Seeing the Forest AND the Trees

13 Feb
Winter forest near Budapest, Hungary. Wikimedia Commons.

Winter forest near Budapest, Hungary. Wikimedia Commons.

“The most important thing that the library does is make it possible for me to get the articles that I need to do my research. That is absolutely the most important.”

This is what one of our most prominent and influential researchers said to me and a colleague the other day when we were interviewing her as part of our environmental scan of the University related to data services and technology infrastructure. Does she believe that the library provides other services? Yes. Does she think that we may have a role or two to play in the areas associated with data services and/or eScience? Without a doubt. But when asked the question, “What role can the library play in supporting your research?,” without hesitation, this was her answer. Our researchers cannot work without access to the literature and the library provides that. That role is the most important one.

I think it’s easy to interpret this comment in a negative light, after all, librarians have little of nothing to do anymore with making access to journals possible, at least not beyond negotiating license agreements and fulfilling the occasional ILL request. Once in awhile, I still walk up to the 3rd floor of the stacks, pull a print journal off of the shelf, and scan and email an article for a researcher too busy to walk to the library and get it him/herself. I don’t mind. It’s good exercise. But in terms of the many tasks that librarians once did that made articles accessible, from cataloging to systems design and maintenance, these are jobs that we have long since passed along to third party vendors; OCLC, Serials Solution, EBSCO, Thomson Reuters, and the like. These are the businesses that build the databases, aggregate and package our resources, provide the catalog records and metadata for articles, journals, books, et al. Librarians today simply purchase these products, put them in place for our users, and then let them use them. Oh sure, we still do some teaching and training and even a little searching ourselves from time to time, but when it comes to the most important thing that we do, in the eyes of countless patrons, we do very little. At least I do very little in that regard.

But I don’t necessarily want to see that as a negative thing. Instead, I hope that it’s something that we don’t lose sight of, because when it comes to what people think about the library, they still, overwhelmingly, think of us as a collector and provider of resources. In my library’s case, those resources are journals and journal articles. In the public library’s case, those resources are books. Fight it all you want, call yourself what you want, offer any number of other services that you wish, but for now, it remains the most important thing. People expect us to build collections of relevant resources and then make those collections easily available to them. If we do nothing else, we’re expected to do this.

This is likely because the task of building collections and making them accessible is what we do best. I’ll argue that it’s certainly what we do better than anyone else on my university campus. It’s what makes the library different from an archive or a museum or a storage unit or a high performance computing center or a networked drive or shared folders or… the Internet. Like an archive, we preserve things, but we don’t treat our things so special that you need white gloves to touch them. Like a museum, we collect things, but unlike the Metropolitan Museum of Art that’s only able to display a small percentage of the more than 2 million pieces in its permanent collection at any one time, we make our entire collection available to our patrons at all times. Like a high performance computing center, we accept and store data, but we also supply the necessary metadata to it and link it to other relevant sources so that users can both find it and put it in context. We share, just like folders on a shared drive, but (hopefully) in a much more organized and logical fashion.

In other words, the library has some very unique and very important characteristics in our role as collector and provider of resources. The ability of a patron to get an article easily may well be the tree that they see as the most prominent and we need to not lose sight of that tree as we’re trying hard to see the bigger forest. Instead, I think we need to remember to see both. Listening to this particular researcher this week, I was reminded to do just that.

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The Power of Positive Pete

7 Feb
Photo taken by Bobak Ha'Eri, on November 1, 2008. Used with permission.

Photo taken by Bobak Ha’Eri, on November 1, 2008. Used with permission.

Congratulations to the Seattle Seahawks, winners of Super Bowl XLVIII (the NFL loves those Roman numerals)! Congratulations to all of the players, the coaches and staff, the team owners and management, and to all of their terrific fans who have cheered long and loud for their team. 

Yes, I’m a sports fan. My dad and I shared practically every weekday breakfast during my years from elementary school through high school, taking turns reading the sports section of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. I love athletics, competition, games, and the many, many lessons that one can learn through playing and watching sports. Team work, discipline, self-confidence, striving to be one’s best, developing good habits around health and fitness, and having fun; despite everything that’s wrong with sports today (and there’s plenty!), these fundamental aspects remain at the core of all that’s good about sport. 

As a sports fan, I was one of the 108.7 million people who tuned in to watch last Sunday’s Super Bowl. I may have been about one of the 3 viewers who could care less about the commercials (I mute them, regardless of the show or event that they are part of). I tuned in to watch the game. And to watch Pete. I tuned in hoping to see Pete Carroll coach his team to victory. And he did.

Why Pete Carroll? Well, I’ve followed his career for awhile, from his early failures in the NFL (the Jets and the Patriots), to his success at the University of Southern California, to his return to the NFL with the Seahawks. If you’ve never paid any attention to him, even if you give not a whit about football or sports, once you see or read any story about him, it’s pretty hard not to be captivated by him. The guy’s outlook, his energy, his enthusiasm … it’s downright infectious. He makes competition and hard work and continued focus fun.

Now I live in New England and I cheer for an awfully successful NFL team (Go Patriots!) with one heck of a head coach (arguably the best ever), but seriously, if I’ve got to pick between Pete Carroll and Bill Belichick as to who I want to hang out with on any given day of the week, I’m looking for Pete eight ways to Sunday. I like upbeat. I like positive energy. I like fun!

And if I was ever asked to pick a head coach for a team of professional librarians, I’m going with Pete, too. Here’s why:

Last week, a discussion broke out on the medical librarian listserv, MEDLIB-L, around the topic of libraries closing. Sadly, this is not that uncommon of a discussion. Too often the list gets another email from another librarian who has recently lost his/her job due to his/her library being closed. This happens more often to hospital and/or clinical libraries, but even academic libraries are not immune from huge changes and the continual loss of positions (see my posts from this past summer for evidence of that very thing happening in my own library). For several days, people offered any number of ideas for how librarians, collectively and as individuals, could approach this problem/issue. Some were far-fetched. Some have been tried before without much success. Some were new and worth giving a go.

The discussion went on this way for about three days, i.e. in a generally positive tone, even when calling for big changes, until someone lobbed a “None of it matters anyway” grenade onto the gathering.

Now in truth, I take real issue with this kind of communication etiquette. Be it during an online discussion, face-to-face meeting, or supper table conversation, I don’t care for the practice of loaded comments that are thrown in for no other real purpose than to silence the whole talk. Some folks found the comment “realistic.” That’s fair. It may well be the reality of many a corporation and/or hospital with a highest priority being the bottom line, that libraries and librarians are an easy target for cutting. In an age of easy access to information, why do hospitals need libraries or more, librarians? Why do schools? Why do towns? Yes, it is a reality of the world in which we live that institutions and entities that do not generate profit are deemed less valuable. 

That said, I couldn’t help but feel my hackles go up when I read a colleague saying to a group of colleagues, “It doesn’t matter what we do, administrations will make the decisions that they make, regardless” (paraphrasing) and it made me furious when another gave thanks for a “voice of reality” begin spoken at last. If this is our reality, I thought, then why do I even show up in the morning? 

Perhaps the comments bothered me most because I took them personally. Many years ago, my friends had a nickname for me. This nickname grew out of a tendency that I had (still have, sometimes) to see the worst in reality. I often defaulted to the same, “What difference does it make?” attitude that I heard (interpreted) being shared by some of my colleagues on that list. My nickname was, “The Prophetess of Doom.”

Fortunately, since those days, I’ve learned some practices and the science behind them to be a little less “doom and gloomy” in my disposition and outlook on life. A lot of this centers around understanding how intricately connected our thoughts are with our behavior and attitudes. There’s an awful lot of evidence to support the fact that what we see and how we see it, what we say and how we say it, what we think and how we think it, and what we do and how we do it, are all intertwined. I’m not talking the Practice of Pollyanna, but of cognitive theory:

The basic proposition of cognitive theory is that information processing is a defining feature of what it means to be human, enabling individuals to make meaningful representations of themselves and their world. Humans are in a continual state of processing streams of information from their external and internal environments. They receive, encode, interpret, store, and retrieve information; this information processing plays a vital role in human adaptation and survival (Clark DA, Beck AT, Alford BA: Scientific Foundations of Cognitive Theory and Therapy of Depression. New York, Wiley, 1999).

When librarians say that our reality is, “Nothing that I do matters,” whether we believe that we’re being self-defeating or not, we are setting ourselves up for defeat. We are interpreting our environment as one in which we cannot win; where we cannot find value. How is this possibly a strategy for professional survival?

Enter my favorite coach:

After he got fired from the New England Patriots, Pete Carroll set out to purposefully articulate for himself his core values and beliefs, those things that were most true about himself and how he approached life (and by default, coaching). He dubbed his philosophy, “Win Forever“, and based it upon the value(s) of competition. For him, competition was at the root of his being. It made him aspire to always be the best that he could be, regardless of the circumstances. While it’s easy to see competition in sports, his larger point is that we all compete to be ourselves. It doesn’t matter if you have an opposing team, an opposing management, an opposing societal shift in information use and delivery that’s sucking away the foundations of your very profession; in the end, you are competing with yourself to be your best and when you succeed at that, you’ve succeeded. Period.

I believe that there’s a message that librarians can take from Coach Carroll, and not just because he won the Super Bowl on Sunday, but because his message seems to say that in a time when we may feel like nothing much matters, that’s exactly the time to believe the we matter the most. It takes discipline, a willingness to work hard, and a willingness to adjust your focus and attitudes so that you can make the changes that you need to make in order to reach the potential that you wish to reach. It’s a process of self-discovery, creating a vision that is true to yourself, and competing to hold onto your vision and ideals through any number of ups and downs in your career. It’s not about “nothing that I do matters.” It’s about “everything that I do matters.”

“If the goals, strategies, and techniques you have laid out for yourself are really true to your core self, you will always be able to get back to them. You will always want to get back to them.”  (Pete Carroll, Win Forever: Live, Work, and Play Like a Champion)

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Back Tracking

31 Jan

As promised earlier in the week, I’m checking back in today with some thoughts on my Information Seeking Behavior Tracking experiment. As you might imagine, it wasn’t the easiest task. It’s hard to pay attention to all that you’re doing during the day that relates to looking for information, particularly when you’re in the information business. That said, I think I did well enough to draw a few conclusions:

  1. I don’t use my library’s website very much.
  2. I use Google a lot.
  3. I get side-tracked often, thanks to having so much information pushed at me during the day.*
  4. I still use the old fashioned, “first-hand experience” method of answering some questions that I have. For example, one day I didn’t even look at my Weather Bug app to see the temperature before taking my puppy for her morning walk. Instead, I just went outside to discover it was cold.
  5. I use social media to both give and receive information. As it should be.

*If I call this divergent information behavior, it probably sounds better, doesn’t it?

Of course, the first two items on my list help me appreciate the behavior of many of our patrons. My library’s website is filled with valuable information, but I don’t use it often because (a) I believe that I know where to go for the information I need (library bypass – guilty as charged), and (b) I’m lazy. I don’t want to go through multiple layers to get to the things I need. And I don’t think that I’m all that different from most of the folks who use our library. I also generally get “good enough” information by quickly searching the Internet (I use Google) and following one of the top 3-4 results. There may well be better information out there, but “good enough” is good enough. 

This brings me back to the question that I’ve been asking for awhile, the question that led me to track my behavior in the first place. As a librarian, I spend valuable time and effort packaging the best resources for my patrons. I create subject guides, websites, flyers, handouts, emails, and posters. I teach classes and give presentations. All of these are efforts to let students and faculty and researchers and staff know what’s available to them, but I’m not very convinced anymore that it’s the best way to get the message out. I’m not suggesting that I quit doing those things, but I do believe that I need to think as much, if not more, about how I get the message to patrons as I think about what the message is in the first place.

This morning, I read an article entitled, “Design Dimensions Enabling Divergent Behavior across Physical, Digital, and Social Library Interfaces” (Bjorneborn, L., Persuasive Technology, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 6137, 2010, pp 143-149). Citing the work of B.J. Fogg and Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, Bjorneborn writes,

Human behavior may be seen as a product of three factors: motivation, ability, and triggers. … Motivation includes information needs and interests. Ability includes information literacies to navigate with integrated body and mind through physical, digital, and social information spaces. Triggers include convergent and divergent design dimensions that may stimulate convergent and divergent information behavior.

Our patrons come to us with motivation and we concentrate a great deal on improving their ability to navigate our resources, but how about triggers? What are the triggers that we have in place to make them use our resources, including US. How do I trigger people to call me for help? How do I trigger them to think of me when they’re in need of something that lends itself to my expertise? How do I put myself – how do we put all of our library resources – in the pathways of our patrons’ information seeking routines?

These are important questions that I don’t know we’ve spent much time thinking about and addressing. I also think that they become all the more important as we’re seeking to do new things and provide different services that don’t easily trigger “librarian” in someone’s mind. We reaped the benefits of the “book = library/librarian = book” connection for a good, long while, but when we’re trying to sell services like data management, that connection isn’t there. We need triggers.

Bjorneborn concludes his paper noting that, “Persuasive design may bridge ‘affordance gaps‘ between users’ perceived affordances and designers’ intended affordances.” Put another way, maybe librarians need to look to the literature of design, psychology, and maybe even the “Science of Shopping” to help us fill and/or bridge the gaps between what we want our patrons to know about us and what they do know.

A Snippet of My Tracking Tracker

A Snippet of My Tracking Tracker

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