A quick thanks

My thanks to Deborah Elizabeth Finn, who not only gave me kudos for some of my consulting work, but also points out the valuable possibilities for collaboration between nonprofit technology workers and librarians.

To my librarian readers - what ideas spark when I suggest offering our information organization skills to local (or not so local) nonprofits? How else can we help our communities in this way?

Theoretical Job Description for the Librarian with a Laptop

In my last post, I mentioned the idea of a "Librarian with a Laptop," who goes out to coffeeshops and other co-working facilities and brings library services directly to patrons. Here's a pie-in-the-sky job description for such a role, too much for one person to handle but an idea of what might be:

Job Description: Digital Outreach and Training Librarian
a.k.a. "Librarian with a laptop"

Basic Function: Under direction of [an appropriate manager], to provide online and in-person training and outreach to staff and the public in the use of online library services and emerging technologies.

Typical Duties and Responsibilities:
1. Initiates, develops, plans and implements the Library's online services initiatives through personal consultations, onsite and offsite workshops, online and offline outreach, and other programs as developed.

2. Offers professional development to staff at centralized locations and at staff workplaces in emerging technologies, current databases, online outreach, and other subjects as determined by recognized need and staff surveys.

3. Trains and develops staff members to realize their potentials and use that developed potential to provide the best library service.

4. Attends public meetings around the city to present information about the library and offer tailored trainings to constituent groups (e.g., schools/PTOs, business/civic associations, cultural/immigrant organizations, etc.).

5. Maintains working relationships with educational institutions, social and community groups and businesses with regard to online library services. Facilitates cooperative efforts with these organizations to provide systematic service to larger constituent groups.

6. Writes training and promotional materials for city-wide library resources for distribution within library buildings and to promote city-wide library services in local business and organizations, including both print and online formats (blogs, RSS feeds, etc). Coordinates and encourages contributions by other staff to such publications.

7. Conducts and coordinates "Librarian Is In" sessions at local coffeeshops to reach prospective business and student patrons.

8. Travels to branch locations to provide direct training programs to the public on emerging technologies, current library resources and other subjects as determined by user surveys.

9. Recommends and/or plans changes in service and new services through the library digital portal.

10. Works with the Digital Services Manager to revise and update policy and procedural provisions affecting the delivery of online library services.

11. Responsible for oral presentations and written reports on assigned activities to senior management, trustees and other stakeholders.

12. Actively participates in system-wide committees, training and other professional activities.

13. Represents the Library on city-wide and state-wide committees, and at professional conferences.

14. Peforms other realted and/or comparable duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications:
1. A Bachelor's degree from a recognized college or university and an MLS from an ALA-accredited library school.

2. Five years of pertinent professional library experience.

3. Extensive knowledge of current library resources, practices and policies; substantial knowledge of library profession trends, theories and best practices; broad professional outlook.

4. Demonstrated interest in community and library work; demonstrated ability to use and teach searching via search engines and proprietary databases; demonstrated ability to work well with staff and public.

5. Demonstrated ability to assume responsibility and carry out assignments independently; proven oral and written communication skills, especially through electronic media; demonstrated knowledge of the techniques of programming and presentation; initiative, dependability, good judgment, tact and courtesy.

6. Flexibility and the willingness to learn and adapt; a commitment to professional development. Willingness to participate in professional activities and to expand on professional knowledge.

7. Proven ability to interpret and apply library policy; to analyze and solve problems; to generate new ideas; to organize and manage complex activities; and community relations.

A thoughtful return

Hello, all, and welcome back to the Eclectic Library. The very short reason for four months of silence? A lack of time and a lack of focus....I was too busy to keep up with my own professional reading and just didn't have very much to say.

Suffice it to say, with spring comes refreshed thinking. In particular, this post from Nate Hill over at Catch and Release about a Library Outpost service model stopped me short and lit a fire under me. After you've finished reading my post (;^), go and check out his.

Nate's idea was to create Library Outposts in places where people are already congregating -- near business centers, schools, apartment complexes, etc. These would be streamlined library buildings, with little to no print material but lots of space for computers and events. With this in mind, here’s another idea for you: From those library outposts, as well as traditional branches, librarians can make forays out into even more targeted areas of the community. Send a “Librarian With a Laptop” into coffeeshops and other places with free wifi to raise awareness of library resources among entrepreneurs and self-employed freelancers, researchers and writers. Set up in a corner of the space with a tabletop display promoting the library’s services, the nearest branch or Outpost location, and a few bullet points of what the library offers. The librarian can showcase database offerings and catalog functionality and help answer reference on the fly.

Think of these roving librarians as another tier on your service model, one even more focused on serving patrons as individuals rather than on the building as the primary resource. You might even use such forays as proof-of-concept for your Outposts, by sending the roving librarian in first to stimulate interest in the area you’re thinking of putting an Outpost later.

I'm not the first person to think of this, not by a long shot, but it's such an easily-implementable idea that I'm going to share my version of it with you. Also, it does seem to be an initiative coming more from academic libraries rather than publics, but we can serve so many more of our patrons remotely in this same way.

Next post, the job description for this Librarian With a Laptop, public-library style.

Uh-oh, our cover's blown!

Apparently, IL2007 made WoWInsider: Librarians Who Play World of Warcraft references the WoW Ladies LJ community, which references The Librarian in Black's coverage of the WoW session at IL2007.

More citations than my reference class paper, but there you have it. One more stroke against the school-marm librarian image, dangit, and I must say that I'm pleased. In fact, tomorrow morning, I'm going to repost the following call:

For a long while, I've been wanting to do a calendar of decidedly non-traditional looking librarians: tattoos, motorcycles, dreads, piercings, non-natural hair colors, cosplay/costumers, funky geeks, eclectic hippies, thrill-seekers, etc. I've got some connections amongst Boston-area photographers (and assorted oddballs), but I'd like it to be as global as possible.

So, who's in? Who's willing to be seen as an antidote to the bun-and-glasses type? I'm not asking anyone to reveal parts of themselves they'd prefer to keep personal, but if you're truly comfortable flying your colors in public, why don't you think about it?

Let's say this will be a 2009 calendar, eh? Who's in?

Technoschism: Stephen Abram

Technoschism: Reorganizing and Restructuring Libraries for the Real Future
Stephen Abram, Sirsi-Dynix

Slow change? My eye.
[While the technology rebooted, we discussed Google and how search engine optimizers manipulate the hits you get. News to me, which is sad. Must learn more about this.]
Library core skills is not information - libraries improve the quality of the question and the experience
Information Ocean, not highway. Exploration space, not a collection space.
We must be about more than the books, we must be about the entire experience.
"We librarians have to learn when we study something to death, Death was not the original goal!"

• Epaper & eReaders withfullsize screens
• Light-based keyboards & fullsize monitors
• Projectors the size of sugar cubes
• June 2007 - every cable and phone wire will have switched over to broadband
• iReader
• iPhone & other full-service phones (G3 standard)M/li>
Web on a credit card
• Everything is getting smaller - we need to get there in the first wave

We can't teach people to flush....how are we going to teach them Boolean logic?

• Advice #1: Go XML for Dominant Personal Services -- XML senses the device and changes to fit
• All that matters is: Community, Learning, Interaction -- he collected stories to create personas and there was no overlap between the stories the librarians told about what was important and what the users said was important
• Intention Paths -- is your library website a closed Swiss Army knife? Make sure that your website information such that it works
• You can't make it too simple

• Advice #2: Understand JSR168, Portlets and RSS
• 250 million books go online in the next five years -- what then? A chapter and paragraph-level economy on books, and how do we integrate ourselves into that?
• Get our heads out of the book -- books aren't at risk, librarians are at risk
• Get realistic about the role of reading in electronic environments

Stephen really serves Google, but only in the way of enlightening us. If half of what he says is true, Google knows all.]

• Advice #3: Geton the OpenURL and FedSearch Wagon -- give yourself and your users search options that don't harvest your information in the process of helping you search
• Let Google do the Who, What, Where, When questions. Librarians can focus on the How and Why questions. Let librarians focus on their specialties and expertises and promote themselves, let them become experts.
• What librarians do best is context management, not content management

• Advice #4: GPS & Broadband: Deal With It, Act Local?
• Google knows where your users are and can tailor their services to the local level.

• Advice #5: Be ready for advanced social networks
• Are you ready for Web 2.0/Library 2.0?
• Libraries are about communities and environments, not single-functions like the social software
• We need to create environments and provide information that delight our users
• We need to have a discussion about this, not about making OPAC suck less
• Use del.icio.us and wikis to share and preserve the knowledge of reference libriarans

Get your texthead to nexthead: What is your strategy for dealing with the death of DVDs, CDs, cassettes, etc.?

Types of learners: experience learners, visual learners, audio learners, text learners. How do we support the full range of learning, of learning styles?

• Advice #6: Get social
• BiblioCommons -- Canada's answer to all of this.
• We have an entire generation socially networking for life. We need to be out there -- facebook.com seems to be one of the strongest contenders.
• Ning.com has a Library 2.0 group.
• ActiveWorlds and SecondLife virtual worlds getting thousands of questions a night, -- there is a huge library presence: teaching, answering questions, book discussions.....everything that we do in Real Life we do there.
• Magazine Content, News Content...it's all becoming social. How do we insert ourselves into the social content map?

• Advice #7: Get political
• Become an advocate in all the places that we are being social
• These millenials will be voting on our bond issues in the next ten years, we NEED them

• Advice #8: Reorganize
• E-learning
• Information Commons
• Learning Commons
• Community Integration
• Reference Cowboys
• Virutal Operations and Branches -- your virtual visitors are completely different than your in-person visitors

• Advice #9: Get Conversational
• Instant Messaging reference *works* -- Thomas Ford Memorial Library gets 50% of their total reference through IM
• Cha-Cha
• IM is better than email for reference

• Advice #10: Increase our HR ability to adapt
• Everything is a toy...play with them -- we learn through play
• Use the PLCMC Lerarning 2.0 model as a structure to play in
• "information literacy" courses are like "ugly salons"
• Use the same list as a checklist of things you can do
• The culture of the library changes as this happens
• Build a petting zoo in the library so that the public can learn to play on these technologies

Brains have changed in millenials (3rd shift in brain mapping). We need to shift our ways of providing services to match their brains.

SchoolRooms -- built based on reports on how millenials think. User-centered design.

Are you ready for Imagineering the Library? Are we ready to be the purple cow?
It's the staff that distinguishes us from the search engines? People live in the foothills of the information ocean, and libraries can be there.

Change for our users in the context of learning and community.

[Wow, Stephen Abram is wonderful. I'm glad I've finally gotten the chance to see him speak.]

Where's Jenn?

Hi, all! For the next three days, I'll be blogging from the lovely Sturbridge Host Hotel, home of the 2007 Massachusetts Library Association Annual Conference.

As you can tell from the lack of posts, life's been a bit busy lately, mostly with non-library stuff. I'll go into more on that in a bit, but for now, I just wanted to set the stage for the next series of posts.

I'll be double-posting, both here and over at the MLA Conference Blog, so you can follow along wherever you choose. I'm one of a dozen bloggers here (another six are sitting at tables around me) posting to the conference blog, so you'll have a variety of opinions and observations to choose from.

Thanks, much, and here we go!

A quick post for the spiders

You know, most people stop posting while they're on vacation. I haven't had time to post since I've been back!

That said, all is well here at the Eclectic Library. There's a post on Twitter and one on experience planning at the library on the back burner, but they're not quite toasty yet. For now, I offer this:

G. Kim Dority only has 3 subscribers in Bloglines, and that's a shame. She only posts once a month, usually a very insightful column in support of her forthcoming book on LIS careers, and it's always worth reading.

This month, she has an astounding column on LinkedIn and the use of social software for career networking. Dear readers, whether you're a librarian or not, read this article and follow those links. Your careers will thank you.

But now, to close the library and enjoy the lovely warm weather.

"Librarian" video by Haunted Love

New Zealand-based Haunted Love has their first video up on YouTube: "Librarian". I'm a bit torn, as to be expected. They trot out all of the usual librarian stereotypes ("I want to wear glasses ever-y-day"), but they add an almost Secretary-like vibe to the idea. The exposure is good, but I still want to see the video featuring librarians on motorcycles, with tattoos and blue hair. There's the promotion to catch a few new faces in the profession.

A fun vid, regardless, and one worth the four minutes. Enjoy!

via The Laughing Librarian

No, they didn't teach me this in library school

From Library Journal news:

Chris Ward, former assistant director of the Salt Lake City PL,
gives the most thorough description of and insight into the relationship between the "chronically homeless" and libraries I've ever read. I had to stop after the first half; it was too much to take in one sitting.

Required reading for library school students and anyone working in a public library.

N.b.: I currently work for a branch of the Boston Public Library. This article is spot on, and applies nationwide. Yes, even where *you* live.

Personal responsibility and professional development

Over in the Liminal Librarian, Rachel Gordon has a pithy post about personal responsibility on the part of new librarians. The last few sentences sum it up nicely:

If we're going to continue to remain relevant as a profession, we need first to take personal responsibility -- for remaining informed, for building something that goes beyond ourselves, for moving forward in our careers. Our institutions are nothing without their people; our profession is built from our multiple and ongoing contributions to the field. It's difficult to be proactive in moving ourselves or the profession forward if a sense of entitlement and a belief that we are subject to forces beyond our control permeates our careers.

Rachel is discussing this sense of personal responsibility from the perspective of newer librarians, regardless of age. I've had a growing frustration with more experienced members of our profession who hold desperately onto the idea that "all that technology" has no relevance to good librarianship. In fact, I've been thinking so much about this idea that I submitted an abstract for Internet Librarian on "Making Them Care: Demonstrating the relevance of Library 2.0 to staff and management"

What I find most ironic about this resistance to learning about new technologies -- or even new ways of doing this work that don't require something electronic -- is that libraries have been trying to position themselves as "the people's university" or "a place for lifelong learning." How can we claim that title if the professionals providing support for that learning don't keep learning themselves? Particularly about tools that are becoming increasingly pervasive in our patrons' lives, and our own?

I've often felt that I, as a 30-something librarian with nearly a decade in the field, straddle the fence between the techno-evangelists and the reluctant adopters. I see the benefits of slow transitions to new technologies, of not running off hare-brained after every fad. But I also see where willing ignorance and the inability to see why this is important are keeping us from serving ever-growing numbers of our patrons in the best possible way.

Why do I need to know this stuff, anyway?

Back at the end of February, Michael Stephens was visiting my institution, talking about The Hyperlinked Library. In the middle of a whirlwind presentation, he posed a question that’s been burning my brain for a long while:

Is one of the purposes of a library a place where folks can come in and learn more about the technology in their lives? Do we all need to be knowledgeable about the tech?

Let’s break these out, and reverse them:

Do we all need to be knowledgeable about the tech?
In a word – yes! I discussed all this in a previous post but that’s a bit long and rambling. How about a list:

• Librarians still have the reputation of knowing everything. This is one of our greatest assets and one we can’t afford to lose. When we can’t answer a question about "the tech," we lose part of that reputation.


• More of our patrons – and a more diverse grouping of them – are asking us questions about computers and technology. Everything from "How do I apply for a job at Home Depot?" (no paper applications any more) to "What computer should I buy?" to "How do I send photos of my grandkids to my sister?". Nowadays, those questions include blogs, wikis, Wikipedia, Flickr, handheld mobile devices, iPods, digital cameras and more. In order to answer those questions, we need to know even a little about all of it.


• The days of "you’ll have to ask our computer expert" are over. Technology has permeated our patrons’ lives, in ways too varied to list. Having just one person on the staff who’s "good with technology" limits our ability to serve all of our patrons in the same way that "You’ll have to talk to the Children’s Librarian." does.


• Also, since the "computer expert" in a smaller building is typically a librarian or library assistant who happens to understand tech, they’ve got plenty of other things to do. Answering basic technology questions should be something all staff in a building can do.


• Similarly, having this knowledge means that each of us can educate our patrons and help them find information and answers to their queries, both through workshops and in-the-moment training.


• Speaking of which, much of what we're teaching patrons is how to use our own library’s electronic stuff! Online catalogs, electronic databases, downloadable audio/video, library blogs, social computing-enabled OPACs, instant messaging and web-based chat reference, new book shelves on Shelfari, newsletter RSS feeds and more – we need to understand how to use this stuff before we can expect to teach our patrons how to use it.

That’s quite a list, and I expect to be adding to it over time. The point is, there are now too many compelling reasons why all staff in a library building – not just the one or two more 'tech-savvy' folks – need to understand current technologies.

Okay, question #2:
Is one of the purposes of a library a place where folks can come in and learn more about the technology in their lives?

Again, it seems that the answer should be a resounding YES! because libraries are the keystone to lifelong learning, the cornerstone of a democratic people. People should be able to come here and learn about computers in the same ways that they learn about philosophy or biology or French.

But we don’t (typically) teach philosophy or biology or French in our buildings, other than in special programs and events. So why this focus on teaching technology? Why have many libraries taken on this role with an almost religious fervor?

I'd guess the chain of events started with the switch from card catalogs to OPACs, from the Periodicals room to database terminals, from Date Due cards to heat-printed receipts. The tools that libraries used for some of their primary functions – information retrieval, circulation of materials and cataloging – entered the computer age, and computers entered our libraries. As first computers and now the peripherals (MP3 players, digital cameras, scanners, thumb drives, etc) have spread through our culture, we’ve bought the books and some of the devices and made them available to our patrons. Just this moment, a parent came and asked if we had any educational software for children (PC-based, mind) available for loan. He fully expected it to be here, because other libraries have it to offer.

It only follows that we need to be able to explain how to use the things we offer. When we started carrying LPs and then cassettes, patrons asked us questions about the players and used-vinyl stores. VHS, CD, DVD and now MP3 – if we carry the usable product, we must know something about how to use it. Why would we offer things we couldn’t help patrons to understand and use?

Now, it’s all of the stuff I’ve mentioned earlier in this post, stuff our patrons use to a greater or lesser degree in their lives. And, with offering that stuff, our patrons still expect us to be able to explain it. More importantly, they have “librarian” fixed in their heads as a person who can help them make sense of the ever-increasing whirlwind of information and expected ability to figure things out. We created this expectation, perpetuated it by being able to answer their hardest questions time and again, and now they’re coming to us asking about the Web and email and online forms and so much more.

So, yes. I believe that all of the staff in a library should know something about the technologies that our patrons encounter, at least enough to ask good questions and find out what the patron doesn’t know yet, or get them started with a basic understanding that they can explore further on their own. I’m really not that savvy of a technologist, not compared to my husband the network engineer or my friend the software developer. But as long as I know enough about how email works to find the attachment buried at the end of a forwarded message, or enough about how firewalls work to explain why ours is on the fritz, or enough about online shopping to help a teacher find 24 copies of an out of print book...that’s part of being a good librarian.