I really enjoyed the DIY session that the In the Library with the Lead Pipe authors facilitated (From the Periphery into the Mainstream: Library DIY Culture(s) and the Academy). Instead of having a panel of “sages on the stage” tell us what DIY means to libraries and what we all should do to encourage it at our own libraries, they opened up the floor for the audience to share their thoughts and experiences. Given the topic, I thought it was a great idea, since assuming any sort of ownership of the label would be anti-DIY. A lot of the people I talked to who left the session mentioned coming out feeling energized (even a library administrator talked about how much energy there was in the room). It was a great prelude to Henry Rollins’ keynote, since he is the ultimate DIY-er. I came out of it feeling very good about our profession. It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day of librarianship, so we need reminders from time to time that there are lots of people in this profession who are passionate, enthusiastic and who want to create disruptive change.

I think if you ask a group of people what DIY means within librarianship, you’ll get a lot of different answers. And I saw a lot of different ideas of DIY in the discussion at ACRL. Even in the post from In the Library with the Lead Pipe that introduced the DIY idea, it was clear that the authors didn’t share the same vision. When I think of DIY, I first think of it more from a user perspective; the notion of unobtrusively supporting patrons in doing the things they want to do rather than expecting them to ask for help or want everything to be mediated. If I look at it internally within our profession, I see DIY in librarianship as a leveling of the playing field between expert and amateur (or inexperienced and experienced) and being about doing awesome things outside of traditional hierarchies, boundaries, etc. I had no position in ALA or Information Today, but I created conference wikis for ALA Annual 2005 and Computers in Libraries 2006 that allowed everyone to benefit from the wisdom of everyone else. I wasn’t on a committee or sponsored by an agency when I brought together four other fantastic librarians and created Five Weeks to a Social Library, a totally free online learning experience about social media using social media, which became a model for some future online learning initiatives. Much like Henry Rollins, when people tell me “you can’t” that’s exactly what I want to do. So when someone says, with respect to creating a model for online learning, “if you think you can just throw together a few pieces of technology and get things to work differently you are deluding yourselves,” my first thought is “challenge accepted, lady.” I never called what I was doing DIY. It’s just how I operate.

I admire greatly my friends who are willing to work within traditional hierarchies like ALA to get things done and make things better from within. In terms of my service-type work, I was always too impatient. There have been moments where my goals have aligned with those of professional organizations — when I created an ALA Unconference for Jim Rettig’s presidency and right now when I’m building a mentoring program for the Oregon Library Association — but, for the most part, if it’s going to take years of rising in the ranks and building influence to get things done, I’m not game. In my daily work, I’m more willing to put in the time to build relationships and influence, but even that’s something that was hard for me to grow accustomed to early on in my academic career. It was my work as a subject liaison that helped me appreciate what good things can come from slowly cultivating relationships and demonstrating competence. I find that the most meaningful instructional innovations come from years of trust-building, slow steps, and waiting for opportunities to arise. I wish I could see my way to viewing ALA or ACRL committee work in the same light, but I just can’t.

Anyone who has read this blog for more than a couple of years probably knows about my aversion for labels (transliteracy, Library 2.0, etc.). So Brian Matthews’ post about DIY vs. Startup thinking criticizing the session and the In the Library With the Lead Pipe blog post on DIY really rubbed me the wrong way. It was especially frustrating to see how much Brian misrepresented (at least in my opinion) both the session and the notions of DIY that came out of the session. Had I not been at the session, I would have thought, from Brian’s post, that the session was a bunch of librarians who think they have all the answers, care more about their own ego than their users, and are not willing to work within their libraries to come up with concrete solutions whining about how much their libraries suck and should change or go away. That was not at all the tenor of the conversation from my perspective and I honestly think that what people were describing as DIY, sounded a lot like Brian’s “start-up thinking.” Brian can use terms like destruction vs. disruption to try and make them seem different, but if you actually look at what creative destruction is, it sounds a whole heck of a lot like the result of disruptive innovation in most cases (Clayton Christensen, who coined the term disruptive innovation talks about it in this video). Again, it’s semantics. Most of the people at the presentation were talking about finding space to make innovative projects happen within traditional libraries. Sounds a whole lot like the challenge of disruptive innovation to me, where it’s difficult to find space for creating innovative new services (or markets) when there is a focus on the core functions (or markets) of the business.

There were people at the DIY session who were talking about destruction or rebellion, but it wasn’t the totality or even the majority of the conversation (I can only think of two people in the session who really used that sort of rhetoric, but my memory is by no means photographic). I think most people were looking to find creative ways to do innovative things within traditional hierarchies. Brian might be able to find fault in the DIY blog post, but not so much in the conversations that took place in that ACRL conference session.

I must have been in a different session than Brian, because I didn’t get that “damn the man” message from the ACRL session. I heard people talking about the challenges some of them face in doing innovative things and working outside of traditional hierarchies, but it didn’t seem to take on a “it’s all our bosses’ fault” tone in my opinion. I think it pushed most of us to think about what it is about the structures in our institutions that keep us from doing things and what can we do about it. I think that people like to believe ULs and AULs have the power to unilaterally change culture, but it’s not true. They can work towards an ideal culture, but culture is all of us, and we all have to buy into a different vision. When I look at the promotion and tenure process at my institution, an AUL or even a UL can argue that DIY-esque projects that benefit the profession or our patrons are as valuable, if not more, than publishing peer-reviewed articles, but promotion and tenure is a faculty-driven process and thus no one individual can change the norms of their institution. AULs and ULs can lead by example and work towards changing norms — by saying yes to DIY-esque ideas and valuing that sort of work — but I personally believe that they have less power, in terms of changing culture, than one might want to believe.

Brian also criticized the DIYers (not sure who they are, maybe everyone at the session who spoke up?) for not having a clear vision for what a library that encouraged this kind of work looked like. But some people did articulate the things that need to change to encourage DIY, including valuing that sort of work in tenure and/or promotion. I really liked that one person mentioned the notion of giving librarians a portion of their time to work on DIY-esque projects. I have been advocating this idea in conference talks for the past five years at least. Google gives their staff 20% of their time to work on pet projects that could benefit Google. This means that people don’t have to ask permission to try and build an application that does x, so long as they are using their 20% time for it. It allows the freedom to create innovation within an organization structured around specific goals. When Google actually looked at the impact of that 20% time, they found that 50% of their products (like Gmail!) were created during that 20% time. I would argue that libraries would see a similar ROI. This is something that AULs and ULs absolutely have control over and I honestly believe that it’s an ideal way to make space for disruptive innovation without actually giving up the core functions and goals of the library/institution.

I guess what bothered me most was the fact that Brian seems to be creating a false dichotomy that simply doesn’t exist from my perspective. It’s an amazing stretch for him to say “DIYers talked a lot about,” in a session where the audience was doing most of the talking and there certainly was nothing that looked at all like a movement or even agreement on what DIY means. So for him to characterize the people in the session as being all about “me” and not about “the user” is offensive. The conversation in the session was largely about us as librarians and how we can make innovative things happen within our organizations. It was introspective. It wasn’t about the content of those innovative things. So for Brian to make it sound like the people in that room weren’t “optimistic”, “committed to pushing the boundaries”, or making “changes from within the system” seems like a major mischaracterization. One of the first things someone said as a way of defining DIY was that it’s about begging for forgiveness rather than asking for permission. If that isn’t a strategy for pushing boundaries and making things happen, I don’t know what is.

There were things I had issues with in the rhetoric of the DIY session and the blog post from Lead Pipe. The notion that there is a “traditional library” and that we need to move away from that is a fallacy. Does every generation think they invented change? Libraries have been changing and adapting and becoming what their communities need for at least the past century (I didn’t take a history of libraries class in library school, so I won’t try to go further back). We have new challenges now and are in a very different information ecosystem, but most libraries are changing (and have been for some time) to meet the changing needs of their communities. I’m not moved in any way by the whole “libraries are doomed!” rhetoric and I always wonder why anyone who really believes that about our profession went to library school in the first place. I don’t always agree with Wayne Bivens-Tatum, but on the notion that change isn’t new, we definitely see eye-to-eye.

I also think that one problem with DIY, which I have experienced myself, is the fact that it’s often unsustainable unless it becomes part of an organization or gets stable funding. Then again, doesn’t that sound just like a startup? How many online tools have you used that disappeared when their creators realized they were not going to be bought by Google? The percentage of DIY projects that are self-sustaining without funding or organizational support is quite small. The longer I’m in the profession, the more my focus has gone toward sustainability, because I just don’t think it’s ethical to create something people will depend on that you have no plan for sustaining.

What I’d be interested in hearing from Brian is how he, as a manager, actually creates a startup culture. As a manager, I’d love to create that sort of environment in my unit, but I can’t see what startup management looks like in a library context. Brian talks a lot about changes in thinking, but how does he encourage that and how does he give his employees the space and (more importantly) the time to think that way? What is he doing differently? It’s been my experience that you can hire awesomely innovative people, but that’s not enough if you aren’t giving them time and opportunities and helping to overcome barriers to their success. A good manager helps their people be successful within their unique institutional culture. It’s very easy to talk about what libraries should be doing or what we could learn from other industries, but really, Brian, what do you do as a manger to create this culture? Or even what does a startup manager look like in a library? Brian could have spoken up at any time during the session and talked about that, because, really, that’s the constructive direction the conversation needed to go when people started talking about institutional barriers.

I honestly hope that the In the Library with the Lead Pipe gang doesn’t try to further define DIY as Brian suggests (I doubt they would given that they didn’t even adopt a stage on the sage approach in their session). Some people who have latched onto a term and made it “theirs” have become so one-note, and spend all their time elucidating and defending “their term” to the point where it becomes more about them and the term than about making libraries better. I’d much rather see the Lead Pipe folks continuing to lead by example with their own brilliant DIY project, which is far more important in terms of inspiring others than being self-appointed keepers of the flame for DIY.

It’s possible (likely?) that my reaction to Brian’s post is colored by my own severe allergy to labels. I think when we get into conversations about semantics when we’re really talking about quite similar concepts and goals, we’ve missed the boat. It shouldn’t be Transliteracy vs. Information Literacy or Startup vs. DIY when the goals are so very similar. How do we work together to create a better future? What we need are suggestions for these librarians who feel stifled in their current jobs or can’t find ways to make DIY or startup behavior happen. How do we harness the energy that was palpable in that session for the good of the profession and our communities?

My chapter is called “Mobile Learning: The Teacher in Your Pocket” and is available for free via PDXScholar, our institutional repository at Portland State. It covers mobile learning in libraries and in the classroom and I’m surprisingly proud of it (given that I usually hate everything I write).

The rest of the book is fantastic as well and the author lineup reads like a who’s who in library technologies: Robin Ashford, Lisa Carlucci Thomas, Chad Mairn, Chad Haefele, Lili Luo, Sue Polanka, Rebecca Miller and many more. The book includes a great mix of writing from academic, public, and health science librarians.

That I was able to post this to my digital repository as soon as the book came out is evidence that every author should advocate for themselves in negotiating contracts. The implicit message most publishers send when they give you a contract is that this is the contract, when, in so many cases, there is wiggle room or alternative options. With ABC-CLIO, I was originally given a contract that afforded me no rights to my work and afforded them the right to sell my work in whatever future products/content mashups they wanted. After stating that I would not sign a contract like that, they ended up giving me one where I still have copyright and can do what I want with the work outside of the book project. It’s always worth remembering that you’re contributing the most important part of the equation: the content. You could publish your content without them, but they are dead in the water without content. Don’t ever settle for less than you feel you deserve.

At ACRL, I went to a panel presentation on library value that included representatives from the University of Minnesota and the University of Huddersfield, whom I’d cited in my article. I was heartened to learn that they both are now using the data they collected to make improvements and was particularly interested in how the University of Huddersfield was targeting instructional efforts based on their data. I fervently hope that they will publish about this, because, in looking at the literature to date, there really isn’t evidence of using value-focused data for improvement. When people are putting the pieces together, they need to see the full picture of what library value research can achieve, and the most important (to me) piece of it is currently missing from the literature and the Value of Academic Libraries blog. I understand why the scholarly literature would lag behind, but the blog certainly doesn’t have to.

I’ll preface this piece by saying that I don’t know anything about the culture of the library at the University of Virginia. I don’t know if the culture there is so broken that this seemed like the only option to fix it. I don’t know if many more in the library are for this change than against it. I believe that the library faculty at UVa did not have tenure, which will make the change slightly less jarring than it otherwise could have been.

I personally am not a huge believer in tenure for librarians although I am on the tenure track and have seen the benefits of my position. But, I’d also say that I’m not a big believer in tenure at all. While I’m a huge advocate for academic freedom (obviously, being the pain-in-the-ass contrarian I am), I don’t think a system that only protects that for a minority of faculty (what about contingent faculty???) is a solid system. I think union-representation and union contracts could be key for the protection of academic freedom in the academy for all. That being said, I do think it’s helpful for librarians to be faculty, if only so that they can serve on faculty senate and faculty committees. We are partners in supporting student success and need to have a seat at the table so that we can better understand student and faculty needs and the direction in which the institution is going. Then again, I’d probably say the same of many student affairs positions. Whether we need faculty status or simply a seat at the table is debatable.

University Librarian Karin Wittenborg argues that getting rid of faculty status “is an important step to take to recognize the work all library staff does.” I don’t know that getting rid of faculty status will achieve that. Academia is stratified. You have tenure-track faculty, full-time faculty who are not tenure-track, adjuncts, clinical faculty, academic professionals, and staff all contributing to the success of students at the institution, but not being treated as equally important. Getting rid of tenure or faculty status for librarians or for all teaching faculty will not change this. Even when I was a social worker, there was a definite caste system. The psychotherapists were “more important” than the case workers, since they focused on the deeper, less mundane problems. At libraries without faculty status, you still have the professional vs. paraprofessional issue or the MLS vs. non-MLS issue. Valuing the work of all library workers is a cultural issue that will not be fixed simply by removing faculty status. In fact, I see much more value placed on our non-faculty counterparts at my current tenure-track job than in my previous non-tenure-track one. It has everything to do with organizational culture.

I’ve seen first-hand that the way librarians are seen by faculty is more of a cultural issue than one mitigated by librarian status. At my previous institution, we had nominal faculty status. We had access to faculty development funds but were called staff with faculty rank (makes a lot of sense, right?). I built many strong relationships with the faculty in my liaison areas. While my Director tried to make us true faculty in the Senate and Assembly, and largely succeeded around the time I was leaving, any changes would not have changed the way we were seen by faculty. I didn’t find it to be any barrier as the Head of Instruction or a liaison and actually had a far easier time building information literacy into curricula there than I have at Portland State (which has nothing to do with faculty-ness and everything to do with the culture at the individual institutions).

But I looked forward to seeing what collaboration would look like as a true tenure-track faculty member. I do feel much more like a partner here in some ways and I love working with the teaching faculty at Portland State. I serve on faculty senate committees here and don’t feel like I’m seen as being “less than” other faculty. However, just like when we were essentially staff at my last institution, there are faculty who we teach for who see us as equal partners (and thus are open to true collaboration) and then there are faculty who see us as someone to teach what they want us to in their classes without any conversation or collaboration. In fact, I found it much easier to do interesting things like flipping the classroom (though this was before it had a trendy name) at Norwich than I have at PSU, though that might just be because I haven’t been here as long.

In my view, the best thing to come from our faculty status is the fact that we are much more plugged into what is happening in the University and can thus better align library priorities to the direction in which the institution is going. If we could not serve on things like the Curriculum Committee, the Educational Policy Committee, the University Studies Council, the Budget Committee, and the Faculty Senate itself, we might not be as plugged in. We also would not be able to advocate as well for the needs of the library and how it can support initiatives as things are being planned without being on these committees. Do you need to be faculty to be plugged into the University? No. But it does make it easier.

The contention made in this article, that very few libraries have faculty status, is false and I’m surprised that Wittenborg would have said that. In the survey on libraries building a culture of assessment (for which we got a 41% response rate), we found that 37% of the responding academic libraries had tenure-track faculty status, 29% had faculty status without tenure, and 35% have no faculty status. When you limit it just to PhD/Research institutions, 43% have tenure-track faculty status, 23% have faculty status without tenure, and 34% have no faculty status. That makes faculty status seem much less like the exception Wittenborg made it out to be.

Also in the survey that I’ll be presenting the results of at ACRL, I learned something very surprising about the impact of faculty status on libraries’ likelihood of having a culture of assessment and their likelihood of being involved in a campus-wide assessment initiative. Given that we got results from 41% of all academic libraries in the U.S., I feel pretty confident that our results are representative of the population. Want to know what we learned? Come to our presentation at ACRL (Friday at 8:30 in Wabash 2-3 at the ICC). Not going to ACRL? We’ll be publishing our results as well.

I agree with Karin Wittenborg 100% that all library workers should be valued, regardless of their title or designation. If that was her goal in taking this action, it’s a noble one. I question whether removing faculty status from librarians will achieve that, since the stratification issue is usually cultural and not just a faculty vs. non-faculty one. If I were at UVa, would worry about the rift this act would create for decades until all those with grandfathered-in faculty status retire. However, I don’t buy the library faculty assembly assumption that librarians will not be as professionally engaged if they’re not faculty. Part of being a good librarian (not just good faculty) is being engaged in our profession, aware of emerging trends in our areas, learning from the successes and failures of other libraries, and sharing our own successes and failures. If your librarians aren’t engaged (and there are many different ways to do this, not just publishing peer-reviewed articles, attending ACRL, and serving on ALA committees), they should be fired. That should be part of the job of everyone working in a library, not just faculty. And it also should be supported for everyone in a library.

In the end, I don’t think our being faculty or not being faculty has any bearing on whether faculty and students value us. It’s what we do that matters. Being a fantastic liaison. Meeting emerging faculty and student needs. Making faculty members’ lives easier (whether it’s helping them with the data management part of a grant app, helping with a lit review, helping them develop great research assignments, etc.). Supporting students at their points of need. These are the things that will make faculty and students value us. In general, I think libraries should be much less focused internally and much more focused externally than they currently are.

Those of you without faculty status: are you able to serve on key committees with faculty? Do you feel plugged into what the University is doing? Do you feel like the library’s position suffers on-campus as a result of your not having faculty status?

If you want to read more about the model, it’s aptly described here: Nelson and Burns “High-Performance Programming: A Framework for Transforming Organizations” in Transforming Work: A Collection of Organizational Transformation Readings, Alexandria: Miles River Press, 1984.

Clearly Qualtrics is reading from the same playbook. As I’m becoming a Qualtrics ninja with the survey I’m conducting now, when I saw a New York Times article on the company pop up in Google Reader, I was eager to read it. It was an interview with Qualtrics co-founder Ryan Smith who talked not only about the company, but about how he’s built a transparent culture there. Given how awesome their software is, his methods are worth listening to:

We’ve been extremely transparent, but not so that we can be cool. And it’s not about an open environment, because that’s not what makes a company transparent. It’s more around the fact that everyone needs to know where we are going and how we are going to get there… That’s one obstacle a lot of companies fall into. I believe most companies fail because they’re not focused — they either get focused on other things in the market that aren’t important, so they’re thrashing around without a clear objective, or they’re focused internally on things like politics and bureaucracy. It’s not that these companies aren’t smart companies or lack good businesses. It’s just that there’s a lot of noise.

What I found interesting was how he achieved this. They built a system internally to track goals and objectives, which isn’t particularly innovative. Lots of libraries have strategic plans and have faculty/staff do annual goal setting based on that plan (though Qualtrics does this goal-setting quarterly, which seems about right given the pace of technological change these days). What I found interesting was second system they built:

We have another system that sends everyone an e-mail on Monday that says: “What are you going to get done this week? And what did you get done last week that you said you were going to do?” Then that rolls up into one e-mail that the entire organization gets. So if someone’s got a question, they can look at that for an explanation. We share other information, too — every time we have a meeting, we release meeting notes to the organization. When we have a board meeting, we write a letter about it afterward and send it to the organization.

First, this sounded really big brother to me, but now I actually like the spirit of it. No matter what the size, it’s easy to not know what your colleagues are working on. Especially when you’re working on something big and all-consuming, it’s easy to get into a head-down state where your head is 99% on your work and 1% (at best) on communication. Knowing what people are working on will help people to collaborate, to cross-pollinate across these ideas. People who have information on something a colleague is working on can help them out. It also forces people to question whether the things they are doing correspond to those quarterly (or annual) goals. In libraries where librarians are faculty, but probably in most libraries, a lot of what librarians do is of their own choice. A liaison knows they have to serve x departments, but how they serve x departments is largely up to them. And that’s a good thing. But knowing what other liaisons at the library are doing can inspire their colleagues to try new things with their departments and help their colleagues learn from their mistakes. Of course, all of this requires a truly transparent and risk-tolerant culture where people feel comfortable daring boldly and failing. I also think the idea of having people report how well they did on their weekly goals is great, so long as it’s not used punitively. Like I said, it would only work in the right kind of culture (a high performing culture).

We do something similar at my work. A few of us in the library (mostly pre-tenure folks) are part of a research interest group that meets every two weeks. Each time, we set goals related to our research projects and at the next meeting have to tell each other how we did with them. Knowing you have to tell your colleagues that you didn’t do the things you’d said you would (even when the stakes are that low) is a nice motivator to get things done. It’s also just really interesting to know what my colleagues are working on and to talk about my projects (which I am feeling very head-down on other than that hour every 2 weeks).

How do you keep up with what your colleagues are doing? How does your library track goals and their progress? What methods does your library use to be transparent about what’s going on so everyone is marching towards the same vision?

That I haven’t heard any criticisms of the research agenda of the Value of Academic Libraries initiative other than my own either means that I’m completely alone in my concerns or that people are afraid of criticizing what they see as a a sacred cow. I’d fully intended to write a post this week about the whole ACRL Value of Academic Libraries initiative, but was asked to write about it for the next issue of OLA Quarterly, which I’ll link to as soon as it comes out. The gist is that I’m concerned about the impact of value research and the value movement on assessment focused on learning. It can be difficult to sell librarians on the value of doing assessment, but when assessment becomes focused on demonstrating value, librarians will likely become that much more concerned about what negative assessment results in a class could mean for them, which will likely influence how they design their assessment(s). I am also not-at-all convinced that college/university administrators are going to buy the argument that the library is valuable because there’s research that demonstrates a relationship between library use and student success/retention. I tend to believe that college/university administrators are smart enough to discern the difference between correlation and causation, but maybe that’s just me. While I’d like to believe that values research can also inform practice and help libraries improve, the studies out there right now that have embraced this kind of research don’t show any evidence of using the data they collected for improvement. Anyways, you’ll be able to read my diatribe thoughtful article on the subject soon.

I have a new article out this month in Reference Services Review. It looks at the process building a culture of assessment through the lens of John Kotter’s 8-step process for organizational change and is called “Building and Sustaining a Culture of Assessment: Best Practices for Change Leadership.” You can access it in my institution’s repository, PDXSCholar here. If you’re a librarian trying to lead from the middle (or the bottom), this maps out a clear strategy for doing so. I’ve read too many articles about building a culture of assessment that seem designed for a Director (or someone who had authority), when most of the people trying to get colleagues on-board with assessment do not necessarily have positional authority (instruction coordinators, assessment coordinators, etc.). My article is full of practical advice for building culture change from the bottom up.

Right now, I’m working on a major study with Lisa Hinchliffe of UIUC and Amy Harris Houk of UNC-Greensboro. We’re surveying academic library instruction program leaders to determine what factors help facilitate the creation of a culture of assessment and what factors hinder a library in moving towards a culture of assessment. It’s the first study of its kind to actually be done in any sort of systematic way with a truly representative sample (our response rate is insane!) and the preliminary results look to be very important for the profession. When I was working on the literature review for my Reference Services Review article, I noticed that the vast majority of studies I was reading (from higher ed and libraries) were case studies and anecdote. The few research studies I found suffered from having a too-small sample size, an unrepresentative sample or (in most cases) both. It seemed about time that someone put the theories librarians and educators have had about what it takes to create a culture of assessment to the test. We’ll be sharing our early results at the ACRL Conference and will be publishing our more-comprehensive analysis later.

I’m also doing a qualitative research right now. Anyone who worked with me at Norwich knows that since hearing librarians from the University of Rochester talk about library ethnography in 2006, I have been dying to do that kind of research in my own library. It frustrates me how many decisions we make in libraries based on our own preferences or what we think we know about our patrons. If there’s anything I’ve learned from doing assessment and usability testing, it’s that librarians are frequently wrong about their patrons and how they use resources, spaces, etc. I got a grant with two terrific colleagues at PSU (Emily Ford and Molly Blalock-Koral) last Spring to do an ethnographic study to develop a better understanding of the information needs, behavior and challenges of returning students (which we defined as students with a gap of at least four years in their formal education). We’ve been collecting data this term and last and it has been so fun! I’ve learned a ton about students at PSU and I’m especially excited that most of the people we’re working with actually aren’t big library users (some don’t use it at all). The biggest challenge has been taking off my librarian hat and putting on my observer hat. It’s hard not to intervene when you know you could help them search more effectively!

I geek out on assessment because I’m so curious about our users and what they think/want/do. I truly believe that better knowing our users will bring us closer to meeting their needs. I only wish I had more time to do this kind of work. Librarians who get to do user research as a regular part of their job are insanely lucky.

On the one hand, I think Julie tars way too many people with the same brush. There are a lot of people who focus on emerging technologies and trendy topics who are providing an amazing service to others by sharing what they know. There are plenty “where the rubber meets the road” speakers out there whose road happens to be technology. There are also lots of people who focus on ideas that provoke and make people think in new ways that spur action.

On the other hand, she’s right about quite a lot. I, too, get tired of the focus on certain hot trendy topics that end up being discussed at every conference for a year or two and then seem to disappear into the ether. Some of these topics are valuable and influence practice in meaningful ways. Some seem to serve no useful purpose other than to push librarians way too far out in front of their patrons or to make librarians feel like their libraries are “so five minutes ago.” Regardless of their worth, they serve to distract from many other innovative or just plain useful things people are doing that don’t happen to be “hot topics.” I’m researching, writing and speaking much more now about assessment (and not the hot “Value of Academic Libraries” type of assessment), which is about 1,000,000 times less sexy than programming for little kids. Luckily there are conferences for this kind of stuff, though at many of them, I feel totally out of my depth (this coming from someone who has keynoted international conferences). I think it is more difficult for children’s librarians, simply because there aren’t a bunch of conferences made just for the discussion of youth services.

I also see that gender imbalance Julie mentioned, along with the lionization of hipsters, “thought leaders”, tech evangelists, and party-animals who offer very little in their talks that could be put to practical use in libraries. At first I was prepared to argue with her assertion that those style-over-substance folks were all male until I realized that I couldn’t think of a single female librarian who truly fits that description. I don’t feel like men necessarily have more opportunities to become famous rock-star librarians (and yes, that term turns my stomach). There are more men involved in library technologies than women and, at this point, technologies are hot topics at a lot of conferences. But I do think it’s more acceptable and expected in our society for men to be thought-leaders, impressarios, evangelists and the like (how many female cult leaders have you heard of?). I think a woman who acted like that in our profession would be tarred and feathered and marked as a phony. It’s a double-standard; like the guy who sleeps around and is a player and the woman who acts the same way and is a slut. This gender stuff is pervasive and insidious.

One good way to stop conferences from being all about trendy people and trendy topics is to get on conference planning committees. It’s great to see smart, savvy people like Andromeda planning major conferences, because it means we’re so much more likely to see thought-provoking and useful keynotes and presentations.

Julie writes about how she feels she would have to compromise who she is and/or focus on the wrong things to become a big name in the profession. I don’t believe that’s true. Julie, I’m not going to give you and your compatriots advice on how to become a big name in the profession (which clearly is not what you’re looking for). That’s way too ego-driven and I’d still like to believe that ego-driven efforts will not lead to lasting success (yes, I live in a dream world, but I like it here). I’m going to tell you how to change things to benefit more than just yourself. You and your children’s librarians don’t feel like there’s a forum for you to give presentations, share your ideas, and get the recognition you deserve? Make one! Create an online conference or a conference in your local area. Create an awesome youth services unconference at ALA, ILA, etc. Subvert the dominant paradigm. It’s possible. I’ve done it. When I was frustrated by the lack of affordable learning experiences about social media (in the days before free webinars and Learning 2.0) I created Five Weeks to a Social Library. It was a hell of a lot of work, but it was rewarding. I’ll tell you, it’s things like that, which did not bring fame or fortune, that I am most proud of. And honestly, in the long run, being proud of what you’ve accomplished is a lot more meaningful than fame. Also, subversion is just really fun.

But maybe I’m weird. I never really consciously wanted fame or keynote gigs or any of that (not that I’m complaining; I feel ridiculously lucky for the opportunities I’ve received). I created this blog back in 2004 because I was lonely. I had done my degree program online, was about to graduate, was in the midst of a soul-crushing job search, and I needed to find a like-minded professional community to keep me sane. I was thrilled to have a circle of blogger friends online and never really wanted for more. And from there, every good thing that happened to me came from following my heart. I created a wiki for the 2005 ALA Conference since I lived in Chicago and thought crowd-sourced info about the city might be useful for others. That made the readership of my blog explode, which led 6 months later to an offer to write a book. Creating a similar wiki for the Computers in Libraries Conference led to my first speaking gig (which scared the life out of me). I know I was lucky, but I do believe that doing good work, following your heart, and focusing on helping others in the profession will lead to good things.

Finally, let me just say that this fame thing, fame in the library profession, is really trivial. I’ve had people call me a rock star librarian (again, gagging) and yet the vast majority of librarians have no idea who I am. I was big at certain techie conferences and a nobody at the Library Assessment Conference. It’s a very small portion of our profession that really follows all the library blogs and the memes and the FriendFeed or Twitter discussions. It only feels bigger because those are the people you associate with. I was put in my place recently by one of my research partners on a project I’m PI’ing who suggested that maybe she should send out the recruitment email for our survey since library directors will know who she is (she’s a former ACRL President, so she’s totally right). But most importantly, all that stuff doesn’t make a difference to the students and faculty I serve. If you think recognition from your profession and fame is important, you’ve got your priorities all wrong. A faculty member who says he loves the tutorial I made means a hell of a lot more than the librarian who thinks I rock because of my blog. It means I’m effective at my job, which is why I became a librarian.

Being a rock star librarian reminds me of that commercial from Intel a few years back with the co-inventor of the USB. Do you really aspire to this?

This post on the New York Times Motherlode blog about parents sharing sensitive information about their children online really touched a chord with me. I had a similar thought to Jillian Keenan when I read the “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother” article that went viral in the aftermath of the shootings in Connecticut. Sure, Liza Long used a different name for her child, but she wrote it under her own name, which doesn’t make it all that difficult to connect the dots. I’m a big believer that kids can overcome their childhoods. So what if he does overcome it all? What if he’s not the next Adam Lanza? He’s now been branded with a scarlet C for crazy (isn’t that what the NRA wants to do now to the mentally ill?) in an agonizingly public way. As an adult, someone may put two and two together and realize that the person they’re dating, the person they’re considering hiring, or their roommate was once so troubled that his mother thought he could end up a mass murderer. I agree with Liza Long that we need to talk about mental illness and treatment for the mentally ill in this country. I think she could have done that without using her own name and thus connecting this to her son.

Think of yourself as a young person. Think of the bad, stupid, dangerous, and embarrassing things you did. Imagine that all of those things were Google-able because your mother or your friend decided to blog about their own life, in which you just happened to play a role. I agree with Jillian Keenan that unless we committed some horrible crime, we have a right to leave our childhood stupidities and teenage hormone-filled hysterics behind us. I have a lot of friends who have overcome some pretty bad childhoods to become pretty great people. They shouldn’t be marked for life by their childhood because someone else decides to share it online.

I remember once reading a funny blog post a friend had written about her toddler son playing with his penis. While it was an adorable story about a toddler, is it a story that boy, one day an adult, is going to want his friends to see? Is he going to want a potential employer to find it when she searches for his name? Sure, not harmful, but certainly embarrassing for the next Supreme Court Justice nominee or Academy Award winner. There have been many times when my son has said or done something absolutely hilarious that I haven’t wanted to share with the entire world. I often ask myself, if I’d done this as a child, is it something I’d want people to know about me now? If the answer is no, I don’t share.

Back in the day, these were anecdotes we only shared with friends and family in person and on the phone. They were fleeting and not permanent records in cyberspace. We could complain about bosses and spouses and, so long as you could trust those you were telling, no one was any the wiser. But now, when spaces like FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter are essentially the new third places — the spaces where we can let our hair down and connect with people we care about — it seems only natural to share things similarly to how we did in physical third places. But it’s not the same. Not nearly. In spite of the fact that I totally side with Jenica Rogers on the whole librarians vs. American Chemical Society thing, I do think that calling someone a bitch on FriendFeed is putting something in writing (doesn’t make her arguments against ACS any less credible though). Because even when you create a private feed, if you have hundreds of “friends” you’re not just talking to a few trusted pals. I count among my Facebook friends people I love dearly, people I was friends with 20 years ago, people I’ve met once or twice, and people who I don’t know who happen to be librarians. Unless I go on a rampage and delete hundreds of Facebook friends (or create different classes of friends — both of which seem overly time-consuming), I will never trust that what I write there is “just between friends.”

People my age were the last that got to create a digital footprint free of their parents’ insights and (and, lucky for us, also their own adolescent sturm und drang). I don’t want to get in the way of my son having that opportunity. Sure, there may be some cute family pics of him online and if you’re my Facebook friend, you’ll probably hear some endearing stories, but I hope that he can create his own online persona. Messy, flawed and probably with plenty of things that he regrets; but they’ll be his mistakes to make. I think this next generation deserves that.

Lots of universities look at factors they can easily measure. Grades. Financial aid load. Visits to academic advising. But I believe that self-efficacy plays a huge psychological role in retention. Self-efficacy, that sense that one can succeed at their task. Believing in oneself. I find it surprising that in searching the literature on the role of self-efficacy in retention, it seems to be a topic that has only recently started to be explored. And in studies, researchers have found that self-efficacy has a significant impact on persistence and retention. Students with high self-efficacy are more likely to be retained. Students with low self-efficacy are not.

Context, one’s history, plays a huge role in self-efficacy. One study I read found that first-generation college students tended to have lower levels of academic self-efficacy than those with parents who went to college. Having been a social worker, it makes perfect sense to me. I don’t think too many of us realize how much the way we grew up figures into whether and how we believe in ourselves. I had two college-educated parents. Not completing college was not even something I ever thought was an option. But as a child and family therapist, I saw many bright young people whose vision of what they could become was limited by the horrible circumstances in which they were growing up. I remember one client of mine in particular and every time I think of him I always cry.

He was 12 when I met him and he was having major trouble in school. He was very angry and that anger was spilling out into his interactions with everyone from his classmates to his teachers. He was put in a class for emotionally disturbed children, which was a shame because he was learning next to nothing in it. He was a smart-ass, but he was also smart. Extremely smart. We had most of our therapy sessions at his school, and I’d often buy him books or take him over to the school library to get books. He was a voracious reader, but reading and academic achievement weren’t encouraged at home. He was living in low-income housing in a high-crime area. He was the victim of physical abuse. His mom only paid attention to him when he misbehaved. And all of that conspired to limit his sense of self-efficacy. Constrained what he thought he was capable of. Some people overcome horrible childhoods to achieve great things, but many don’t. I remember thinking at the time, if I could adopt this boy, he would have a very different future. And that thought broke my heart. It still does.

There’s not a lot we can do about what our students come in with, but there are things we can do to help them be successful once they get here. I have always been an advocate for a strong library role in first-year instruction because I think it’s a critical time for students to build self-efficacy and thus be retained. I don’t believe that one-shot information literacy sessions work well with a population that is already convinced they are expert researchers, but I do believe that being present and being a support to first-year students is critical. And I also believe that we can play an important role in helping instructors design research assignments that build self-efficacy rather than tear it down.

Imagine you’re a college Freshman. Your experience with research papers is minimal and mostly consists of finding books in your high school library and summarizing what you’ve read. Suddenly, in your third week of college classes ever, you are asked to do a major research project where you have to find five peer-reviewed sources. Your professor explains what peer-reviewed means, but not how or where to find sources. You have to not only find five peer-reviewed articles, but read them, understand them, and synthesize them into a paper with a cogent argument. Do you come out of this experience feeling –

A. Frustrated, but realize that your professor’s gave you a crappy assignment
B. Frustrated, but grateful for the kick in the pants by your professor because you’re learning so much
C. Proud of yourself for completing it at all
D. Frustrated and wondering if you’re really cut out for this

Probably different people will conclude different things from this assignment, but for those who already have a low sense of self-efficacy, this crappy experience just confirms their fears that maybe they’re not ready for college.

Clearly, instructors can tear someone down. But they can also build a student up. And this is where I think teachers can learn a lot from video game design. In video games, you don’t go up against the big boss bad guy right off the bat. You do things that give you practice; that build your confidence. You develop skills and a sense of self-efficacy that then help you persist when the game gets tough and your character dies 20 times in the same place. If you played a game where you got that kind of a smackdown from the start, you’d quit. Game designers know how to scaffold skill acquisition in a game through tasks that increase in difficulty so you’ll keep playing.

Imagine you’re that same college Freshman who is essentially green when it comes to college-level research. Imagine that your instructor teaches the research process step-by-step, giving you small assignments along the way that allow you to practice each step in the process. You learn how to brainstorm keywords, search effectively in a library database, evaluate sources, etc. and with each small assignment, you move towards a full research paper. Your final assignment in the class is to write that research paper (let’s also assume that writing skills are similarly taught in a scaffolded way). By that point, you’ve developed the skills necessary to complete the task successfully. Your instructor set you up to succeed. She built your skills and sense of self-efficacy through scaffolded instruction and small assignments leading toward a research paper. This may lead to a positive feedback loop; building student self-efficacy through information literacy instruction may result in greater student interest in developing information literacy skills. One study showed that students with higher self-efficacy were more likely to be interested in learning about library resources.

I have seen way too many first-year assignments that set students up to fail and I believe that the library can and should play a role in supporting faculty in designing assignments that teach and assess research skills, and increase student self-efficacy. I don’t think most instructors are intentionally trying to torture first-year students. I think in many cases they are used to working with upper-division students or graduate students who can handle a different sort of assignment. Teaching first-year students is an art. That’s why so many people don’t want to do it.

I’m going to start offering faculty workshops on research assignment design in Winter term. I had the opportunity to do this over the summer with some of the faculty in my liaison areas who were taking their classes online and the conversations and collaborations that came from the workshop were amazing. It’s great to support student information literacy at the course design level, because it’s likely to have more impact than any one-shot could.

I’ve come to believe that our success in creating information literate students will not come from our teaching alone, though our work as teachers is valuable. It will come from influencing faculty teaching and assignment design. It will come from injecting information literacy into courses at a molecular level so that we can help students become not only information literate, but confident in their own research skills. It’s no an easy fix and it requires a heck of a lot more collaboration and trust between librarians and faculty than it takes to get into a class for a one-shot. But it’s so very worth the effort.

I don’t think being entrepreneurial is just about getting or making money. It’s about finding ways to do more of the things you want to do than you could if you just relied on your own internal resources. It’s about partnering. Seeking funding. Seeking mutually-beneficial opportunities with other people and groups. Looking beyond what has been done in the past and toward whole new ways of doing things. It’s about creativity and chutzpah in equal measure.

I don’t know if it’s something about being tenure-track faculty, but now, at Portland State, I really understand what it is to be entrepreneurial. It’s not that we weren’t amazingly creative and inventive at Norwich. We found so many ways to do things for free that other libraries spent a fortune to do. We made a lot happen with a very small staff. But we were very much about making it work using our own resources. We often didn’t look outside of the library (to external funders or units on campus) for ways to make things happen (and part of me wonders if that’s not a product of the self-sufficient Vermonter culture). Here at PSU, the librarians are all about partnerships. I was blown away when I got here by how strong the liaison program is. Our liaisons are deeply involved with the majority of departments. They know their faculty well and they know the curriculum. They’ve taken the time to really build strong relationships with the faculty in their disciplines. And the proof is in the pudding. We are teaching not only in the lower levels, but in many key upper-level undergraduate classes as well as graduate-level classes. And so many of my colleagues have partnered or are working towards partnering with their departments in creative ways: to do collaborative research on how to best support their students, to team teach a credit class, to collaboratively fund an online collection, to embed themselves in a class online, to create a flipped classroom model for library instruction, etc. I’m constantly inspired by the creative things I see my colleagues doing around me.

And it’s not just about partnering with the traditional departments. We’ve built bridges to lots of other units on campus: Research and Strategic Partnerships, the academic advisers, OIT, etc. These partnerships have led to a number of mutually beneficial projects that allowed us to offer more to students and faculty than we could have otherwise. We’ve brought units into the building (a writing center outpost and the learning center) that allow the library to provide more support than just with research and information seeking without actually offering any of it ourselves. These are win-win projects for both sides of the partnership. My colleagues Joan Petit and Tom Bielavitz write about some of our projects in their book chapter “Innovation on a Shoe String: High Impact Space and Technology Updates in a Low-Funding Environment.”

We’re looking to strengthen our relationships with faculty and to increase their awareness about how we can support their teaching and research. We’ve partnered with the Center for Online Learning this year to be part of their Advanced Design process which gets faculty from a specific department together to design online courses from scratch using a backwards design model. In working with faculty at the point in which they’re building their classes, we have the opportunity to influence research assignment design and help faculty scaffold research skills instruction in their classes. Again, a win for us because we’re helping to (hopefully) improve student success and a win for faculty because they’re (hopefully) getting better research products from students.

For the Winter term, I’m hoping to piggy-back off the popularity of my Zotero and Mendeley workshops and begin offering a series of workshops geared towards faculty with many of my colleagues. We’ll cover topics like determining where to publish, open access, fair use, using online library resources for your class, and research assignment design. I hope that by doing this, we will continue to better position ourselves as partners in student success and build those critical faculty relationships. I believe that it’s not teaching one-shots that is going to make students successful information seekers/users in school and life. It’s weaving information literacy instruction into academic curricula. And that can only happen with the disciplinary faculty. It can only happen through partnerships. And what we’re doing is helping to put us in a position to experiment with other models of information literacy instruction and create meaningful change.

The environment here has helped me get more into that entrepreneurial mindset. While I felt very creative in my last job, I’m much more driven now to build relationships on-campus and look for opportunities outside of the library. That’s not to say I didn’t have strong relationships with my departments in my last job, but frequently when I’m going for an opportunity here, I’ll think to myself, “gosh, why didn’t I think of doing that at my last job?” It’s an exciting time here and I feel like the greatest challenge is actually choosing the right opportunities, the right partnerships, to pursue. We can’t do everything.

So I wonder, is it being tenure-track faculty that helps to nurture that entrepreneurial mindset? Is it because we go through the same evaluation process and serve on the same committees as other faculty that building partnerships feels so natural? Is it faculty governance and the faculty-driven culture? Or is an entrepreneurial culture possible in any sort of library, even one that is not so flat as a traditional faculty-governed library? What do you think?