flickr creative commons from Honou

Everyone loves stories. Whether it’s your children listening during story time, your mom reading a mystery novel, your dad reading the morning newspaper, or your friend telling you about their crazy weekend, stories grab our attention, help us relate to others, and transport us into new situations.

Stories can help convey your message in a way that a simple relation of facts cannot. Listening to Ira Glass, of This American Life, deliver a keynote speech this year at the ACRL National Conference made me realize how powerful stories can be. The way he works is that he relates a narrative with a certain direction and breaks it up every now and then with a bit of insight or something with emotional meaning. The story doesn’t even have to have a specific point or moral, just a direction.

Narrative is powerful because that is what our life is—a giant story. It goes in a specific direction but we’re never sure what is going to happen next. There is also (hopefully) some meaning and insight thrown in along the way. This is why everyone easily relates to stories and they’re a large part of any culture.

I listened to business consultant Stephen Shephard talked about something similar last week at a conference called Leadership in a Connected Age. He said that to be an effective leader one needs to create a vision for the future of your organization so remarkable that people can’t help but ask “what can I do to make this a reality?”

This is very similar to telling a story. You’re crafting a vision of a possible future that people can relate to. Rational arguments are important, but they don’t have the power of a well fashioned story. Whether it’s a vision of the future or a spy thriller, their power lies in that we put ourselves in those situations. That is why our heart races a little at horror movies. You identify with the person getting chased by zombies.

Therefore, the story should not be overlooked. It should consciously be used as a tool in your personal in professional life. You can use it to lead as in Shephard’s idea of a vision for the future. You can also use it to market your services to users. Tell the story of what you are doing. Make a video, use social media, relate what you or your institution is accomplishing by using narrative.  Your users will feel that much closer and be able to relate better with you and what you’re trying to achieve.

This post is not really library related. It’s a cautionary tale but important nonetheless.

This morning at around 2:50am I was rudely awaked to some annoying beeping. After dragging myself out of bed and investigating I realized that it was my carbon monoxide alarm going off. I thought it may be the battery but that was only one beep. The four quick beeps in succession that I was hearing meant go outside and call 911, so that’s what I did.

I went out into the dark, rainy night and dialed 911. The dispatcher got all my info and said he would send out the fire department. They arrived about ten minutes later. First one huge engine showed up, then another. At one point there were about six firemen in my place just hanging out 9probably going through my stuff). They used their CO Geiger counter, or whatever it was, and informed me it was my stove. This was after they knocked on all the doors of the rest of my apartment neighbors and woke them up (I am gonna get beat up).

They called the Vermont Gas company and a technician arrived about 45 minutes later.  All the while I was hanging out in my car. He did some detective work and realized that one of my pilot lights was abnormally high and burning/melting the metal above it. It was this that was causing the release of soot as well as carbon monoxide. After some quick adjustments and dusting off the soot created by the malfuction, I was told that the problem was resolved. I thanked the technician and quickly went back to sleep.

This was pretty annoying gettting roused in the middle of the night, but it was also lucky that I had that alarm and there were fuctioning batteries in it. So I exhort you: unless you want to wake up dead, get a carbon monoxide alarm and make sure that it is working properly. Ialso want to thank the Burlington Fire Department and Vermont Gas for the reasonbly quick and professional response.

One of the keynote speakers Steve Shepard has some really useful ideas about how to lead and create the future for your organization. If you want to learn more about his ideas I would urge you to check out some of his articles (especially the one on The Reverse Engineered Future).

He gave a great quote by Alan Kay. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” This was primarily the theme of what he was talking about—creating a believable, exciting vision for where your organization.  Then it should be easy to get people to follow you and build momentum. The other quote he gave was from the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. “If you don’t know where you’re going any road will take you there.” It is essential to have a clear vision to be able to innovate and stay relevant.

He also discussed the power of harnessing the crowd. He gave the example of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. You would always want to ask the audience over phoning a friend. Crowds are smarter than individuals. Use this to your advantage, and don’t underestimate the power of crowds.
You don’t always want to be a part of the crowd though.  Shephard said, “That warm sensation of everything going well is just the body temperature at the center of the herd.” It is also necessary to get out there and take risks. Create an environment in which failure is welcomed. Failure is the only path to innovation, and without innovation organizations become irrelevant.

There was also a lot of discussing about different social media tools. Cathy Resmer hosted a great session where she outlined a number of tools and best practices. But as Elaine Young a professor here at Champlain college states, “not everyone is using social media.”

This is very true, and it is important to keep in mind when engaging your users. Sure you’ll want to use some social media tools to engage your patrons, but also have some low tech options. Sit down and talk to a group of your patrons. Have conversations where they are. Use all the tools at your disposal, even if that tool is just a phone or you asking someone in person for feedback.

First, it helps that we get to see students almost every semester through our revolutionary information literacy program spearheaded by Sarah Cohen. Students get used to seeing a librarian and realize that we can help them. Instruction is very closely tied to reference. Re-evaluate what and how much you are doing in the classroom. Don’t just tell students there are databases available to them. Tell them WHY Google is not always the best place to get information. Make the case for libraries.

Second, professors give assignments that require library resources or that students must talk to a librarian. I think this one would be the most beneficial for anyone in increasing their reference usage. Forcing students to use the library is a great way to help them try it out and see how beneficial using the library can be. I constantly see students amazed at how useful the library is after they get over the idea that “it’s all on Google.” One student even found that using the library was quicker than searching online because they didn’t have to wade through all the “useless websites.” So, talk to your professors. Ask them to build the library into their assignments. They’ll be rewarded with better student work and you’ll be rewarded with a busy reference desk. I know we are.

Finally, we record reference statistics differently from other libriaries I have worked at. Instead of doing the tally method we are using Zoho Creator to easily create a form to record every reference encounter. This form collects all the data and you can export it easily into an Excel spreadsheet. This makes data collection simple, but it also allows you to see what stories your numbers are telling.

I made up a graph With the help of my good bud Chris Campion I made up a a graph in Excel using our data and we can see that a good percentage of our questions are coming through chat. You can also look at other things like “when are the bulk of your questions coming in?” Are you getting a lot of questions later at night? Perhaps you might want to discuss changing your reference hours to support this trend in the data.

These are just a few ideas, but they seem to be working for us. What’s working at your library, or what isn’t working?

The 2009 ACRL New England Chapter conference was entitled Are you being served? Customer satisfaction and library service. I believe this theme of customer service  is becoming increasingly important, not only in libraries but in business as well.

The morning worskshop I attended was presented by Sara Laughlin, and it was called Tools for Understanding Your Customers. It was a hands on workshop in which the participants learned different ways to find out information about who their customers are and what they want. She broke down market research into six approaches:

• Survey
• Existing Data (yours and others’)
• Interview
• Focus Group
• Observation
• Comments/complaints

We were able to look at these approaches in depth and recognize the pros and cons of each. Understanding your patrons is key to serving them well. Libraries need to use marketing tools just like other businesses so they can know and tailor their service to their patrons.

The annual business meeting followed lunch at which I was recognized for being awarded the ACRL National Conference Scholarship. This scholarship allowed  me to attend both this conference and the ACRL National Conference in Seattle, for which I am truly grateful.

The afternoon consisted of a plenary session in which all the people who attended different sessions brought their findings and questions together to share with the group. They also used Twitter to enhance the session and projected tweets onto the big screen, which I thought was an excellent addition to the discussion.

I found Anne Washburne’s insights to be the most helpful. She said that “people are forgetting how to be nice to each other.” Customer service is about treating people with kindness. But this also applies in your workplace. She stated that anyone can be a change agent, just by owning their work environment and being positive. This means not going into work making excuses and complaining but coming in purposefully everyday and realizing that everyday you can make a change. I know I was a little inspired.

The conference wrapped up with a social hour which I thought was very beneficial. I was able to meet a lot of different people from around New England who are doing some pretty cool things. I also may have volunteered for helping to get a stronger ACRL-NEC presence in Northern New England. I know that even in the Burlington area we have five colleges and we do not collaborate as much as we should. I would like to see a stronger cohesion and simply more conversation among us simply because I think we can learn a lot from each other and it would allow all of us to serve our customers better.

I put in my birth date this morning and it gave me relevant computations about that day including how many days ago it was, notable events, the sunrise and sunset, and that it was a “waxing gibbous moon.” I can see this being a very powerful tool for doing more in depth and especially precise research.

The goal of the Wolfram Alpha folks “is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.” It is a very ambitious project and am excited to see where it goes in the future. Give it a try!

I recently had an excellent summer scheming meeting with my amazing colleague Sarah Cohen. I like when we put our heads together. It gets me energized and excited about new ideas and initiatives that we could try.

Sarah had just gotten back from a trip to the UK and while there she visited Champlain College’s study abroad campus in Dublin. She related that immediately when she got there she had reference questions from the students there. Apparently students are doing significant research while they’re abroad, and are not quite sure where to get appropriate resources.

Even before she told me her idea I was on the same page as her: we should offer in depth reference to these students using a service like Skype or something similar. They do have our Digsby/IM chat available to them (which they have made use of), but with in depth research something more is needed.

I think we are going to look into it this summer and then maybe run a pilot of the service in the fall. The only missing piece that may be necessary is screen broadcasting software. I really like Procaster, which allows you to live stream what is going on on your screen.

But I really would like something that would allow me to use Skype and then simply switch from my camera to viewing what is on my screen. Is anyone using anything like this? Are there any free or cheap options available? I’ll do some more research, but it should be fun trying something like this.

This just in: Fail Whale! (thanks to Lee LeFever on Flickr)

Twitter has gotten a lot of press lately. CNN loves to talk about it. It has been on both John Stewart and Steven Colbert. Jimmy Fallon uses it copiously and talks about it on his show. Twitter has grown 2,300% in 13 months. There is no ignoring it.

Yet, recently at the ACRL conference in Seattle I was told students aren’t using it.  I heard this at an excellent session called If You Build It, Will They Care? Their data may be correct for the time they conducted the survey. I thought as much was true myself. I had not seen students on Twitter. Now, though, my response to them is: “just wait.”

The presence here at Champlain College has been growing steadily. This is likely in part due to the efforts of “the queen of social media” Elaine Young, a marketing professor at the college. She began to use the hashtag #campchamp to group all the tweets Champlain College together.

Following and using that tag has proven very useful in learning what’s going on around campus and connecting with students, faculty, and staff. I was even able to perform some preemptive reference for a student who tweeted that they were working on a paper.

I am predicting a growing number of students will be on Twitter in the coming months. It is not going away. We may have a number of pretty savvy students and faculty members here at Champlain, but I forsee a this becoming a national trend.

My advice? Try to find and follow the tag for your school or your community using a tool like Tweetdeck or even Twitter Search and RSS. If there isn’t a tag , start it. Someone has to be the first. Why not you?

It is a much less formal way to interact with students and faculty members. Instead of seeing them in class or meetings or a reference interview, you can simply have conversations about what’s going on around campus or in current events or whatever. It can be very powerful community building tool, in addition to its other myriad uses.

Your students may not be there yet, but they will be…they will be.

thanks to dottorpeni on flickr

I really enjoyed reading the Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians. It succinctly puts in perspective the place of libraries and librarians in the world.

It came out of a gathering called: In the Foothills: A Not-Quite-Summit on the Future of Libraries (which I wish I could have attended). This group, composed of some very bright library enthusiasts, undertook the task of thinking about the library in big picture terms. It’s often easy to lose this perspective when you’re going to meetings or sorting through mountains of email, but I find this statement invigorating, and something that we as librarians, archivists, etc. can really draw strength from:

The Role of the Library

The Library:

• Provides the opportunity for personal enlightenment.
• Encourages the love of learning.
• Empowers people to fulfill their civic duty.
• Facilitates human connections.
• Preserves and provides materials.
• Expands capacity for creative expression.
• Inspires and perpetuates hope.

I hope that when I and my colleagues are making decisions about our library and what we should be doing, that we don’t lose sight of this big picture perspective. I know personally I will try to keep in mind that my mission is bigger than just myself or my institution. It is about all libraries together and about humanity.

We were doing some Q&A towards the end of the session, when the conversation surprisingly turned to libraries and library science in general. They were asking me about my profession. These were things like, “what do you enjoy most about librarianship,” “is there a secret librarian handshake,” “and are libraries going to be around in a hundred years?” I gave them my honest opinion on these things, and they were pretty easy questions since we as librarians think about them all the time (except we probably do need a secret handshake).

But towards the end, the professor brought up a point about libraries as a physical space. He talked about how if it was possible to download all the experiences, thoughts, emotions, etc. of one human being, we’ll call him Mr. Jones, and upload it onto a computer or terminal, then someone could interact with that personality composed of all those experiences, but not the physical individual. It was his contention that the experience of Mr. Jones’ friends, relatives and especially romantic partners would be severely diminished  if they could only interact with this bodiless personality and not a physical person.

He then compared this to the library as a physical space. Of course we have all this information, and much of it can be accessed online, but again his contention was that your experience and your college career would be diminished if you were not able to interact physically with the library.

It was at this point that a sharp student asked if he was comparing the library to sex. His response? “Going to the library is the most fun you can have with you clothes on” (a la Jerry Della Femina).

I really respect this professor and love his enthusiasm and excitement about the library. But I also really found this philosophical discussion of the library very enlightening.

The library is not just a collection of information. In our Western society we are often very dualistic, separating the mind and body. But a human is not just the sum of his thoughts and experiences. It is also his physical pleasures, scars, and smells. So to is the library not just the information inside it, but the quiet study nooks, the frantic computer lab the week before finals and the interactions with friends, professors, and librarians. You’re missing an important part of college if you haven’t been to the library.