In anticipation of my upcoming two-part workshop on mobile technologies for libraries, Dan Freeman of ALA TechSource interviewed me, asking me about my thoughts on the present and future challenges and possibilities for mobile tech in libraries. The interview is now up on the ALA TechSource blog and I’m just pleased that I didn’t say anything too silly. I’m really looking forward to the workshop; it’s an area that is exploding with possibilities for libraries and I hope it will help people get both a macro level view of mobile tech and also think about what makes sense to implement in their own libraries.

When I wrote my book Social Software in Libraries five years ago, I decided to include a chapter on mobile technologies. As I started researching the topic, I was disappointed to find that very few libraries were doing anything to make their services (including their website) accessible via a mobile device. I’d written a paper in grad school on mobile accessibility and I was honestly shocked to find that this didn’t seem to be a major concern for libraries at the time.

Flash forward five years and just about every library is thinking about how to make its content and services accessible via smart phones — from their website and catalog, to their licensed content, to instructional services. Libraries, and related institutions, are also developing interesting apps that make their digital collections more accessible and expose people to the rich history where they are standing. At the same time, a variety of exciting trends and technologies are opening up new possibilities to provide unique library services via mobile devices.

Because this is a topic that has excited me for years and years, I’m thrilled to be offering a two-part webinar entitled Delivering Innovative Mobile Services through Your Library. Part 1 (on July 21st at 2:30 pm EST) will be devoted to covering trends in mobile technologies that librarians should be aware of. Part 2 (on July 28th at 2:30 pm EST) will be focused on specific applications of mobile technologies in libraries with lots of concrete examples. I just finished creating my slide deck for Part 1 and I am really excited to show people the exciting things going on out in the world of mobile tech.

Visit this page to register and see more about what I plan to cover in this ALA TechSource-sponsored webinar.

I really like eBooks, which is something that surprised me when I won my Kindle last Spring in a raffle. In fact, just about every book I’ve read since then has been on my Kindle or occasionally on my husband’s iPad (I greatly prefer reading on the Kindle). When I first assumed I would hate reading ebooks, I’d based it on the experiences I’d had reading books on my computer through academic platforms like NetLibrary and eBrary. Reading on the Kindle is nothing like that – the absence of a glossy backlit screen is key for me. And the consumer ebook market seems to have exploded in just the past six months, even for those who are far from early adopters. When my dad got a Kindle in September I knew eBook readers had arrived. Even at Norwich I’m starting to get inquiries from patrons about whether they can read ebooks from the library on their mobile devices. There’s no doubt at this point: Ebooks do have a real place in the future of reading. Unfortunately, the way most people are using eBooks at this point completely bypasses the library, and this is what publishers and ebook manufacturers seem to want. Why wouldn’t they?

And the options that libraries now have for ebooks (in terms of content, interface, interoperability, etc.) are, by and large, piss-poor. I am deeply concerned about the fact that many libraries are increasing their collections of ebooks to the point where a huge chunk of their collection development purchases are ebooks. They provide a compelling model. In many cases, multiple students can read the same book at once. The books take less time and effort in terms of processing and take up no physical space at all. But the negatives, the uncertainties of where the ebook market is headed, and the current restrictions most ebook vendors have placed on their products often outweigh the benefits. That doesn’t mean we can bury our heads in the sand and ignore this huge trend, but I also agree strongly with Eli Neiburger at the Library Journal eBook Summit that libraries are screwed (watch his presentation from the Summit here and here).

This post is basically a stream of consciousness outline of some of the concerns that have been swirling around in my head regarding eBooks. I am far from an ebook expert. I don’t read contracts from vendors and I don’t know the ins and outs of the ebook market, DRM, first sale doctrine, etc. I’m just someone in charge of collection development for our largest School who realizes how little most librarians know about what we’re getting into with ebooks (me included) and who is really concerned about where things are going. If you want to hear about eBooks from people with deeper knowledge of the subject, here are a few people I can recommend: Sue Polanka, Jason Griffey, Eric Hellman and Tom Peters.

There are differences between eBooks for individuals and eBooks for libraries to lend

Buying a physical book versus checking it out from the library are not radically different processes. Both have very small barriers (leaving the house to get a library book or buy a book at a bookstore vs. waiting at least a day or more to get a book purchased online). Getting an eBook on my kindle is ridiculously simple. Click on the order button and it’s there. Heck, I can even preview part of the first chapter for fee to see if I want to buy it! And for the average person who just wants to read a book and be done with it, they don’t care about it working on other devices, any restrictions on lending, etc. Getting an eBook from a library is often a circuitous and confusing process; so confusing that libraries have to create tutorials on how to do it. This doesn’t even take into account the myriad interoperability issues when patrons want to actually read a library ebook on their mobile/ereader device. And the fact that libraries often can’t get eBook packages/options that provide the content our patrons want (especially in academic libraries). The worst part is that I can’t see this getting better in the future when it makes no financial sense for Amazon, B&N, Sony, etc. to make it easy for libraries to get and provide this content to their patrons. If the e-reader providers largely control the market for eBooks, libraries will be aced out.

What about ILL?

Interlibrary loan is an important part of what we do. Many consortia have cooperative collection development agreements where they will not duplicate collections and can borrow from each other. What does that mean when what they’re buying are ebooks? Only a small number of ebook vendors (actually, Springer is the only one I know of) allow for any sort of ILL, which means that the more our book collections go digital, the less we will be able to loan to other libraries or borrow from other libraries. That libraries are going in this direction without considering the impact on ILL are really shooting ourselves, our patrons, our profession, in the foot. Just try to imagine your library without interlibrary loan. I know I can’t.

Too many platforms, too little interoperability

In a perfect world, we’d have a collection of eBooks that were all accessible through a single easy-to-use, easy-to-search platform. Unfortunately, that doesn’t look like it’ll ever happen. The best we can do is to make our eBook collections findable via our library catalog, but that lacks the sophisticated search functionality of the individual platforms themselves. I teach our distance learners how to search for books in the catalog AND eBrary, even though our catalog contains the eBrary MARC records. Why? Because the search functionality of eBrary is better. eBrary can search the full-text of books and will often pull up a much better results list.

We get a lot of Gale’s literature reference works through Literature Resource Center. However, LRC doesn’t contain all of Gale’s literature reference works, and if you want to subscribe to those, you can’t get it on the same platform as the LRC. For example, we want to get Gale’s Children’s Literature Review since English majors seem to have increasing interest in research YA authors. Given the size of the collection (well over 100 volumes) and the direction that reference collections are going in, it made sense to look into getting it online. The problem is, we can’t get this collection through Literature Resource Center. Instead, we would need to catalog it and hope that users stumble upon it. We teach English students to search MLA International Bibliography and Literature Resource Center. We teach them about our print reference works. We teach students how to find books of criticism on specific works or authors in the catalog. Now, we need to somehow explain that while most of our reference collection lives on the first floor of the library, some of it is online and accessible through the catalog if you know the specific title of the work (since it’s not like you could do a search for Roald Dahl in the catalog and have the Children’s Literature Review pop up). This was difficult enough for me to explain in a blog post for librarians; just imagine me trying to explain all this to a bunch of Freshman in our EN 102 classes!

And how do you browse a shelf of eBooks?

Browsing is still an important part of the discovery experience. Every time I am helping a student find books on a specific topic, I will suggest that they look to the left and right of the books they are specifically looking for on the shelf to see if there’s something that didn’t come up in our search that would be a great fit for their research. There’s nothing like serendipity, and serendipitous browsing is still not replicated well online. And this becomes even more difficult to imagine replicating when you have a mix of ebook collections and print books. The collection becomes even more fragmented, even more difficult to browse.

DRM and crazy rules for “lending”

I always feel embarrassed when I have to explain to our distance learners that they can’t do any of the things they’d like to do with eBrary books. Our distance learners are often on the road for their work. Many are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and have Internet access for very limited periods of time. I even had a student on a submarine who had 1 hour per day to access the Internet and get all of the work that requires an Internet connection done. So when I tell them, no, you can’t download the books; no, you can’t print more than a small portion of any book; no, you can’t read them offline, I feel like a jerk. Why are we providing such a crappy product to our students that doesn’t meet their needs in any way, shape or form?

And of course eBrary says that their DRM is absolutely necessary to protect the copyright holders, but then you have a platform like EBook Library, where users can download books using Adobe Digital Editions where the document will simply expire after a predetermined amount of time. There are ways to protect copyright holders and still provide eBooks in a way that works for most users. From what I’ve seen (which isn’t a lot), eBook Library so far has come the closest to providing the sort of user experience my students need. But, of course, the more platforms you purchase or lease access to books on, the more different rules and restrictions they will have. And patrons won’t understand why you can download this eBook, but not this one, or why this one will let you print, but this other one will stop you at 5 pages.

Then you add in the nightmare that is ensuring that ebooks work on mobile devices and dedicated e-readers. There are different formats, different constraints. Then you bring in the issue of accessibility, which is a huge legal issue that too few librarians think about on a regular basis. And not knowing where the ebook market is going and what devices patrons will own in the future, makes it difficult to make any decisions now. But at the same time, can libraries afford to sit and wait until there’s greater clarity regarding the future of books?

What do we own and what does that mean?

When my library buys 20 physical books, we own those books. Those books don’t disappear unless a patron loses them (in which case we usually recoup our costs) or we choose to remove the book from the collection. We can ILL those books, we can put them on reserve, and there are no further costs for that book (unless it requires rebinding) beyond the initial purchase. But take a look at our eBrary collection. We pay lots of money each year for access to tens of thousands of books but we don’t own anything. We cancel our subscription and those books are gone. Books get added and disappear from our eBrary collection depending on their current deals with publishers, meaning that something a student used for their research two months ago may not actually be in our collection when they are looking to cite something from it.

Then there are eBook collections that libraries have perpetual access to. For those, we usually have to pay a platform fee each year to keep our access to that book. We can’t just mount it on our own servers. Some vendors, like EBook Library allow you to archive your own copy, but I’m not really sure what that means since it’s not like we can then email copies of it to students or just put it up on our server for anyone to download. If EBook Library fails, I’m not sure how we would make those books we “own” accessible. I know that some vendors belong to Portico and that Portico has now opened up a separate eBook preservation initiative, but the majority of eBook vendors we would want to work with are not currently members. I’m not an expert in this area by any stretch of the imagination and I’ve never read over every detail of the contracts we have with these vendors, but I am concerned that some librarians may not be thinking about the long-term preservation of the ebooks they are purchasing.

Patron driven acquisitions is not a magic bullet

I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read recently about patron-driven acquisitions and the vast majority have been entirely positive, raising no concerns whatsoever about the practice. I’m not saying I think it’s a bad idea, but I don’t think it’s the magic bullet that many are making it out to be.

Collection development is a tricky game. It’s not just about building a collection for the people who use it today, but anticipating what people might want in the future. For example, my library had a rather poor Chinese history collection. Then we got a Chinese major, a professor to teach Chinese history, and the possibility of a Chinese studies major starting next year. Suddenly, in one year, I had to put a tremendous amount of my social sciences collection budget towards filling in that area. Right now at Norwich, Latin American history is not a hot area of study, but I still make an effort to buy some of the best works in the area. There has to be a balance struck. Obviously, you are going to spend more on areas that people are studying now, but you have to keep an eye on creating a balance that recognizes that hot areas of study change over time.

We actually did patron-driven acquisitions for our distance learners for a few years. Instead of doing ILL for our students who live all over the world, we purchased whatever they wanted. After two years, I looked at the books that had been purchased in the first year and found that only two of them had circulated more than that first time. We now have large collections of books on Zulu warfare and the military history of Australia because two students were interested in those subjects, but will those ever get used again? It’s highly unlikely. Just because one student is interested in a specific book or topic doesn’t mean that others will be. I’m not saying that purchasing some books that students want makes sense, but having seen what a 100% patron-driven acquisitions model looks like, I don’t think it solves any problems.

Look, I get it. We’re in a tough spot. We’re trying to do more with less. We’re trying to justify continued funding in the face of the fact that such a small proportion of what we buy gets used NOW. But I’m not sure that moving a large portion of our acquisitions budget to patron-driven acquisitions is a responsible decision in the long-run. I do think putting some of a library’s collection budget towards patron-driven acquisitions is an excellent idea and that’s what we’re experimenting with this semester with Ebook Library. But I still feel in my bones that it would do a disservice to the long-term health of the collection to rely solely on the taste of today’s patrons. To me, cooperative collection development is a model for sustainable collection-building that makes much more sense.

I don’t know where ebooks, patron-driven acquisitions, or e-readers are going. When I read posts like Andy Bukhardt’s about the horseless carriage vs. the ebook, I wonder if reading online in the future will not resemble in any way what we do and use for it today. It seriously hurts my brain to even imagine what reading will look like 10-20 years from now. What I do know is that the more I read about ebooks and the future of publishing, the more concerned I get. And the more I talk to librarians about this the more I realize how little many of us think about any of the larger issues (beyond content and perhaps accessibility) when we think about getting eBook collections. I actually saw a forum post in response to my American Libraries column about the Terms of Service regarding Kindle books that they didn’t sign any agreement when they bought a Kindle for their library. Sigh… People with very little understanding of these issues (and I include myself in that group) are making big decisions for libraries. Ebooks can no longer be the realm of knowledge of just a few experts; we ALL need to understand the current issues, keep up with new writing on the subject (from librarians, educators, technologists and the publishing/e-reader/mobile device world), and scan the horizon to gain some sense of where things are going. Otherwise, how can we possibly make collection decisions about these materials? Whether we want to make those decisions or not, they are going to be continuously foisted on us over time. I had a faculty member last semester ask if we could get the Encyclopedia of Associations online instead of in print. Our patrons are going to increasingly come to us with e-readers that they got for the holidays or their birthday, wanting to see what the library is offering that they can read on their shiny new device. Whether we want to face it or not, we owe it to our patrons and the future of our libraries to learn as much as we can about this stuff so that we can make decisions that best serve the patrons and the institution.

Who are your go-to eBook experts? Who would you recommend that others read on the subject? I’ll add those recommendations to the Library Success Wiki.

A colleague of mine and I have been talking about transliteracy for some time and came to very similar conclusions as David Rothman did in his smart and respectful critique. I’d thought about writing about it myself for months but two things stopped me. The first was that I thought perhaps there was something I was missing, which is still certainly possible. The other is that I’ve tried to avoid discussions about buzz words ever since I got bruised and battered for criticizing Library 2.0. While I do agree with David that Library 2.0 and Transliteracy describe things that are not in any way new and are murky terms to say the least, I think there’s a key difference between the two. I feel like the rhetoric around transliteracy is far less hysterical; less “if you don’t do this your library will become irrelevant!” or “if you don’t do this you’re against change!” That makes me feel more confident that my own critique (as someone who actively promotes information literacy as part of her job and is the Chair of her University’s Information Literacy Committee) will not be seen as an attack.

I’ve been following the blog Libraries and Transliteracy since it started. I read Tom Ipri’s article in C&RL News. I’ve read a number of other pieces on the subject from non-librarians. All of them start from the same basic definition (“Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks”) but there seems to be no agreement on what that means and how it should be applied. I still don’t feel like I have a handle on what transliteracy means. Lane Wilkinson looks at transliteracy through the lens of library instruction and teaching students to navigate a complex information ecosystem. From her presentations, Bobbi Newman seems to focus more on transliteracy being about teaching digital literacy. Tom Ipri writes:

On one level, transliteracy is a descriptive concept, being a “new analytical perspective.” In its original iteration, transliteracy is more about understanding the ways various means of communication interact and understanding, not necessarily teaching, the skills necessary to move effortlessly from one medium to another. It is about the convergence of these media and acknowledges the multi-modal experience of engaging with the modern world.

The First Monday article I read defines transliteracy as being the convergence of other previously existing literacies like digital and media literacy (which I always felt like information literacy did too). I feel like I’m smarter than the average bear, but the more I read about this, the more stupid I feel. When I see sentences like “in fact, incommensurability is anathema to the transliteracy project because transliteracy is predicated on the ability to maneuver between competing ‘paradigms’ of literacy” my eyes glaze over. As someone who studied philosophy a great deal in college, I’ve always felt that the mark of a great theorist is the ability to explain something simply (thanks John Locke and Jeremy Bethman!). So I’m going to look at the way Lane Wilkinson distinguishes information literacy from transliteracy, since it seems like the most coherent and concrete description I’ve seen.

Lane Wilkinson describes the difference between information literacy and transliteracy as being that information literacy compartmentalizes academic research and tools vs. popular research and tools and transliteracy conceives of them as all being part of a big information ecosystem. That certainly sounds like a good idea; our instruction should be about teaching patrons to make sense of the information ecosystem that exists, and that does extend beyond the walled garden of the University. The issue is, that’s how I and my colleagues have always seen information literacy. That’s how information literacy was defined by pretty much everyone I attended ACRL Immersion with. Sure, there are some librarians that only see our role as teaching the library resources, but that’s more about them doing a disservice to their patrons than about information literacy being that limited. I believe that what I teach students in information literacy sessions should be just as useful for them when they work on a paper as when they are choosing their next laptop. It’s about enabling people to make good decisions by choosing the best sources of information (for their need). It’s not just about academic research, but about life-long decision-making support. Information literacy isn’t just for academic and K-12 libraries; it’s for all libraries. When you teach a patron how to find grant information online so they can start their small business, that’s information literacy. When you teach a patron how to avoid getting scammed online, that’s information literacy. When you teach them how to create their own blog in order to share information, that’s information literacy. Call it information literacy, call it transliteracy, call it Fred, but I just don’t see how the two terms are different. Were we not doing it all before? What is new?

The way librarians and other instructors teach information literacy instruction has grown and changed in response to the changing information ecosystem. We respond to the needs of our students and what is available to them. We didn’t stick our heads in the sand and pretend the Wikipedia doesn’t exist. We don’t spend 50 minutes now covering how to search a print index. I would be a negligent instructor if I didn’t teach students in my liaison area (the social sciences) about the primary historical, government and NGO/think-tank/etc. sources on the web. As the resources, technologies and students change, so do we. And while there are librarians who don’t change the way they teach, that’s just being a bad instructor. It has nothing to do with information literacy instruction somehow being insufficient.

What I find is that the biggest force for making information literacy just be about the library is faculty (not all though — I have plenty who are gung ho for me to teach students how to critically evaluate all sources, including those on the web). I sometimes get complaints when I cover web searching and evaluation in addition to searching tools like Academic Search Premier. I’ve received dirty looks when I tell students that the Wikipedia (as well as other reference works) is a great place for getting ideas for keywords to use in searching on their topic. And perhaps that’s where transliteracy can be useful. Perhaps librarians just need to see if this takes hold with K-12 teachers and college and teaching faculty and jump on the bandwagon if it does. That’s no different from my jumping on the fact that my University amended General Education Goal 1 to include the teaching and assessment of “the ability to find, analyze, synthesize and critically evaluate information” and getting a committee together to assess how that is (or isn’t) happening. It doesn’t really matter to me what faculty and administration are calling information literacy (independent/critical inquiry, research skills, Gen Ed Goal 1, etc.) as long as they’re talking about it. But I don’t see how us changing our own language about this is going to change anything regarding our ability to promote it.

Someone in the comments on David’s post felt that the term information literacy has too much baggage, because many think of it as being just about the library and library instruction. Forgive me if I’m wrong (I wasn’t a librarian then) but didn’t we get rid of the term bibliographic instruction and change it to information literacy because it had too much baggage and was thought of as being the librarian’s thing? To be honest, I feel like it’s our own fault that information literacy is thought of as being a library thing. We push information literacy from a library perspective. Librarians go to faculty meetings armed with the ACRL standards which have no meaning to non-librarians and talking about library instruction. We work to make sure that all students in certain classes get information literacy instruction from a librarian (as if other instructors are incapable of teaching it). In trying to communicate our unique qualifications to teach information literacy, we make information literacy about us. And we buy into it just being about us too. I remember when I first approached my director about asking the VPAA to create an information literacy committee made up of members of the faculty from each academic school, her first thought was “couldn’t the Faculty Library Committee do that?” And now that we have a committee, we are mapping out how information literacy is taught and assessed throughout the academic curricula; regardless of whether it’s done by a librarian or their professor. I think until we change our own marketing approach to being less about getting librarians into more classes and more about information literacy being taught (no matter who is doing it) it won’t really matter what term we use. It will always be associated with us.

In the end, I felt like the whole Library 2.0 thing was a distraction. So many libraries jumped on the bandwagon, creating “2.0 services” that were not carefully planned for, staffed or assessed. Now we see a vast 2.0 graveyard of abandoned blogs, wikis, Facebook pages and more. And, in the end, there was never really any agreement on what it all meant. I can’t really see anything good that came from that term or discussions about it. Now, instead of tons of articles, presentations and books about Library 2.0, we will see tons of articles, presentations and books about transliteracy. What real impact will it have on our patrons? How will it change the way we serve them? I feel like a cynical jerk sometimes, but I want to see results. I have no problems with theories as long as they can be applied to our work in some way. My own teaching has been influenced heavily by constructivist learning theory, but I’m not sure what transliterate library services or transliterate instruction looks like. And until someone can show me, I guess I’m going to be as cynical about that as I was about Library 2.0.

I’m not sure if I’ve become more cynical or just more observant, but lately I feel like I’ve been seeing things through new eyes. We make so many assumptions in this profession, often based on the idea that we know what students need and want. Time and again, research has shown that we’re usually wrong. Some of the things we think are great might actually be great… just not for the average college student. Some things create a whole different set of problems. I’ve been thinking a lot about how so many of our efforts to make things simpler for our students only seem to make it more difficult for them to find the best resources for their papers. Are we making things better or just more complicated?

An example we’re dealing with now at our library involves WorldCat Local. Our library is going to be moving over to OCLC Web-Scale Management for our ILS (which I am really excited about!). Now that we’re going in with Web-Scale Management, we are going to be upgraded to the full version of WorldCat Local (which is called a discovery tool, but doesn’t hold a candle to something like Summon). Through agreements with vendors it is indexing and in some cases federating a variety of database content. But I have to wonder if doing this is going to make it easier or more difficult for students to find what they’re looking for. I’d say at least 75% of students doing research at Norwich have to cite scholarly works in their papers. When they search in WorldCat Local, they can’t limit their search to scholarly sources, so students have to look at each source and determine whether it is scholarly or not. How is this any easier for them than just going into Academic Search Premier, and limiting their search to scholarly journals? It’s searching more stuff at once, but it’s not giving students the tools they need to narrow down their search to quality sources. And as much as I’d like to believe that our information literacy sessions are churning out keen-eyed critical thinkers, too many students still can’t distinguish a blog post from a scholarly journal (as I discovered this semester when I assessed EN 101 students after their library session).

It gets even more complicated when you think about teaching all this. How do you explain this buffet of options to students when the majority of college students don’t want a buffet; they just want some relevant, authoritative options. I’ve experienced this when teaching students about Google Scholar. On its face, it seems like an easy sell. It has scholarly stuff and it’s the Google interface. ‘Nuff said. But then you find books from Google Books in there… most of which are not available in full-text… even though it may look like they are when you find a long preview. Oh yeah, and some of the books aren’t scholarly by a long shot. Uh oh, and did you just find a website with someone’s unpublished articles? And you found an article from the New York Times? And you found some random crappy website? Ok, so yes, there is an awful lot of awesome scholarly stuff in here, but unfortunately, just like with regular Google, you still have to wade through a lot of stuff (some scholarly, some not) to find what you’re looking for. And if we use WorldCat Local as a discovery service, I fear our students will have similarly frustrating experiences.

Project Information Literacy’s most recent report indicates that “students think library sources require less evaluation than information posted by anyone on the open-source Web.” When you have library search engines that are throwing everything from Time-Life books and USA Today articles to the Journal of Military History and Oxford University Press books at students, it’s scary to think that students are assuming the resources they are finding through the library are always of sufficient quality to use in their paper. Then again, I’ve even heard faculty say that to their students that anything from the library is of good quality. One of Project Information Literacy’s other reports suggests that students are overwhelmed by the amount of information available to them and have difficulty making sense of the results they get. Does this seem like a group in need of more or in need of simplification and a sense of context?

Another thing I’m having a crisis of faith about is screencasting. I was one of the screencasting early adopters and promoted it in presentations and on my blog. But the more screencasts I created, and the more students I worked with, the more I realized the limitations of screencasting for providing assistance to students. I read an article about screencasting a few months ago (darned if I remember who wrote it), but it confirmed what I was beginning to suspect. The author(s) gave students an assignment for which online instruction would be helpful and then had some students use a screencast and some use an HTML tutorial. What s/he found was that while students found the screencast more engaging, they weren’t as easily able to use it to complete the assignment because they couldn’t easily switch back-and-forth between the database and the screencast. This begs the question, do most students want to watch a video of how to search a database or do they want to quickly pick out the piece(s) of information they need and move on? This, other articles and my own experience tells me that the majority of students are coming to online instruction with a specific information need and want to skip, skim and scan around until they find the answer. Satisfying an information need like that with a screencast is like students coming to the reference desk with a specific information need and us spending five minutes showing them various aspects of a database that they don’t care about. I can see screencasts being good for people who just want a basic orientation or as a required component of a class in place of face-to-face instruction (I can also see quick-and-dirty custom screencasts being useful for providing reference assistance to remote students), but the majority of people who could benefit from library instructional assistance probably have a very specific information need and would likely rather skip, skim, and scan their way to the answer.

And don’t get me started on ebooks or patron-driven acquisitions! I’ll save those for future posts. I’m not saying I have all the answers — or any of them for that matter — but I do think the answers for figuring out what our patrons need come from… wait for it… our patrons. We need to understand how they do research, how they use our current resources, why some of them don’t use the library, and what they want from the library that they’re not currently getting. So often, library surveys ask about their satisfaction with our current services, not what the ideal library would look like or how we can support their research needs. They may never even have thought about those things themselves. We need an in-depth understanding of our users, through focus groups, surveys, ethnographic studies and more. And while studies like those from Project Information Literacy are fantastic, they aren’t a substitute for studying your own unique population. Development of technologies in the library world is way too vendor and librarian-centric, when the focus should be on what it is our students really and truly need.

I was thinking about writing a post reflecting on recent posts about the myth of the graying of the profession (and the coming librarian shortage) and Peter Brantley’s post about involving young’uns in discussing the future of libraries, but Colleen Harris beat me to the punch. And because she really knows how to tell-it-like-it-is, I feel no need to comment further on this topic. Take a look at her post, On Great Myth of the Librarian Grays. While I do have a tremendous dislike for these AUL or UL-only-type organizations and meetings, I have equal dislike for the idea of meetings that purposely exclude library administrators. We should be able to come together as professionals, all equally passionate about creating a great future for libraries (whether we’ll be working in that future or not). We all bring something different, unique and useful to the table. Those who should be excluded are those who think that people below or above them in rank have no place in the conversation.

Probably the post that has inspired me most recently is Olivia Nellum’s Reserves, Newsletter, Instruction where she discusses how she created a textbook reserves collection with basically no money and a heaping helping of moxie. She also discusses some of the difficulties and unintended consequences of undertaking a project like this.

If you’re a new grad, LIS student, or are just thinking about becoming a librarian, you must check out Bobbi Newman’s post So You Want to be a Librarian? She has pulled together some of the best advice around the web on the profession and job searching into one easy resource. Also worth taking a look at is Andy Burkhardt’s Library School To Do List. In it, he lists some of the important things LIS students should be doing to make themselves marketable in the profession.

Isn’t it fun when you work hard to create something in social media and then the provider makes a change that forces you to redo everything? I’d created a nice Facebook page for my liaison area using StaticFBML and Boxes and then Facebook gets rid of boxes, changes their layout, and I had to totally rebuild the page. Grrr… And of course right after that, I find this great post from TechCrunch on the 12 Best Ways to Customize Your Facebook Page. Grrrr… But hopefully you can get something out of it!

In Evernote, Cloud Computing and Reality, Iris Jastram reminds us of the dangers of having complete faith in the cloud.

I have always felt strongly that librarians cannot come up with creative solutions to problems without having time to just reflect. And sadly, in most libraries, staff are stretched so thin that there’s barely time to get the basic work of libraries done. Learn More, Do Nothing by Peter Bromberg at the Learning Roundtable reminds us of the importance of taking that time to let things sink in and reflect.

While Sarah Houghton-Jan was writing about training in this post (also from the Learning Roundtable Blog, I think all library instructors struggle with The Tension between “Learn It Fast” and “Learn It Well”. We want to cover as much as we can in a single session, but we also want to make sure that the people we’re teaching actually absorb the material. I know that I, myself, have moved from one end of that spectrum to the other in my years of teaching information literacy and I’m getting much more comfortable with the notion of teaching less in order to ensure greater impact.

For those interested in eBooks and wanting an answer to the question “why can’t all eBooks work on all eBook readers???” check out Jason Griffey’s detailed explanation at Pattern Recognition.

I’m starting to see more and more posts from librarians looking at how they iPad could be used professionally. The Great iPad Experiment from Tiffini Travis provides some useful advice for those looking to use the iPad for teaching. At Not so Distant Future, Carolyn Foote talks about Piloting iPads in Library Settings, specifically at her school library.

Selling vs. solving and supporting. I read two posts that make it clear that the focus in marketing can’t actually be on selling. David Lee King looks at how to Support Your Community and provides some valuable advice for libraries. In Solving vs. Selling, David Armano reminds us that people don’t want to be sold to and that the focus of “selling” should be on solving problems that people have.

Lots of food for thought here. Hope you find it all as interesting as I have!

Between work, my son and the class I’m teaching at SJSU (which is about to start), I rarely have time these days to blog. It’s certainly not that I’m uninspired to do so, as I’m constantly reading things that inspire me, provoke me, or just plain interest me. But anyone who has read my blog for a while knows that I put a lot of thought into my posts and have a difficult time keeping them short. So I thought that it might be worthwhile to periodically share the articles, posts, and other resources I find that get me thinking as they might get you thinking too. So here’s the first installment of “Inspiring stuff to read.”

Want to read all of the articles/sites/posts in one browser tab? Click here.

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!

I never in a million years thought I’d get an eBook reader from the current batch of options. They were so not on my radar. I didn’t get all excited and jealous when I saw people with them. I never even thought I’d want to read a book that way. Heck, I hate reading articles on my computer! I’ve printed out every article assigned for ACRL Immersion because there’s no way I’ll retain anything if I read it at my computer. And even if I did want to read eBooks, I’d never want to do it on a device that only does that — like I need another electronic thing to lug around.

And yet, here I am, the owner of a Kindle. No, I didn’t have a total change of heart and buy one for myself. I actually won it in a raffle at a conference I was speaking at. Even if you don’t necessarily want to buy a Kindle, it’s pretty exciting to win one! From my hotel that evening, I registered my Kindle and downloaded a couple of books. I read stories from Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness on the way home the next day and found it to be a pretty good reading experience. It’s nothing like reading on a computer screen — no glare, no backlight. To my surprise, I actually found it to be just as pleasant as reading a print book. A few weeks later I read a 320-page book, Orange is the New Black, on the Kindle (by the pool, in the bathtub, and in bed) and, other than having to plug it in at night, I never thought about the fact that I was reading on an electronic device. The reading experience was just as absorbing. I even fell asleep reading on it! I’ve been pleasantly surprised by it and am actually reading more now that I have it than in the entire year since my son was born.

Knowing what I know now, would I have bought it? Probably not. I don’t travel enough (or read enough, with a toddler in the house) to make it really worthwhile. But there are other reasons why I think the Kindle, and eBook readers like it, are not where it’s at. First of all, while you can annotate a book, it’s extremely cumbersome on a Kindle. When I was in college, I highlighted and underlined the hell out of my books and wrote notes in the margins. When I thought about transferring my Immersion readings to the Kindle, I rejected the idea because I knew I’d want to write notes in the margins and underline important passages and it seemed like a hassle to do that on the Kindle and then refer back to those annotations at Immersion.

Most also don’t take advantage of one of the most exciting things that’s happened in computing in the past decade — the growth of the social web. In addition to easily annotating the things I read, I might want to see what annotations others have added to what I’m reading, if they choose to make them public. If I’m working on a group project, I certainly want to share my annotations with my team members. I want to make it easy for friends to see what I’m reading and what I thought about it and to see what people I trust thought about the book I’m considering downloading. I know the upcoming update to the Kindle firmware will have some social features, but it’s still a long way from what could be possible in the future. I can’t even imagine what reading online is going to look like in the future!

I’ll wait to spend my money on a device that offers all this and is more than just an eBook reader (go convergence devices!). The iPad still isn’t exactly what I want, and at that price it’s just not worth it for me (though I must say that I’ve had fun playing with other people’s iPads). I know so little about the market for eBook readers, but I feel like everything is really in its infancy, is so proprietary, and is so tied only to recreating the print reading experience rather than reimagining the reading experience. I definitely enjoy reading on my Kindle, but I’m much more interested in seeing what comes out in the next several years. I have a feeling it’s going to put what’s available right now to shame.

For library folks near the Buffalo area, I wanted to let you know that I’ll be participating in an all-day conference on “Gadgets and Gear” for the Western New York Library Resources Council on May 7th. I’ll be speaking all morning about mobile trends in libraries (QR codes, augmented reality, mobile library websites and apps, location-aware services and games, text messaging services, etc.), a topic I’m really excited about. I look forward to meeting librarians in the area and playing with some cool gadgets! I don’t really suffer from technolust when it comes to gadgets (I only got my first smartphone a year ago), so I have a pretty clear-eyed and pragmatic view on the topic of library services for mobile users.

If you’re planning to attend and there’s something you’d specifically like me to cover in my talk, please let me know!

I took an absolutely obscene amount of notes from Ken Haycock’s keynote, because it was just one pearl of wisdom after another (I’m only including some choice bits here). I’ve seen Ken speak once before, and he is someone I would go out of my way to hear speak because he has such deep knowledge of and experience with leadership and management. He has been in so many different leadership positions and positions where he has had to ask for resources and create change and consensus. Ken is currently the director of the School of Library and Information Science at San José State University (where I teach) and he has really turned the program into one of the most innovative in the world.

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.