Author Archives: Hugh Rundle

About Hugh Rundle

Hugh Rundle is Systems Librarian in a suburban public library service in Melbourne - the second UNESCO City of Literature, . He can't walk past an independent bookshop, but is still happy to declare them outdated. He may be slightly addicted to Twitter.

A failure of imagination – the problem with format neutrality

Posted on by
5

Photo care of Adelaide Archivist (Flickr)

I often hear librarians promoting their ‘modern librarian’ credentials by saying “it’s about the information, not the container”.  By this they tend to mean that librarians in a world of instantly downloadable ebooks, subscription journal databases and multiple other formats for audio, visual and written works should be format-neutral.  That we should not be concerned about in which formats information is available, as long as it is available somehow. But what if it is about the container?

About the container

If it wasn’t about the container I wouldn’t become enraged every time I’m using my iPad and tap on a link to an interesting-sounding website coded with Flash.  If it wasn’t about the container frail old ladies wouldn’t ask if you have any large print books published in soft back and not too long please dear I can’t hold them up in bed.  If it wasn’t about the container your members would be able to download their Overdrive books to a Kindle.  If it wasn’t about the container the US Department of Justice wouldn’t be suing major publishers for collusion because they were so desperate to break Amazon’s market power.

The reason your library website stinks and it’s all your fault is that you thought the container didn’t matter. How do you expect your members to find things when the container the information sits within resembles a pool of vomit or, at best, a trifle?  Because it’s about the container your patrons don’t know what your library provides for them, because when they click on a link to find journal articles it takes them from the Everytown Library to a weird website called Galcentage, or EBOLA, or something.  And didn’t I just log in before?  What even is this?  Because it’s about the container is why Google only has one box.  Because it’s about the container is why User Experience experts have jobs, and why they call it ‘UX’.  Because it’s about the container is why Myspace has 30 million users and Facebook has 901 million.  Because it’s about the container is why there are blog posts called “20 of the world’s most beautiful libraries” and why there are none called “20 of the world’s most useful libraries rated in terms of the information they can make available”.

About the container is exactly what it is.

Designed for the job

Last week US President Obama ordered all major government agencies to make two key services available on mobile phones within a year.  He hasn’t asked them to create two new services, he has ordered them to make two of their existing services fully available from a smartphone.  Obama knows that the information is important, but the container determines whether or not it is useful.  Likewise, part of the success of Wikipedia is due to their focus from the very beginning on fast load speeds and widespread accessibility.  WIkipedia wanted to be the encyclopaedia for the world – not the world in the usual American sense of ’All 50 states plus Britain and the nice bits of Europe’ but the actual world.  The world of crappy 26kbps dialup modems in the Andes and 2G feature phones in Africa.  Wikipedia isn’t the prettiest thing to look at, but it is perfectly designed for the job it wants to perform.

Thinking that all containers are equal is what has led librarians down the dead ends in which we sometimes find ourselves.  Considering an ebook edition and a hardback edition of the same book to be equally useful is all very well, but what happens when the publisher has different ideas?  What happens when HarperCollins decides you can only lend the ebook version 26 times?  Or when Penguin decides you can’t have any ebooks at all?  Or when your members can use any ereader except the one that 80% of your ebook reading members own? What happens when I bought the ebook from Amazon and now i want to transfer it to my Sony reader?  Is subscribing to a bunch of journals or licensing ebooks really the same as owning them?  Can you really say that you have electronic access to a title when the only way members can get it is to go to the library and ask a librarian for the password to log in?

A failure of imagination

Thinking that the container doesn’t matter betrays a failure of imagination.  When ebooks finally started to become available commercially librarians jumped on them, thinking they would be just like paper books only better – no damage, no overdues and no shelf required.  But why would they be just like paper books?  Ebooks are nothing like paper books.  Lending an ebook is an absurdity.  There is no technical reason why every member of your library can not be reading the same ebook simultaneously.  There is no technical or physical reason to set a limit on the amount of time members have to read ebooks.  The amount of energy, money and technical development put towards making ebooks lendable just like paper books reminds me of the old story about NASA developing a pen that would write in zero gravity, whilst the Russians just used pencils.  The idea of ‘lending’ ebooks is a simple Pavlovian response to hundreds of years of dealing with physical books.  The new container for books changes everything – distribution, economics, interactivity, standard length, even the way we understand the world.  Saying that nothing has changed and then getting shitty when publishers beg to differ doesn’t help your members – quite the reverse.

An Open Access journal called WordPress

The Open Access movement in universities appears to be gathering steam.  I have admired their work and their good arguments, but I sometimes wonder if they too are victims of a failure of imagination.  The whole institution of academia and career progress within universities is based around the getting papers published in professional journals, which in turn are rated according to some arcane calculation of their worthiness.  Obsessing over open access journals only makes sense in these terms.  If the issue was only that new scientific discoveries need to be made available free of charge to the world, it would be a simple matter of each researcher having their own website and posting their papers as the research is written, with peer review via the comments – an open access journal called WordPress.  Instead, researchers and publishers are caught in an absurd discussion around ‘green open access’ versus ‘gold open access’, Harvard University’s library says it can’t afford to subscribe to so many journals any more, and citizen researchers have long been locked out of any meaningful role in scientific progress.  All because the measured value of researchers is tied to the seventeenth-century economics of scientific publishing.

Perfect access under imperfect conditions

I’d like librarians to forget about content for a little while – we solved that problem already.  The problem you need to solve isn’t the storage or accumulation of information.  The problem you need to solve is access to information and useful ways to share ideas.  Not access according to the old models, or your present circumstances.  I want you to think about the perfect model of access, under imperfect conditions.  Not what can be found at a PC terminal inside the library with a librarian at your elbow, but what can be found from a smartphone on the bus when the monthly data plan is running low and the assignment is due tomorrow.

Do you want to help your community to access ideas worth sharing?  Well you’d better make sure your catalogue makes it as easy as TED.com does.  Want to make sure your online tools are useful and clear no matter what device is used to access them?  Follow the lead of Wikipedia.  Want to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful? You’d better have a search tool as user-friendly as Google.  Want to give people more power to share and make the world more open and connected? You’d better make a platform as powerful as Facebook.  Want to help your community to think different?  Make sure your services as intuitively easy to use as Apple’s.  Want to provide a platform for your community to create their own content and share ideas with the world?  Better make it as reliable and easy to use as WordPress.

Sound hard?  You bet it is.  But you didn’t become a librarian so you could sit in the quiet surrounded by books did you?

We interrupt this transmission…

Posted on by
Reply

This post is just for any regular readers.

My branch manager retired a couple of weeks ago, and I’m acting in the position until it is permanently filled.  Whilst in some ways this is quite exciting, the downside is that my job hasn’t been backfilled, so I’m basically filling two positions at the moment.  Thus I don’t have a lot of energy for blogging and my posts are likely to be a little irregular for the next few weeks.  Never fear, It’s not about the books is a long term project, but the next little while might be a bit sparse.

Of course, I’m exploring lots of exciting things, so eventually you’ll get to read about them :-)

For today’s post, I’m handing it over to you.  If you’d like me to explore any particular areas of library land, or have a burning question you’d like answered, pop them in the comments below and I’ll try to address them in future posts.

Why everyone is probably wrong about the DoJ ebooks case

Posted on by
2

I didn’t mean to write a post about this, but I couldn’t help myself.  Some of you won’t like what I have to say.  I have been following the Department of Justice versus Apple and the Big Five case for a little while now.  Or rather, I have been following the commentary online.  Reading the posts and the comments, there seem to be two main themes – either what could be loosely summarised as “DoJ #FAIL” or “Amazon gives me cheap eBooks what’s the problem?”  Let’s take a moment to embrace the assumption that the legacy publishing industry will continue to exist and examine both arguments.

DoJ #FAIL

There appear to be many people who don’t actually understand what the US Department of Justice is alleging and what their job is.  The claim is that several major publishers and Apple colluded to fix eBook prices.  The Department of Justice is not empowered to pass judgement on Amazon’s business model, unless it breaches US law, and nobody appears to have any evidence that it does.  The Wall St Journal reports that Macmillan CEO John Sargent complained the decision will “have a very negative and long-term impact on those who sell books for a living” but this misses the point.  Jordan Weissman in the Atlantic also wanders into the irrelevant when he complains that “Amazon isn’t simply a garden variety retailer, or a helpless, well-meaning innovator.”  The Department of Justice is required to investigate when businesses appear to be colluding on price.  Whether their competitors are large and successful or not doesn’t matter.  Whether the people running the businesses believe colluding on price is the only way to maintain a profit is also of no import.  It is not the DoJ’s job to keep publishers’ and writers’ incomes high, but rather to keep the price consumers pay low.  The law states that you can’t collude to artificially hold up the price consumers pay.  Everything else is noise. If publishers can’t work out how to make money from $9.99 eBooks, then so be it.

Amazon gives me cheap eBooks what’s the problem?

The problem is that although it is not the Department of Justice’s job to make publishers’ lives easier, Amazon still currently holds what amounts to a virtual monopoly on the sale of eBooks.  Estimates I’ve seen range from 70% to 90% of the entire market which even at the lower end is still high enough to be overwhelming.  When you buy an Amazon ebook you will only ever be able to read it on a Kindle or within a Kindle app. When you buy a Kindle you will only ever be able to read books you bought from Amazon in AZK format or ebooks in PDF or ePub format that don’t have DRM restrictions.  So once Amazon has you it’s very difficult to escape, because your books can’t be transferred between devices.

The other issue is that, as Charles Stross has noted in his excellent overview of this issue, Amazon could be said to be engaging in predatory pricing.  By charging less than it costs publishers to produce an eBook, Amazon is ensuring that nobody else can charge less than them. Although Apple could in theory have spent some of its mountain of cash in a price war with Amazon, nobody else can afford to burn money like that.  Once the competition is gone, Amazon can increase prices again or simply use cheap ebooks as a way to sell something else, like expensive Kindle readers or simply other goods once they have hundreds of millions of customers.

A monopoly of the publishers’ own making

The complaint of many is that Amazon has a monopoly and it is therefore they who should be under investigation.  This argument may have a small amount of merit due to the factors above, but there are a few problems.  The main reason for Amazon’s stranglehold on ebook sales is the publishers’ own pig-headed insistence on a model that has already failed once before – Digital Rights Management.  By insisting on DRM, publishers have pushed out small independent online retailers and ensured Amazon maintains control over ebook sales through it’s domination of the ebook reader market.  Since Kindles don’t read non-DRM ebooks, publishers insisting on DRM cede their power to Amazon.  Basically, Amazon has a monopoly of the publishers’ own making.

If publishers want to survive, they need to end the use of DRM. One senior Hachette executive publicly stated that he thinks it is unnecessary just a few weeks ago – if Hachette’s board have any brains they’ll listen to him.  Removing DRM means suddenly Amazon loses some of the lock-in powers of the Kindle, whilst also making non-Amazon ebooks more valuable to customers because they are transferable to whichever device is most convenient.

Disaggregation and WordPress for eBooks

So far we haven’t covered anything not already commented upon.  But there has been something missing from most of the commentary I’ve seen.  In all the discussion around this case, there has been an implied assumption that an ebook market requires publishers to exist – in their current form if not the exact same companies.  I think this is profoundly flawed.

Amazon itself now has a system for authors to publish directly through Kindle Direct.  This is a first step, but it is simply a horizontal expansion of a retailer into production.  The real revolution will come when enough authors realise that publishers are no longer necessary.  In his recent book Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky writes about the origins of the publishing model.  The whole basis of the system is seventeenth century economics, whereby the owners of expensive printing presses needed to find new content to print.  Because each print run was a risk, those printing the books needed to ensure that the books they printed were high quality, well advertised and widely distributed.  Hence the integrated publishing house which combines editorial, typesetting, printing, marketing, distribution and sales.  Although some of these functions have been outsourced in recent years (notably physical printing, the whole basis of the original system), the concept of an integrated ‘publishing company’ is still alive and well.  The problem these companies have is that it will not be too much longer before authors realise that ebook publishing does not require publishers at all.

The real threat to publishers is not Amazon or even piracy, but disaggregation. There is no good reason for all the things publishers do to be done together by the same organisation.  What is needed to produce high quality ebooks and make money for authors is good writing, careful editing, clever marketing and an efficient distribution platform.  They can all work separately from each other.

Independent authors would keep their copyright, and may even choose a variation on Creative Commons licensing for particular uses (eg for students).  Editing might be a service authors pay editing agencies to perform for them, either through a direct cash payment or through a percentage of profits.  Marketing is now possible with a small investment of time by the author through social media, but may also be done by generalist or specialist marketing companies, depending on the means of the author and estimated potential readership.  Alternatively don’t discount the emergence of some kind of authors guild acting as a member-funded marketer.  Finally, the opportunity is there for a WordPress-style open source distribution platform to hit Amazon where it hurts.

The main reason Amazon has such a monopoly is the same reason Facebook has a ‘monopoly’ on social sharing – breadth.  Authors wanting to self-publish ebooks are told they have to be on Amazon, because that’s where everyone is.  Readers often only look on Amazon, either because they are locked into the Amazon-Kindle system or simply because experience shows them it has a huge range at the cheapest price. Because ebooks are fungable goods, (or arguably, fungable services) being sold in a frictionless and almost entirely transparent marketplace, whomever sells at the cheapest price is likely to get the vast majority of sales. At the moment authors have few choices about where they sell.  They can hand over 30% of their income to Amazon, hand over 30% of their income to Apple and hope the censor doesn’t block them, or hand over 40% of their income to Smashwords. It shouldn’t be particularly difficult for appropriately keen coders to develop an open source system along the lines of WordPress whereby authors or small cooperatives can maintain autonomy in publication, but utilise the benefits of a common searchable database.  Once that happens and reaches a large enough size, suddenly Amazon and Apple look very vulnerable.  When you can get the benefits of a large unified database and only pay 2.5% to PayPal to handle payments, why would you cop a 30% Amazon tax?  When you are selling your ebook for a 20% discount compared to Amazon or iBooks, why would I buy from them?

The best way to predict the future is to invent it

This is not a prediction.  I don’t know what is going to happen with ebooks.  Some, like Eli Neiberger, argue that ‘bits have no value’ and soon ebooks are likely to be virtually impossible to monetise.  I don’t subscribe to this view, but I think it’s more likely than the current model continuing.  What I do know is that the future of books is not the present of books. I know that if you concentrate on the legacy container instead of the contents you will go out of business.  And I know that librarians need to understand all of these things, and work out what they’re going to do to ensure they are still able to provide their communities with the information and cultural works they need and want.

Libraries as software – dematerialising, platforms and returning to first principles

Posted on by
18

Ever since I read Marcus Westbury’s article about Renew Newcastle, Cities as software, last year I’ve been thinking about how the concepts he writes about can be applied to libraries.  For those who are less text-centric, Westbury also gave a talk at Tedx Newie.

Cities as software

The principle is fairly straighforward, but like many ‘disruptive’ ideas it is only obvious after someone has articulated it.  Westbury’s insight was to realise that the problems of stagnating, post-industrial Newcastle were not caused by the decaying buildings or ugly streetscapes – the ‘hardware’ of the city.  And since there was no hardware problem, building new office blocks or spending money on street beautification wasn’t going to work.  The problem with Newcastle was a ‘software’ problem – so many shops were boarded up, so many businesses struggling along, that it had become impossible for any new businesses to succeed.  What Newcastle needed was for someone to hack the planning, regulatory and real estate systems to make the place vibrant again, thus attracting new business and a new sense of civic pride.

Thinking about cities as a combination of ‘hardware’ (buildings, streets, parks) and ‘software’ (laws, rules, traditions, business models, cultural norms) is a useful conceptual model because it allows us to separate out things that are often conflated.  A heritage building, for example, is hardware, because it has physical form.  But it is also software, because it has cultural value and often a legal identity as having heritage value.  The software determines what can be done with the hardware.

Libraries as software

The software/hardware framework is a good way to think about what libraries are really about as we move further into a world of post-paper publishing.  What libraries have all too often focussed on in the past is hardware – buildings, books, journals and rooms.  Librarians get caught up in hardware questions continually – hardback or paperback, how many PCs, should we buy Blueray discs, lend Kindles, subscribe to downloadable talking books, throw out our cassette tapes….?  In this context, we can consider things like journal databases, ebooks and other downloadables as hardware as well – we treat these things as artifacts, things to be collected and stored.

Hardware is what decision-makers and funders think about – books, buildings and, if we’re lucky, computers. Hardware is easy to understand, easy to provide once-off grants for and usually offers a photo opportunity.  The problem with hardware, however, is that it’s useless without software. Marcus Westbury recognised this in Newcastle and if librarians are to fulfill their real purpose (and keep their jobs) they need to recognise it too.

The real value of libraries is not the hardware.  It has never been the hardware.  Your members don’t come to the library to find books, or magazines, journals, films or musical recordings.  They come to be informed, inspired, horrified, enchanted or amused.  They come to hide from reality or understand its true nature.  They come to find solace or excitement, companionship or solitude. They come for the software.

Dematerialising

Dematerialising could be the best thing that ever happened to libraries.  With the Open Access movement gathering steam, Open Source so entrenched that Red Hat made $1Billion annual revenue in the last year, and more options than ever before available to authors wanting to be published, we are at the beginning of a completely new era in the way information and art is disseminated.  If your business model relies on the idea that you provide access to otherwise restricted informational and cultural artifacts your business isn’t going to be viable for very much longer.  This applies whether you’re a publisher, bookseller, newspaper proprietor, television executive or librarian.

How we change the software – the services we provide, the way we make information findable, how we help people to make connections between things – will determine the future of libraries and the communities they serve.  This has a connection with the ideas I wrote about in Return to the coffeehouse - how to turn your library into an ideas factory, where we considered the importance of ‘platforms’ in building new ideas and services.  The dematerialised library – the library as software – provides a platform for the community to use in their quest to understand and enjoy our world and their place in it.  It becomes a true information and culture service rather than merely a technology for sharing and shipping informational and cultural artifacts.

What is a library?

Libraries are a technology for free, large scale inter-generational transfer of knowledge and culture. The fact that they have performed this purpose through the distribution of information technologies such as scrolls, codexes and newspapers for hundreds of years is merely a reflection of the technology available at the time. It’s time to reconsider our purpose.  Instead of processing, moving, accessioning and purchasing physical or digital items, librarians are better used to organise and share information and stories. Libraries run like this become creation engines.  They become more about creating and sharing a community’s ideas than providing access to the ideas of others.  Thinking about your library like this provides space for some innovative new approaches.

Consider Darien Library, which offers their community print-on-demand technology for both pubic domain works and self-publishing .  Or think of the academic libraries that publish works written by staff at their own university – a practice so widespread that Purdue University Press has published a book about successful library publishing strategies.   Now prepare for your brain to melt and read Nate Hill’s plan for world domination public libraries to become a local-publisher/Kickstarter/creators-&-writers-club mashup with not only completed works by local writers on their catalogue, but local works in progress on their catalogue.

Letting go of the desire to maintain ‘quality control’ and encouraging members to share their stories, like Darien has done and Hill proposes, can help libraries and the communities they serve reach their full potential.  Letting go of control allows libraries to encourage the development of innovative ways to create, store, retrieve and share stories and ideas.  In this model libraries cease to be a gatekeeper and become an enabler – helping our communities to share, learn and connect in ways that are otherwise not possible.

Platforms

With these sorts of ideas in mind, and inspired by the ‘Apps for Democracy’ project in Washington DC, in 2011 the State Library of Queensland ran a competition called Libraryhack and opened up library data to innovative web developers.  The National Library of Australia has been working for some years to integrate data from a number of collection databases both within the NLA and in other organisations.  They have released a number of APIs  and rumour has it they are soon to release a single API for ‘Trove’,  their flagship information portal.  This will allow others individuals or organisations to create their own interfaces and tools to use Trove data. Meanwhile, Jason Griffey has created something potentially more subversive by forking the PirateBox to create LibraryBox  - a tiny, portable and off-grid wireless distribution point for ebooks, downloadable audio and any other electronic content libraries care to distribute.

These sorts of projects are just a taste of the sort of thing librarians could be turning their minds towards.

Wasted on the desk

At VALA2012 Eli Neiberger talked about librarians being ‘wasted on the desk’. His view is that instead of hanging around waiting to help people read spine labels, librarians should be ‘out the back’ building amazing tools like Griffey’s Library Box or the Trove API. Renew Newcastle operated mostly as a negotiator and explainer – they worked through the contracts, laws and regulations to work out how people could do what they wanted to do.  Rather than just providing access to information, libraries should be more active in finding solutions to help people use information. With ‘Open Government’ initiatives gaining traction in many nations, notably in the US under the Obama administration, Craig Thomler recently wrote about government agencies feeling that it was a waste of their resources to be making their data more usable.  Freedom of Information for them begins and ends with making the data available, whether it can be easily understood or not.  This presents a great opportunity for National, State and local libraries to make government truly open by building tools and standards for usable data. This could be extended to enable the creation and useful application of other local information, data, stories, expression.

All of this means we need to think more on Neiberger’s observation that people are now starting to pay for convenience rather than access.  Libraries were once at the forefront of providing both access and convenience, with early OPAC technology at the leading edge of what was then possible.  The general state of libraries’ information delivery is now so far below what people expect that we are being told en masse that “your library website stinks and it’s your fault.” A good place to start afresh might be this article from Designing Better Libraries.

Allowing innovation to operate without capital

Marcus Westbury talks about Renew Newcastle a lot, and recently he followed up his Tedx talk with another one - this time talkling to architects and designers. Again, I was struck by something he said about what Renew Newcastle set out to do, because it applies just as equally to libraries.  Westbury’s comment was that Renew Newcastle set out to ‘enable innovation without the need for capital’.  If we combine the ideas of Westbury with Steven Johnson’s ideas about platforms we can envisage the library as a platform for enabling innovation, learning and cultural development to occur in our communities without the need for capital.  Isn’t that a lot more compelling than a place for lending books to people?

You need an R&D culture, not an R&D department

Posted on by
3

A couple of weeks ago, a tweet popped up in my feed just begging for a click-through:

What Gilliian was so excited about was this post by Daniel Messer on the Letters to a Young Librarian blog.  The core of Messer’s arguments is this:

Libraries need their own R&D Departments. We have Circulation, Reference, Information Technology, and so on. We are sorely lacking in R&D.

I can see why some librarians were enthused by this proposal. It stands to reason that if something is important it should have its own department and funding.  There’s just a small problem – Messer’s solution is destined to fail.

The problem with an R&D department is that it will perpetuate exactly the problem Messer has identified.  Libraries already have R&D departments, it’s just that they are largely outsourced.  We outsource development of cataloguing classification systems to organisations like OCLC and the Library of Congress.  We outsource our ILS to software vendors.  We outsource our journal databases to other software vendors and publishers.  We outsource the development of hardware like PCs, microfilm readers and printing facilities. Some libraries outsource their physical processing to specialist companies.  Others outsource the selection of new material.  We do all these things because it is perceived to be easier, or more efficient, or higher quality.  Often it is.

As Messer has identified, however, there is a problem with outsourcing like this – the priorities of the organisation doing your research and development often has different priorities to your organisation.  As a Systems Librarian, I spend a lot of my time dealing with this reality.  The problem I have with Messer’s solution, however, is that it simply replicates this problem within the organisation.  If you bring all your R&D in-house by creating an organisation called ‘The R&D Department’, what happens when they realise their small team and small budget can’t solve every problem at the same time?  The have to prioritise. Somebody’s ‘top priority’ will be pushed down the list.  Pretty soon you’ll be writing blog posts bitching about the R&D department and suggesting libraries need to become more efficient by outsourcing their R&D to vendors.

What libraries – and other service organisations – need to do is not create an R&D department but rather create an R&D culture.  Given the whole point of libraries is to facilitate research, one would think we should have a head start! Organisations like Google and Gore don’t rely on R&D departments to do all their research and development – both famously offer/require staff 20% of their paid time for working on whatever R&D project takes their fancy.  Tim Harford writes about adaptive organisations like Google and Gore in Adapt: why success always starts with failure.  One of his main points is that (As Messer himself describes) those at the ‘front line’ are best placed to understand what is needed in terms of developing new strategies, procedures or tools.  R&D is not just about new tools – it’s about new processes, new services, and new concepts for delivering those services.

Messer himself gives us a perfect example – he developed a small program to get his ILS to print patron names on a receipt printer.  Messer didn’t work for ‘the R&D department’ when he did this – he was running Circulation. Messer’s role had a enough ‘slack’ in terms of how he spent his time to allow him to research what he needed to do and develop and test it.

The challenge for libraries then is not to build a new department, but to create the space and encouragement for staff to undertake research and development as simply part of their job.  Last week Rory Litwin wrote in a rather more controversial blog post that

In order to make a claim to professional autonomy, librarians need more than a set of admirable values to justify it. They need a body of professional expertise that is incontrovertible, made up of knowledge and skills that others recognize required extensive education to gain. They need to be able to make the case that what they offer as professionals is something that other people cannot do nearly as well. They need to show that what they do is not only interesting and admirable and important, but that doing it takes expertise, and that they possess that expertise.

Litwin goes on to say that the solution is for librarians to forget all about this newfangled blogging business and only share ideas about librarianship via scholarly journal papers and discussions based upon them.  Presumably by writing letters to each other on parchment using a feather quill.*

Whilst I think Litwin is profoundly wrong about how professional expertise should or should not be shared, he’s quite correct that for Librarianship to be taken seriously as a profession we need undeniable professional expertise, not just values (although we still need the values!).  How we develop, share and prove that knowledge is the matter of several different but equally robust opinions.

Tying these two demands together – better research and development for the tools we need to do our jobs, and a stronger focus on robust research within the profession – I see the need for two different types of research and development.  What Messer is asking for is really more support within libraries for R&D to solve the organisation’s own internal problems – whether it’s a bit of computer code, a better internal process, a new machine or a different way of organising rosters. That is, better production technologies.  What Litwin is asking for is a stronger commitment to R&D focussed on the needs of our patrons. That is, better products and services.

These R&D needs can not be left to an ‘R&D department’, because the willingness and indeed the responsibility to develop and share new ideas, processes and technologies is what makes librarianship a profession rather than just another service role.  What is needed is a new approach to library management.  When librarians and other library staff are removed from the silos of traditional departments; when they are given dedicated time and support to develop new tools, new processes and new services; when librarians are rewarded for experimenting and sharing their findings: that is when R&D in libraries will flourish, and librarianship will secure its place as a vibrant and respected profession.

*As Rory notes in the comments, my paraphrasing may be overly harsh.  You really should read the original post yourself.

From selection and recommendation to curation and suggestion

Posted on by
4

A couple of weeks ago I went the the VALA 2012 conference and saw an inspiring keynote closing address from Eli Neiburger.  Whilst the talk itself was great, it was the question and answer session afterwards that inspired this particular post.  Eli was asked about the skills new librarians will need, and the first thing he said was ‘curation’.  But what exactly is this, and why is it different to what we’ve always done?

Curation and selection are opposites

Imagine a military museum with a particular number of rooms and a certain number of weapons on display.  You follow the path from room to room and stand behind the velvet rope looking at the exhibits.  This is the world of selection, where a limited number of items can be collected and stored in a restricted space.  Every poor decision about what to collect costs money and time, but more importantly also has an opportunity cost because something else could have gone in the space.  This physical reality has led to the traditions of commercial publishing and newspapers, as well as selection and collection development in libraries.

The world we live in is decreasingly bound by these realities.  On the internet, the opportunity cost of hosting a file is approaching zero, such is the cheapness of computer storage.  In this new world, the options available to military weapon enthusiasts look more like this.  If Neo wants to know where the most interesting guns are, he’ll need help, especially if he wants to find one of these  (thanks to Eli for the tip).  He’ll need a curator.

Curation provides guidance.  it doesn’t restrict choice, but rather opens doorways.  It is a way of making sense of an endless number of choices.  it’s a map – patrons can wander off the map if they like, you’re just giving them a place to start based on what you know.  The other key difference is that selection takes place before an item is available to your users, whereas curation simply makes it more visible after it is available to them.

This reminded me of an important distinction regarding how librarians provide personalised service.

A good book

Public librarians often get asked to recommend a good book to read.  All of us have fallen in to the trap of then immediately doing so.  This may feel like we’re providing great service, but it is actually an example of very poor and thoughtless service.

What patrons of course mean by ‘a good book’ is ‘a book that I will appreciate reading’ – not ‘a book you enjoyed’.  For this reason librarians long ago invented ‘the reference interview’.  This handy tool works for most enquiries and is needed because most people need a bit of coaxing to explain exactly what it is that they are looking for – whether it’s a book on dinosaurs or the latest Stephen King novel, it’s surprising how difficult it is to work out sometimes.

So once you’ve worked out what they are actually asking for you might then simply try to think of what you have in the collection that is most like that thing.  If you’re providing fiction books, this can get tricky.  It means you’re either going to fall back on one or the other of the following strategies:

  • recommend something you have read that you really enjoyed and is somehow ‘similar’ to what they say they enjoy.
  • recommend another author based on the genre of the books they tend to enjoy.

Neither of these is really all that useful – one of them is essentially spam, whilst the other could have been provided by Amazon or LibraryThing.  These patrons come to us because they want suggestions about what to read next that will expand their world and provide meaning to them in their current state of mind.  If they wanted more of the same they could have found it.  They’ve come to you because they don’t want more of the same (even if they don’t know it).  To serve these patrons properly you need to  make a psychological and verbal leap from recommending to suggesting.  The School of Life’s Bibliotherapy service is an example of the sort of thing we need to aim for.

If you are recommending something, it’s more personal for both them and you.  People think of ‘recommend’ in the same group of words as ‘guarantee’.  When a patron wants help to find a new book for recreational reading you can’t take the risk of recommending, because what they are actually asking for is assistance taking a leap into the unknown.  You can minimise the risk to an extent, but they want a bit of risk in their choices because that’s how we find interesting new ideas, new ways of seeing and new art-forms. If you recommend something you are implicitly bearing the risk that they won’t enjoy it.  Do that enough times and nobody will ask for your recommendations any more.

All this is much harder, of course, but Librarians exist to help people expand their minds.  In postmodern libraries we need to do this by curating and suggesting, rather than selecting and recommending.