library of primitive art

A Generation Joneser speaks

I tried to post a comment to Michael Stephen's Tame The Web, specifically in response to a guest post on Generation Jones written by Michael Colford. After muttering under my breath, I finally realized I can simply post the comment to my own blog and pray for trackbacks. So here goes:

Add me to those unfamiliar with the GenJones term, but who will gladly adopt it henceforward. Apart from being a librarian (and isn't that why I'm reading this anyway?), I'm at the bottom -- or rather, early -- end of the Gen, at a whiskered 50. Older than my fellow commenters, I believe I feel that sense of tween-ness even more strongly.

Some of my peers have no interest, in fact an outright fear of the new technology: they feel positively threatened by it.

I am looked upon by the younger, connected-since-birth generation as something slightly extraordinary: pretty hip for an oldster, or at any rate getting cred for wading into 2.0 with only modest trepidation.

 And I'm at the tail end of the more established Boomer set, the ones who wear suits and run libraries, the ones who let the youngsters fiddle around with the technology. I suspect they think my interest in the profession's technological future is a career killer (and time waster). Or maybe it's that they anticipate being safely retired when the future finally comes to pass.

 But being the youngest family member to older, 'true' Boomers, this sense of being between generations has been with me since childhood: The Boomers had all the fun we missed out on, whereas we had to come of age in the unenlightened Seventies.

So wot the hey, wot the hey! Best we just soldier on. What is it we Gen Jonesers can add in this multigenerational muddle? The experience that says that play is good -- and learning better -- but not every toy makes a good tool.

The keys to the kingdom

OKAY, SO MAYBE as a mid-career librarian I'm still fairly new to the new paradigm. But since when did LIS students and 'new professionals' (and I use the term warily here) have as much to tell us as we had to tell them?

Unsurprisingly, as my fiftieth birthday hurtles toward me I have been thinking a great deal lately about my place in the chrono-professional continuum. By this point in my career I might be expected to be something of an all-knowing sage. But I haven't learned this much about my profession in this short a span since I was in library school.

This soul-searching has been amplified by working alongside a younger coworker who now is also a newly-enrolled library school student. As a result I've been paying a lot more attention to what I do and what I know (or don't!), and how I present and teach it, and how it's all being received. It's one of the keener professional privileges to have the opportunity to mentor. But it's also just a little humbling.

It's still commonplace to knock library school as less than challenging or engaging. This is done most often by those (like myself) who weren't challenged by library school. For the record, this is not so much a reflection of innate intelligence as the poverty of ones alma mater. The cliché was always that you could only learn so much at library school; the greater balance could only be learned on the job. Unchecked this dismissiveness can be self-perpetuating: My mentor (Wisconsin, 1952?) often disparaged the library degree as merely 'the union card'. For his time this attitude doesn't particularly surprise me.

And when I think of the proto-Internet days of my library education, I am reminded that library science was not yet traveling at the speed of byte; we weren't that far removed from the punch card era. (Remember when Boolean operators were our WYSIWIG?) For all the foundation we received in traditional library basics, we at Columbia never knew there might be another way to learn the ropes -- not at least until we got to the 'real world' and discovered all those bright and knowledgeable graduates of other LIS programs. (There were, of course, standouts in my class -- you know who you are -- and I expect each and every one will respond with an aggrieved rejoinder.)

(Even as I was writing my post, Jennifer Macaulay was posting a sober and insightful appraisal of her own LIS Education which both confirms and belies my assessments here.)

It's easy to compare my library school education (Columbia University GSLIS [r.i.p.], 1981-84) to my younger colleague's. There are still some aspects that do not seem to have changed in twenty-two years ... or fifty-four, for that matter. I must say I find this disheartening. New concepts and approaches haven't yet reached all the way into the curriculum at all the (remaining) library schools.

One bit of encouraging news I have noticed comes from the changing nature of library literature. Back in the 'eighties reviewing lib lit was mostly a valuable exercise of tracking down references and familiarizing ourselves with the standard journals. What we found there was often pretty dull stuff: often outdated, it was presented as faits-accomplis by all-knowing strangers. Article indexing was slow to keep up with the literature. Hardly the stuff of inspiration. But nowadays scholarly print publishing is frequently supplemented by and will soon be entirely supplanted by e-journals. (Even so, I'm not convinced it's of any higher quality than it ever was, but that's somebody else's blog-fodder.) And how great is it to be able to used hotlinked citations to follow up on an author's train of thought?

I am particularly heartened that so much of the practical and inspirational library literature is coming from the LIS students themselves -- madly blogging away, questioning and learning and sharing, applying and sometimes improving upon what they've been told. I'm particularly pleased by that questioning part. I don't believe we were expected to be heard from, which probably didn't much help our appreciation of our chosen profession. While there's still plenty to teach the students, I'd like to think that there's a looping back to the library faculty and to the profession as a whole.

I write this in part to let the fresher faces among us know why they might be encountering such intransigence among their elders. In our defense, we never had it this good! Luckily for me this chance to teach has also been an education for me, allowing me to rediscover the joys (yes, and frustrations) or being a student again. Except, perhaps, for being a little wiser.

<Photo source UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Services>

Scaling Library 2.0

Live and learn. I have been wrestling with this post for days, tweeking and editing and expanding it far beyond its original germ of an idea. TIme to take the blue pencil to it and get it out there.

The title of this post can be read in two ways, and I mean both of them: Not only scale in the sense of 'ascend', but also 'scale' as in 'adjust the size'.

What started my thinking was a post by David Lee King entitled Making Time for 2.0, a must-read for library staff who want to know: How can I possibly have time for this stuff? (Shout out to the omni-web-present videoblographer Michael Stephens' Tame the Web for the reblog.)King answers both library administrators and managers unsure of how to "provide time, equipment, and training in order to successfully implement these new tools into the library's digital space" 2.0; and library line-staff, who may be reluctant to invest the time learning new library techniques.

In the Comments Jenny Levine makes the excellent point that in the final analysis time spent learning 2.0 is fungible: "I also think it’s important to point out ways to get BACK time that can then be devoted to tracking and playing with emerging technologies ... Doing seemingly small things ... can help you regain time, which is almost unheard of anymore."

One of the things that has confounded me about implementing Library 2.0 in our libraries has been a question of scale—both the size of the staff and the size of the audience. Michael Stephens’ delightful video reminds me that his library can loose a good-sized staff on exploiting the new social software. David Lee King answers the flip side of the coin smartly with his example of the solo librarian who still “has time for a library blog and console gaming nights.”

Both strike me as examples of libraries, big and small, that can depend on a large and diverse audience. But what of the small library with the small audience— due either to the narrowness of the subject focus, the library’s small core mission audience, or it’s restricted access policies?

Until recently my library has tended to operate under the Field of Dreams fallacy: It you build it, they will come. The collection itself will generate its 'natural' audience--whatever that is. There’s frequently little incentive to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ in special libraries, and therefore little incentive to innovate.

"You cover such esoteric topics that you either have to do it really well or not at all." This aphorism was uttered some time ago by my wife to describe the challenges and pitfalls of running a special library. When we launched our blog we knew that its subject matter—art, archaeology and material culture of much of the ‘non-Western’ world—would appeal to a fairly small audience. We also knew that the web audience was potentially far larger than our walk-in audience ever was ... or will be. We saw right away that the blog offered the opportunity to expand our patron base by reaching out to the audience beyond the walls. Would it draw more people into the library? Perhaps, but that wasn't really either realistic nor even the primary objective.

It suggests to me a third dimension of Library 2.0, namely depth: Our library can capitalize on its traditional strengths of subject knowledge but provide it to a wider audience. In the end, it's not so much a question of scaling down what Library 2.0 has to offer in deference to your narrow audience, yet taking advantage of Library 2.0 to discover and address an untapped and potentially much larger audience with the same economies of scale.

Embracing risk (sort of)

Thanks to Amy of Library Garden for putting her two cents into the most recent edition of Carnival of the InfoSciences by bringing our attention to the recent post by Alan Kirk Gray at Last Clear Chance, Good News. Your Place of Work is Risk-Free!

Library Garden calls it

a really nice discussion of how many libraries have arrived at making decisions based on trying avoid the worst thing happening. The result, according to this post, is that we miss out on possible successful actions because we are afraid of the possibility of some bad outcomes.

For me it comes right on the heels of the Wired news entry on the complementary need for companies to be flexible enough to embrace technological innovations over which they don't have complete control. And not-so-on-the-heels of my accumulated experience in a remarkably risk-averse corporate style, often known as "traditional". (Okay, so maybe it is called 'traditional' after all.)

There is also a pernicious corollary I was introduced to early in my library/museum education: "We tried it once and it didn't work." This was meant to prevent ones 'repeating the same mistake' but never took into account changing circumstances (technology, audience acceptance, staffing). I regret not having pressed the point a few times in the past when making changes could have had a significant impact on the present. This also dovetails nicely with the discussion last month on promoting a 'Culture of Maybe' in the workplace.

   Q.:  Newbie wants to know, At what point does one stop referring graciously to all the links in the chain of referral that let to the ultimate blog post (so-and-so mentioned here a post by whoosie, &c.), and simply cite directly? Is this ultimately a question of blogiquette?

Q: And who's got the best library management blog out there? There's pleny of chatter on the wire about the implementation of 2.0, but what about managing it? I'm fielding your recommendations.

Ostrich photo (what else) by gravitywave via flickr!