The Delicious Burden

Books Have Many Futures : NPR

The premise of Lane Smith's new work for children, It’s a Book, is simple: Books are under siege.

via www.npr.org

Wonderful illustrator of many of Jon Scieszka's works.

Whats really important about libraries?

A question was posted by a fellow librarian on FriendFeed today.   Said librarian  posted the following question to folks:

"[Another] Q for non-librarians: which is most important for you in libraries:

1) big collection, 2) lots of good staff, 3) innovative w/ tech?"

Overwhelming response from non-librarians?

They want big collections with easy means of delivering what they want, when they want it, closely followed by technology innovation. Good staff was meaningless (or useless) to them, since libraries aren't about the librarians or the staff.

And I don't think this means they want to go to their local library and expect that it have every book sitting on the shelf waiting, a la "just-in-case".  It means being flexible, creative and innovative in how we deliver services and expectations:

"I guess I would say "big collection" or the easy ability to get what I need from somewhere else in a way that's convenient for me. I generally do everything online when I can, so I don't need lots of staff, though when I do need to interact with staff, they need to be good (and not just do all the things that I just did online to try to fix whatever issue I'm having). Innovative with tech - yes, if it makes things more convenient for me. Otherwise, meh. Self-centered, aren't I? :) "

So what does this mean for librarians? We talk more and more about user-centered design and services, so lets start asking the users what they want, instead of what we think they want. 

Writing a lot, or how I am going to stop worrying about the time and just do it

I'm reading a great book by Paul Silvia, called How to Write a Lot: a practical guide to productive academic writing.  So far - great advice.  So far - haven't been able to implement any of it. 
Silvia's first chapter breaks down the reasons for why academics don't write and the arguments for why and how these are what he calls "specious barriers" to being a really productive academic writer.  I wholly agree with his logic, its just that I'm what you would call a really disorganized planner, so I tend to get organized, but then never follow-through. 

His first piece of advice is to schedule your writing time and guard it with your life.  Easier said than done.  While I completely agree with the scheduling part, its the "where do I find the time on my schedule that isn't blocked off for a meeting" part that gets me tied up.  I want to try and make this a part of my everyday schedule, but so much gets in the way of this, including meetings, reference hours, other obligations.  However, Silvia argues that this is your writing time and you have to defend it, regardless of who or what is trying to take the time away from you.  Librarians especially need this time carved out at work, since we unfortunately don't have the luxury of summers or semester breaks away from campus.  Starting this week, I'm going to start scheduling my writing time on my corporate calendar, since the writing is important -- not just for tenure, but because I enjoy it and want to do more of it, but always have an excuse for why I'm not doing more of it. 

A second piece of practical and insanely simple advice:  write down your goals and objectives for each writing session.  Make them concrete and most importantly, do-able.  A goal such as "Write 200 words today" is a concrete goal and easily met if you schedule your time and focus on writing and not other tasks to do while in your writing session.  He also suggests giving your writing projects deadlines, since many of us start writing, but with no clearly articulated deadline, its easy to set it aside or procrastinate. 

So here is are my proposed writing goals:

1.  Set up a writing schedule for the next six months.

2.  Write at least 1 hour every day.

3.  Finish one journal article within the six months period

4.  Submit article to a journal.

Stay tuned...

Why librarians won't weed

Weeding is on my mind a lot lately.  Considering we have two huge weeding projects going on at my library, this isn't an unusual situation.  Today there was a listserv email from a community college library director asking for advice about weeding and weeding projects.  Some people replied with the standard responses of using selective criteria, subject and core title lists and usage statistics, but my question is:  if everyone else in your consortia or regional network owns a copy and it hasn't circulated in 20 years, why are you holding onto it when shelf space is at a premium, students are requesting more group study areas, you need more new books and Google Books and other full-text repositories have copies online?  Why don't librarians like to weed?

Because we are human and thus, pack rats.  We hold onto what we just might need, someday, just-in-case.  Just-in-case what, I'd like to ask?   Just-in-case that one bright-eyed student walks into your library, comes up to the reference desk and asks for that core title, written by a philosophy scholar sixty years ago and sitting on the shelf, never been used, just collecting dust.  Frankly, we can do better.  What use is that title sitting on your shelf for 20 years, when we should get rid of it, purchase materials users really want (maybe let them make the purchase requests?) and keep a constantly evolving and changing collection; as the needs of the community dictates.  A "balanced" collection is really a fantasy; does anyone really have a balanced collection?  I think its a philosophy that every library school student is taught and is supposed to emulate once they get a bibliographer gig, but it isn't practical and it isn't, well, to be honest, it isn't useful if the books are never being used.  Why are we so afraid to weed and to order relevant, useful materials that students and faculty want?  A lot of it has to do with our identities as librarians and territoriality.  I'm the only one who knows what the user needs and I alone know what is best or relevant for the collection.  We were the experts and our expertise was counted upon to find and acquire resources.  This may have been accurate back in the day when materials were scarce, ILL was slow and your local collection had to be comprehensive, balanced and "just-in-case".  In the age of Amazon, ILL turnaround of 3 days for books and 24 hours for journal articles, multitudes of electronic resources and databases, this isn't true anymore.  So, why are librarians still afraid to weed?

Some of it has to do with faculty and the perception that what we are weeding is unique and invaluable and thus, shouldn't be discarded; in fact, much of it isn't unique or valuable, but commonly held and if published before copyright protection sets in, may be in the public domain and available in full-text online from one of several digital repositories.  And yet, we still hang on to the books, not able to weed them from our collections, even though they aren't being used, most of them are irrelevant to the curriculum, research and scholarship occurring on our campuses, and duplicated in libraries all over the country.  Our main weeding project this summer is the removal of 31,000 titles from book storage off-site, which is being re-purposed by our campus in the fall.  Five years ago, these books were transferred from our main library to the storage facility, with the following criteria in mind; books published prior to 1959 (1979 for science titles) and had not circulated in the 18 years since our circulation system first went online.  These titles would remain accessible through our OPAC, and users could request them through IDS.  If an item was requested, it was brought back to the main library and the location was changed back to the main library in the catalog.  

For this project, thanks to a great tool designed by our systems administrator (called the GIST De-Selection Manager) I'm able to run a de-selection report on the 31,000 titles in our off-site storage.  The report, obtained by running OCLC numbers against a WorldCat API and several other APIs, returns holdings information for IDS Project libraries, NYS libraries which do OCLC ILL, full-text availability in Hathi Trust and Google Books, as well as Amazon prices (if available) and a recommendation to weed or keep based on a pre-determined conspectus ranking.  What it does is make the weeding decision much easier for librarians; for a major weeding project, it streamlines a majority of the labor-intensive work in checking our holdings against WorldCat, title by title.  Because the GDM also uses conspectus data, I can tailor our preferred conspectus holdings and the GDM will include this information in its final recommendation to keep or weed dependent on whether or not it is a subject area we want to grow or to shrink.  While GDM is still buggy (since a lot of the items are pre-1959 and have no ISBNs, some of the APIs have trouble returning results since they are searched using ISBNs, etc.) it has enormous potential for freeing up the decision-making of librarians when it comes time to weed.  With data in hand, I can easily make weeding decisions and feel confident to remove materials from the collection.

Its time to take the data and make evidence-based decisions; not subjective ones based on just-in-case.  Having the data will go a long way towards feeling confident enough to make the decision to weed. 

Going back to work

One week left until I go back to work and I'm going to miss this.  Griff is so high energy and Silas is so little and needs us so much that it can be overwhelming.  Its definitely been hard -- having a toddler and infant at home is more work than my regular day job, but still - I'm having a difficult time when I think about returning to the library. Last time, I was home with Griffin for almost five months and it feels like short shrift to go back so early this time around.  I'd love to stay at home with them longer, but I know I'd go crazy before too long.  

So how do you balance work and family - effectively?  How do I balance the needs of my boys and also do well at my job and my career?  This summer, work is going to be busy -- weeding project, GIST version 2 release, new budget allocations -- the better I manage my time, the easier it will be for me at home, too.  That is my goal for the next couple of months, to work on time management and scheduling, and make sure work gets done at work.  Home time needs to be more about the boys and not stressing about the job.  I take so much for granted and I don't want to look back at my life in ten, twenty years and regret not spending the time with my two precious kids. 

Comments on Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody"

Spending today reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. Reading Chapters 1 and 2 has given me a couple points to ponder:

1. Professionals are fast becoming a thing of the past. With the power of new communications tools and media, information is no longer a scarce resource and librarians need to get used to the fact that our users don't need us to be gatekeepers of the written word any longer. This is becoming truly apparent in the newspaper publishing industry, but Shirky also mentions librarians and television programmers as two other examples of professionals who once were gatekeepers of scarcity.

2. Second point: broadcast and communications media are two different mediums for communicating, but they are blurring in the age of rapid social media technologies. Messages posted on MySpace are really not intended to be broadcast to the world, but shared between friends. Just because they are posted to the MySpace account just means that the user is comfortable and familiar using that technology to communicate with friends. Shirky uses the analogy of a group of teens sitting at a table in the mall's food court. You see lots of these groups every day at the mall, but you don't go and sit at the next table and overtly eavesdrop on their conversation -- this would be considered weird. This is just like the conversation on the web -- the conversation in the food court is in a public space, anyone can listen in, but most don't because it would be socially awkward and rude. The web is just a reflection of society.

Getting It System Toolkit (GIST) released yesterday

Yesterday, the GIST team released the Getting It System Toolkit to the public and now we are awaiting feedback and input from other libraries.  
Today, the Acquisitions clerk and I sat down at my library and went through the workflow for the acquisitions processing and worked out the bugs in our request process.  Its going to take a little while to get used to, neither of us has used ILLiad before, but it really streamlines the request workflow, which was a holy mess before.  We were getting requests from a number of different interfaces (emails through my work account, the library's php request form, the website suggestion box, emails routed from the director's office, etc.) and no real easy way of managing the overload of paper this created.  Print out the request (email, flyer, brochure, website, etc.) put it in a folder, check library holdings, find a vendor, download an OCLC record, create an order record in the ILS, and on and on.  The GIST interface and the backend ILLiad request form takes all this disparate information (request, holdings, price, user feedback) and puts it into one place.  It is pure heaven...it also automates the communication portion of the request, by setting up customized emails and with one click I can send a faculty member an email to let them know I have ordered their book.  I love it!
 I am really looking forward to when faculty and students get back and start using this request system in earnest.

Here's the text of the release announcement:

Milne Library at SUNY Geneseo is releasing the first version of the Getting It System Toolkit (GIST) on Wednesday, August 19th.  GIST was developed at the State University of New York College at Geneseo with an eye toward converging ILL and Acquisitions workflows and user interfaces, while leveraging the strengths of various workflows and systems. Beware: GIST was designed to transform the business of borrowing, buying, and accessing.

The purpose of GIST is to provide a new model and useful tools to integrate and optimize acquisitions and interlibrary loan services, and to promote regional collection diversity.  It is a system for merging Acquisitions and ILL request workflow using one interface, allowing for user-initiated requests, coordinated collection development and acquisitions.  The project integrates disparate content and workflow (holdings, price, user feedback) that is hard to merge in many ILS.

So how does it work? 

GIST uses customized ILLiad 8 workflows, client layouts, and web pages that display discovery information from Amazon Web Services (price, reviews, & ratings), the WorldCat API (holdings information), Google Books API (table of contents or full/partial text), and open access content, and prompts for user input and feedback.  Why?  Currently, most acquisition and ILL requests are done through function-based departments, with their own workflow and multiple methods of input from librarians, faculty, students and other users.  GIST allows a library to customize and configure the request management process through:

    * Automated holdings information check using the WorldCat API service (local, regional, state, etc.)
    * Purchase price look-up service using Amazon and other vendor APIs
    * Collection of user feedback (should library purchase this item?  Is it essential, non-essential, etc.?)
    * Customizable emails and workflow enhancement by using the ILLiad software on the staff side

The GIST team at SUNY Geneseo is interested in getting your feedback. Go to the Getting It System Toolkit Blog (http://gettingitsystemtoolkit.blogspot.com/) and give us your feedback! 
Interested in downloading?  Check out the GIST Documentation and installation instructions at http://toolkit.idsproject.org/doku.php?id=wiki:gist.