articles available in full-text through other databases.

I know what you’re probably thinking — “every database displays things that aren’t available in full-text. You can just enable your link resolver and students will be able to link to the full-text.” That would be nice, but JSTOR has decided not to make that possible. The response we got from tech support was “OpenURL links are not currently available when your users arrive at articles in collections that you do not license.” So, we can link out from full-text articles in JSTOR to versions of the same full-text in other collections, but we can’t link out from articles we do not have the full-text of in JSTOR to full-text in other collections. Either a lot of smart people don’t understand the purpose of OpenURL or they really don’t want to make it easy for students to figure out that their library has access to these resources through another database.

The other response we got was this: “At this time it is also not possible to change the default search to just your licensed collections.” Students can check a box on the Advanced Search page only that will “Include only content I can access”, but how many students are going to 1) notice that check box and 2) know what it really means? Especially when the default option (the box already checked) says “Include links to external content” and the explanation next to it says “JSTOR displays citation information and an outside link to the full-text of some recently published articles on external sites.” It makes it sound like students can get more full-text content that way when the reality is that they’ll just get more results that ask them to pay $12 or $30 for the article.

The tech support person went on to state “I will make sure that your suggestion of setting default search limits, and expanding OpenURL links to cover all non-licensed content, is passed on to our development team for consideration.” I have to call BS here. I can’t believe that these were not conscious decisions on their part. Was this developed by one lone dude in a shack with no input from other designers and librarians? I have to believe that they can’t be surprised that libraries would want these features.

I refuse to believe that all of the smart people at JSTOR have no idea how OpenURL works and have no idea how pretty much every other database vendor in the known world operates these days. Even if they were clueless, JSTOR has advisory boards made up of librarians who could tell them how things work. So my first thought was clearly they want to confuse students into paying for access to articles they could get through another database or ILL. But then I remember that this is JSTOR. They’re a not-for-profit. Something is clearly going on behind the scenes that we’re missing the boat on. And the first thing that pops into my head is PUBLISHERS. Are the pressures of publishers pulling out of JSTOR to pursue lucrative deals with EBSCO become to much? Did you have to make concessions that benefit your publishing partners but hurt the end user? I do understand that this change will make it easier for people not affiliated with a library to search JSTOR (helping to increase their base of individuals purchasing articles), but there is no reason that they couldn’t at the same time give libraries the ability to customize the default at their institutions or to make OpenURL work across the board.

So which one is it, JSTOR? Are you really that clueless about how modern databases and OpenURL link resolvers work? Are you out to make a buck off confused Freshmen with credit cards? Or did your publishing partners force you into it? Either way, you’re putting the customer dead last in this equation and, IMHO, breaking a trust relationship you’ve had with librarians for many years. I know that my solution to this will be simple. I just won’t teach JSTOR to social science majors here and will encourage students to use WorldCat Local. JSTOR articles are indexed in WC Local, so students can find the articles there and use Serials Solutions 360 Linker to link out to whichever database holds the full-text. Problem solved. And I doubt I’ll be the only librarian looking for a way around teaching JSTOR in information literacy classes if JSTOR doesn’t make a change ASAP. Way to make yourself less visible to future scholars, JSTOR!

I’ll be really curious to see how this shakes out, because I can’t imagine we’re the only library that’s going to be very negatively impacted by JSTOR’s bad decisions. I hope they make a change, and soon, because my History and Political Science info lit classes are coming in just a couple of weeks.

Update: For those who think that this is already resolved or have mentioned that you’re seeing a link resolver link to some articles, let me explain what you’re looking at as I’ve done a bit more digging. There are three types of results you can get right now in JSTOR, and you’ll see each in this screenshot (sorry for the size, my computer is being wonky — just click on it to expand it):

JSTOR results

The first (with the gray asterisk) is from a journal that is not in a JSTOR collection we subscribe to. There will be no link resolver link that lets patrons easily get to the article in another database to to our library’s ILL form. Frequently, there will be something that tells the user they need to pay to access the article. Otherwise, it’ll just be a dead end.

The second (with the green check mark) is an article that is in our JSTOR collection. Students can click on the title and get to the full-text.

The third (with the yellow arrow) is from a journal this is in our JSTOR collection, but it is not from the date range of full-text that is available through JSTOR (in this case, the article is from 2006 and JSTOR’s coverage goes to 2005). Clicking on the title of this type of result will provide a link resolver link so that the patron can check to see if the library has this in full-text elsewhere.

For those who are seeing link resolver links right now, what you are seeing is the third type of link. You may just have too many JSTOR collections to easily get a result in the second category which is very lucky for you.

Librarians keep a lot of statistics and measure a lot of things. Gate count, reference transactions, instruction sessions, website hits, visits to a specific tutorial or research guide, e-resource usage, etc. We are big on numbers. I have no problem whatsoever with measuring things like this and in many cases I think it’s essential. The thing I do have a problem with are the unsupported interpretations we often make based on these numbers and the direction they’re going in.

Reference desk transactions went down. This is a bad thing! We need to try and get them back up! Really? Why? Do you know why they went down? You probably have some theories, but do you know for sure? Is it because you’re less approachable or is it because there has been an increase in instruction sessions which helped students become more independent researchers? You need to look at the larger ecosystem beyond the reference desk to figure out why this happened and whether it’s a good or bad thing.

The tutorial I created has received more hits than any other one. It must be really useful! Oh yeah? Or is the tutorial for a class that has a lot of sections? Did an instructor require that students visit it? Are the people visiting it staying for a long time or just for a few seconds? Are they getting anything out of it? You can’t say that a web hit = someone getting something out of that page.

We’re teaching more library sessions than ever before. Students will be more information literate when they graduate! Maybe. But how do you know that? Teaching more doesn’t necessarily = learning more. If the instruction you’re providing is not course-integrated and emphasized at various subsequent points in their college career, it might be going in one ear and out the other. How can we determine that what we’re teaching is actually making our students information literate?

Sidenote: Years ago, a professional colleague complained that students in her information literacy sessions were not as engaged as they were years ago and reasoned that the caliber of students at her school had declined. The question I wanted to ask at the time, but didn’t, was have you considered that maybe the way you teach doesn’t work for the current crop of students? We come to unsupported conclusions all the time — not just when trying to analyze statistics. Don’t just assume it’s “them.” Maybe it’s you.

Statistics can tell us a lot of things, but they can also be manipulated to support just about any position. Without actually knowing why something increased or decreased, we should be hesitant about making any judgments.

We often take these assumptions right up to Administration, using these numbers as evidence that we are doing a great job, deserve more funding, etc. This reveals another flawed assumption; the idea that these numbers matter to administrators outside of the library. What do university administrators care about? Retention. Student success. Accreditation. Student satisfaction with the University. Etc. They don’t care about the number of information literacy sessions the library taught unless you can somehow show how those contributed to student success (i.e. student use of quality resources in their papers increased leading to better grades). They don’t care about the number of reference transactions unless you can show that reference support helped to improve retention. Sure, they may nod their head and say “great job!” but you’re not going to really get them excited and “on board” until you tie what the library does to the University’s goals and provide data that demonstrates how what you do contributes to those goals.

I don’t have all the answers on exactly how to measure how the library contributes to the larger goals of the University, but I do know that we’re doing our students a disservice when we make assumptions about how what we do is impacting them based solely on a bunch of numbers. And if we want to promote libraries to the people who hold the purse strings, we need to focus more on demonstrating how we contribute to their “bottom line” than to our own.

A lot of times, providing detailed explanations for the past seems to not really provide excuses, but sort of muddy the waters. It’s hard, as somebody who wants to see change and innovation, to hear a long account of the past without thinking that the teller implicitly thinks it should still sort of be that way.

I agree that it’s valuable to know why a decision was made originally — sometimes there was a very good reason and knowing that offers a perspective that we may not have originally considered. More times than not, at my library, none of us know why the decision was originally made. I think that lack of institutional memory sometimes helps us up a great deal in our ability to push changes forward. Maybe we all need a bit of institutional amnesia at times.

Norwich University is steeped in history. When I graduated from Wesleyan, I knew next to nothing about its history. Students at Norwich know the history of Norwich. They are steeped in it from Day 1. There are classes on Norwich History and assignments where students have to research certain aspects of the history of Norwich in the archives and museum. Students here, especially in the Corps of Cadets, feel a part of a tradition. And that not only connects students to Norwich while they’re here, but it connects the alums to the University long after they’ve graduated. And many of those alums have taken very good care of the University, financially, over the years.

Our library is very change-oriented, but there is definitely a hesitance to change anything that feels like it might not be in keeping with the Norwich tradition or that involves getting rid of something that’s been around a long time.

Right now, we’re looking at making changes to our reference desk. It’s big, bulky and not at all conducive to having a true research consultation or allowing the student to “drive” our computer. We sit at the desk and the student has no choice but to stand. We want a space that feels collaborative. A space where students can be at eye-level with us and can sit if they’re working on something more in-depth. We want it to be less bunker-like and more inviting.

But then there’s that history thing. The desk has been in the library since it was built. It even has a plaque with the name of an alum on it. Our Head of Reference is very hesitant to get rid of the desk, because she doesn’t want to make anyone angry. So we’re looking at modifying it, but no modification to the existing desk will really give us what we’re looking for. It’ll be a bit better, but I have a hard time seeing the point of spending a lot of money on “a bit better” when we could probably spend a similar sum and get just what we want.

I completely understand that we need to be cognizant and respectful of things that represent Norwich’s history and things that the alums might be attached to. They are stakeholders too. But are they really attached to a reference desk? And wouldn’t most alums be happy to see a change that would improve services to current students? I honestly don’t have the answer to that. Nor do my colleagues.

I’m sure other libraries also struggle with making decisions that might anger older and loyal members of their population or that represent a major break with tradition. I think the key is to keep asking questions and take nothing for granted. What was the reason for doing it this way in the first place? Is there really a good reason to keep this the way it is? Do the people we think care about this really care? We always think we know our populations, and more often than not, we’re dead wrong. And that not only applies to the reasons to avoid change; it also applies to the reasons (and the way we want) to change. My colleagues and I don’t entirely agree on what this new reference desk should look like and each of us are so sure we’re right. My feeling is that we should ask the students. Do they want to stand at a 42″ desk? Sit at a 30″ desk? Have both options available? We each have our own biases.

Sometimes it’s not about change vs. history. Sometimes it’s all in our heads. Sometimes it’s just about figuring out what your stakeholders really want and care about. And, yes, sometimes the wants of stakeholders will conflict, but I think we spend a lot of time debating things that might just be non-issues if we actually asked our users.

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.

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.

I’ve found it interesting how some vendors are vilified (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) while others get a free pass — to the point where we no longer even think of them as vendors. Open source vendor? You’re cool. Vendor who blogs and gives talks about 2.0 stuff (a la Paul Miller, Stephen Abram and Tim Spalding)? You’re cool too. Product manager, marketing dude or executive at a company like Ex Libris or EBSCO or Elsevier? Not so much. And why is that? They’re all trying to sell something to libraries, right? They all want to make money from us. But some of these people are seen as being good and having our best interests at heart while others of them are seen as being out to screw us.

Once upon a time, I was asked to speak on a panel. So was Tim Spalding. Because I was a member of this organization, I was not paid and had to pay for my travel to get to the conference. Tim got paid to come and be a part of this panel, in which he spoke about his product, LibraryThing. I mentioned it to the organizers because I thought it was odd that a vendor get paid for the opportunity to drum up free publicity for his product. The organizer said that she really hadn’t thought of Tim as a vendor. Interesting. Is Tim an awesome guy who most of us think a great deal of? Certainly. Is he a very entertaining speaker? Without question. Does he sell stuff to libraries? Yes. Does he sometimes exhibit at conferences? Yes. Does that make him a vendor? I’d say so!

And that’s not to say that vendors are bad. Most aren’t. But I really take issue with the way our profession tends to idealize some types of vendors and vilify others. I think a lot of people have started to see this black-and-white thinking as problematic in light of the whole LibLime Koha fork thing. Because suddenly you have this open source company — a company that is supposed to be good and out to benefit the larger open source community — doing something that benefits them and their customers at the expense of the community. But weren’t we just hoisting the LibLime folks on our shoulders last year? Weren’t many of us (me included) promoting them and weren’t we excited when we saw their client list growing and growing and growing? (Many of us may still be happy to see their client list grow as it’s a sign that the market share of open source software in libraries is growing.)

Folks at OCLC definitely used to get a pass in the same way the open source folks did, though that seems to be changing as public perception shifts towards viewing them as a vendor that wants to gobble up and control our data (which is also a simplification). It reminds me a lot of how some librarians felt about Google — how they went from loving Google to feeling totally betrayed by them. I guess my take is that if someone makes their money off a library without working in it, they are a vendor. Consultants are vendors. People who sell products are vendors. People who sell services, like maintaining open source systems, are vendors. And all of them will put the good of their company over the good of libraries. That doesn’t make them evil — it makes them good businesspeople.

And again, with the Stephen Abram thing. I didn’t like his paper because it lacked a level of quality and polish that I would expect from Stephen and a company like SirsiDynix. It was about at the level of professionalism of a poorly-researched blog post (hey, like this!). I take issue with anything that doesn’t cite where its information is coming from and uses phrases like “some companies”, “some software” “some argue.” There were lots of factual inaccuracies and opinion masquerading as fact (”Proprietary software has more features. Period. Proprietary software is much more user-friendly”). And what was up with the completely pointless chart on page 4? It was just an awful piece. The fact is, there are a lot of good arguments against open source and against choosing an open source ILS, but Stephen’s lack of good hard facts and citations made any point he made seem less credible.

Part of me started to wonder on Friday if someone from an open source company wrote a similar screed against proprietary systems, would it garner the same reaction from the Twittersphere/blogosphere? And I hate to say it, but I think the answer is no. If someone from Equinox went off on the weaknesses of proprietary systems in a way that was badly researched and perhaps contained some hyperbole, many folks would probably nod their head and say, “yeah, they do suck.” Some of us might send the link to our colleagues, writing that it contains a great distillation of why open source is the better option for the ILS. I’m not saying this to damn anyone or shame anyone, because I know I do it too sometimes without even thinking about the double-standard.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve been so sleep-deprived lately that I’ve been seeing everything through whatever the opposite of rose-tinted glasses are (green?). I guess what I’m trying to say is that we really can’t look at things as being so black and white. We can’t say open source=good, proprietary=bad. It’s not that simple. Stephen Abram is not a bad person because he wrote a crappy “position paper. OCLC isn’t necessarily evil. Open source vendors aren’t necessarily good. We shouldn’t assume that a vendor is out to take us to the cleaners and steal all our data, but neither should we assume that a vendor has our best interests at heart (no matter how cool they or their representatives are). Things are really, really gray, and require a much more critical eye than we sometimes have by default.

Updated: I just read Cindi Trainor’s The Sacred Cows of Library Technologists, which I think dovetails so nicely with my points and is far, far more eloquently written. Check it out!

Wayne Bivens-Tatum recently wrote a very interesting post questioning who should be teaching library instruction — librarians or faculty. This is an issue that I’ve been thinking about a great deal and while I don’t think an answer exists for every discipline or every school, I thought I’d share my own thinking on it.

We have been working on our report to our accrediting body, NEASC, since the Spring and one of the library goals that was originally written into it was for library instruction to be taught in every English 101 (AKA Freshman comp) class. Last Fall, we taught library instruction to 90% of the EN 101 classes as a result of aggressive marketing to instructors. We thought it a reasonable goal to say that we’d like library instruction to be in 100% of EN 101 courses so that the University would know that every Freshman has certain standard basic information literacy skills. It would create a baseline so that we wouldn’t have to teach the most basic aspects of library research in upper-level classes for the small number of students who didn’t have a library session in EN 101.

While this seemed innocuous enough to me and my colleagues, the English faculty asked us to strike it from the report. They objected 1) to the idea that we are the only ones who can teach information literacy and 2) to any mandate that faculty would have to have a library session as part of their class (which would interfere with academic freedom). We at the library certainly weren’t trying to say that we are the only unit teaching information literacy. Even when librarians do teach a one-shot (or even a few sessions), what students are learning in there is only a very small piece of the information literacy puzzle. The academic freedom issue is trickier and isn’t one that I have a difficult time speaking to. I assume that there must be certain standards, guidelines and requirements that instructors teaching 101 must adhere to already so that students can achieve a basic level of knowledge/skill. We always tailor our instruction sessions to what the instructor has assigned his or her students, so it’s not like anyone would be telling faculty what to teach. It’s the students who suffer because of this lack of standardization since it means that we either have to teach the same things again in upper-level classes or we skip teaching the basics in those classes and students who’d never had library instruction end up lost.

Wayne talks about a new model at Princeton in which the librarians are training the writing instructors to teach library research themselves. I can’t see that flying at many institutions where librarians are seen more as support staff than as fellow instructors with their own area of expertise. I can’t imagine most faculty here being willing to accept training from us on how to teach library resources to their students. But if they were, I certainly would be happy to let go of our instructional role in EN 101 if it meant that all students would get the same preparation.

I don’t think librarians should see the teaching of information literacy as our domain. Some faculty members are teaching information literacy and library research brilliantly in their discipline themselves and that doesn’t threaten me in the least. My Director wants us to be teaching at three levels in every discipline (for example, I teach at the 100, 300, and 400 level in the history program), but I don’t know if that is always necessary. For example, there is a criminal justice research methods class for majors. I do not teach in that class, but they still receive significant information literacy instruction from their professor. On the other hand, I have worked with a class of Junior psychology majors who had never used PSYCInfo or PSYCAbstracts. I think we (librarians AND faculty) need to worry less about what is our domain and more about ensuring that students have the skills they need to be successful in their major. It doesn’t matter who teaches it as long as it’s being taught.

But it needs to be taught well. There are some faculty members who are more knowledgeable about the library resources in their area of study than any librarian here. There are other faculty who have never used a database and still tell their students to use the New York Times in microfilm (we’ve had it online for years). The most unfortunate thing is that, in most cases, it’s the people who are very aware of our resources who request library instruction for their classes. Those who are not continue to assign their students to use only print journals and to find things we don’t even have anymore.

I struggle with how to reach those faculty members. When we get a “rogue assignment” we usually email the faculty member to either get clarification, describe the difficulty that their students are having with the assignment, or let them know that something they want their students to do is literally not possible. Sometimes that helps; sometimes we never hear back. I’ve been wanting to offer brown-bag lunch sessions on new resources in specific disciplines in an effort to get faculty up-to-speed with what we have available, but I suspect that the people I most want to reach will not be the ones who show up. I really want to provide outreach to these faculty — either to get them up-to-speed on our resources or to provide instruction in some of their classes — but I’m not sure how to reach them.

While I don’t really feel territorial about information literacy instruction, I do struggle with the knowledge that the library resources are our area of subject expertise. No matter how library-savvy the faculty member, we are always going to be more “up to date” on what we have. A history faculty member who uses our library all the time was surprised to learn in an instruction session the other day that you could create an account in JSTOR and save articles to your account. Faculty I work with frequently comment that they learned something new when I teach to their classes. I don’t know that all of us can teach it better (some of us are piss-poor instructors), but more often than not, we are going to be more knowledgeable about the library resources and their capabilities. This, of course, begs the question of whether deep knowledge of resources or teaching skills are more important, but that’s a question for another day.

Ideally, I’d like to see one of two things happen: 1) a faculty member who is very up-to-date on what is available through the library teaches his or her students about library research and information literacy or 2) a librarian teaches library research and information literacy in close partnership with the faculty member. Because what’s most important is that partnership. When a faculty member gives over sole responsibility for teaching research to the librarian, the students rarely see value in what is being taught. I’ve had faculty leave the room while I’m teaching and the students in those classes always become less engaged as soon as it happens. When the faculty member makes comments throughout the session and stays engaged in what I’m teaching, the students stay engaged, because the faculty member is indicating with his/her behavior that this is valuable and important. Ideally, I’d love to see classes team-taught, but just having the faculty member engaged in the class makes a huge difference for the students.

I must apologize for the twisted path this post has taken — it matches well my own muddled thoughts on the issue. I think so much of what the ideal is for library instruction depends on the university, the discipline, and the individual faculty members a librarian is dealing with. We can’t say “___ is the best way to do library instruction.” Even in the social sciences (my liaison area), I work very closely with one department and in another I’ve only taught one class session in two years. I don’t think there’s a perfect model that will work for every institution/department/class, but I do know that the more that we or academic faculty are territorial about our roles, the more likely it is that students will get very poor library instruction or none at all.

Like Wayne, I’m curious what your thoughts are on who should be teaching library instruction? Do you have similar power struggles at your institution? Do you have great partnerships with faculty in teaching library instruction? I’d love to hear about it. We all learn so much from hearing about the experiences of others.

And just to be totally gratuitous, here’s a picture of my biggest (and most wonderful) distraction from blogging.

I was wondering if you had any advice or links to websites or professional literature that deal with this issue. That issue is: how do libraries deal with the roles and responsibilities of 2.0 technology? Some of it crosses borders and/or job descriptions. Who is in charge or responsible for tweets on twitter, the library marketing director, the reference librarian, the library director, etc. I suspect this is something that we will just have to work out as an organization. I’m just wondering if anyone else has any wisdom they might share in this regard.

My take on this is that there probably isn’t much professional literature on this topic because how the roles and responsibilities are assigned depend very much on organizational size, organizational structure, and who is really interested in doing it. At a library with a very small staff (like the Luria Library at Santa Barbara City College) it may be an interested director who takes responsibility for these 2.0 initiatives. At libraries where the lines between tech and public service are very clearly delineated, it may be the tech folks who are in charge of the Twitter account, whereas, at a library (like mine) where tech librarians do reference shifts and public service librarians are well-trained in library technologies (and every line is extremely blurred), it may be a joint responsibility or the responsibility of the public services librarians. In some libraries (perhaps most?), people have taken this on because they’re simply the ones most into marketing and/or web 2.0 tools. In bigger libraries where there is a marketing director or an outreach librarian or a digital branch manager, that person may be in charge of these initiatives.

But I’m curious, what are your thoughts on this? Especially with regards to 2.0 tools that are created in an effort to reach out to patrons, who should be responsible? What makes the most sense? Should it be the person who has the most contact with the public? The most tech-savvy person? The person with the most authority (the Director)? This is one of those questions that has myriad answers, so I wanted to open it up to see how other libraries handle it (or how you think libraries should handle it).