Tame The Web » The Transparent Library / Library Journal

X – On Anonymity & Librarianship

Michael — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 20:08:35 +0000

In the Library with a Lead Pipe is one of my favorite blogs. The writing is peer-reviewed, balanced and well-reasoned. The most recent post by Emily Ford is evidence of this:

http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/x/

Emily explores the nature of undisclosed publications:

Hiding our identities allows us to break accepted social practice and there is nothing inherently unethical or wrong with creating a character in Second Life or engaging in gender swapping or other identity experiments online. However, the realm of library professional discourse, i.e. writing critical essays or peer reviewed articles that contribute to the discourse of our profession, is not where this kind of experimentation or use of nondisclosure should occur. Undisclosed publishing can be used to insult, act violently, and lash out in a way that defies our understanding of social contract and accepted norms of professional behavior. It can easily lead down the path of snarky and negative venting that are wholly unproductive.

Read the whole piece and take a look at the comments.

The Transparent Library Director

Justin Hoenke — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 13:43:54 +0000

I’m not a library director. Heck, who knows if I’ll ever be a library director. But spend some time working in a public library and you’ll see a common theme: most employees and the public have no clue what a library director does. There’s this belief that the library director is some person way high up in the sky making all these decisions and pulling all these strings to make the library work. With such little information known about the day to day happenings of a library director, employees and patrons end up getting confused about the direction of the library. In turn, that can sometimes lean towards anger, poor morale, and communication breakdown. The victims here? It’s always the patrons. When the library staff doesn’t know what the hell is going on, the patron’s suffer. They lose out on valuable materials, services, and more.

Social media allows us to be more transparent than ever. We can check in at every place we visit, we can tweet quotes from conversations we’re having, we can share pictures at the tap of our screen. Blogging/Video blogging makes it super easy and quick just to share your thoughts/actions for the day. To some folks, this transparency is scary. Most everything you say or do can be found on the web. Here’s where I burst your fun bubble. THIS ISN’T ABOUT YOU. I’m just as guilty of this as you are, so I’m not pointing fingers. We have to remember that when we’re working in a public library that we are public employees. Our salaries and benefits are graciously paid for by public taxes paid by the people we serve. Living in the era of the Tea Party and slashed library budgets, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that our country is pretty darn upset about taxes and will do anything to get rid of what they consider unnecessary spending.

USTREAM
Have a UStream feed running in your office all day as well as during meetings. What have you got to hide in these day to day meetings? If you’re talking about people behind their back, you probably shouldn’t be doing that anyway.

Opening up your office and your meetings to the public will give your community the primary resource they will need to understand your direction and vision. Instead of hearing half true rumours from other employees and around your town you’ll be giving the information to the public as it was meant to be heard.

*Yes, I understand that some meetings are meant to be private. These meetings should totally stay that way.

FOURSQUARE/FACEBOOK PLACES/GOWALLA/ETC
Check into every place you’re visiting in the community. Give us a little info about why you’re there.

I don’t have a solid example for this recommendation, so instead I’ll point you to my Foursquare account (http://foursquare.com/justinlibrarian). Just imagine that all those restaurants I checked into are different meetings and locations I’m out scouting for possible collaborations.

TWITTER
In my own opinion, this is the perfect tool for the director who is on the go to use. Tweet quotes from meetings you’re attending. Give your followers a brief 140 character synopsis about what’s going on.

Don’t think you have enough time to tweet? That’s a lame and outdated excuse that everyone uses. Look at Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker’s Twitter stream for inspiration. He’s running a whole city and he can still tweet! http://twitter.com/corybooker

VIDEOBLOGGING
Fire up your webcam (chances are that your laptop already has one. If not, get this one) and start talking. If you’re a director, you should be well spoken and ready for the cameras. A quick 1-3 minute videoblog about your day that can then be uploaded to your library YouTube account will give your staff and patrons always valuable face time.

I couldn’t find any specific library directors already doing this (although I clearly remember seeing one out there a few years ago) so instead I turn your attention to teen author John Green and his brother Hank. They run the Vlogbrothers channel on YouTube where they just talk about…stuff! It keeps them connected to their rabid fan fan base and provides quick and easy updates to keep them relevant and interesting.

LIFESTREAM
Jenny Levin’s blog is a beautiful example of how a lifestream can be used to keep people up to date with what you’re tweeting/blogging/sharing. It’s easy to set up and use once you get the ball rolling and it will provide your community with more than enough information about what you’re doing while you work.

http://theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2009/08/17/experimenting-with-my-stream.html

There shouldn’t be this communication breakdown in libraries anymore. Starting at the top and leading by example, directors who embrace social media can show their staff and the public they serve just what they’re doing to keep their libraries relevant.

For further reading, I highly suggest you check out these awesome articles by Michael Casey & Michael Stephens:

The Transparent Library: The Open Door Director

The Transparent Library: Check Your Ego at the Door

-Post by Justin Hoenke, Tame the Web Contributor

The Transparent Library: It’s Fine to Drop Dewey!

Michael — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:36:11 +0000

MS: Each semester, during an intro class unit on organization of information, we discuss these issues. Dewey designed a system that worked well for its time—and way beyond—but it has deficiencies we’ve tried to cover with Band-Aids, like more signage. We listen to Marshall Shore interviewed on NPR about the original project at Maricopa County Library District’s Perry Branch. Then the students share their views and personal experiences—and many echo what Michael mentioned above.

Smith has an answer: “WordThink allows library staff the freedom and creativity to develop collocation relationships that could never happen in Dewey. [It] allows staff to anticipate customers’ inquiries and shelve items that have natural affinities.”

What a perfect duty for librarians: creating connections among materials to inspire users. To me, this naturally pairs readers’ advisory with the foundations of collection management.

Read the whole column here: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6668191.html

The Transparent Library: Reasons for Optimism

Michael — Fri, 29 May 2009 10:59:44 +0000

MS: I just concluded a section of my favorite class to teach: LIS768 Library 2.0 and Social Networking Technologies. Centered around the concept of participatory service, the class encourages students to experiment, play, and think critically about improving services in a changing world. I close the session with some counsel to students as they head out into the job market.

Make Issues Opportunities. Look at any of the issues impacting libraries right now, for example, the economy, new converged devices, and digital streaming and downloads. Then look at what innovative thinkers have done regarding such issues. Learn to be such change agents.
Never Stop Learning. By graduation, our students should have learned, through successes and stumbles, how to address a problem and find solutions via evidence and their own thinking. When one student expressed her excitement at mastering Facebook, I commented, “Now you can take on anything.” The master’s degree is just that, not an end point for librarians’ learning.
Be Curious. Marketing guru Seth Godin suggests, “To be curious means to explore first.” New grads should emphasize this trait and even add it to their résumés, saying something like, “I’m curious about how libraries and librarians can help change the world, one library user at a time.”
Focus on the Heart. No matter where they find work, new grads should remember they’re human-focused. Consultant and blogger Karen Schneider reminds us that “the User is the Sun.” If we help people achieve the best they can—satisfying information needs, providing entertainment, enabling social connections—we’re reaching the heart.

Read the whole column here.

Cheers & Jeers at the Transparent Library

Michael — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:14:57 +0000

Jeers to the librarian mind-set that in troubled economic times, learning, curiosity, and play must take a back seat. Now is the perfect time to find ways to extend services with free open tools.

Cheers to libraries like Roselle Public Library, IL, and Lafayette Public Library, CO, for creating user-centered communities for their patrons with Ning, a free DIY social network site.

Cheers to the American Library Association (ALA) for embracing Twitter and promoting the use of hash tags like #ALAMW09 that conveyed streams of Midwinter Meeting information to folks all over the world. And cheers, too, for launching ALA Connect, a virtual online space.

Jeers to the organizations that still don’t understand that controlling the conversation—call it public relations, marketing, etc.—has passed out of your hands. Brands are created by users and conversations about your brand happen all over. Find them. Chime in. Respond.

read the whole column at http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6650292.html

The Transparent Library: Dear Library Directors

Michael — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:38:41 +0000

… As people find information “on the fly” or “just in time,” how can we still play a role? We’re excited to see new ways libraries are offering reference: texting, Meebo, and outreach to places like Panera Bread. It’s not time to stop those innovations. Could your reference staffers be doing their jobs in other channels? In other spaces?

We were impressed by Columbus Metropolitan Library, OH, and others that have changed imposing reference desks to friendlier stations where staff and users stand beside one another. The reference interview these days should be all about collaboration and context.

But remember the role of privacy. Consider private reference interview areas, much like hospital admissions cubicles, where patrons can quietly and confidentially seek information. Online channels like Meebo also provide a low-cost way to answer sensitive questions from library users online.

Read the whole column here.

The Transparent Library: Measure the Silence

Michael — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:55:33 +0000

You hold community nights for customers to talk to you and go out to where they are and try to hold conversations where it is most convenient for them. From all of this, you try to steer your library on the right course, paying heed to and responding to input.

But what are you not hearing? As with any healthy relationship, personal or public, you need to hear what’s not being said. What about the silence? What are people not telling you and why? How do you measure the silence?

First, recognize that there are two types of silence, actual and perceived. Actual silence is easy to understand—no one is communicating even though you’re listening and paying attention.

Perceived silence can be more insidious. That’s when your staff or customers are saying or doing something and you’re not hearing it because either you haven’t put the proper mechanisms in place for them to talk to you, or, more likely, because you’re ignoring the conversation.

Read the whole column here.

The Transparent Library: Six More Signposts

Michael — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 19:23:03 +0000

Check your ego at the door. Good leaders don’t surround themselves with “yes” people. And good leaders know that if their message is not being heard, or it’s being heard incorrectly, then the fault does not lie with the listener but with the speaker. Stop worrying about the snarkiness of survey responses and start worrying about the meaning behind those negative comments.

Be sure to listen through the criticism. Behind relatively unconstructive criticism may lie a real concern. Show those critics you can listen, and show them that you’ll respond.

Recognize and grow your talent. Talented staff reflect better on you. Talented staff can help you take your organization places you didn’t think possible. However, if you view talented staff as threats, or, worse, ignore them completely, then you are doing a disservice to yourself and an injustice to your organization.

Embrace change. Build change into everything you do. Don’t plan, implement, and forget. Recognize that the tools will change, but the purpose and mechanism will stay the same. Not trying a library blog because “next year there’ll be something new” is not a workable excuse. We need to communicate now with our users.

At a recent conference, we overheard someone say, “Every time people really like something, we get rid of it.” Wouldn’t a better solution be to examine the reasons that something becomes popular or well used and find ways to deliver it as much as possible, be it Facebook access, more tables and chairs, or niche materials?

Properly handled and managed, adaptation to change ensures our survival. You can build that change into your organization through the use of review teams and community forums, drawing on staff and users alike.

Read the whole column here: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6618868.html

12 Signposts to Transparency Part 1

Michael — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:30:12 +0000

We recently presented a workshop in London at Internet Librarian International, based on our writings here, and realized that throughout the columns we’ve identified a set of mile markers for the journey toward transparency.

Give everyone an avenue to talk.
Play nice and be constructive.
Grow and develop your support community.
Be willing to accept anonymity.
Tell the truth. Lies don’t work.
Focus on user-driven policy, not driving users away.

Read the whole column here.

The Transparent Library: Library PR 2.0

Michael — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 08:42:45 +0000

The rules of marketing have changed. Do libraries know that?

Corporate PR-types used to control the message. Sitting behind a desk, they’d write a carefully crafted press release and then send it off to newspapers and upload it to their web site. The attention the company got might barely justify the salary of the PR professional.

Today’s world is fundamentally different. Neither news nor brand identity are controlled through press releases or carefully choreographed newspaper articles. Brands are molded and shaped by the audience—and the audience is everyone. People talk. And people listen.

Social tools, social media, and social engagement are the norms for many large advertisers that have populated sites like Facebook and Twitter with brand-focused pages and interactive techniques. Are you following your favorite brand?

Read the whole column here.

Transparent Library on Twitter

Michael — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:00:32 +0000

Michael and I have been pondering ways to get feedback and input for our column in LJ. Weeks ago, we made a Twitter account and a few people even found it and followed us. Now, we’d like to promote it just a bit. We’ll be looking for ideas, insights and whatever you’d like to share a few times a month. Thanks!

http://twitter.com/TransparentLib

The Transparent Library: Lighten Up People!

Michael — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:08:34 +0000

Libraries—all libraries—should be fun, even in difficult times. Just scan LJ‘s recent Movers & Shakers (M&S) roster or peruse the library blogosphere to see library workers who have discovered that a sense of play and creativity, even what seems like frivolous experimentation, can result in useful services and solutions.

M&S Tony Tallent, while at the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County, NC (he’s now at Boulder PL, CO), devised “Drop Everything and Learn Day,” aiming at “encouraging staff to stay curious and inspired.”

But some libraries, mired in hierarchical leadership structures, closed communication systems, and restrictive policies, drain the life out of users’ curiosity and damage staff morale as well.

Read the whole column here: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6585880.html

Check that Ego!

Michael — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:07:47 +0000

If you pretend someone is not there, if you pretend the awards and honors that someone on your staff receives aren’t worth mentioning, then this reflects upon you. People will notice it and question your awareness. If they see you deliberately refusing to recognize talent, then they will begin to ask, “Why?” The results from this questioning won’t aid in your leadership.

However, if you recognize and embrace your talented staff, if you give them the skills they need to continue improving, then your staff, your organization, and the greater library community will not only recognize those talented people but also respect and honor your organizational efforts.

They’ll notice that you’re sufficiently comfortable as an executive to salute the great talent around you and your willingness to use that talent for the greater good of the entire organization. That is true leadership.

From “Check your Ego at the Door”

Read the whole column here: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6573364.html

The Transparent Library: Dear MLS Grad….

Michael — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:47:19 +0000

What’s the library policy on blogging and social networking for staff? Can you maintain your personal/professional blog if you accept a position? We’d urge hiring librarians to encourage new staffers to continue their blogging or participation in social networks.

Does the library employ vertical teams for planning and implementation of new services? Can new hires participate and share their voices from day one? Inviting new staffers to play a role in service creation signals a willingness to hear new ideas. Ask for examples.

What mentoring opportunities are there? A recent job listing from Davidson College in North Carolina included this bit: “We want your newbie enthusiasm and fresh ideas, and we’ll mentor you in your growth.” This is a promising trend; it’s vital for veterans to mentor and encourage new librarians.

Read the whole column here: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6566471.html

AND, don’t miss this comment from Andrea Pearson:

Many recent graduates work as substitutes or work part time. Ask about mentoring and career paths if you are applying for these positions, too Our library system (Hennepin County, MN) has great training opportunities which are open to FT, PT, and subs. The HCL substitute librarians are creating a Library Sub wiki, “Librarian Substitutes 2.0,” in order to keep in touch with each other and keep up professionally. Right now it’s in a very early stage, but we welcome subs and PT librarians to visit at librariansubs at wetpaint.

Please leave a comment sharing your own thoughts about “finding the right fit..”

The Transparent Library: Embracing Service to Teens

Michael — Thu, 15 May 2008 21:55:52 +0000

MS: Comments on my blog ranged from the forward-thinking, right-up-Ranganathan’s alley and the “Anonymous” who said, “Of course that crap should be banned” to the thoughtful critique and commentary of Ian McKinney from cutting-edge Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, IN. He reminds us the problem was specific kids, not technology. Indeed, I worry the teens in Mishawaka won’t care about the library and that will hurt the whole community. Were other solutions considered?

MC: When we advocate bringing teens into the library, we don’t acquiesce to rowdy teen behavior, as some suspect. Behavioral problems are never acceptable in the library. Foul-mouthed teens need to be booted out for the day, and problem teens for longer periods. Sometimes this means hiring security guards, and sometimes this means setting a firm tone at the beginning.

But don’t misunderstand; teens will be teens–they need to talk and socialize–so don’t expect a library with a lot of teens to be quiet. Carving out a teen area is great, if you have the room. If not, try to find an area that can be kept relatively quiet and offer it to those users who need a sanctuary.

Issues with teens are often larger community challenges. Kids need interesting and safe things to do. The entire community should be a part of the solution.

Read the whole column here: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6556178.html