Tag Archives: value

How do I spell success? R-E-P-E-A-T

19 Mar

I was away on vacation last week, enjoying a wonderful few days in Old Montreal (Vieux-Montreal), thus my post is a bit on the short side this week. When we arrived at the hostel where we were staying, I promptly locked my work iPod in a locker off the main room and refused to look at it until Sunday evening, the night before returning to my cubicle. Vacation is about getting away and while I’ve been as guilty as anyone in terms of not leaving work behind during these respites, this time I decided that I would (and could) do just that. I’m hardly so important – nor my colleagues so incompetent – that I can’t leave work for a week or two without any serious catastrophes occurring. And as expected, nothing happened in my absence that required me being here. It was a nice break.

When I did peek at my email on Sunday night, I saw one note that was worth reading – a note from an investigator that I’ve been working with to put together a proposal for a new project. He was writing to let me know that it was a go. YES! It’s a really different project, compared with others that I’ve worked on to date, and I’m looking forward to learning some new skills and working with some new colleagues. Great news!

Then on Monday, I got a phone call from the project manager of the mammography study, letting me know that the principal investigators wished to continue supporting part of my time, i.e. keeping me on their team for a few more months as we write a paper together and work on hosting a panel at the Clinical Translational Science Center’s annual research retreat in May.

These two bits of news, for me, are real indicators of the progress I’m making in demonstrating the value of embedded librarian services here on campus. Repeat performances spell “success”!

My fantastic new laptop that I picked up while on vacation in Montreal! Cool, eh?

My fantastic new laptop that I picked up while on vacation in Montreal! Cool, eh?

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Two and Two and Two: Making Connections

24 Oct

Two meetings with two principal investigators about two grant proposals over two days lead me to two observations and thoughts about the state of our profession and the work that we do:

1. Is the library a silo, too?

We speak a good bit in the profession about how often those that we serve, our patrons, live and work in silos. Scientists do research in specific areas. Departments treat diseases within a specialized field. Administrators make decisions within the context of the the top level that they know best. It’s very common. And it makes us quite frustrated because the reality of the world is that we rarely function in a world that doesn’t (or couldn’t) benefit from other areas, if only we knew about them. However, “Nobody knows what I do!” is a common cry not just from librarians, but across the board. Is this perhaps a glimpse that we, like our patrons, are living in a silo that we’ve created for ourselves? 

Yesterday, I sat down with a researcher to do some work on the proposal that we’re submitting for the next round of informationist grants from the National Library of Medicine. It is an absolutely fantastic project and each time that I come away from talking with Dr. Kennedy, I can’t help but think how refreshing it is to speak with a researcher who knows as much, no, more than I do, around the issues related to data sharing. Turns out that he’s internationally known as a proponent of data sharing in his field (neuroimaging), leading projects and initiatives and working groups and all sorts of attempts at advocating among his peers for the necessity of this practice. It is by chance – pure chance – that our paths crossed and that this crossing led us to work on the grant proposal together. You see, he knew of the RFP for the informationist supplement grants because of his connections to colleagues at the National Library of Medicine. I happened to give a talk at one of his lab’s meetings awhile back on an unrelated topic and he noted that the title on my signature line includes “informationist.” Thus, he asked me what this meant, what I did, what I was doing related to the supplement awards, and if I’d be interested in helping him on a project idea that he had. This is how we came to yesterday.

What I want to point out, however, is that Dr. Kennedy came across this information with no connection to the library. He learned of it from a colleague at the National Library of Medicine, yet that colleague, evidently, didn’t think to point him to his library as a place to find an informationist. 

Are you following me?

There’s a chat happening on the MEDLIB-l listserv today (and other days and in other circles of our profession, too, of course) regarding our name, i.e. should we incorporate “knowledge” into our job titles, use it in some form instead of “library” to describe our workplace, etc. I’m not going to get into that discussion here, but I bring it up because a consistent thread in these discussions is that if our patrons don’t know the value of the library, then we are evidently doing something wrong in our work.

To this I say, “Yes and no.” 

Yes, sometimes we haven’t done the best job at getting out and letting people know how we can build partnerships, collaborate on research projects, embed ourselves in curriculum, teach classes on a variety of relevant subjects, and much more. Our history is as a passive profession. For years and years and years we were able to meet our patrons here, in the library. They had to come to us to use our resources. Once here, they made the association that librarians were important because libraries had resources. But those days have been gone for decades now and we haven’t always been the best at getting out and helping people associate us less with the library and more with our skills. WE are the resource that we really need to save now, not the library or the journal collections or the subscription to UpToDate. We cost the administration more than those other resources, thus we best be able to prove that we are the resource worth keeping the next time the forced budget cuts come along.

But I also say no to the belief that if people don’t know our value, we’re doing something wrong. I’ve done a ton of right things over the past year and a half as an embedded informationist that have led me to all sorts of fantastic new opportunities, yet still it’s only by chance that I discover someone right here on my very campus who has been working on and advocating for many of the same things we’ve been talking about here in the Library. We work in different worlds, all of us, and despite the forward strides and promise of networked science, it remains so darned impossible to be able to make all of the connections that we could make that would ultimately lead to better work, e.g. science, medicine, information management. Work that would prove our value.

To me, that realization really hit home when yesterday when I thought about how someone who works for the National Library of Medicine, the funding agency behind these informationist grants (the National LIBRARY of Medicine) didn’t associate the library with those awards. I don’t say that out of any place of judgment, either. Well… maybe a little, but the truth is that there’s no point in judging and/or blaming and/or pointing fingers. It is simply our reality. We all live and work in some degree of a silo, but if we want to be associated with value, we need to be valuable. Visible and valuable. Both.

2. “You have a unique skill that only a handful of people on this campus have.”

I was told this today by another principal investigator as we discussed the rewriting of another grant proposal. The skill she refers to is my knowledge of how to use and leverage social media for all sorts of positive things. Her point was that when you have something that few others have, you’ve got to use it. Social media is trendy in medical research today, but few medical researchers actually use social media. They want the money to do the research, yet don’t have the expertise in the products to know how to use them effectively. Thus, when you do have the expertise, you have value. Research teams need you on their team. This is terrific!

Yet I felt myself hesitating at the thought that as a librarian, the skill I would bring to a research team lies in social media. Is that a librarian skill? As we talked though, the researcher described to me how knowing the social media tools and the social media landscape affords you the skill of knowing better how to collect and manage the data that’s generated from the use of these tools. Novices don’t have that. And data management… now THAT is a skill that the library is clamoring to get into. But even for me and my “out of the library box” thinking, making this connection took a few minutes. Even for me! 

It surprised me, but I wonder if as we break out of our silos and work closely with others, perhaps one of the things that gets blurry is the answer to the question, “Who knows what?” What are librarians supposed to know? What are researchers supposed to know? What do doctors know? And who does what? I think that it’s this vagueness that makes us argue over (or more politely, discuss) what we call ourselves, what services we provide, and what our value really is. Silos and walls keep us separated, but they also keep us neat and orderly. We say that they need to go. Are we ready for the flood of uncertainty that all the mixing-up to come will bring? 

National Preparedness Month was last month, but you can still celebrate it today.

life-preserver

 

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Add it Up

10 Oct

The theme for this month’s international Open Access Week celebration is entitled, “Redefining Impact” and will focus on alternative metrics (altmetrics) and the emerging realization that there are better ways to measure the reach of one’s research than simply how many times a published article about it is cited. Publication certainly has value, but in today’s world with so many faster, far-reaching, and varied means of communication, scientists and others in academia need to recognize – and track – how well their work is or isn’t getting to its intended audience (and, perhaps, beyond).

Similarly, with funding harder to come by and the cost of everything rising exponentially, e.g. healthcare, education, food, clothing and shelter, the pressure is on from administrators, funding bodies, and the general public for these expensive endeavors to demonstrate their value. If the NIH gives a scientist several million dollars to carry out research, the expectation is that the outcomes will be worthy of that grant funding. If you pay $100,000+ for a four-year education, you expect to walk across the stage four years later with more than a piece of paper claiming you have a degree. More and more, we want demonstrable value for our investments.

countable quoteIn such an environment, we have to begin to investigate these altmetrics. For libraries, the traditional practice of tracking gate counts, circulation statistics, reference transactions, collection size, and other straightforward numbers that measured … well … numbers, it is past time for looking at alternative means to really answer the question(s) of our worth. As Steve Hiller, director of assessment for the University of Washington Libraries noted in an article for Information Outlook last year, we need to ask, “What makes a library good?” We need to look at these traditional metrics and ask if they’re truly yielding measures that matter. (Information Outlook, 16(5), Sept/Oct, 2012) 

Yet, value is a difficult thing to measure in numbers, of course, and this is what makes the task so difficult and, often, elusive. There are many articles and blog posts and online discussions on the topic of assessing the value of libraries, written by people with much more expertise in the area than I have. If you’re interested, I’d recommend Megan Oakleaf’s white paper, The Value of Academic Libraries, that grew from the ACRL-commissioned study of the same name, as a starting point.

In this post, I want to ask instead how we measure not the value of libraries, but librarians. What are the altmetrics that we need to collect on ourselves to demonstrate that the work we do matters to our patrons? As an academic librarian, I’ve built my portfolio of those tools that we tell researchers to build themselves. I have my ORCID profile, my ResearcherID, and my ImpactStory. I’ve registered this blog with ScienceSeeker. I have a LinkedIn account. I put my presentations on SlideShare. I tweet prodigiously (@mandosally).

These things have been successful in raising my profile within my profession. They’ve garnered me a small band of loyal followers, invitations to speak at conferences and to be part of webcasts, the opportunity to teach classes to a number of library staffs, and the odd-but-thrilling connection with a few real celebrities. It’s all wonderful stuff and I wouldn’t trade a bit of it. But… what does any of it say regarding my value as a librarian to the research community that I serve here at the University of Massachusetts Medical School? How do I measure that? What altmetrics are there that I can track and collect and show to my administrators to prove to them that I am, in fact, adding value to the work of the people that I serve and thus, ultimately, to the library?

I thought of this question earlier in the week when I was putting together a traditional altmetric profile (how’s that for an oxymoron?) for a faculty member here. As part of OA Week, we want to give a presentation on altmetrics and my library profile just isn’t going to cut it for an audience of researchers, so I asked Dr. Sherry Pagoto if I could use her as a guinea pig to set up all of the previously-mentioned profiles for her. Her reply was, “Cool! Yeah, I’d love to see this data (I think!).  I’ve been wanting to set this kind of thing up but haven’t gotten to it, so this will be fun!” Later, when I had her ImpactStory profile pretty well done, I tweeted it (of course!) and it prompted this “transaction”:

Sherry ImpactStoryTo me, this is an unequivocal demonstration of my value as a librarian on that particular day. I did my job and I did it very well and I have the proof, in a tweet, of this fact. Great, isn’t it? But short of taking screen shots of tweets and email replies, short of catching conversations with grateful patrons on video and posting them to YouTube, short of saving notes and phone messages and journal entries describing “good days”, how do I systematically capture all of this “value”? It’s a challenge. It’s perhaps THE challenge that any and all of us who work in information, innovation, and intellect, and the service roles that operate in those realms, face. It’s perplexing.

This week I’ve been reading Kim Dority’s book, Rethinking Information Work, and I really resonated with her sentiment that ultimately we are all self-employed.

And believe it or not, this is good news. Because if we understand that regardless of our current employment situation we are solely responsible for the well-being of our careers (and paychecks), that means we can take control. We can focus not on lifetime employment, but on lifetime employability.

One thing that I often find myself saying to colleagues, particularly newer grads from library schools, is that when you successfully embed yourself in the work of your patrons, your own value – and your job security – rises much more than if you were only trying to prove your value to your library directors and managers. This is because, if you want to talk numbers, there are more of them than there are library directors and managers. The word gets out that you’re worth having around – that you can do this and that and the other thing that they never knew before. And suddenly, you have done for yourself what can’t easily be captured on any annual evaluation, but is worth much more. You have made yourself employable, regardless of any circumstance. In a time of tight budgets and job cuts and the very real struggles of librarians to keep their libraries open, this is likely the biggest asset you can have.

Perhaps for a long time, librarians depended upon their libraries for their value. We counted on the intrinsic value of the institution to give us worth. Perhaps today, however, it’s the institution that is dependent upon those of us who work in it to bring that value back. And this is why, I believe, we need to shift the discussion from measuring the value of libraries to measuring the value of librarians. Those are the altmetrics that I’m still waiting to see emerge.

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