Organizational culture is a very real and a very powerful force in every organization. I have worked in a variety of different organizations and each had had its own rituals, norms, values, and assumptions that influenced the way people worked together, shared information, and got things done. Culture is this weird, powerful, unspoken thing that both impacts and is impacted by the people within it. While organizational culture can change over time, it is usually because of major staff turnovers as culture is notoriously difficult to change.

Organizational culture can be positive and healthy or seriously maladaptive, but I think most cultures have a little from column A and a little from column B. Healthy cultures incorporate and adapt to new people and ideas. Maladaptive cultures are notoriously difficult for newcomers to feel welcome in and tend to force them to conform or leave. It’s in organizations with maladptive cultures where I think the issue of cultural fit can be most problematic.

I know what it feels like to work at a place where you don’t fit. You feel like a second class citizen in just about every interaction. You go from participating in meetings to avoiding speaking at all costs. You feel like your perspective is not taken seriously and the projects you’re involved in are marginalized. There were a few of us at that job to whom it was made painfully clear that we were the odd men out. These were not slackers who did a crappy job, but folks who were passionate about and devoted to their work. Not fitting was torture for my psyche and made me question whether there was something inherently wrong with me.

Based on my experience, you might think I’d be suggesting that people carefully screen their applicants for “fit.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. Screening for cultural fit tends to lead to monocultures that don’t embrace diversity of any kind — racial, gender, perspective, experience, etc. Monocultures are toxic and have difficulty adapting to change. Hiring people in your own image leads to an organization that can’t see clearly beyond its navel. As expressed in the article “Is Cultural Fit a Qualification for Hiring or a Disguise for Bias?” in Knowledge @ Wharton —

Diversity in the workplace has long been valued as a way to introduce new ideas, but researchers have found other reasons for cultivating heterogeneity. Information was processed more carefully in heterogeneous groups than homogenous groups, according to “Is the Pain Worth the Gain? The Advantages and Liabilities of Agreeing With Socially Distinct Newcomers,” by Katherine W. Phillips, Katie A. Liljenquist and Margaret A. Neale, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Social awkwardness creates tension, and this is beneficial, the study found. “The mere presence of socially distinct newcomers and the social concerns their presence stimulates among old-timers motivates behavior that can convert affective pains into cognitive gains” — or, in other words, better group problem solving.

So perhaps bringing people in who aren’t such a perfect fit, and maybe even challenge the current structure a bit, is very good for the organization. Any time I have worked with someone who has a very different perspective and lived experience than I have, I have learned so much. I remember when we hired an instructional designer at the PSU Library who came from outside of libraries, I found that it was much more difficult to get on the same page, but the ideas he brought to our work more than compensated for any difficulties I had as a manager. He allowed us to see beyond our myopic librarian view. I think hiring people with different cultural, racial, gender, socioeconomic, etc. backgrounds provide similar benefits to the organization.

Whether it is conscious or unconscious, hiring people who are “like you” is bias, and it tends to result in organizations that are less diverse; not only in terms of perspectives, but in terms of race/gender/religion/etc. When you’re on a hiring committee, how often do you find yourself judging candidates based on qualities you value in a colleague rather than the stated qualifications? It probably happens more than we’d all like to admit.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of considering fit without even thinking about it. I remember when I was on my first hiring committee, once we’d weeded out those candidates who didn’t meet the minimum qualifications, I felt myself basing my evaluation of the rest on whether or not they had the traits I value in a colleague. The person we hired ended up becoming a good friend and while he did a fantastic job in his role, part of me wishes I had put my personal biases aside when making that decision. I may still have championed him, but I would have done it for the right reasons.

One thing I feel strongly that we should hire for is shared values. It is critical that the person one hires doesn’t hold values antithetical to the work of the organization. I don’t care anymore if a candidate seems like they could be a friend, but I do care if they evidence and support the goals and values of my library and community college. Just having the required qualifications isn’t enough; being a community college librarian isn’t for everyone.

Unfortunately, in reading this New York Times article, “Guess Who Doesn’t Fit In at Work”, and from my own experiences, people are judged by much more than shared values, which unintentionally biases people doing hiring against folks who have different lived experiences and interests. This is discrimination, plain and simple. When I was looking for an image to use for this post, I found this blog post about how people doing hiring should look at candidates’ social media profiles to scan for cultural fit. That we should look at what restaurants candidates visit and what things they favorite on Twitter frankly scares the crap out of me. Because in doing that, you’re saying that people with different views or outside-of-work activities are not welcome in your organization.

What we need is to embrace diversity in its many forms and value contributions from everyone, but that is easier said than done. I like the suggestions theNew York Times article has regarding hiring for fit without bias:

First, communicate a clear and consistent idea of what the organization’s culture is (and is not) to potential employees. Second, make sure the definition of cultural fit is closely aligned with business goals. Ideally, fit should be based on data-driven analysis of what types of values, traits and behaviors actually predict on-the-job success. Third, create formal procedures like checklists for measuring fit, so that assessment is not left up to the eyes (and extracurriculars) of the beholder.

Finally, consider putting concrete limits on how much fit can sway hiring. Many organizations tell interviewers what to look for but provide little guidance about how to weigh these different qualities. Left to their own devices, interviewers often define merit in their own image.

Clearly, the more structured the process and the less leeway there is for making decisions based on aspects of a candidates personality, interests and background, the less likely the bias.

And what of those cultures that may hire for diversity but then treat people with different ideas and experiences like pariahs? Unfortunately, I get the sense that changing culture is nearly impossible without a decent amount of staff turnover. I witnessed a culture shift in my first library job, but it was because my boss had hired over half the staff over a period of about six years and was able to cultivate the right mix of values and diverse characters. I’ve also seen new administrators come into organizations with really strong, entrenched cultures and fail spectacularly at creating any kind of culture change. Fixing the problem of bias in hiring is only half the problem. We also need to embrace diversity in our organizations so that people of color or people with divergent ideas feel valued by the organization.

I feel very lucky that I work at a library that values diversity and diverse perspectives. We have a group of librarians who have different passions, different viewpoints, and very different personalities. Yet I don’t see anyone marginalizing anyone else. I don’t see anyone whose opinions are taken less seriously than anyone else’s. I don’t see people playing favorites or being cliquish. What I see is an diverse group of people who value each other’s opinions and also value consensus-building. We don’t always come to complete agreement, but we accept and respect the way things go. We have a functional adhocracy, where we feel empowered to act and where we alternate taking and sharing leadership roles organically. I feel like everyone is valued for what they bring to the group and everyone brings something very different. Even after one year, it still feels like heaven to me and it’s certainly not because everyone is like me.

We have a long way to go in building diverse libraries, but becoming keenly aware of how our unconscious preferences in hiring and our organizational cultures can help or harm diversity is a good step in the right direction.

Image credit

The level of hubris I had—and probably exhibited—back then embarrasses me today. I’m sure everyone probably feels that way looking back on their shiny new-to-­librarianship selves. Luckily, I had patient and understanding colleagues who were, by and large, pretty game to try new things.

These days, I cringe when I read things that accuse experienced librarians of being against progress or innovation in libraries. Yes, some people in this profession fear and fight change in any form, but painting everyone who resists specific changes with such a broad brush is an overgeneralization.

Resistance to new ideas has many causes. Some colleagues may be reasonable and some not, but writing them off as being change-averse simply creates an “us versus them” dichotomy that will not help anyone move forward.

Sometimes the idea itself is brilliant but a bad fit for the setting. It’s easy to get excited about something another library is doing and want to replicate it at your own. I remember early on trying to implement social technologies like blogs as a communication mechanism at my library before I even understood how people communicated there. Not surprisingly, no one took to them. But two years later when we needed a way for librarians to create research guides without knowing HTML, a wiki was a great fit. The problem wasn’t social technologies; it was trying to solve problems that didn’t exist.

Sometimes change resistance comes not from the quality of the idea but from the way it’s presented. Organizational culture is the shared values and unwritten rules about how the organization works and how things get done. Whether the organizational culture is functional or not, it cannot be ignored. Learning and working within the culture is critical for change leadership. ­Ambiguity can also trigger resistance, so provide clarity on what it will take to create the change and what is required of each individual. Just because your ­vision is clear to you doesn’t mean it’s clear to your colleagues. The Harvard Business ­Review article “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail” illustrates many additional ways we can sink (or save) our own ideas.

I’ve more recently had the chance to be on the other side: resisting a change I didn’t think was good for our patrons. Years ago, when advocating for improvements to a library instruction space, a colleague suggested that we buy iPads and a cart to wheel across campus to classrooms. What appeared to be the innovative choice was a bad one for us for a variety of pedagogical and logistical reasons. Given our understanding of our patrons’ technology skills and the mobile unfriendliness of many online research tools, it wasn’t a good fit. But to the person who was relatively new to the library and keen on implementing mobile technologies, it may have appeared that we were against progress.

I still go into every new job and new academic year full of ideas and enthusiasm. I also understand the importance of learning how patrons use the library and what they need from it, as well as working within the organizational culture.

In the end, change is not just about doing cool stuff; it’s about providing a better experience for our patrons.

The post It’s Not Us Versus Them appeared first on American Libraries Magazine.

When I graduated from library school, I worried about anti-online-degree bias. I worried that people would think my degree was somehow “less than” because I’d done it fully online. I remember being asked some questions about it at one interview that made the search committee’s biases pretty clear, but the people who eventually hired me seemed to see it as an asset rather than a weakness (mind you, it was for a distance learning librarian position).

That was in 2004. I assumed that 11 years later, people had gotten the message that online courses and online degrees are not necessarily less than, and that the people who go through them can be just as (and in some cases more) qualified as students who did on-site programs. That was until I read this article by Angela Galvan from In the Library With the Lead Pipe:

Hiring Librarians has documented responses from hiring managers claiming students in online programs cannot work in teams or learn effectively, when many students choose online programs for the exact opposite reasons. As with myths about poverty which overshadow the well-established resourcefulness of poor students, online MLIS students are dismissed as asocial and not “team players”… Suggesting online programs lack rigor or cannot result in “real” learning is harmful, technophobic, and helps maintain the whiteness of academic libraries. This attitude favors applicants with the wealth and time to enroll in face to face programs, even though very little of their development as librarians occurs in lecture style, classroom settings.

After reading this, I went down the rabbit hole into the Hiring Librarians site, which interviews people who hire librarians. I think I’d seen some appalling interview on the site a while back in which an interviewee said they wouldn’t hire a woman who didn’t wear makeup. That is beyond deranged and discriminatory in my opinion. Bfut I hadn’t really delved into the site since then. So I saw comments like this:

“I am reluctant to hire online only students. There is an important dynamic missing when one does not have to interact in person with other students and the instructor. I consider those who are currently working in a library as usually a better hire.”

Are there any library schools whose alumni you would be reluctant to hire?
“If program was purely online courses.”

“I feel graduates from online only schools suffer from lack of camaraderie and group study experiences. They do too much learning in a personal vacuum.”

Which library schools give candidates an edge (you prefer candidates from these schools)?
“University of Texas at Austin and other schools who do not rely entirely in online coursework.”

“Prefer someone who attended graduate school in person over and online degree.”

” I will say, and it pains me to say this, but exclusively online programs don’t graduate the same caliber students as those who have at least some on-site matriculation. There’s no substitute for creating relationships in the classroom that you’ll carry with you your entire career.”

“I don’t trust completely online programs.”

“‘Most’ librarians work with people. It is odd to get a degree for that kind of job online…I believe that many folks are graduating that should not…”

I’m amazed that there is this much ignorance in our profession.

I chose to do my degree online at FSU, in spite of getting offered a nearly full-ride to the University of Maryland, for love. I was in a new relationship with a guy I was crazy about, and while I knew it was silly to give up such an offer, I followed my heart. That guy ended up becoming my husband and I shudder to think of what I’d have missed had I chosen the other path. There are all sorts of reasons people choose to do their degree online and it rarely has anything to do with being lazy. People have spouses, kids, infirm parents, jobs, financial limitations, and myriad other things that tie them to a specific place. For the straight-out-of-college student, it is easier to move for school because they usually have fewer things tying them down. I moved to Tallahassee for social work school when I was 22, and it was a great experience. But, for a degree like ours, I really don’t feel like someone will be irreparably harmed by not taking classes face-to-face. So much of what we learn is on-the-job, and I think a library school does a greater disservice to students by not requiring an internship or some sort of work experience in libraries than they do in not requiring face-to-face class attendance.

Like Angela Galvan, I also feel like by saying that you would not want to hire someone with an online degree you are expressing a bias against people who do not have the means or privilege to move to a place with a library school. That feels really wrong to me.

I’ve been teaching for San Jose State University’s online iSchool program for about 7 1/2 years. When I first started teaching in the program it was not all online and most of the students in my online classes came from California. Soon, the program became 100% online and I started teaching students from all over the country, North America, and the world. Another shift was that I found that most of my students were working in libraries and some had more experience than I did. At Portland State, our Access Services Manager was going through the program and, in my current job, our serials librarian is doing it. Both women are amazing, full-of-energy, and experienced in the field. That said, I’ve had a lot of less experienced students in my classes who knocked my socks off and have gone on to do amazing work in libraries.

I’ve been nothing less than blown away by the caliber of students graduating from San Jose State’s program. Yes, in every class I teach there are a few slackers who do the minimum amount of work to make it through the class (or less), but the majority are thoughtful and deeply engaged with what they’re learning. I require blogging in my class, so students do a lot of reflective learning and then have discussions in the blog comments around those reflections. These really become thoughtful asynchronous conversations in many cases. I also usually require group work. (I’m not sure where this assumption that online programs don’t require group work comes from. It was required in my program in the age before collaborative tools like Google Docs.) This semester, I’m requiring more group work than I ever have before (for a three-part, scaffolded project), which I really think is valuable. In our jobs, we do projects with other people with diverse skill sets and levels of motivation and have to make things work. Often a lot of our collaboration happens online, even if we work in the same building (it’s even more challenging at PCC with four campuses/libraries). It seems like a good idea to prepare students for that reality.

I’ve heard lots of negative things over the years about San Jose State’s program from people who have no experience with it. The assumption is that if it’s big, it must be bad. It must be just a diploma mill — churning out degrees willy nilly to unqualified new librarians. While I agree that library schools are churning out too many degreed students vis a vis the job market, this is an across-the-board problem not just limited to one school. I’ve been so impressed with the quality of San Jose State’s program, which is heads and shoulders above my experience with the online program at FSU (keep in mind that I got my degree 11 years ago and probably their online program isn’t as dismal as it was then). There is a considerable focus on getting students practical experience and educating them about career options beyond just working in libraries. As an instructor, I’ve been impressed with the level of training and support they offer their instructors (even lowly lecturers like me). I was allowed to dump the LMS and use blogs for my course instead. I use a hosted-by-the-iSchool WordPress Multiuser platform for the class and have been totally supported in that. My course, like all courses, was assessed by a full-time member of the faculty. We’re offered all sorts of professional development and training and, now, each person teaching for the iSchool (even part-timers like me) are required to attend or watch some professional development programming that the iSchool offers each year. The administration is deeply devoted to quality and supporting faculty in supporting students. I have been nothing but impressed and that’s why I continue to teach for them after all these years.

It’s true that it’s more difficult to develop bonds with instructors and other students through fully online programs, though it’s not impossible. I stay in touch with some of my former students and one of my best students ended up getting a job at Portland State! But I don’t have a network of friends from library school nor do I think any of my instructors from FSU remember me. By doing an online program, you also lose out on the ability to work in the library located at that library school, which I know was an important experience for many of my friends who went to schools like UW and UNC. Yes, those are all benefits of face-to-face programs, but are they worth going into substantial debt to quit one’s job and/or uproot one’s family? Probably not for most people who do not have wealth and/or privilege. Do I feel like I’ve been irreparably harmed by not having those connections and experiences? Not at all. I developed a strong network of professional friends through work, online networking, blogging, and service.

My online program was pretty crappy in 2003-2004, but I learned like crazy on the job and was able to achieve a great deal professionally over the past decade. Unlike many of my students, my experience in libraries was extremely limited — 6 months in circulation at a public library and an internship in a university archive — but I was given an opportunity by my colleagues at Norwich who didn’t see my online degree as an indictment of my potential. Whether someone graduated from an online program or a face-to-face one means nothing in the long-run. What matters is the skills and passion they bring to their work.

Image credit: Student with an Online Degree by bluefieldphotos bp, on Flickr.

It is easier to leave a project behind when you know there are people equipped and committed to supporting it. I’ve heard horror stories about libraries that have not been able to maintain technologies—from blogs and Facebook pages to mission-critical, homegrown ­software—after an employee left.

It’s challenging to think of leaving as part of project planning, but here are some questions to consider that will make your project more likely to survive your exit.

Is this a strategic focus of the library or a pet project? As you’re getting started with planning, consider whether the project is meeting a widely recognized need. How well does it align with the library’s strategic plan or goals? Make sure that you are involving and seeking feedback from your colleagues as you work on the project so that they feel invested in its success.

How easy is the technology to maintain? This seems like it would be the most obvious consideration when planning a technology project, but I’ve heard about so many libraries that have been left with something that they have no staff capacity to maintain.

If you’re choosing subscription-based software, make sure your funding is coming from a stable source. If you’re selecting open source software, make sure it’s a vibrant project with a lot of contributors who continually improve upon the codebase. At my library, we recently moved to LibGuides because the university that developed our open source research guide software had abandoned it.

If the software is homegrown, make sure it is developed based on commonly used standards and programming languages.

Maybe you are amazingly skilled in an unconventional programming language, but how likely is it that the person who replaces you will be too? You can’t assume your replacement will have the same skill set unless it is written into the job requirements.

Who will maintain it when you’re gone? Many of us work in specialized positions in our libraries, but there shouldn’t be an important project that only one individual can keep going. Library job searches take time, and someone needs to be able to quickly pick up the baton. At my last job, I was part of an instructional design team that worked closely together on every project, so I knew that there were others who could take over my work. Cross-training and team-based structures are so critical to ensuring continuity.

How thorough is your documentation? I’ve heard from numerous libraries that were left with social media accounts that they had no control over because an employee left without sharing the login information. Documentation should be kept from the start about how to access, use, and maintain these accounts. If you’re building an application, it’s good practice to develop documentation as you go. You might think everything is intuitive, but that may not be the case for someone brand new to it.

How will you assess it? Nothing is forever, and some projects are not meant to stand the test of time. The needs of our patrons and available technologies are constantly changing, and we must be able to show that our projects are having the needed return on investment. To do this, you should plan from the start for how you will assess the project.

We can’t predict the future, but we can plan for it.

The post Future-Proof Your Project appeared first on American Libraries Magazine.

National organizations like the Institute of Museum and Library Services have recognized the importance of catching up in math and science and are funding STEM initiatives that expose young people to science in creative and engaging ways. Schools, museums, nonprofits, and libraries have accepted the STEM challenge, developing programs and spaces that allow children to become makers. Makerspaces, hackerspaces, and projects like the Hour of Code and the National STEM Video Game Challenge give children the experience of creating something themselves, which can be a powerful motivator.

Libraries don’t necessarily need to invest in expensive tools like 3D printers and laser cutters to promote STEM. Tools like Makey Makey, Squishy Circuits, Cubelets, and Raspberry Pi are affordable options to get kids creating and programming robots, game controllers, and other cool technologies. They are also accessible to librarians with a small amount of tech-savvy and the ability to search the web.

The internet is chock-full of articles by youth services librarians and others involved in STEM work with children that share programming ideas and technology tips. Some of my favorite sites ­include Make It @ Your library, Tinker, Robot Test Kitchen, Simply STEM, Instructables, and the ALSC Blog.

You don’t even need to use technology to offer STEM programs to kids. Many of the programs that Amy Koester, youth and family program coordinator at Skokie (Ill.) Public Library, shares on her All Things STEAM page are craft-building projects that teach scientific concepts. The Skokie Public Library has been a leader in developing spaces, tools, and programs to support making, and their events are a great source of inspiration.

In addition to being the first library to create a makerspace, the Fayetteville (N.Y.) Free Library offered a weeklong Library Geek Girl Camp last summer in which girls participated in fun science activities and met women working in the sciences. In 2013, the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Public Library partnered with community technology organizations to host a program called Storymaker Maker Party, where kids could create narratives using computer programming, stop-motion animation, circuits, and robotics.

The beauty of offering STEM education in the library is that it’s a neutral space where students are not being graded for their participation. Libraries are rarely hamstrung by rigid curricula and thus can focus on what most interests children. In less affluent communities whose schools may not have the funding to offer Lego robotics clubs and the like, the library may be filling a major void.

Children are naturally creative, so programs like this are rarely a tough sell. The challenge is to develop a culture that sees this sort of tinkering and creation as a lifelong pursuit. By providing tools and programming tied to STEM for children, teens, and adults, libraries can play a vital role in fostering creativity, curiosity, and a community of tinkerers. They will also be part of the solution to a major national problem.

The post Making for STEM Success appeared first on American Libraries Magazine.

I hate one-dimensional characters in movies and TV. I love complex characters who have good qualities and bad. I like that “The Good Wife” actually isn’t really such a paragon of moral virtue at all. That she has made questionable decisions and struggles with things, just like we all do. I like how many of the “villains” on that show do monstrous things, but still have likable qualities and people they love and who love them in turn. I’m glad we’re seeing more and more shows like that, where characters are as flawed and three-dimensional as we all are.

Yet there seems to be something in us that likes to simplify things when it comes to judging real people. Someone is either good or bad. On the side of right or on the side of evil. And there’s a tendency to either vilify people or put them on a pedestal. But the world is not so black-and-white.

I think few things have made that tendency to simplify as clear to me as the whole Joe Murphy vs. #Teamharpy lawsuit and social media debacle. It seemed like the dominant narrative either had to be that Lisa Rabey and nina de jesus were heroes and saints and Joe Murphy was a monster, or that Joe Murphy was a saint and poor innocent victim and Lisa Rabey and nina de jesus were monsters. I personally don’t believe either is true. Joe Murphy is not a saint, but he has had his reputation damaged (maybe fatally in our profession) for something there may be no evidence of him having done. Calling someone a sexual predator without first-hand knowledge or evidence that they are one (and I’m not saying that victims need to have evidence) seems like a shitty thing to do. But, given the number of negative things I’d heard about Joe from other librarians prior to all this, I’m assuming (and hoping) that Lisa thought she was doing something good in warning people about him.

I’m writing this knowing that I will probably be trolled by someone for it, but c’est la vie. I’m disturbed by the fact that, after all of the petitions, and Facebook drama, and blog posts, and tweets about this no one seems to be talking about this (other than right-wing feminist-hating nut-jobs) since the lawsuit was settled and Lisa and nina published retractions. We shouldn’t let right-wing feminist-hating nut-jobs control the narrative. And we also should be willing to admit when we were wrong and/or stand up for our beliefs if we feel we are right.

When I first wrote a post about all this, social media had been relatively quiet about it. I think there had been a couple of blog posts and the Team Harpy WordPress site was up, but nothing with a lot of vitriol had come out. Most of the rhetoric seemed focused generally on how common sexual harassment is — even in our female-dominated profession — and how important it is that there are whistleblowers who speak out about that behavior. There were posts about the importance of believing victims and supporting whistleblowers. I’d say that people were generally supportive of Lisa and nina, but were not necessarily assuming that Joe was what they said he was.

Soon after, the discussion took a turn for the bizarre, at least to me. The conversation around Joe on Facebook and Twitter became intensely vitriolic, with plenty of people arguing his guilt as if they had inside information. Respected library administrators who have never met Joe were calling him a “douchebag” on Twitter. There was a change.org petition asking him to drop his lawsuit, apologize to nina and Lisa, and compensate them. It was signed by over 1,000 people, including many people I like and respect. I did not sign it. I found it really odd that no one was considering the fact that he might be the victim in this. Instead, Lisa and nina were treated like victims, which, if they did harm his career without any evidence of a crime, they were very much in the wrong. I find it difficult to believe that over 1,000 other people knew for a fact that he actually was a sexual predator.

It seemed more like people thought he was wrong to have sued them. If someone publicly accused me of a terrible crime with no evidence and damaged my career, wouldn’t I be the injured party and shouldn’t I be able to seek damages in a court of law? The idea that he was squashing their free speech rights was ridiculous. If it’s not true that Joe is a sexual predator, it is slander. It’s one thing to say Joe Murphy is a jerk. That is opinion. But stating that someone is factually something that they don’t know is true is not protected speech. Destroying someone’s reputation is a tremendous and personal violation of another human being. But maybe he deserved it because he was a player and a flirt? How is that any different than “slut-shaming?” I found it disturbing that none of the people I like and respect seemed to be acknowledging this. But maybe everyone but me knew for a fact that it was true?

I don’t like Joe Murphy. I still feel about him exactly the way I did when I wrote my first post. But, as I mentioned then, I think the fact that he was disliked by so many people made it easy for folks to believe him to have done it (and he might consider why so many people were saying awful things about him behind his back, because it’s not just “haters gonna hate”). We’ve all seen the delight people feel when someone powerful (or someone who is perceived of as being privileged) is taken down. I’ve been reading a lot about Jon Ronson’s new book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and am looking forward to reading it and learning more about this strange and all-too-common social phenomenon.

In addition to the fact that plenty of people wanted to see him taken down a peg, this was happening at a time when things like gamergate and the recent conversations, articles, and presentations about sexual harassment in librarianship were shining a pretty bright light on this issue. I think people wanted to show their support for women who have been the victims of sexual harassment and this lawsuit gave our community an opportunity to come together to do that.

But let’s remember something here: nina and Lisa were not sexually harassed by Joe Murphy. That was never what anyone was claiming. But many people behaved like Joe was suing the victims of harassment. No. He was suing people who were reporting something they said they’d heard. This wasn’t about believing the victims of sexual harassment. They may have believed they were doing the right thing, but they weren’t harassed by Joe prior to posting what they did.

Now the tide has shifted and the trolls are attacking nina, Lisa, and their supporters (including me, though I wasn’t actually a supporter). I can’t even blame Joe much for engaging in a bit of schadenfreude now (I’ve seen him favoriting some of the trolling tweets his lawyers have been shooting out to me and others) I can’t fathom the suffering he must have endured through all this. I can’t imagine how demoralizing it must have been to have more than 1,000 people in our profession signing a change.org petition against him. But sadly, because he’s put on the mantle of the innocent victim and good-guy, I doubt very much that he is going to examine the behavior that got him here (and I don’t mean the lawsuit).

And that’s the rub. How do we call people like Joe on their shit in a way that might actually create change? Calling them a sexual predator on Twitter without evidence is clearly not it. I believe in the power of social media for good, but I haven’t seen a lot of good come out of it when it comes to calling out powerful men for bad behavior, because many then just position themselves as victims. Has public shaming really ever worked to meaningfully change people’s behavior (again, gotta read Ronson’s book)? But the “whisper network” doesn’t work either. People were saying lots of things about Joe, but the information wasn’t getting to people in power or maybe even Joe himself. Maybe he didn’t know how a lot of people felt about him. I have no idea.

Still the greatest tragedy here, in my opinion is that so many women suffer sexual harassment and most of the time the perpetrators get away with it. And this whole sordid affair did little to help the cause of encouraging women to come forward. I’ve been sexually harassed and stalked and never reported any of it. But it was when a faculty member at a former job who used to stand too close to me and would put his arm around my waist sometimes later escalated to grabbing a colleagues breasts that I realized my silence was hurting other women. Because men who do things like this don’t just do it once. If they get away with something that you consider too minor to report, they may escalate to doing something much worse to someone else. We have to find more ways to help women feel safe reporting harassment. I’m happy that more conferences now have codes of conduct and discernible methods of reporting inappropriate behavior, and that will help, but it’s not enough.

I don’t have anything positive to end with here, so I’ll close with an excerpt from an interview with Jon Ronson where he talks about a situation where guy at a conference was social media shamed after a woman tweeted about an off-color joke he made and then she was horribly trolled after he said he lost his job because of it. See any parallels?

The strange thing is the impulse to shame often comes from a good place. Like the desire to confront sexism, say. A good example is the tech conference incident: Hank whispers a naff joke about ‘big dongles’ to his friend, Adria hears it and takes offence, posts something on Twitter and the whole thing snowballs.

Ronson: Yeah, everybody involved in that shaming is doing it for social justice reasons. So Adria feels that in calling out Hank she’s a calling out a greater truth: that privileged white men don’t know the effect they have on other people. The trolls think they’re doing the right thing because they feel Adria robbed Hank of his employment – so they wanted to get back at her. Everybody involved in that story feels the urge to be a good person – and it’s carnage all round. Everyone is broken by the experience; especially Adria, she has it worse than anybody. I mean, I’m on Hank’s side. Nobody wants to live in a world where you can’t make a dongle joke! But by the end of the story, Hank’s okay, he’s got a new job, but Adria’s unemployed and subjected to death threats. So Adria’s view of the world feels vindicated.

Image credit

ACRL was ridiculously amazing this year. I feel energized, affirmed, and hopeful (and completely exhausted and sick since it ended). The programming was so high-quality and relevant that, in most cases, I had at least four options in every time slot on my planner that I wanted to attend. Luckily, ACRL records all the sessions and will be putting them online in the next few weeks; there are so many I want to listen to! It’s really nice to go to a conference when you feel like you’re actually in a position to implement some of the things you’ve heard about.

I have such warm feelings for my amazing colleagues at PCC, but I also have such warm feelings for the community college library community. Everyone has been so welcoming and positive about my move. It feels like marrying into a family, but only in the good ways. I feel so very lucky. I think community college librarianship is the best kept secret in our profession and I’m just happy I got the chance to figure it out.

Secret seems to be the problem though. Two years ago, I heard a good deal of complaining on Twitter that there wasn’t much programming for or by community college librarians at ACRL 2013. This was definitely not the case this year, where there were more sessions by community college librarians than any one person could attend. What was interesting this year was that, in many of those sessions, only community college librarians attended. I went to a great session presenting projects from the Assessment in Action program that were done by community colleges, and the session was attended almost entirely by community college librarians. And yet there was so much any academic librarian interested in assessment would have gotten out of their very realistic and honest (warts and all) descriptions of their assessment projects. We had about 80 people at our talk on what it takes to build a culture of assessment (where we compared our results from community colleges to those from the first study), but only a handful of attendees were not community college librarians. I totally understand that these might have seemed to be only relevant to community college librarians, but I also think there is a tendency to believe that community college libraries have more to learn from university libraries than vice versa. Maybe that’s true when it comes to data management, scholarly communications, and home-grown technologies, but the singular focus on student success makes community colleges a fantastic source of learning about instruction, outreach, and assessment.

Portland Community College looks to Portland State University a great deal (especially in the library) for ideas and to create a consistent experience for students moving from one school to the other. But, in my time at Portland State, most of my colleagues were not interested in the community colleges that provided around 2/3 of their student body. I’ll admit I was guilty of it as well until I was contacted by a wonderful librarian at PCC (who is now my colleague) who saw a presentation Amy Hofer and I gave at the 2013 Oregon Library Association/Washington Library Association Conference and wanted to meet. Amy and I started to meet with fantastic librarians from Portland and Mount Hood Community Colleges to talk about our learning outcomes and instructional practice. During the worst summer of my professional life, they were a ray of sunshine and hope. When I first saw the brilliant work my now colleague, Pam Kessinger, did around curriculum mapping, I became ashamed of the fact that I originally thought we at PSU had more to teach than we had to learn from the community colleges. I was so wrong. Interestingly, Amy and I are now both working for community colleges.

I was so happy to see the presentation at ACRL about how Appalachian State and their local community colleges met to collaborate and discuss learning outcomes development. Similar work was done years ago in Oregon and that work blossomed into a group, ILAGO (Information Literacy Articulation Group of Oregon), that connects community college, university, and K-12 librarians around our shared information literacy and advocacy goals.

There is so much Portland State could learn from Portland Community College about how to build a culture of assessment right. Having served on the Assessment Council at PSU, I can say that there was only lip service paid at the administrative level to the importance of assessment and no real support for assessment was provided in the years I was at the University. You can’t even find learning outcomes for courses (if they exist at all), and while the departments were required to draft program-level outcomes a few years ago, they were not published anywhere on the websites of most departments (I had to ask for a copy from Institutional Research). A couple of departments were doing really great assessment work, but they were the exception rather than the norm.

The College is still on the road to building an assessment culture, but they’re doing it in such a smart way. Every department is required to do assessment, but the faculty in each department are empowered to decide what they want to assess and how to approach it. And they are given support, in the form of faculty mentors associated with the Learning Assessment Council. And the people to whom we have to report our assessment progress each year and who give us feedback on it are our peers on the Learning Assessment Council. The faculty are driving the bus. The departments I’ve seen doing assessment seem to be really focused on doing it to improve their programs for their students. It’s very inspiring. And so nice, as a new librarian learning about her liaison areas, to be able to see the course-level outcomes for every course listed prominently on the College website. I’m not saying every community college is doing amazing assessment work, but, according to our research, they seem to be doing more than BA, MA, and PhD-granting institutions.

Take a look at the results Lisa Hinchliffe and I shared at ACRL from our study of the factors that facilitate and hinder librarians in building an assessment culture, and you’ll see that community college librarians are ahead of the game in terms of assessment practices. [Sorry the formatting got a little messed up in slideshare, but the content is all there.]

Community college libraries have longer been scrutinized by outside entities and so have longer had to play the accountability game. Their more singular focus on student success and learning encourages a focus on assessment for and about learning. And I’d argue that their long history of being resource-constrained (by-and-large) has led in many cases to real creativity (I think this is also sometimes helped by having leaner organizations with less bureaucracy). There’s a lot we could learn from the approaches community colleges have taken to engaging in assessment practice.

This is starting to feel like a guilt trip for university librarians, but I think community college librarians share the blame if they’re not sharing the great work they do. When you look at the literature, a lot less publishing is happening in community college libraries. Seeing how much busier I am in my current job with reference, instruction, and library-wide projects than I ever was in previous positions, I totally understand why, but I don’t think we can expect people to be interested in our work if we are not out there sharing it. Lisa and I exhorted our audience to share their assessment work. Whether you publish it in a journal, at a conference, on a listserv, or a blog, what matters most is that you’re sharing it (though I’d love to see more people publishing in places that provides open access to their work). Librarians of every type could benefit so much from knowing the great work that goes on in community college libraries.

I also think it would be helpful to not use the term “community college library” in the title of articles and presentations, unless something is really only relevant to community college libraries. I think it may make people from other types of academic libraries think it isn’t for them. The work my incredible colleague at PCC, Sara Seely, presented in our ACRL presentation on teaching sources and source evaluation for lifelong information literacy was from a community college context, but was totally relevant to any librarian teaching information literacy. I understand the desire to have community college-specific programming, but I think having the speakers be from a community college is good enough and would expose more people to our great work. So much of what we do and struggle with is not unique to community colleges.

Let’s share the great work we do and break down the barriers between community college librarians and academic librarians in other contexts. There is so much we can learn from each other!

Image credit: 99u

When my brain was completely full on Thursday at the ACRL Conference, Jad Abumrad’s keynote felt like a spa for my brain. For those who don’t know, he is the co-host of Radiolab, a very cool and innovative show on NPR, and the recipient of one of those fancy schmancy MacArthur genius grants. Good call ACRL planning committee! His keynote was brilliant and it was coming at a time when I’ve been reflecting on where I am in my career now that I feel like I’m not in survival mode anymore.

For those who missed Jad’s talk, here’s another one he gave two years ago that covered some similar territory:

Jad Abumrad: Why "Gut Churn" Is an Essential Part of the Creative Process from 99U on Vimeo.

I have such admiration for people who are confident. People who are poised. People who are strong advocates for themselves. People who are quick thinkers. People who are energized, not anxious, when in a crowd of people. People who can be politic. People who are brave. I have a lot of friends I wish I was more like. But I’ve also learned over the years that many of the people I thought were all those things were actually just as big a ball of neuroses as I am. That a lot of people I thought were so confident were actually overcompensating for major insecurities.

People you admire are probably more than meets the eye too.

There are people who say they admire me. I’ve always been uncomfortable with that because I don’t think I deserve it. I’m also uncomfortable because I worry that it creates this false expert vs. novice dichotomy that might make them think they can’t achieve what I have. Anyone can do what I’ve done.

I know a lot of people who are afraid to take risks in their work and/or are in difficult work situations that are killing their passion for their work. In the interest of encouraging other people who are struggling, and inspired by Jad’s talk (though not nearly as eloquent), I’m going to share a bit here.

I am a big ball of self-doubt.

Have you let doubt keep you from trying something or pursuing an idea? Well, screw that! I have never felt certain about anything I’ve done while I was doing it. The entire time we were working on Library DIY, there was a constant voice in the back of my mind telling me “this is crap. There’s a reason no one has done something like this and that’s because it makes no sense.” I’ve cringed when hitting publish on the vast majority of blog posts I’ve written because I think most times that the ideas I have are stupid.

Jad talked about how “gut churn” is an essential part of the creative process. That feeling of anxiety and doubt and panic when you’re trying to do something really creative and different is very normal and very necessary. I’ve always believed that talented, accomplished, and creative people feel really certain about their projects and path (á la Steve Jobs), but it was a relief to know that I’m not alone in feeling the “gut churn.”

So many of us are stopped in our tracks by fears that our ideas are not innovative or even good. Sometimes we’re right and sometimes we’re wrong. I’ve had projects fail and I’ve had projects succeed beyond my wildest dreams, but I’m always glad I went for it because I learned from every one of them.

I’m starting to realize that “gut churn” is better than certainty, because it leaves you more open to making changes and improvements based on what you hear from others (colleagues, patrons, etc.). The more stuck you get on the perfect rightness of your original vision, the less likely you’ll be to accept feedback and make improvements. I’ve learned to develop some amount of detachment from my projects, so that when my work is criticized, it doesn’t feel like a criticism of me. Becoming defensive isn’t productive, and I regret times when I was defensive about stuff in the past.

I’m more of a beginner now than I was before.

One of my favorite former colleagues sent me an article entitled “The importance of stupidity in scientific research.” What I initially thought was a joke actually was a fantastic editorial about seeking out opportunities to “feel stupid;” where you can’t easily find an answer and have to struggle, learn, and make your own discoveries.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. … The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.

I was a high achiever in high school and, at the elite college I attended where I felt perpetually out of my depth, I avoided taking classes that scared and challenged me. What a waste. I’ve come to love the anxiety of doing something new that I’m not necessarily a natural at. Public speaking was something that used to terrify me, but over time, I became increasingly comfortable and found my voice as a speaker. Moving from a university to a community college put me back into the beginner role, and I’ve grown so much as an instructor over the past few months because of it. Feeling ignorant (as I did in my first term here) is not a comfortable thing, but it makes you struggle more and learn more to get beyond that beginner state.

I don’t consider myself an expert at anything. There are some things I’m better at than others, but in my teaching, my writing, my speaking, and everything else I do professionally, I am a work in progress; a perpetual beginner. Having that attitude leaves us open to learning and growth.

Haters gonna hate, but don’t let them define you.

I’m one of those people who just wants to be liked. I’m a people pleaser. I remember in my sophomore year of college, I lived in a house where most of my housemates were always fighting with each other. My buddy Dan Young and I were like Switzerland where everyone bitched to us about other people and we just tried to stay neutral and sympathetic.

I’ve always gotten along with people in the workplace, so when I had what I can only describe as a “nemesis” in one of my jobs, I had no idea how to handle it. This was someone who had been up for the management job I got. I tried to connect with her and be friendly, but she did everything in her power to undercut me in meetings and make me look bad to our superiors and colleagues. I constantly heard from colleagues about her saying bad things about me behind my back, as if I was some kind of horrible person, which made me wonder if I was. I hate that I let her get to me so much. But when she started alienating other people at work, I realized it wasn’t all about me.

The good thing that came out of this experience is that I’m now more ok with not being liked, especially when I’m pretty sure there was nothing I did to deserve it. Sometimes it’s not really about you, but about a situation or the fragile ego of the other person. Sometimes you’re walking into a context that dooms you from the start. It’s always worth starting from a place where you examine your own behavior to see if you somehow caused the problem, but you shouldn’t hang your whole sense of self-worth on whether or not your colleagues adore you.

Even my painful experiences have led to valuable learning.

I spent a big part of the past four years feeling like a failure. Every time I started to feel good about the work I was doing, something or someone came and smacked me down. Still, I’ve learned so much about myself and how to handle difficult work and political situations because of the experiences I had.

In the talk I shared above, Jad talks about reframing awful things that happen; using them as an arrow to point you toward the solution. That’s what led me to my current job, one that was not at all what I’d envisioned as my future when I was at Norwich five years ago. Yet it fits me like a glove. When I was feeling horrible about work, I thought a lot about what the right job would look like. And it looked quite a bit like what I’m doing now. Pain has a way of sharpening your focus and showing you the right path.

I deserve good things. So do you.

I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes and I’m sure I’ll make more in the future. I’m a work in progress, but I’m always striving to be better. I want to be a supportive colleague and be good at my job. I want to be a good wife and mother. I want to feel like I’m contributing to the profession beyond my library in useful ways. I’m working on getting used to the happiness I feel now that I’m in a job I love. I’m trying to be nicer to myself. I’m trying to feel like I deserve these good things that are happening for me.

We all deserve good things. We are all works in progress. Don’t let your own doubts or the stories you’ve got in your head (or that people tell you) about what you can and can’t do prevent you from taking risks and growing. Try. If the worst thing to fear is failure (and recognizing that you will learn from it either way), it doesn’t seem like such a huge risk to take.

Image credit: Gut churn, by Dreadful Daily Doodles

So, I missed writing this for Open Access Week, or Fair Use Week, or Open Education Week, but I think these are topics that we should be focusing on every day of our professional lives; not just 3 weeks of the year.

Imagine for a moment that you’re doing an ego search (not that I would ever do that) and you find that someone is selling an article you wrote (with your name on it) as part of a book or journal that you never contracted with. Sure, you published the article, but for a completely different publisher. Now you find that some random company is making money off your work. You contact them and demand that they remove your article because what they’re doing is illegal, but they insist they are in the right.

Sound implausible? Did you sign away your copyright to the publisher? Or is your book chapter or article licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY? Then what they might be doing is perfectly legal based on what you agreed to. You, like most of us, just didn’t understand the implications of what you were signing.

Making your work open access is a fantastic thing to do. Our goals as faculty should be to promote and share knowledge as widely as possible, and the fruits of our research will be much more likely to benefit society when they are freely available for anyone to access. Too many authors completely sign away any rights to their work, often forcing libraries at their institutions to pay for students and faculty to use something the institution has essentially already funded. Sometimes they feel they have to in order to get tenure, but some are just unwilling or ill-equipped to read the terms of their contract. I still remember an instructor being annoyed with me that we didn’t have access to her Springer book chapter because PSU had “already paid for my research.” Sorry, I wasn’t the one who blindly signed a contract that didn’t even allow for depositing a preprint into an institutional repository.

When we were getting PDXScholar off the ground at Portland State, I talked to many faculty in my disciplines about getting their work into the repository. So many had no idea what the contract they signed did or did not allow them to do with their work and what it did or not not allow the publisher to do. I think we focus so much on the research and then the writing, then we spend months going through the peer-review process so that, by the time we receive an author agreement, we kind of mentally feel like our work is already done. I’ll admit that I wasn’t too savvy about this myself early on, but I’ve always made sure that I could make my articles and book chapters free available online in some way, shape, or form. I wrote about this back in 2013 when I was on the tenure track at PSU.

Now, I think the work we do in terms of negotiating the contract is as important as all the work that came before it. If few people can access your research, what was the point of doing it in the first place?

But it is also short-sighted to only think about whether or not we can make our work open to the public. We should also be concerned with what the publisher can do with our work. We usually think that once the work is published in the journal that the publisher is done with it, but we are sometimes signing contracts that allow them to do much, much more with our intellectual output. I once signed a contract for a book chapter that essentially said I could do anything I wanted with the work (in terms of republication), but so could the publisher. It was better than the first contract I was offered, which gave me no rights to do anything, even put the chapter in our repository, but it gave them the ability to republish my chapter in any other publications in the future.

How would you feel if you found your work published in a book that you knew nothing about? How would you feel to know that random people were making money off work you didn’t see a dime for (even originally)?

Several articles from The Scholarly Kitchen blog have made the point that just because something is published OA doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be reproduced for profit:

• CC-Bye Bye! Some Consequences of Unfettered Reproduction Rights Become Clearer
• More Creative Commons Confusion: When Does NC Really Mean “Non-Commercial”?
• Getting Beyond “Post and Forget” Open Access

Many OA journals make their work available through the Creative Commons CC-BY license, which allows for the maximum reuse,  including the creation of derivative works and selling the work commercially, so long as the creator is given credit. I could take a bunch of articles with CC-BY licenses, package them into an anthology, and sell that anthology. All I’d have to do to stay within the license is to credit each author. But I could sell their work and not give them a penny of the profit. So could any publisher.

I would be deeply uncomfortable with the idea of licensing any of my work under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. I’m not ok with random people with whom I have no relationship making money off my work. I would guess that many people feel that way.

I’ve published in two open access journals in the past 18 months, both of which had Creative Commons non-commercial licenses. In Collaborative Librarianship, they license the work under a CC-BY-NC-ND, which allows people to share the work, with credit, so long as they don’t make money off it, but people also can’t make derivative works. I’m ok with that. The idea of someone being able to change and republish my article in some way I hadn’t intended does make me slightly uncomfortable, though I have no problem with my work being open to anyone to read, share, and benefit from. College and Research Libraries‘ default license is CC-BY-NC (which does allow for derivative works), but I love that C&RL allows the author to specify a different license for their work in the author agreement, giving the ultimate freedom to the author to define how their work can be used.

While I’d rather my articles be CC-BY-NC-ND, there are other materials I create of which I would be happy to allow derivative works to be created. Those include tutorials, presentation slides, LibGuides, and perhaps some course materials. For those, a CC-BY-NC lisense should do the trick.

My blog is licensed under a CC-BY-NC-SA license (SA=Share Alike), which seriously limits the use of my content. People who use it must not only be non-commercial entities, but must license what they create from my work using the same license. That means that whatever they add to my work must be licensed in the exact same way. I feel ok about having that requirement with my blog content.

When we were looking at what license to use for our LibGuides at PCC, we toyed with the idea of a share-alike license in the spirit of “we want everyone to share their stuff.” Ultimately, we went with a CC-BY-NC license because we know that many libraries do not have the ability to put any sort of license on their LibGuides (due to college/university rules) and this would limit their use more than having no license at all. We want to make it clear that we welcome other librarians grabbing our content. Why reinvent the wheel?

But we need to consider more than just under what license our content is being released. If the publisher retains copyright of your work, they can ultimately do whatever they want with it. Just because it has a non-commercial license doesn’t mean that the publisher can’t allow another publisher to use your work for their profit. The Creative Commons license just tells people what they can do without needing to ask permission. Ultimately the copyright holder has the right to do what they want with the content unless your contract specifically spells out limitations. With the exception of the two articles I published in Emerald Journals, which I’m pretty sure I dropped the ball on, I’ve retained copyright on all of my publications, including my book Social Software in Libraries.

I’m not a lawyer or any kind of expert on contracts, but, ultimately, there are four key things I look for in any contract these days:

1. Who will hold the copyright?
2. What rights are we giving to the publisher and what could they consequently do with our work in a worst case scenario?
3. What rights do we have to the work and can we make it available, in some way, freely online (if it isn’t already through the journal)?
4. If the work is open access, under what license is it made available to the public?

Whether a contract says it or not, this is our intellectual property. It came from our minds and our considerable efforts. We should work to make sure we have some agency over how our work is made available and who benefits financially from it.

What success stories have you had in dealing with publishers? What frustrations? Any tips for those new to the universe of scholarly publishing?

Update: Just after posting this, Micah Vandergrift shared with me Bethany Nowviskie’s post which came to a very different conclusion about Creative Commons licensing. I think that’s great! Whatever decision we come to as individuals about how we’d like our work to be used, let it be well-considered.

We need to be just as dedicated to evaluating and improving those systems as we are about the systems we control. Our evaluation of databases and other online tools has to go beyond the content and functionality provided. We need to think about whether we are doing right by our patrons. Otherwise, we are not being good advocates or good stewards of their tax dollars or tuition.

Here are just a few things to consider when evaluating online tools and collections:

Is it usable? I’m sure we all have a list of databases that we recommend to people just starting out with research, and it’s usually because they are relatively intuitive and easy to use. Shouldn’t all of our databases be that way? There are certain databases that students find so frustrating to use that I don’t teach them anymore. Is the content always worth the bad experience?

Is it accessible? There are two kinds of accessibility I’m talking about here. The first, and most critical, is Americans With Disabilities Act type of accessibility. At my library, we were recently considering a new collection until we learned that it was not accessible to students with certain disabilities. If this isn’t one of your considerations when looking at vendors, you are putting your organization in a precarious position.

The other kind of accessibility is about ensuring that no matter what device patrons are using—phone, tablet, gaming system—they can easily use our online resources. Libraries are increasingly developing responsive websites that work regardless of what device is accessing them, but some of our vendors still have not made the effort to move in this direction.

Does it protect patron data? After Adobe’s terrible example of collecting and transmitting in the clear everything users were doing with ebooks in Adobe Digital Editions last year, I hope more libraries are considering this issue. We should look particularly closely at the data collection and privacy practices of web services where patrons have to create separate accounts.

Does it provide good usage statistics? In this age of lean collection budgets, we should not spend money on a product that doesn’t allow us to determine ROI.

Unfortunately, we can’t rest on our laurels once we have signed the contract for an online tool or collection. Products, policies, and collections change all the time, both in the library world and outside, and these businesses rely on us being complacent. When a large scholarly publisher pulled its content out of a major database aggregator a few years ago, customers of the aggregator did not see discounts or rebates for the content lost. Instead, the aggregator added a mix of lesser value and open access titles that saw less use.

We, as a profession, should not stand for such behavior, especially those of us who are part of large consortia and buying groups. If we do not advocate strongly for our patrons, who will? And if we cannot make headway with these vendors, we need to use our collective power and purse to seek out—and perhaps create—better solutions.

The post If Not Us, Then Who? appeared first on American Libraries Magazine.

We spend a lot of energy trying to create things from scratch when, frequently, another library may have already done something very similar. Looking to see what’s already out there before starting a new project can help save time and avoid repeating the mistakes of others. Years ago, when I was looking to develop the protocol for an ethnographic study, I found Andrew Asher and Susan Miller’s free and practical manual, So You Want to Do Anthropology in Your Library?, which answered most of my initial questions.

Looking at what other libraries have done doesn’t necessarily mean following them in lockstep, but much can be learned from people who have tackled projects before us. Libraries seeking to build an easy-to-use video production studio can look to Penn State’s One Button Solution, which is meticulously written for other librarian’s benefit. Want a cheaper digital display option? A librarian at the Somerset County (N.J.) Library System created one using Raspberry Pi and can show you how to do the same. I’d heard about these two examples at the ALA Annual Conference last summer, but documentation on them is easy to find online.

Our ability to benefit from the experiences and creations of other librarians depends on our own willingness to share when we do something novel. When you’ve finished a long and exhausting project, sharing information about how you did it and what you learned is often the last thing you want to do. But no one else will benefit from your hard-earned experience if you don’t. If you’ve benefited from what someone else has freely shared, don’t you owe it to the community to do likewise?

In addition to inertia, some people don’t share because they don’t think what they have done is particularly novel or exciting. I often feel that way myself, but I’m almost always wrong. What’s the harm in sharing even something mundane or imperfect? Others could still benefit from your approach to building tutorials, the children’s program you did last week, or your display idea.

Sometimes the barriers are on the institutional end, where librarians who’ve done great work are prevented from sharing what they did or open sourcing an application. Administrators should advocate for—not squelch—sharing and openness. Sharing the good work done at your institution not only gives back to the community from which you’ve probably benefited, but it is also great PR for your library.

Last year, in my previous job at Portland (Oreg.) State University, I led a team that developed Library DIY, a system for making bite-sized chunks of instructional content available for point-of-need learning. I shared information about the project on my blog and also advocated for the software infrastructure to be open-sourced. While I had to field quite a few questions from other librarians looking to replicate Library DIY, it was worth the relatively small investment of my time to help many other libraries and their patrons.

We are fortunate to be part of a profession so generous in sharing expertise. In the interests of conserving energy across the profession and improving libraries, borrow liberally and share generously.

The post Reuse, Recycle, Share appeared first on American Libraries Magazine.

I’m sure most of you have already heard that the ACRL Board has decided to adopt the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. What I think is more interesting is that they deferred action on the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, choosing instead to take a wait-and-see approach. I think this is a very wise decision and applaud it. There certainly was no lack of concern about the Framework and the sunsetting of the Standards, as evidenced by many critical blog posts and the Open Letter to the ACRL Board, written by librarians in New Jersey which garnered  many signatories including some big names like Megan Oakleaf, Esther Grassian, and Patricia Ianuzzi. I think the most concerning part of sunsetting the Standards to me (which I hadn’t thought of until I read the open letter) was the potential impact of this on accrediting bodies, state groups, etc. that have used the Standards to carve an important role for information literacy in these spaces. I don’t know that sunsetting the Standards will be as disastrous as described in the open letter, but it makes sense to be cautious.

I appreciate the tremendous work that went into the creation of this document. Knowing that it took me over a year to get my colleagues at Portland State to a final draft of our instruction program’s learning outcomes, I can’t imagine what an undertaking it would be to get such a theoretical document adopted by a national membership organization. Kudos to the Task Force, many of whose members I know and respect greatly. While I don’t love every aspect of the final product, I appreciate their Herculean effort and how difficult it must have been to incorporate so much feedback. Bravo!

While I disliked the tone of the Open Letter, I thought it was important to show how many librarians were dissatisfied with the recommendations of the task force. Everyone was allowed to comment on the Framework (via survey) through its various iterations, but unless someone posted their response to their own blog, the comments were not made public. We knew what our issues were with the Framework and maybe the issues of our colleagues, but only the task force saw the full scope of the feedback they were receiving. I think it might have made more sense to  make the draft Framework available on something like CommentPress, where people could publicly comment on it. It would have increased the transparency of the process and maybe would have made people feel that their concerns were being heard.

I’m not entirely happy with the Framework, though it is greatly improved from its first draft (on which I published detailed thoughts). Metaliteracy (or transliteracy) has always felt to me like the “Library 2.0″ of information literacy. Library 2.0 came into vogue, was overused, garnered a lot of conversation and controversy, and disappeared when everyone realized that Library 2.0 was just about being a good librarian (old wine in new bottles). The things described as metaliteracy may not have been in evidence in the Standards, but I believe they have been in evidence in the way librarians have approached information literacy (just look at the literature on library instruction of the past decade).

Threshold concepts, on the other hand, feel new (at least to me) and important. Threshold concepts have made me think about information literacy and learning in very different ways (maybe threshold concepts ARE threshold concepts!), but I find it odd that we are structuring a guiding document of our profession on two particular learning theories, especially two that are fairly new and not embraced widely across the profession. I think threshold concepts are a brilliant way of thinking about how students develop disciplinary knowledge, but it feels odd and presumptuous to structure our profession’s guiding document around them and around metaliteracy.

I also can understand why some people had issues with the idea of using the Framework for assessment. I know some have argued that the knowledge practices and dispositions are like outcomes, but most are written as outcomes that are impossible to measure. We can’t measure that a student “values”, “respects”, “understands”, “appreciates”, “sees themselves as”, etc. We can only measure their ability to do x which may mean that they understand and value something, but it may just mean that they can do x because they were told to for the assignment. I won’t know that a student “develop[ed] and maintain[ed] an open mind when encountering varied and sometimes conflicting perspectives,” but I can tell from how they used sources whether they only chose those that supported their argument or whether they integrated multiple perspectives.

That said, many of these knowledge practices and dispositions can be easily turned into outcomes at our own institutions and seem to cover most of the same ground as the Standards did, though in a more thoughtful, less mechanistic way. And I think the addition of “Searching as Strategic Exploration” helped a lot in ensuring the Framework covered similar ground to the Standards.

While the idea of incorporating more student self-reflection into our work is lovely and a good goal, in most cases, I don’t have the time to determine whether a student has crossed a threshold; I barely have time to assess whether they’re demonstrating a grasp of a learning outcome. And I can see why defining such an ideal makes this document feel so far from the reality most of us are facing.

However, some of the hand-wringing I’ve seen on listservs about how the move towards the Framework and toward sunsetting the Standards is going to completely change their instruction programs seems crazy. Why does it have to? I haven’t met a librarian who told me that their library or institution requires them to be in lockstep with ACRL (maybe it’s the case at some, but I’m glad it’s not the world in which I live). ACRL isn’t exactly our accrediting body and my experience with accreditation is that they want you to be assessing outcomes, not “outcomes as defined by ACRL.” At Portland State, the outcomes we developed and adopted for our instruction program were loosely structured around and based on the Standards (among other documents like AASL’s) and I don’t imagine that it’s going to be a high priority to revise them in light of this change unless the library’s program of instruction changes. ACRL adopting the Framework doesn’t have change the way we teach unless we want it to. And while threshold concepts may impact some of our thinking and teaching, it does not mean we have to completely redo our outcomes or our rubrics if those are still what we hope to see from students and what we plan to assess. I don’t see myself using phrases like “format as a process” or “information has value,” even though I’ve been teaching (and will continue to teach) to many of the knowledge practices listed under those threshold concepts for years.

One thing that has made me bristle at the Framework is some of the paternalistic rhetoric I’ve heard about the Framework “moving librarians forward.” One person wrote that if we keep the Standards people will do nothing to move their instruction program forward. It makes me imagine backward librarians who support the Standards clinging to their old “BI” ways of teaching when there is this brilliant new way that they should be pushed towards for their own good. It reminds me of a lot of the rhetoric around Library 1.0 versus 2.0. The idea that libraries should have to change something that has worked and is working at their institution at all is silly. I also find the idea that this Framework is going to move people who are happy with the Standards forward silly. Is the Framework the law of the land? I love the idea of sharing new ideas and empowering people to make their own local decisions (not pushing them forward), and, in the end, I think that’s what the Framework will achieve.

The thing that surprised me the most from the task force was the complete dismissal of the idea of making linkages or crosswalks between Standards and the Framework. In looking at both documents, it seems a relatively easy thing to do, and Amanda Hovious at Designer Librarian has already made headway on this. My guess is that, in time, libraries, ACRL’s disciplinary sub-divisions, and other groups are going to develop learning outcomes based on the Framework and this will allay many of the concerns people have about it.

I do think that not sunsetting the Standards in the long-term could be problematic primarily because of what it will take to retain them. In coming up with a completely new document, the task force did not make changes to the standards (which was their original charge) because they recommended that the Standards be replaced instead of reworked. If the standards were kept, they would still require an overhaul, because ACRL (and plenty of librarians) found that it was not a match with current thinking about information literacy and instruction. On a practical level, maintaining two information literacy-focused guiding documents is a bear for the organization. Still, I think it was very wise not to sunset the Standards before we see how librarians take to the Framework.

In the end, it’s just a document, not a law, or even a “Standard” (a term which I dislike in association with information literacy and teaching). I appreciate the universe of things that have impacted my thinking about information literacy and teaching. Vygotsky’s Mind in Society. Threshold Concepts. The BEAM Model. Critical pedagogy. Carol Kulthau, Bob Schroeder, and Elyssa Stern-Cahoy’s explorations of the affective components of information literacy. The AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner which highlight some of the dispositional elements of information literacy. An amazing talk by Robert Farrell and Bill Badke on situating information literacy in the disciplines that they gave at Library Instruction West last summer. My experiences at Immersion. My experiences teaching and learning from my own successes and failures. Conversations with my colleagues on the job and within my larger network. The Framework will be another thing that I will read and may influence my thinking, but I feel no need whatsoever to be in lockstep with it.

We all should do what is best for the students at our institutions. We work in these weird spaces, mostly tucked into other programs’ curricula — sometimes as a regular component and sometimes at the whim of the instructor — and have to shape-shift to meet the unique needs and constraints of each situation. I am far more focused on the work the Developmental Education task force at my institution than the Framework, because of how embedded information literacy and library instruction currently are in much of the DE curriculum and how important it is for us to ensure it is embedded in meaningful ways in whatever the future DE curriculum looks like. I don’t see myself in the future talking “threshold concepts” with disciplinary faculty unless it seems like it’s an idea that is going to move the conversation forward. In some cases, we don’t use words like “information literacy” at all; we use terms like “research skills,” or “critical thinking skills,” or whatever is meaningful in that particular context. I’m more focused on the outcomes of the courses and programs I’m working with than those defined by our profession (though I see the value of locally defining what it is one’s library instruction program intends to achieve). The vision of information literacy as a discipline is lovely, but realistically, most of the time, we are playing the role of guests in someone else’s discipline. We can have our own goals and outcomes, but not defining them in concert with the disciplines we serve seems like a mistake.

What do you think of the ACRL Board’s decision? Will ACRL’s adoption of the Framework change your library’s outcomes or your approaches to teaching? If so, how?

I think this is a great example of how important clear communications are for a company. Throwing out terms like widgets and APIs and then using them in different ways in different contexts is bound to lead to confusion (especially if your original API wasn’t actually a real API). That I couldn’t find the information in their documentation or community site — which, while it is a treasure trove of good information, is also big, unwieldy, disorganized, and incomplete — is a huge problem for current and potential future customers. That the emails from support were so unclear that they led several intelligent librarian to the completely opposite conclusion is not good at all.

I still really love using LibGuides and am thrilled that we are ditching Library a la Carte (as are my colleagues), but the neat freak (and librarian) in me really wants to open the amazingly useful junk drawer that is their documentation and organize it for them.

Update: I’ve been in touch with a Springshare representative who tells me that things like the contextually aware D2L widget from Portland State University will work in LibGuides 2.0 and apparently, the responses we’d received from support were based on hypotheticals (though we’d explicitly sent the link to PSU’s code in our emails to support). This is very good news, but I am dismayed that it takes a blog post to receive a straight answer, because what we’d heard from support originally was that there was a change in access to the API. What I do know for sure is that if you want to use JSON data and full access to the API, you will need to upgrade to the CMS product and that what they used to call an API wasn’t a true API. So there isn’t access to the full API with LibGuides 2.0, but apparently there never was, FWIW.

When you think of Web 2.0 (a term I know you know I dislike), what do you think of? Rounded corners? The read/write web? Social media? Collaboration? The wisdom of crowds? How about open APIs? Maybe that last one doesn’t come to mind for most people who aren’t web developers, but open APIs are critical to so many of the “2.0” web services we rely on. For those who don’t know what an API is, it is short for Application Programming Interface, and it is what allows developers to pull content or data from one web service into another. One application will make a call to the other through the API to pull in updated data/content regularly. It is the technology behind many incredible mashups out there (I’m particularly in love with those that layer data on top of Google Maps) and is how so many of our web services connect to one another. Use the wonderfully clever IFTTT (if this then that)? Won’t work without APIs. You don’t have to be a programmer to recognize the value of all that.

I thought APIs were so integral to social software back in 2005 that I wrote about them in my book Social Software in Libraries. My writing on the topic was originally going to be an entire chapter (Chapter 2 to be precise), but the powers-that-be wanted it edited down, so it ended up in the chapter on “the future.” And, as predicted, it has become an increasingly important part of web 2.0 services in the ensuing years.

LibGuides was originally marketed as the Web 2.0 version of subject and course guides. It offered a Web 2.0 look-and-feel as well as tools to gather user feedback. And it certainly made it easier for web design novices to develop decent-looking guides (and ugly ones too as I’m sure we’ve all seen). One great 2.0 feature of LibGuides was the open API, which allowed you to pull content from LibGuides into other websites, like the library website or a Learning Management System (like D2L, Blackboard, Canvas, etc.). This was what my colleague Mike at Portland State relied on to create our contextually aware D2L widget that connected students from their D2L course homepage directly to the appropriate course guide (where one existed) or subject guide to support their research. I led our adoption of LibGuides at PSU and this widget was one of the best things to come out of it.

I’m now in serious deja vu mode as I work with colleagues here at Portland Community College to implement LibGuides (they’d been using the open source Library a la Carte for many years). It’s actually great to have a second chance to implement LibGuides knowing what I know now and what I wish I’d done early on. Many of our students transfer to Portland State eventually, so the college tries to create a consistent experience for students wherever possible. Moving to LibGuides is another positive step in that direction and we planned to use the PSU widget to make our D2L instance even more in-step with PSU (and easier for students to use). However, all our plans went on hold when we were told by Springshare that the open API was not a part of their LibGuides offerings in LibGuides 2.0 (they told us we have access to Tools –> Widgets, “many of which replicate what you might recall as API in v1″). I was pleased to find that this was an issue with how they define API (and did in the past), so apparently nothing has changed in 2.0 access.

LibGuides promoted itself early on as being different from other library vendors, yet this move is exactly what I’d expect from a vendor that knows they have a critical mass of customers, next-to-no competition, and knows users by and large won’t leave. So, in order to pull more customers into their more expensive product, they make a certain feature that was part of their cheaper product now only available in the more expensive one. This is similar to the move EBSCO made when they pulled certain critical history journals our of Academic Search Premier and made them only available in their America: History and Life and Historical Abstracts full text products (which mostly otherwise contained junk at that point). Do you really want to be on par with EBSCO, Springshare?

But the funny thing in this case is that I can’t find this information about the API no longer being open to LibGuides customers anywhere on their website. In fact, I find evidence of the opposite being true. So, if this is the case, it is not only a crappy thing to do, but, unless I’ve lost my ability to search a website, on nebulous legal ground, because people are making purchasing decisions based on the evidence on their website that they will have the same API access in LibGuides as in the CMS. As the person who promoted and helped get LibGuides adopted at two institutions, I am seriously pissed off.

My next American Libraries column is all about how we can’t be complacent with library vendors, some of whom continually change (and in many cases decrease) their offerings without decreasing their price tag. This is just another example of the sort of stuff that goes on all the time and that we should not accept without a fight. These companies cannot survive without us, yet they know that ditching them will be painful for the library and for our patrons. We have to find ways to flex our collective muscle even when it hurts (especially when we are part of large and powerful consortia… cough cough…Orbis Cascade Alliance… cough cough) to advocate for what will best serve our patrons. Otherwise, we are not acting as good advocates for our patrons nor good stewards of the funds we receive.

Image credit: From 2007 LibGuides website, which focused on how it brought “the benefits of Library 2.0 to your institution.” Courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

Teaching is such a solitary thing. Sure, you’re up in front of a bunch of students, and maybe an instructor if you’re doing course-integrated instruction, but the act still feels solitary. We try to make it less so by seeking feedback from instructors and doing assessment, but we rarely get feedback from people who really understand what we do: our colleagues in the library.

But doing that can be terrifying for some. The idea of showing off your approach to teaching can be intimidating. Many of us assume that whatever our colleagues are doing in the classroom, it’s probably ten times more brilliant than what we are doing. I can guarantee that it’s probably different from what you do, but the fear of finding out they’re so much better at it than you is likely unfounded. You probably do some things they wish they did, and they probably do some things you wish you did. All that will come from discovering this is that you will learn more and become better, which seems worth a bit of anxiety.

As a former head of instruction at two institutions, I’ve guided colleagues through peer learning exercises around their instructional practice. What I’ve learned from doing this at two very different institutions is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach; you have to tailor the approach to the needs, anxieties, and culture of the group. But the value and importance of being able to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of teaching with your colleagues cannot be overstated. Not only does it improve your own reflective practice, but it creates a true community of practice, which will elevate everyone’s teaching. A rising tide raises all ships, right?

At one institution, we did peer observation of instruction followed by one-on-one meetings. Before the start of the term, each librarian chose two colleagues whose instruction they would observe  (we made sure no one had to work with someone they reported to) and those people, in turn, also observed them. So everyone observed and was observed by two people. We let the observed librarian pick the class they felt most comfortable having observed, which I think is a good way to decrease anxiety. If I could go back, I’d have each librarian first choose two sessions they are comfortable having observed first and then have people choose their observation partners based on scheduling availability, because I know at least one person couldn’t make it to the “ideal” session.

As each pair watched the instruction session, they took notes and wrote down questions they had about the approach the librarian was taking. This was for the one-on-one meeting each pair would have after the session. The idea was not to look for flaws, but to better understand their approach and brainstorm together better ways of meeting their instructional goals. But I think we all found that the act of watching two other people teach was actually far more enlightening than the conversations we had about our own teaching (though they were valuable too). We were able to lift the veil and see other approaches, and the ideas we got from this were incorporated into our future teaching. It worked out really well for all of us.

I will say that the group I did this with was tremendously comfortable with one another. We trusted and relied on each other, and I think that was what made it possible to do this successfully. At an institution where librarians are more anxious about their teaching or simply don’t trust each other enough, the approach might require tweaks. Maybe there is no meeting after the instruction sessions to discuss and reflect on them. Maybe instead, every librarian just observes two other librarians teaching. That, in and of itself, is so valuable. Or maybe your colleagues are just not comfortable letting other librarians watch them teach. These are not concerns to just brush off and ignore. It takes time to build a culture of trust, so if it’s not there yet, you need to find other ways to build a community of practice and ethic of peer learning that get people relying on each other for their learning and instructional improvement. It’s well worth the work.

One way to do this without peer observation is through reflective peer coaching, “a formative model that examines intentions prior to teaching and reflections afterwards” (Vidmar, 2006). We did this several times at one of my places of work and everyone who participated found it really helpful. We adopted the model promoted by our wonderful colleague at Southern Oregon University, Dale Vidmar. If you’re interested in improving teaching and reflective practice, he is a guy to know (or at least read his work!).

So, with reflective peer coaching, librarians pair up and meet once before the individual instruction sessions they want to reflect on are going to be taught. In that first meeting, each librarian talks about the session and their goals for it. They may also discuss concerns or fears that they have about the session, though not everyone will be comfortable with that. Their partner may ask questions to elicit further reflection on their goals and approach, but they are not there to make suggestions.

The pairs do not actually observe the instruction sessions they’ve heard about. Instead, they meet afterwards to discuss how it went. The act of doing this is what really creates a culture of reflective practice. Taking the time to really think about what went well, what didn’t, and how you might improve next time is so valuable. Having to articulate that to someone else, who may be asking probing questions that get you thinking more deeply about the session, leads to even greater learning. I provided each pair with suggested questions (most of which were borrowed from Dale’s work) that they could ask to elicit responses from their partner, but they were free to conduct these conversations however they chose so long as it wasn’t focused on making suggestions to their partner (which is harder to avoid than you might think! We naturally want to offer our help!). In Dale’s model, there is a third person involved, an observer, who makes sure that the pair is focused on reflection and questioning, not suggesting or advising and makes note of any really interesting comments from the person reflecting. Given how busy my colleagues were, we didn’t have observers.

Another way to build a culture of peer learning is through workshopping instruction sessions. This is where a single librarian talks about a session they’ve taught before or are teaching soon with the rest of the instruction librarians or community of practice. Maybe it’s one that is problematic for one reason or another — no computers for the students, big lecture class, instructor asking them to teach ALL THE THINGS, short time-frame, etc. — or it may just be one the librarian wasn’t satisfied with or is anxious about. So they come to their community of practice seeking feedback. How this plays out depends on the time constraints. It can range from simply offering suggestions to collaboratively redesigning the entire session in sub-groups to give the librarian seeking feedback a variety of different approaches to consider. Either way, the focus is on improving the teaching of a single session. While even this can be intimidating, it doesn’t really require laying yourself bare in the same way you would if your colleagues were actually watching you teach. We tried this a few times at our monthly instruction meetings at Portland State and it went pretty well.

Dale Vidmar (2006) writes that “two essential elements to meaningful collaboration and reflection are to create a trusting relationship and to promote thought and inquiry.” But what if you don’t have a community of practice at your place of work? What if there isn’t a culture of trust and the group dynamics are such that trying to create it would be fraught with peril? Well, you can create your own informal community of practice with even just one other colleague. In that case, it’s mainly about having a buddy you trust that you can bounce ideas off of. The value of this cannot be overstated. Even if you are part of a community of practice, I think having a buddy or two (or more) with whom you feel comfortable enough to share your fears and seek help from on a more frequent basis is critical in the workplace. At Portland State, I had my “pocket of wonderful”, a group with whom I was constantly talking about instruction sessions, and who did the same with me. When I created a new tutorial, they always got the first look before I sent things to the larger instruction list. I learned so much from them and feel like I’m a better instructor thanks to the informal conversations we had. At PCC, I was lucky in my first term to have a wonderful colleague who showed me his approaches to teaching certain classes (that I’d be teaching too), warned me about problematic instructors, and gave me valuable feedback. All of my colleagues are completely lovely and helpful, but his support of my instructional practice was invaluable. I hope in the future, I can be of help to him.

We don’t have to struggle alone. Whether you have a single trusted colleague or a large group that meets regularly, you can find ways to build a practice of reflection and peer learning around instruction.

Work Cited

Vidmar, Dale J. 2006. Reflective peer coaching: Crafting collaborative self-assessment in teaching.
Research Strategies 20: 135-148. (you can find a .doc file of this article on Dale’s website)

 Photo credit: Reflecting Critically to Improve Action, A Guide for Project M & E

I recently attended the Library Assessment Conference in Seattle, which is a fantastic event for anyone who wants to keep up with trends in library assessment. At this year’s conference, one thing was abundantly clear: Data is king.

All three keynote speakers spoke about the use of data in libraries to improve services, better understand our user populations, and demonstrate library value. There were also presentations and posters on data visualization, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in space planning, and other ways libraries are using data. One speaker even suggested that all libraries should be collecting usage data at the individual transaction level for future research.

Libraries are rather late to the data party. Do you have a retail loyalty card in your wallet? Those cards are used to track your purchases so stores can better tailor their marketing and inventory. This is how, based on certain purchases, Target knows to send coupons for baby products to women before they’ve told anyone they’re pregnant. In higher education, enrollment management and student affairs personnel have been using predictive analytics systems for years that use past student data to predict who is likely to succeed at an institution and how the institution can help them succeed.

Libraries at the University of Minnesota and the University of Huddersfield in the UK have examined correlations between different kinds of library use and student achievement, and they have found that many types of library use are associated with academic success. They have also studied specific populations within their institutions—different majors, international students, etc.—to explore their library usage. Predictive analytics can tell an academic advisor when it would be best in a student’s academic career to take a required class to make success more likely. For libraries, user data can be used to develop outreach to specific user populations or even individuals that exhibit certain behaviors—like no library use.

However, correlation and causation are two different things. While it’s possible that library use is associated with student persistence and success, other elements me be contributing. Therefore, telling students that using the library will help keep them in school may not be entirely accurate. Sometimes the data that’s collected doesn’t tell the whole story.

Another major issue is privacy. While most libraries are using aggregate data that has been scrubbed of what they consider identifiable information, individual students have usually not consented to be tracked in this way. And how will students feel if they are targeted because of how they did or didn’t use the library? If patrons feel the library is tracking them, what impact will that have on intellectual freedom? Without being specifically told what is being collected, users might assume the library is tracking the books and articles they access.

Predictive analytics isn’t just for academia; employers like Hewlett-Packard have used data to predict which of its staff members might be at risk of leaving. How would you feel knowing that your employer is doing this sort of research on you?

We are clearly in a brave new world of data. And librarians, like people in all sectors, will have to consider where to draw the line on collecting and utilizing user data. As librarians, though, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard as we are bound to protect the privacy of our patrons. We will need to find a balance between the good we can do with data and our commitment to our code of ethics.

The post Drawing the Line on Data appeared first on American Libraries Magazine.

Does this mean librarians aren’t important to most users’ library encounters? Of course not! We’re the ones making those virtual visits seamless for them. That said, I think there is great value in this high-tech world in creating high-touch services that put a human face on the library and remind patrons of the value librarians bring.

When I was a distance learning librarian at a small private university, I put effort into making personal connections with online students. I built a web page with my picture and information about me to show there was a real person devoted to supporting patrons. I also proactively emailed students in certain key classes with research tips. Never in any other position did I make such strong connections with students I supported. Knowing that I was their librarian and was there to help made a big difference for these distance learners, who were isolated from the physical library, the university, and even their classmates.

These days, many academic libraries have a personal librarian service where students—often in their first year of college—are matched with a specific librarian. In some cases, this librarian emails research tips and information about library resources and services, but in other cases, they are simply a friendly face from whom first-year students can seek help. I particularly like the personal librarian page at the University of Iowa, which makes the library more approachable by including pictures and down-to-earth profiles of the librarians.

Sometimes the most important goal of instruction and outreach is getting students comfortable with the idea of using the library. Library anxiety is a very real thing, and putting an empathetic human face on the library can go a long way toward encouraging help-seeking and library use. The beautiful thing about most of these personal librarian services is that it costs very little to offer them, so even if only a few additional students seek help from a librarian, it’s a worthwhile effort. 

The personal librarian concept can be applied in all sorts of libraries. Public libraries have long offered readers’ advisory services, and many librarians are book recommendation ninjas. These days, however, people are more likely to get their book recommendations from sites like Amazon and Goodreads than from their local librarian.

In a world of faceless book recommendation algorithms, the Multnomah County (Oreg.) Library is humanizing readers’ advisory in a big way. Its new service, My Librarian, allows patrons to select a specific librarian from whom to receive advice on what to read. The front page of the online service includes eye-catching pictures and profiles of each librarian with links to book lists they recommend. Library cardholders can request a phone call, video or text chat, email exchange, or face-to-face meeting with the librarian of their choice.

The My Librarian service allows patrons to find a librarian whose reading tastes they share to act as their personal book recommendation guru. This program, funded by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, is designed not only to help patrons, but also to remind them of how librarians can enrich their lives. In this era of high-tech solutions, it’s good to remember that the high-touch ones are still of value and can be facilitated by technology.

MEREDITH FARKAS is a faculty librarian at Portland (Oreg.) Community College and a lecturer at San Jose State University's School of Information. She blogs at Information Wants to Be Free. Email: librarysuccess@gmail.com.

The post High Tech, High Touch appeared first on American Libraries Magazine.

I was observing students conducting research to see how they approached it and what tools they used, but when I saw Steve use that discovery tool, it was difficult to focus on anything else. Seeing that he was so overwhelmed by the number of links and buttons on an item record that he couldn’t even figure out how to get to the full text of the article made me realize how difficult all those options make it for the novice to use.

Librarians’ vantage point

As an expert user, I’d never considered how distracting all those options can be because I knew where to click and could therefore easily ignore the features I didn’t need. Seeing how a novice user navigated the system provided me with an insight I never could have had otherwise. Unless we observe or otherwise assess our users, we can’t truly understand how they navigate our systems.

This is why usability testing is such a valuable tool in our assessment arsenal. While there are many different kinds of usability testing methods, the most common typically involves subjects using a website and verbally sharing their thinking as they go through it. Often, subjects are given specific tasks to complete on the website so test givers can see if the subjects take the expected paths or can complete the task at all.

You don’t need a fancy usability lab or sophisticated technologies to conduct a usability test. All you really need is a computer and the ability to take notes. If you want to record the session, you’ll need a microphone and a free tool like Screencast-O-Matic, CamStudio, or Google Hangouts. If you want to broadcast the session to people in another room, Google Hangouts, join.me, or the free version of WebEx would work well for this purpose.

Small sample, big findings

Unlike a survey, you also don’t need a huge sample to be able to learn from a usability test. Some usability experts recommend using as few as three subjects in your study. For a usability test we’re conducting on a new online instructional tool, we’re using six undergraduate students. As I showed in my example above, even watching one student use our systems can provide some valuable insights.

Usability testing also isn’t just for our online tools; it can easily be applied to look at physical space as well. What do people see first when they enter the library? How easy is it to find the children’s room? Seeing how users experience the library building can help librarians notice issues they would never have otherwise. Often, it’s the little things that create a great experience, and usability testing can help pinpoint those that might get in the way.

When Steve couldn’t find the full text, he gave up looking for it and quickly stopped using the discovery tool entirely. If users are willing to try exploring library resources at all in their research, libraries often have only one chance to make a good impression.

Ensuring that our website and tools are as usable as possible is critical. Usability testing can help us discover the bumps in the road we need to smooth over to provide a positive experience for our users.

The post Through Their Eyes appeared first on American Libraries Magazine.

1. You don’t need a big budget to create an impressive screencast. Though pricey software options offer nice editing features, there are free and low-cost tools out there, including Jing, Screencast-O-Matic, Snagit, Screenr, and CamStudio. Even tools for synchronous instruction, like Google Hangouts, ooVoo, and web-conferencing software, offer the screensharing and recording features you need. If you use a free web-based tool, be sure you can download the video in a commonly used format so you’ll still have your screencasts if the software site is taken down.
2. Start with learning outcomes. List what a patron should be able to do by the end of a screencast and you will have a much easier time focusing your script and action.
3. Before you create anything, look at what’s already out there. Database vendors and other libraries are creating instructional videos, and something might be available that meets your needs. Even if an existing tutorial meets 80% of your needs, weigh the value of that 20% against the time it takes to create a screencast.
4. Create a script or at least an outline. When I’m planning a screencast, I create a two-column table with my script in the left-hand column and the screen action in the right. If you think you can speak concisely without a script, you could try going with an outline, but a script is also useful when it comes time to add closed captioning.
5. Caption your videos. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that instructional content be accessible, which means either offering closed captioning or creating a separate accessible tutorial. I frequently see library videos that break this critical rule.
6. Keep it short. People will likely be accessing your screencast when they have a specific need. Attention spans being what they are, unless you’re creating something hilarious, you probably shouldn’t make a screencast longer than 2–3 minutes. If your content requires more time, break it up into multiple videos. The only exception to the 2–3 minute rule is for screencasts that are assigned in a class.
7. Keep it simple. Simultaneous text, video, and voice are too much for an individual to process. Make sure the action on-screen matches what you’re saying in the video and that captions can be turned off.
8. While a screencast is more engaging than a static HTML tutorial, it’s not good for everything. Lori Mestre, head of the undergraduate library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found that students were better able to complete a database searching task when they used an HTML tutorial with screenshots. Why? It’s easier to refer back to specific points on a web page than in a video. For resources whose interfaces change frequently, screencasting might not be the best fit either, since a new interface often requires a new screencast.   

Libraries put significant effort into creating online instructional content. Screencasting is a great tool in our instructional arsenal that can be used to poor effect. Lookg at research and best practices on whatever tool you’re using beforehand to help you develop something that truly engages and educates.

MEREDITH FARKAS is coordinator of general education instruction at Portland (Oreg.) State University. She blogs at Information Wants to Be Free and created Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. Email librarysuccess[at]gmail.com.

The post More than Words appeared first on American Libraries Magazine.

And there it sat.

We never used the data for anything, and I’m not sure what changes we could have made based on a satisfaction survey that didn’t tell us whether and what the students learned.

Putting data to use

These days, more and more people understand that assessment data can be used to improve library services and that it's a critical tool in the effort to remain a vital part of our communities. It can also help us learn more about our patrons and advocate for things like increased staffing, improved facilities, and more library instruction. It can be used to demonstrate the value the library provides to the community.

We already collect a lot of data in libraries: collection size, book checkouts, database hits, gate counts, reference desk transactions, and much more. While the data most libraries collect tells a story, it rarely tells us how the library is used, by whom, and what impact it has on their lives and learning. Often the things that are easiest to measure are not the ones that provide the information we need most.

Now, I often use minute papers in my teaching. A minute paper asks students to quickly answer two or three questions about the instruction session, such as “What is the most valuable thing you learned today?” and “What was unclear or what do you still have questions about?” They’re quick and easy for students to fill out, whether on paper or online, and I learn so much from them. I discover what topics I covered that students found valuable and what I either didn’t cover well enough or should cover the next time I teach.

Sometimes the problem isn’t that you’re collecting the wrong data; it’s that you’re not sharing it with the right people. For example, interlibrary loan data is incredibly useful to share with librarians responsible for collection development. At many libraries, this simply isn’t a regular part of the workflow. ILL data gives me, as a subject librarian, a clear sense of the subject areas in which our collection is not meeting patron needs and where I should be focusing my purchasing efforts.

As these examples demonstrate, assessments don’t always have to be intricately designed and time-consuming for respondents. Librarians should approach any assessment effort by first asking themselves what information they are seeking. They may find that they already have the data they need; if not, they will be better able to design an assessment tool with a specific goal in mind.

Meaningful assessment requires a work environment where it’s okay to fail, so long as you learn from it. Assessments will sometimes tell you that your project did not have a positive impact, and that may scare people away from doing valuable assessment work. In a true learning culture, where experimentation and failure are accepted, assessment will be focused on improvement, not accountability, and people will not fear what they may learn from the results.

In this era of accountability and accreditation, it’s easy to lose sight of why we collect data and do assessment. Keeping the focus on learning and improvement is the key to doing meaningful assessment that will make your library better. And in an ever-changing information environment, any library not assessing its services runs the risk of becoming irrelevant to its community.

MEREDITH FARKAS is head of instructional services at Portland (Oreg.) State University. She blogs at Information Wants to Be Free and created Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. Contact her at librarysuccess[at]gmail.com.

The post Asking the Right Questions appeared first on American Libraries Magazine.