JP Porcaro for ALA President

My fellow librarians,

Have you voted in the ALA Elections yet? Well, you officially have until 11:59pm tonight (CDT, of course, because the ALA has its headquarters in Chicago) if you haven't. Be sure to vote- you pay more than enough for the privilege of belonging to our esteemed professional organization, so it would be a shame if you didn't exercise your right to vote as an official dues-paying ALA Member. Despite making it easy to do so online, only 20% of the ALA Membership actually vote, so for the love of Ranganathan, take some time out of your Friday, read up on the candidates in your section, and make your voice heard!

Also, there's something special going on this election season. If you're not aware of this fact already, there are four candidates running for ALA President, one of whom is the first Millennial ever to run for the office: his name is JP Porcaro, and even if you don't know him you probably know of him. One of ALA's Emerging Leaders in 2010 and named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker in 2012, JP was also one of the founding members of the ALA Think Tank, a Facebook community with over 12,000 members which has been described as "social media's largest space for librarians." He is the Librarian for Acquisitions and Technological Discovery at the New Jersey City University Guarini Library.

I met JP when I was feeling particularly disillusioned about my career and my involvement with ALA as a whole. Although my employer at the time didn't actively discourage participation in ALA, like many large academic library systems they were always more inwardly-focused or more concerned with what was going on in our immediate peer group instead, so they didn't exactly encourage me to get more involved either.

Also, there was a certain amount of cynicism among our administrators about the value of ALA- in retrospect, I think this was more a function of where these librarians were in their own careers and not an objective assessment on their part of the potential energy and enthusiasm their entry-level librarians could find by meeting and interacting with other like-minded librarians in a conference setting...  but that's a screed for another day.

So let's just say that I was feeling somewhat adrift when I attended the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston back in 2010. That's when I stumbled upon JP while he was doing publicity for 8 Bit Library at the LITA Happy Hour. 8 Bit Library was the brainchild of JP and Justin Hoenke, and I found myself pulled in immediately to help explore the intersection of gaming and librarians. JP and I went to PAX East that Spring as members of the press, and that's when I started to get to know him as a person and not just the legend which always seems to precede him.

JP is always working overtime to bring his unique energy into whatever it is he is doing at the moment. I've heard him speak recently at the Connecticut Library Association Conference about emotional contagion as a key component of leadership, and I think he's absolutely spot-on in that respect. Here I was, a jaded young librarian with a tendency towards introversion when left to my own devices, suddenly finding myself wanting to dive back into my profession headfirst.

My relationship with ALA changed fundamentally as a result of meeting JP. Instead of being about libraries, ALA became about librarians (i.e., about people and not things), about making connections and sharing enthusiasm. While I became more active along my own professional track, I also went out of my way and out of my comfort zone to become more active with the organization as a whole, volunteering whenever possible- such as this last Midwinter in Chicago, when I co-hosted Library Camp for Monday conference-goers to decompress and reflect.

(And yes, I also did some stumping for JP's campaign).

I'm voting for JP not because of the hype, but because he made me a better librarian. I believe that he can make the ALA a better organization as well- one that is more inclusive, more passionate and engaged with the issues that really matter to our profession, and (dare I say it?) more fun. I encourage you to make the same choice, but even if you don't, I encourage you to vote nevertheless. Help us get the organization we actually want, and not the one that is handed to us by default through apathy and inaction. And thanks for listening!

Me and JP at the 2015 Connecticut Library Association Conference 

Through the Google Glass

It started innocently enough. When Google announced that it was looking for a cohort of early adopters for its shiny new Google Glass device, I answered the call with a nod back to my undergraduate years at MIT, where the Wearable Computing project was just getting underway. I have fond memories of spotting Thad Starner wandering around the Porter Square Star Market looking like he'd been assimilated by the Borg, and although my education ended up taking me about as far away from computer science and electrical engineering as one could possibly go, I never stopped being enamored with technology and its convergence with everyday human life.

Oddly enough, I became a total Google fanboy at the same time that I'd become a librarian (or maybe this isn't so odd in retrospect, given that the digital revolution was fully underway in librarianship at the time I was finishing my LIS degree)- one of my professors had begun her seminar by exhorting us all to create Gmail accounts, as the service had just become available to the public earlier that year; and my final class in the program, the Literature of the Humanities, spend a great amount of time studying the Google Book Scan project and what such an initiative meant for our discipline, the academy, and the future of the written word.
Needless to say, as soon as I heard of Google Glass I knew I'd want to get my hands on one of them, so it was inevitable that I'd take part in Google's #ifihadglass competition.

It never occurred to me that I'd be selected as one of their 8,000 inaugural Glass Explorers, however, as although my desire to play with this new digital toy was surely as greater as the other gazillion people who Tweeted (or whatever the equivalent is called for Google+) their case to be included in the program. My answer was heartfelt, to be sure, but it was a little on the flip side, and more than a little lacking in specificity. So when I did get the nod from Google, I was flabbergasted to say the least...  then I was sad when I realized that, with Child #2 on the way, there was no way I'd be able to justify ponying up the $1500 I'd need in order to get my very own Glass device.  

At first I considered using a Kickstarter to obtain the necessary funds.  I was going to call it The Glass Library, and the idea would be that each backer would be allowed to "borrow" the device for a certain amount of prorated time, to do with it as they will. The mechanics of shipping the item from borrower to borrower seemed somewhat challenging, but certainly I had enough colleagues out there in libraryland who might be willing to contribute in exchange for some quality time with Google Glass. At this point it occurred to me that other librarians may have also been chosen as Glass Explorers, so I reached out on social media to see what they were doing with their invitations.  A few of colleagues responded that they'd approached their Powers That Be about funding their purchase, and that one or two of them had succeeded in getting approval to buy them for their library.

This was encouraging news, as at first it seemed that the Terms of Service for the Glass Explorers program precluded any such institutional purchasing. Emboldened by my colleagues' success, I asked my boss if he thought we might able to do the same for our undergraduate Bass Library, especially since it already had an ever-growing collection of circulating media equipment which could be checked out by Yale faculty, students, and staff. He liked the idea, but suggested that we bring our Instructional Technology Group and Student Technology Collaborative on board with the purchase as well, not just to share the cost, but to widen the pool of potential innovation and development as well.  Fortunately everyone was just as excited as we were about exploring the new technology, so we agreed to move forward as equal partners.

(I'm going to leave out the part where, in the process of putting this coalition together, we unfortunately ran out the clock on my original Google Glass invite. Despite much begging and pleading, we had to resign ourselves to being waitlisted, and although everything turned out okay I still feel somewhat chastened by the near-miss and resolve to keep it fresh in mind so as not to sit on any future similar opportunities. Awesomeness waits for no one, indeed!)

I got to pick up our device this past Friday, at Google's NYC offices in Chelsea Market (where Major League Baseball and the Food Network also hang their hats). To say that I was nervous about my Google Glass experience was an understatement, but despite my initial fumblings with the new technology, my patient  Google technician soon had me up and running with my "fitting" and out the door as a newly-minted Glass Explorer. Despite the fact that I opted to wear the device out, I quickly put it back away as soon as I got in the elevator, as I was deathly afraid of losing or breaking the Bass Media collection's latest acquisition. I was also somewhat self-conscious of being seen wearing Google Glass, which apparently is not an uncommon thing, even among Google employees. The good news is that it comes with a sunglasses attachment, which almost looks like a normal pair of shades and makes you feel much less like you're a walking, talking Borg drone as a result.

 

Glasshole

Glasshole...  or just wearing cool shades?

Although it does seem rather fragile, Google Glass is actually surprisingly rugged. It's basically a big plastic headband built around a titanium frame. Because it's designed to be form-fitting, the device does not fold compact like a conventional pare of glasses, which makes it a bit awkward to carry around, but it does come with a nifty bag that protects the eyepiece display when you stow it away. Now about that eyepiece.  I think one of the common misconceptions about Glass is that it's like looking through a computer screen, when in fact the display is only projected in the corner or your right eye.  Even I was surprised at how easy it was to tune the image out when I didn't want to look at it, and the screen times out quickly as well so as not to waste the onboard battery.

Glass syncs either with your smartphone via Bluetooth, or any existing wi-fi network. Wi-fi syncing is a breeze- you look at a QR Code on your computer screen and voila, you're in.

(WAIT!  Did I just say that Google Glass actually uses QR Codes?  And that it actually makes sense?  And it actually works?  The Apocalypse may in fact be nigh...)

The interface takes a little getting used to at first, as it involves a combination of voice commands and swiping up and down and side-to-side along the rim of your device.  I'm still getting lost when trying to visualize the right path in Glass' operating system, and find myself wishing that it recognized more natural-language commands. Still, it's pretty freaking cool to tell Google Glass to take a picture, and snap, there it is appearing in the upper right-hand corner of your eye as a thumbnail.  Glass has a 5 megapixel camera, so you'll be taking snapshots similar to your current cameraphone.  It is rather weird that you have to "point and shoot" by aiming your head at things, and I've yet to find a zoom function on the camera, but it is extremely liberating not to have to remove yourself from the moment by fumbling for your phone, activating the camera app, aiming and shooting.

I guess this is really the epiphany of wearable computing.  After wearing the device for a while, you really do forget it's there.  Think of Google Glass like a bluetooth earpiece for your eyes and you wouldn't be far off.  In fact, I couldn't help but notice that knowing I was wearing Glass made me less conscious of my smartphone. I didn't want to fiddle and stare down at my screen compulsively because I knew I could get whatever information I needed out of Google Glass by cocking my head and asking it a question.  ("What's the score of the Denver Broncos game?" I asked it as I was changing the baby this evening.  "The Broncos are currently leading over the Chargers 17-0 in the third quarter," the device dutifully replied).

They see me rollin'...

Right now the list of available applications for Google Glass- called Glasswear (get it?) -is somewhat bare-bones, but the promise of the technology can be seen in an app like Strava Cycling, which in addition to tracking your trip like the smartphone app already does using GPS and the onboard accelerometer, also feeds you a real-time heads up display of your speed, time, and distance traveled as you bike. There is also a Glasswear version of Google's Field Trip app, which I've yet to try out, but I'm very curious to see how wearable technology takes advantage and makes sense of location-based data. This is one of the respects in which I think devices like Glass will work really well with libraries, as translating the oceans of metadata on our shelves in the library stacks could open up brand new ways of visualizing our physical collections. We've always romanticized the "serendipity of the stacks," but imagine how much more powerful happenstance discovery could be if a reader could see subject headings, citation rankings, and cross-references just by glancing at the spine of a book!

Our partnership with the ITG and STC means that we will have many different groups of interested parties playing with the potential of Google Glass, so I hope this increases the chances of our seeing these kinds of applications being developed in the long run. On a more utilitarian note, over this Spring I'd like to work on a proof of concept for using Glass as a vehicle for fulfilling electronic document delivery requests via Scan and Deliver. Although the device's price tag is quite hefty for a wearable computer or smartphone, for a mobile scanning unit it's actually quite cheap- add to that the time savings of not having to lug books around the library to be scanned (during which time they are unavailable to other patrons), and I feel like there might just be something there beyond the simple gee-whiz factor.

So that's my two cents after a weekend with Glass. Despite knowing that I'd be kindly disposed towards anything so new and shiny, I was nevertheless still pleasantly surprised by how natural and unobtrusive it felt while wearing and using it.  But don't just take it from me- here's an assessment of Google Glass from my 10 year-old daughter Andriana, who naturally took to it like a fish to water.

Do you even code, bro?*

It's funny how ideas tend to percolate through the quintessence. After coming back from a fun and extremely knowledge-packed ILLiad International Conference in Virginia Beach last month, I was doing my best to digest all of the cool things that my resource sharing colleagues were up to and ruminating about coding, libraries, and how to foster a culture of innovation myself when I stumbled across Jenica Rodgers' excellent post "Considering the librarian tech skills gap."

In her keynote for the New Librarians' Symposium at the Queensland University of Technology**, Jenica said:

Or the best new idea requires skill sets we aren’t training for and don’t have, except for a dozen people who are all being hired by Google, and that one guy who can write his own ticket and you could never afford him anyway. Or even smaller scale: Griffey shows me his LibraryBox and enthuses about how straightforward it is, and I totally want to make one to take to every meeting I ever have and insist that people download the files we’re going to be working with instead of printing them out… and then my eyes glaze over when he starts talking about the code that you need in order to set one up. I, um, was hoping for a nice little point and click and stick the cord in the hole kind of interface and he’s talking about GitHub…

Oh, how much of this rings painfully true! As a librarian who openly embraces technological innovation, I am constantly running into examples of phenomenally bright people doing amazing things. For all of the hand-wringing about the future of libraries, there's an awful lot of inspiration to be found out there if you look for it. The tricky thing, as Jenica so rightly identifies, is taking that inspiration and transforming it into something actionable at your own library. In so many instances, the innovative spirit may be willing, but the coding flesh is just too weak.

When I got into the resource sharing business all those years ago, I don't think it ever occurred to me that interlibrary loan would be such fertile ground for the library hacker set. Never mind the fact that the predominant ILL management system, ILLiad, was the brainchild of a bunch of programmers in the Virginia Tech library system who were tired of doing things the hard way. In my mind, coding was something that vendors did. Even if you did manage to pick up some new and interesting stuff at a conference or elsewhere in the library blogopshere, your local IT department was usually too busy supporting all of the existing systems to commit resources to adding anything else to their plate.

Somewhere along the way, however, a tipping point was reached in the library world where frustration with waiting on vendors or systems staff to provide desperately-needed solutions met with a critical mass of programming skills in the latest crop of library school grads. This was nothing short of a revolution for librarians, but like all revolutions it has come with its share of turbulence, as disruptive technologies have pushed administrators, staff, and IT folks out of their comfort zones and into unexplored territory. And also like many revolutions, this one has not been equally distributed. While through the serendipity of fortuitous hirings and receptive management some libraries have transformed themselves into hotbeds of innovation, others find themselves scrambling just to keep the basic service points staffed and the library budget in the black.

Contrary to what many people might think, this isn't just about the money. I've seen library systems with deep pockets struggle to get themselves out of the 19th century, whereas libraries which have been financially challenged for years somehow find ways to cultivate and sustain a culture of innovation. In her subsequent blog post, Jenica explores the nature of this disconnect. Her conclusions, below, are of course spot-on:

1. We aren’t taught crunchy tech skills. 
2. We don’t know how to learn crunchy tech skills.
3. It’s not our job to learn crunchy tech skills. 
4. The technology headspace is openly hostile to most of the profession.

While all of these are true, I would submit that the following is also true:  We don't know how to manage librarians with crunchy tech skills.  And this is just as important as #1, 2, 3, and 4.

I will never have enough time or energy to learn how to code like a Mover and Shaker. And chances are, that if you're already a director, assistant/associate director, or department head, nor will you. But what we can do is focus on developing our skill sets so that we can effectively manage the innovators in our midst and create a work environment where future Movers and Shakers are not just happy accidents but an inevitable outcome.

How do we pull this off, exactly?  Well, that's what I've been trying to figure out. While this is by no means an exhaustive list of suggestions, here's what I've managed to come up with so far...

• Learn to code. But wait, didn't I just admit that I'm never going to be able to code like Matthew Reidsma?*** Well, yes, but you can't manage what you don't understand. I may never learn how to write a script in Lua, but I sure as hell will have an easier time asking other people to code one for me if I know what it is I'm asking for in the first place. Managers are interpreters between the people with the skills and the people with the budget lines - if you don't learn how to speak both languages, something is going to get lost in translation.
• Cultivate your talent. This is rarely about hiring people from the outside, especially in these times of shrinking library budgets and hiring freezes, but finding out how to develop what you already have and don't even know it. For example, student labor used to be about staffing the circ desk or reshelving books, but chances are these days that you're employing student assistants who have some l33t skillz (grad students can be especially useful trainers in this regard). I've had the good fortune of managing some talented student employees, some of whom I've been able to successfully hire as library staff. 
• Challenge your staff to learn new things. At the same time, don't neglect the staff you already have. This one comes down to basic transformational leadership. If you want to foster an environment that is friendly to technological innovation, you need to encourage your staff to become managers of innovation themselves. Doing so means throwing out all of your assumptions about what your staff is or isn't capable of. This is often much harder than you think, but experience has taught me that it's almost always worth taking that leap of faith in empowering your staff to develop their own skills and tools to become the agents of their own continuous improvement. 
• See what other people are doing. Steal from them shamelessly. Share your successes with others so that they may see, steal, and share in return. My favorite example of what all librarians should aspire to be is the IDS Project in New York State. If you are not familiar with the work they've been doing over the past several years, it's nothing less than extraordinary. The IDS Project has fostered a statewide culture of innovation predicated on a collaborative model of training, support, and mentoring which consistently puts them on the bleeding edge of the resource sharing world. Somehow they've managed to find that magic balance between tech skills, strategic thinking, and good old-fashioned librarianship, and I've done my damnedest to replicate this magic in my own workplace.

I'll admit, it's still a work in progress. And there's a lot more going on here that I think Jenica does a brilliant job of deconstructing in her posts about this topic, especially insofar as coding culture is still a hostile space to women in general and not the most accessible subject matter to our profession. But I hope that I've been able to contribute one library manager's perspective to how we can start to bridge the tech skills gap and incorporate technological innovation into the DNA of the library workplace.

* Know Your Meme- "Do You Even Lift?"

** Note to self: I need to get my sorry librarian butt to Australia... 

*** Sorry, Matt, but I couldn't resist (congrats again on being a 2013 Mover and Shaker!)

The one that got away

No, I'm not talking about fishing or lost loves here, but a library job that you passed on at some point in your career for reasons that may have made sense at the time but now cause you to kick yourself for missing what might have been a great opportunity. I'm sure everyone had one or two critical decision points in their lives where their career could have taken a completely different tack, had the other road been taken, leading one to think back and speculate "What If?"

For me it was a special collections job at a public library. I was just barely out of library school when I landed an interview for this position, which promised equal time maintaining a small but very interesting and eclectic historical collection with hours at the library's reference desk. As my degree concentration had been in Archives Management but my work experience in libraries had been in public services, this job seemed a perfect fit for me.

The only downside is that the library in question was in another state. While we would end up being much closer to my family, the prospect of such a move seemed daunting to say the least. My wife and I felt that we'd only just begun to settle down in New England, and with our daughter only three years old it just didn't seem like it was the right time to contemplate starting over again somewhere else. Nevertheless the job sounded fascinating enough on paper and the initial phone interview with the person who would be my boss went so promisingly that I felt like I had to go and see the library itself.

In retrospect, this was probably a huge mistake. Had I bowed out earlier on in the process, I probably wouldn't have felt as conflicted as I did after I actually got to see the special collection first-hand and confirm that it was in fact as cool as it had sounded. As long as the job had remained in the abstract, the "What If?" factor would not capture my imagination as fiercely as it did now that I had been there.

Of course my in-person interview ended up going well, such that they invited me back for a final round. This is where my wife and I had our final gut check and realized that we weren't ready for a change as life-altering as this- not yet. And yet... why does my mind keep coming back to this job, The One That Got Away, and beguile me in a way that no job prospect either real or hypothetical has ever done since? Perhaps I've been thinking a lot more about this lately because I am aware of the fact that I am inexorably approaching another one of those all-important decision points. When the time comes, will I seize the opportunity and embrace radical change this time around, or will I let another one get away...

How about the rest of you out there in Libraryland- does anyone else have a "What If?" they'd like to share?

Occupy Copyright

I've been mulling this post over ever since Occupy Wall Street and its various local spinoffs got started, but I first wanted to make sure what I did end up saying was more thoughtful than opportunistic (also, Real Life came at me this month with a one-two punch that I'm still a bit staggered from and trying to process, but more about that when I'm at liberty to discuss it!). I'm pleased to see, however, that I'm not the first librarian to connect the dots between the causes fueling the OWS movement and the pressures currently facing libraries.

In the Library With a Lead Pipe gives a great rundown of those colleagues who are out there occupying librarianship in various clever and thought-provoking ways, from trying to overthrow the "Doing More With Less" mindset to demanding an occupation of scholarly literature and/or knowledge. I've already addressed the former issue here in my previous blog post, but today I'd like to take the latter point and drive it off the proverbial cliff by suggesting that we occupy nothing less than copyright itself.

How would we begin to do such a thing? Occupying Copyright is equal parts advocacy and action, and revolves around the following key precepts:

Libraries are meant to coexist with copyright, not stand in opposition to it. I don't know how we ended up in this sad situation where librarians are being equated in some circles with illegal file sharers and the Authors' Guild is suing a nonprofit attempt to make orphaned and out of print works more widely available to readers and researchers, but here we are. It wasn't always this way, you know. When Congress crafted a series of special exceptions for libraries to the U.S. Copyright Code back in the 1970's it was to acknowledge the vital relationship between copyrighted materials and the institutions which collected them for the purpose of advancing human knowledge and not merely the bottom line. Just as copyright itself was once envisioned as a productive force in its original limited incarnation, libraries answered the fair question of who was going to provide reasonable access to this vast proliferation of books and other media to those who couldn't possibly afford to buy it all.

Fair Use must be vigorously asserted in order to preserve it. For too long libraries and librarians have been cowed into accepting an ever-diminishing horizon as their legal right, either at the behest of a risk-averse general counsel or as the result of actual lawsuits- such as the Georgia State Copyright Case, which threatens to severely limit the exercise of Fair Use in higher education. In its original formulation, Fair Use was supposed to put the burden of proof on the offended party whose copyright was allegedly violated, but on a playing field where Big Content can effectively lawyer up until the end of time even the large universities are leery of pushing their luck. Couple this everpresent looming threat with a digital revolution that is pushing the for-profit sector inexorably towards a pay per view content delivery model (either a la carte or in subscription format, like Netflix) and it's all too easy for libraries to resort to coughing up licensing fees for what might otherwise be construed as Fair Use. Rather than accept this "better safe than sorry" mentality, librarians should be educating both themselves and their patrons in how to make their own Fair Use determinations and encouraging the lawful occupation of Fair Use whenever possible.

First Sale should apply to all forms of media- print, electronic, or whatever comes next. The doctrine of First Sale has served as the bedrock of libraries since time immemorial, but technological change, the triumph of End User Licensing Agreements, and recent legal developments are threatening to whittle this fundamental right down into a mere sliver of itself. This is a more difficult issue for individual librarians to occupy, but we can and should be agitating on behalf of our patrons for broader licensing terms from ebook and journal vendors, as well as lobbying Congress to carve out a new set of copyright exceptions that would trump digital licensing for non-profit educational and research purposes. At the recent Interlending and Document Supply Conference in Chicago, one of the presenters only half-jokingly suggested that librarians should form their own PAC, as even a modestly-funded political action committee is capable of wielding significant influence if they are able to stay tightly focused on a small set of key issues. Is it time to consider occupying the lobbying process in order to make these kinds of demands heard?

Libraries exist because copyright exists, but this is by no means a one-way relationship, as not only do libraries buy multiple copies of popular items, but they will also invest in more esoteric materials that the invisible hand of the market might otherwise allow to fail. They also purchase- at no small expense, mind you- the published fruit of the research process in the forms of scholarly monographs and academic journals, materials that simply would not have a market if not for libraries. Libraries also promote books, authors, and the cause of literacy. If we are currently losing the rhetorical battle, perhaps librarians need to open a new kind of charm offensive.

#OccupyCopyright

(Pic from Logo Designer Blog, where you can download the image as a free poster!)

Doing less with more

My good friend Andy Woodworth wants to retire the phrase "Doing More With Less":

Unless someone can unequivocally demonstrate how “doing more with less” is a good thing (which I doubt highly), I think librarians should drop the phrase from their lexicon forever. It does nothing but cover up the real hurt of what budget cuts mean for our communities; because less is less and spinning it into some kind of positive helps no one.

Not only do I agree with this sentiment 100%, but I think we should taking things a step further- not only retiring the phrase, but the mindset altogether. In jest I commented on Andy's blog that we should try doing less with more for a change, but the more I think about it the less I'm convinced that I was joking.

So what does "Doing Less With More" mean exactly?

1. You Can't Do Everything. Implicit in Doing Less With More is, well, the doing less part (actually, I think it's explicit in this case, not implicit). Thinking about my previous post, whenever Gordon Ramsay revamped a failing restaurant, what was the one of the first things he did? He simplified the menu. Most of these eateries had boasted menus longer than a sequel by George R.R. Martin, with a page seemingly for every cuisine that had been trendy at one point. Never mind what the actual purported theme of the restaurant was, or whether or not the kitchen was any good at turning out General Tso's chicken or media noche sandwiches. Establishments that embraced such a scattershot approach to their offerings were trying to pander to everyone but ironically enough pleasing nobody in the end.

So, too, are libraries tempted to overextend themselves so as to please as many of our patrons or stakeholders as possible, offering all manners of services and/or programs regardless of actual demand, let alone whether or not we can afford to pay for them. The rapid advancement of technology is in part to blame for this kind of overextension, for as librarians we all too often feel obligated to remain either out in front of innovation as it occurs or at least remain open to its transformational capacities in how we do business as librarians. While I am by no means advocating a Luddite approach to this problem, we must at the same acknowledge that there are only so many FTE hours in a week. By all means leave yourself room for "20% Time," but don't forget to spend some time identifying your strengths and leveraging them, so that you do not wear yourself hopelessly thin.

2. Efficiency Is Your Best Frenemy. What's the first thing that any institution does in response to budget cuts? That's right, workflow assessment. The idea that one can always squeeze a little more efficiency out of any existing procedure in the workplace is by no means new, nor is it limited to the library world, but librarians' recent infatuation with assessment (or, as I like to call it, the "A-word") can make this process a double-edged sword. Again, please don't get me wrong here- I am a self-proclaimed stats geek and proud of it, and I have used assessment constructively in my own office to bring some long overdue change to workflows that were riddled with various inefficiencies. However, whenever I hear a fellow librarian talk about breaking out the stopwatches I can't help but think about Amazon, who has recently come under fire for pushing Taylorism to inhumane extremes in its distribution centers.

As a manager I have no choice to think about the bottom line, but at the same time bottom-line thinking absolutely terrifies me, especially as I see more and more of it trickle into our profession. I've always liked to think that what makes librarians different than their private-sector counterparts is that we don't run things like a business. Of course there are various business principles which can be successfully adapted into the library workplace, but however much we now compete with businesses like Barnes & Noble and Amazon and services like Netflix or Hulu for our patrons' needs we follow their business models at our own peril. Do we know where to draw the line when we assess, or is the temptation to turn a data point into an actionable performance benchmark too strong in this leaner, meaner age? Doing Less With More doesn't mean you need to reject efficiency and assessment, just that you know how to deploy these things intelligently, discreetly, and (above all else) humanely.

3. Find Your Joy. I blog a lot about joy being at the center of librarianship. Indeed, in a Doing Less With More philosophy, joy is absolutely essential, as the goal of doing less with more is to spend more time on what really matters- i.e., your joy. Once you've found that and made it the center of your work, everything you do will proceed outward from that point and inform your work as a librarian. It is far too easy in this day and age to simply circle the wagons and assume a purely defensive position, but once you allow yourself to succumb to a "Doing More With Less" mindset there's only one logical outcome. The older and presumably wiser I get, the more I become convinced that framing is more than half of the battle. A more cynical person might think of Doing Less With More as nothing more than window dressing, an amusing but sad attempt to put a positive spin on a truly depressing situation, but I see it as an opportunity to turn the tables on the prevailing negative discourse and refocus our efforts on the joy of librarianship. Because it is this joy that will carry us through the darkness.

"I can get sad, I can get frustrated, I can get scared, but I never get depressed – because there’s joy in my life." - Michael J. Fox

Gordon Ramsay's Library Nightmares

When left to my own devices, I like to watch either BBC America or the Food Network. One of my guiltiest pleasures is Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, a series on the BBC where the celebrated chef with the foul mouth and ill temper visits a restaurant teetering on the brink of closure and attempts to rescue their operations with expert advice and tough love. Although Chef Ramsay does not shy away from yelling and dropping the f-bomb when warranted (when you see the condition of some of these kitchens you'll curse as well), he is first and foremost a mentoring figure in this show, which may come as a surprise to those who only know him from reality cooking competition Hell's Kitchen on the Fox Network.

No matter how short his fuse, Gordon knows the restaurant industry inside and out, and if he sees so much as a spark of life in an establishment, no matter how beleaguered, he will move heaven and earth to kindle it so as to give the proprietors the best possible odds of success moving forward. The Food Network now has a similar show, Restaurant Impossible, in which Robert Irvine, another U.K. chef, stages similar eatery interventions. I find both shows to be eminently watchable, and will easily surrender my afternoon or evening if either network is running them back to back. Not only do I find the human drama compelling in and of itself, but I think the challenges that people face in the food service industry are almost identical to those facing libraries today.

What are these challenges? After dedicating myself to way too many hours of informal "research" on the living room couch, I've decided that every episode of Kitchen Nightmares or Restaurant Impossible can be boiled down to the following three themes:

1. Unlearning dysfunction

2. Embracing passion

3. Committing to change

Let's look at each in the context of the show(s), then how it can be applied to librarianship...

1. Unlearning dysfunction. When Chef Ramsay or Irvine (for simplicity's sake we will just call him 'Chef' from here on in) arrives on the scene, the first thing he does is experience a typical service at that restaurant, both as a diner then as an observer in the kitchen. Only then will he give his honest, often scathing assessment of the establishment's operations. Usually the restaurant in question is failing because somewhere along the line it embraced a critical mass of dysfunctional processes, which Chef will proceed to unpack and identify, one by one. No workplace chooses dysfunction willingly, but it is uncanny how easily dysfunctional processes can become enshrined as "the way we've always done things" and therefore off-limits to critique or change. Nor does dysfunction spontaneously occur from out the void- instead, it is the net result of received wisdom and questionable assumptions which may very well have been true at some point in the organization's history but are no longer valid.

For example, when I took over my ILL office we were still fulfilling article requests by photocopying the pages in question then scanning them through a document feeder. Despite the fact that most of our peers had long since moved over to an all-digital workflow for these kinds of requests, my initial pleas to acquire a new scanner were rebuffed on the grounds that our copy and scan method was more efficient. While this may have been true when the workflow was decided upon some ten years ago, faster scanners and software that could automate the fulfillment process had since come onto the market that disproved the underlying assumption that "digital = slower." In my case it took some detailed time studies and the fortuitous intervention of another administrator to make my case and get that scanner, proving that the hardest dysfunction of all to overcome is the one that once made perfect sense.

2. Embracing passion. Another constant which emerges from the myriad failing restaurants featured in both shows is that there is either no passion left among the owners and workers or that there was none to begin with. A kitchen that is bereft of passion might as well shutter its doors permanently, as even if all of the underlying dysfunction can be rooted out and eliminated the service will lack the very soul it needs in order not just to survive but to prosper. Usually the midpoint of each episode will feature Chef sitting down with either the owner or the head chef and trying to remind them of why they got mixed up in the food service business in the first place. Once that spark is successfully kindled, it is possible to start talking about things like excellence in service, attention to detail, and a focus on quality, with the goal of providing an overall first-rate dining experience, but without passion these things are all just empty words and phrases.

The same is manifestly true for libraries. I'm sure many of us have had the good fortune at one point in our careers to have worked in a library where a genuine passion for sharing knowledge and championing intellectual freedom- what I like to call "the delightful absurdity of librarianship"- was fully embraced. The idea of working in such an environment is what lured me into library school and down the path of becoming professional librarians, in hopes that someday I might be able to nurture a similar oasis of my own. Working in a library should be a joy so infectious that even the members of your staff who are just in it for the steady paycheck can't help but smile and laugh along with everyone else. When we fall short of this ideal is it because of all of those external pressures that have always been there to some varying extent, or is it because your workplace does not cultivate and embrace a passion for librarianship?

3. Committing to change. Diagnosing the problem is often the easiest part of these restaurant shows, especially when the establishments have obviously gone so far down the wrong path. Even if Chef is able to help a kitchen crew rediscover their passion, the food service industry is still no cakewalk, such that it is all too easy to fall back into the old dysfunction or embrace new bad habits as a form of compromise. One of the things that Gordon Ramsay does in his Kitchen Nightmares is pay a follow-up visit to the same restaurant a few months or even a year later to see if his mentoring and advice were taken to heart. Although sometimes the places embrace Chef's wisdom without reservation, most of the time there's been at least a little bit backsliding on the restaurant's part. Even the successful establishments are not immune to this- in fact, success can often lead to complaisance and renewed temptation to cut corners.

Genuine commitment to change isn't just hard, but an ongoing challenge. Assuming that you are serious about questioning your fundamental assumptions and getting your staff to embrace a passion for their work, it's still all too easy to default to dysfunctional behavior, especially when the chips are down. Back to my example of scanning ILL articles, even after I had secured the new hardware and software it was a constant battle with my staff not to panic when we felt overwhelmed by the learning curve of an all-digital workflow. Instead of running back to the old copy and scan workflow when things got busy, I played the part of cheerleader and encouraged staff and students to tough it out until the new way of doing things was as comfortable as the old. The result was better service for our patrons, better care and handling of our library materials, better use of natural resources (not to mention saving us a boatload in paper and toner costs!), and a more enjoyable experience for our students, who instead of passively photocopying articles were now actively engaged in tweaking the image quality as they scanned so that they took a genuine pride in their work. Whereas before we practically had to force student workers to do photocopying duty, working at the scanner became the most popular student activity in our office!

It's too bad that there is no library equivalent to restaurant reality programming, because I think many library workplaces would in fact benefit from a Gordon Ramsay-style intervention. I consider myself fortunate that I was able to get a free consultation from a giant in the resource sharing community, who offered some valuable constructive criticism about improving our workflows and making the office a better overall place to work. Even though I considered his advice to be friendly, I have to admit that you need to have a thick skin about opening your operations up to such scrutiny, as the natural impulse is to defend even the most indisputably dysfunctional of policies and procedures. That being said, I wouldn't have traded his visit for the world, for even during the uncomfortable bits I was learning more than I could have possibly picked up through any other means of evaluation.

The library world needs its very own Gordon Ramsay, though perhaps with less swearing. Any volunteers out there?

After the sky

There are Giants in the sky!
There are big tall terrible Giants
in the sky!

Maybe it's just the air travel that always makes me think of this song from Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods whenever I go to a library conference, but the more I reflect upon the phenomenon the more I'm convinced that there's something deeper going on. Having just returned from Interlending & Document Supply in Chicago, I thought I'd take a closer look at the lyrics and how they apply to the library conference experience.

When you're way up high
And you look below
At the world you left
And the things you know,
Little more than a glance
Is enough to show
You just how small you are.

Conferences provide both perspective and context. Simply being removed from one's everyday library environment is an important aspect of this shift in perception, and one of the main reasons why virtual conferences (as relatively cheaper and useful as they may be in certain circumstances) will never be able to replicate fully the experience of traveling and meeting your colleagues in person.

One of the more humbling aspects of Interlending & Document Supply was the international scope of the conference. Even working for a major university library I routinely felt that each speaker was opening up vistas that I could only dimly apprehend before, giving me a true sense of my place in the grand scheme of global research sharing.

When you're way up high
And you're own your own
In a world like none
That you've ever known,
Where the sky is lead
And the earth is stone,

You're free, to do
Whatever pleases you,
Exploring things you'd never dare
'Cause you don't care,

Being at a conference can be absolutely liberating. While you may have some colleagues there whom you look forward to seeing again, often you will find yourself in an unfamiliar setting (perhaps in a city you've never even been to before), speaking from the heart and sharing your thoughts and opinions with total strangers. As much as this social aspect of conference-going can be daunting, I always look forward to those serendipitous encounters that bring me in contact both with new colleagues or people I've actually been doing business with from afar for years.

In that light, it's funny and a little frightening how one's reputation can precede oneself among your peers. On the first day of ILDS I was standing in line talking with someone when suddenly the person in front of us whirled around and said: "Wait! You're Tom Bruno?" As it turned out, she was a colleague at a library that we have a lot of dealings with, many of them rather complicated and headache-inducing for both of us to resolve. Never in a million years did I think I'd meet the person at the other end of those ILL requests, but now that I have I feel a much closer kinship than I had before. I had worried that I was at the very best a "frenemy" in her list of resource sharing contacts, but by the conference's end we were fast friends.

When suddenly there's
A big tall terrible Giant at the door,
A big tall terrible lady Giant
sweeping the floor.
And she gives you food
And she gives you rest
And she draws you close
To her Giant breast,
And you know things now
that you never knew before,
Not till the sky.

I'm a fairly extroverted guy when I need to be. but the library conference experience always pushes my limits in how social I can be. After an exhilarating day of engaging presentations and thought-provoking conversations with fellow libraries during coffee breaks and over lunch it can be sorely tempting to crawl back to your hotel room and zone out in front of the Food Network for the rest of the evening, but a conference is charmed time. You only have it for so long, and once the opportunity is lost you will almost certainly regret having squandered it on something mundane that you could do any day of the week at home.

There are indeed giants in the sky, but the rock stars and superheroes of our profession are more accessible than you might think. After hours is the time when keynote speakers, distinguished presenters, and guests of honor mix and mingle with the rest of the conference attendees, and there's literally no telling who you may end up talking to after the first two glasses of wine. It's okay to be a gobsmacked fan- I must have amused the heck out of the folks of the Center for Research Libraries by telling them over and over again that visiting their library facility was on my "Bucket List" of things I wanted to see before I died- but it's not okay to be a wallflower.

Only just when you've made
A friend and all,
And you know she's big
But you don't feel small,
Someone bigger than her
Comes along the hall
To swallow you for lunch.

And you heart is lead
And your stomach stone
And you're really scared
Being all alone...

And it's then that you miss
All the things you've known
And the world you've left
And the little you own-

The fun is done.
You steal what you can and run.

No conference can last forever. At some point your brain will be filled to bursting with new ideas and you will be so emotionally tapped out that even the prospect of gourmet food and an open bar won't be inspiration enough to spend another night out on the town with your fellow librarians. It's funny how quickly this threshold can be reached at a good conference, which is perhaps all for the better that some of the best library conferences I've attended over the past few years have kept it short and sweet. No sooner have you accepted this caffeine and adrenaline powered whirlwind of ideas as your reality than it is time to leave- and suddenly you are rushing to make your travel connections because you pushed your conference agenda to the very envelope so as not to miss so much as a minute of the magic.

My flight out of Chicago on Wednesday night was sufficiently late that I was able to take that Bucket List tour of CRL I had always wanted, plus visit the brand spanking new Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago, where robotic cranes pluck items out of high-density storage bins and whisk them up to a glittering reading room under a glass dome. Between the charter bus scheduled to ferry us from library to library and the thought of having to ride two subway lines to get back to the airport- not to mention the prospect of having to run the TSA gauntlet once I got to O'Hare!- I was already sweating bullets as the conference was declared closed in the early afternoon; fortunately, however, my colleague at the University of Chicago helped me avoid a full-bore panic by arranging for an early tour of the robots at Mansueto and even drove some of us to the nearest L station (thanks again, David! You are a prince among librarians).

Fortune favors the bold- sometimes it even smiles upon the foolish...

And you scramble down
And you look below,
And the world you know
Begins to grow:

The roof, the house, and your Mother at the door.
The roof, the house and the world you never thought to explore.
And you think of all of the things you've seen,
And you wish that you could live in between,
And you're back again,
Only different than before,
After the sky.

Coming home is always a mixed blessing. On the one hand it's nice to be back among friends and family, and who doesn't look forward to sleeping in their own bed after several nights in a hotel? But returning to the office can be jarring, even after just a short conference. When I was a support staff member I would invariably dread whenever my supervisor came back from a library conference, as she'd want to implement all of the new ideas she had picked up from her colleagues... usually all at once!

Now that the tables have turned and I am the one coming back to the office in a hyperstimulated state of mind, I more keenly appreciate the dilemma my previous boss must have found herself in. I try to temper my enthusiasm, but at the same time I don't want my time up in the sky to have been all for naught. Trying to share the creative energy one brings back from a conference without overly disrupting your support staff's daily workflows is a more delicate balancing act than I had imagined when I was on the receiving end, but it's the most important part of attending a library conference in the first place.

This is why we go to conferences, not only so that our experiences there change us for the better, but so that we can share our experience and effect positive changes of our own when we return. It will be a long day indeed -- if ever!-- before this transformative aspect of conference-going can be replicated by other means. Until that day arrives, I will always look forward to the next opportunity to visit the giants in the sky, and as a manager and future administrator I will be sure to advocate that this kind of professional development be properly valued for what it is.

Librarians should be going to conferences not despite declining financial fortunes and shrinking travel budgets, but precisely because of these pressures. It has never been more important for libraries and librarians to share what they know, and there is no better way to facilitate such an exchange of information and experience than by coming together in person. Our email boxes are filled to bursting, our RSS feeders overwhelmed with blog entries, and our social networks are already jammed with so much noise that it is difficult to cull any meaningful signals. Library conferences on the other hand provide an intense albeit brief period where most if not all of our mental and psychic bandwidth can be devoted to absorbing ideas and contributing to the Big Picture issues which so often elude us in our workaday lives.

We need the giants. We need the sky. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a cynic or a fool.

There are Giants in the sky!
There are big tall terrible awesome scary wonderful
Giants in the sky!

How to Leverage your workforce: librarians and the art of the con

"Hire good people."

Writing on the topic of library management, the one and only Will Manley recently evoked the immortal Casey Stengel as an example of how even the best manager in the world is doomed to fail if he doesn't have quality players on his bench:

It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? When he (Casey) managed the Yankees he had Hall of Fame players like Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, and Whitey Ford. When he managed the Mets he had a motley crew of “has beens” and “never weres” like Marv Thronberry and Choo Choo Coleman.

Any time somebody hands me the latest bestseller by the management genius du jour, I mention two words: Casey Stengel.

Then I mention 3 more words: hire good people.

All right, then. But which people?

I've been in something of a curious situation here at my library, where after being obliged to replace two FTEs (or 2/5's of my support staff) in the first 90 days of my tenure as manager I have not been able to make a new hire since, due to uncertain times and the looming prospect of a University-wide library reorganization. As a result, I've had a lot of time to ruminate upon the kind of people I would hire, if only I were given the nod.

While it is tempting to simply fill whatever holes appear in your org chart, when the panic of "OMG who is going to do X, Y, and Z if Joey leaves!" subsides I encourage you to take a step or two back and think of your office more in terms of the big picture than individual workflows. To paraphrase the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus, all workflows flow. Even the very word "workflow" connotes fluidity and change.

In the modern library workplace hiring a person just to perform the tasks that his or her predecessor did is a fool's errand. Instead, you should be thinking in terms that are as broad as possible-- i.e., in archetypes. I've touched on the theme of party balance in gaming and its applicability to library management, but this time I'd like to come at from a slightly different and somewhat less legal angle...

Leverage is a popular television show currently running on TNT. Its premise is quite simple: Nathan Ford (played by Timothy Hutton) is a former insurance investigator turned modern day Robin Hood, leading a gang of semi-reformed criminals who use their unorthodox talents to fight injustice one con at a time. Now why in the name of Melvil Dewey would I compare the library office workplace to a den of thieves? Because in Leverage, every rogue has a different but integral role to play in each week's caper.

First we have the mastermind (the aforementioned Ford, played by Hutton), who is both a skilled planner and an excellent reader of others' motives and intentions. Although the mastermind uses his talents to deploy the resources brought to the team by the other archetypes, it is important to note that the leadership structure in Leverage is not necessarily hierarchical in nature. The mastermind need not always be the boss.

Next is the grifter (Sophie Devereaux, played by Gina Bellman). The grifter is responsible for establishing the suspension of disbelief that makes each con possible, a task which she accomplishes with equal parts social graces and a thorough understanding of human behavior. If the mastermind can predict what a given person will do, the grifter knows what he or she will say-- it is in managing this liminal realm between appearances and actions that the grifter accomplishes her tasks.

Then we come to the hacker (Alec Hardison, played by Aldis Hodge), who lives and breathes in code. The hacker uses technology to circumvent the limits of conventional society, which often put him at odds with the law as well as his fellow man. He is a devotee of the latest in electronics, and is often more attached to his gadgets than he is other people.

After the hacker is the hitter (Eliot Spencer, played by Christian Kane), because sometimes when push comes to shove you'll need someone to do all of that pushing and shoving. Less simply put, whereas the grifter exists to exploit the tension between what seeming and being, the hitter exists to collapse this tension when needed... often with his fists.

Finally you have the thief (Parker, played by Beth Riesgraf). If the mastermind is a cerebral criminal and the grifter a social criminal, the thief is a visceral criminal. She is pure reflex, absent any reckoning of consequence, and delights in what she is able to steal more often than not simply for the sake of stealing it. Unlike the hacker, whose mischief is circumscribes by the limits of his technology, the thief is capable of analyzing and exploiting any system.

Even if you've never watched an episode of Leverage (if you haven't, I strongly suggest you give the show a try!), you can probably already see how well this team meshes. Not only are the archetypes different enough to be complementary in nature, but the team's skill sets are sufficiently overlapping so that they are able to reinforce each other naturally. The mastermind shares skills with the grifter, who shares skills with the thief, who shares skills with the hacker... and so on.

So how do you apply this to the library workplace?

1. Mastermind- This is your Big Picture person, capable of project management and strategic planning. The mastermind also understands the individual strengths and weaknesses of other team members and is able to leverage (no pun intended) these assets accordingly. As I pointed out above, this position is not always the boss. You may in fact have several masterminds in a successful office, each focused on a specific goal or outcome. Not having to rely on a traditional hierarchical organizational structure can be an asset, but it also can present its own managerial challenges. Rather than rely on the arbitrary nature of the org chart, the mastermind secures buy-in by engaging his teammates as per their archetypes.

2. Grifter- Your grifter knows how to Get Things Done by working the system both internally and externally. Libraries are social organizations on multiple levels-- not only does a library depend on the good will of its patron base for harmonious operations, but it also derives its mandate (not to mention its budget allocations) from faculty, deans, corporators, or public officials. At the same time libraries interact with one another, in consortia and other reciprocal arrangements on which we all increasingly depend. The grifter makes sure that you maximize your benefit from these myriad social interactions.

3. Hacker- IT departments are great, but the IT needs of librarians are so peculiar to our profession that there is an increasing need to recruit library staff with developer/programming skills rather than rely on external rosources. Library systems used to be more static, changing every couple years or so; now they are moving targets, thanks to agile development models that reward rapid iteration and field testing by the end users. Living in perpetual Beta can be stressful, but it is also a great opportunity to bend the ear of your vendors and customize their product to your evolving needs. Without your own resident hacker, you are behind the 8-ball in this new synergy.

4. Hitter- No, I'm not advocating violence in the library workplace. The hitter in this context is your throughput muscle, someone on whom you can count to execute and expedite once a given course of action has been decided upon. Hitters are frequently overlooked or dismissed entirely in contemporary management theory, but they are absolutely critical to the operations of any library unit. They may not be the most technically savvy or socially outgoing, nor are they necessarily Big Picture thinkers or natural born troubleshooters, but hitters know how to put their noses to the grindstone, and no library could function adequately without them.

5. Thief- If you haven't figured it out yet, your thief is your troubleshooter. There isn't a problem he or she doesn't delight in trying to solve. Thieves are always testing the limits of your policies and procedures, attempting to find better/faster/cheaper ways of doing things. Sometimes the thief is perceived of as lazy, because unlike the hitter (who is good at following orders, rolling up his/her sleeves, and doing what needs to be done) the thief is constantly thinking of an easier way to do the work at hand. Make no mistake about it- you need thieves as much as you need hitters in your organization, as even the most seemingly efficient of workflows could always stand to be improved in some way, shape, or form.

Okay, so working in a library isn't exactly a criminal enterprise, but the skill set does seem to be disturbingly transferable. "Pimps make the best librarians," says Avi Steinberg in his fabulous Running the Books, detailing his time as a prison librarian in Boston.

Psycho killers, the worst. Ditto con men. Gangsters, gunrunners, bank robbers–adept at crowd control, at collaborating with a small staff, at planning with deliberation and executing with contained fury–all possess the librarian’s basic skill set. Scalpers and loan sharks certainly have a role to play. But even they lack that something, the je ne sais quoi, the elusive it. What would a pimp call it? Yes: the love.

I would beg to differ with Mr. Steinberg about the con men, but otherwise he's right on the money. When putting together the ultimate library team, there's no substitute for proper villains...

The joy of grunt work

Sometimes it's nice to get your hands dirty.

Although we took every possible precaution this year to ensure that we were not caught without student labor during the weeks between the end of Summer School and the start of the Fall semester, Hurricane Irene successfully disrupted our returning students' travel plans just enough that we've been a little short this week nevertheless. So yesterday I got to do something I hardly ever get to do anymore: I rolled up my sleeves and tackled the boxes upon boxes of incoming ILL mail. No meetings, no email, no IM, no phone calls from patrons, colleagues, or other libraries asking for this or that, just me and a box cutter and my favorite playlist of piano medleys on YouTube.

It was the perfect Tuesday afternoon.

No matter how far they may work their way up the org chart, I believe that inside every librarian there's a page or student assistant with a book truck full of titles to be reshelved, or a due date stamper with loans to be checked out, or a tangle of barcode stickers and tattle tape and a pile of new acquisitions to be processed. I've always found library grunt work to be a solace, a form of on-the-clock therapy that is equal parts meditation and good works. No wonder our Medieval predecessors labored in monasteries! I've also enjoyed the kind of grunt work that is done at front line public service desks as well- back when I had more free time, I was a substitute for our Reference Desk, and I always looked forward to getting the call and making myself helpful for an hour or two.

If I could change anything about my job, I would require myself to spend at least an hour or two a day getting my hands dirty, because there's no better way to understand how things work than by doing them yourself. Just in the space of an afternoon I had a couple of insights into how I'll want to train new hires that would not have occurred to me from my office. I was also reminded of how much I truly hate Jiffy Bags, the bane of any ILL librarian's existence- not only did I have a couple of overused bags explode on me, but I also encountered the scariest thing I've ever seen opening ILL mail: a Jiffy Bag containing several smaller Jiffy Bags (ack!).

This is something all librarians should do, especially managers whose regular duties remove them from the daily workflow of their unit. I consider myself fortunate to have had a mentor who had absolutely no reservations about charging into the office and doing whatever it was that needed to be done today. She always told me stories about colleagues who believed that acquiring the MLS somehow made them exempt from doing grunt work, and how she thought that was the most absurd thing she'd ever heard of in her life. I agree wholeheartedly. Not only is grunt work good for the soul, but there's no better way to build morale in your office than by showing your staff that you, too, are willing to break a sweat when the going gets tough.

But please, folks, I beg of you-- no more Jiffy Bags!

OK, so when do we panic?

If you're a librarian and you've been following Costco v. Omega Watch from the start, then I award you extra credit. This case, which involved Costco's practice of buying Omega's watches from abroad and selling them in their stores at huge discounts as loss-leaders meant to attract shoppers, was predicated on whether or not items manufactured overseas enjoyed the same "First Sale" protections that items produced in the United States- i.e., that once you bought something, it was yours to lend, give away, or resell as you saw fit. The Doctrine of First Sale therefore not only permits the existence of used book, game, and music/video stores, but it is also the portion of copyright law on which libraries rely in order to lend materials to patrons.

So needless to say, it was a little unnerving to watch this case make its way up to the 9th Circuit, where it was ruled that foreign works did not in fact enjoy the same First Sale protections as items manufactured domestically. At the time only a few librarians were really paying attention to this, as A. It involved watches, not books and B. Surely the intent of Omega's lawsuit was meant to circumscribe the actions of another for-profit company and not limit the lawful operations of such institutions as libraries. Even when the news broke that Costco would appeal the case to the Supreme Court I remember getting eye rolls and shrugs from my colleagues when I mentioned the case and its potential impact on our very large collection of foreign monographs.

As it turned out, the SCOTUS affirmed the 9th Circuit's ruling in a 4-4 split decision. Because it had not been a majority ruling, however, its applicability beyond that specific case was negligible. So score one for the status quo? Not so fast. For no sooner did observers point out that this decision left the field ripe for another similar lawsuit than the 2nd Circuit ruled once again that the Doctrine of First Sale did not protect the resale of foreign-produced items-- only this time the items in question were not watches, but books.

Supap Kirtsaeng had founded a niche business whereby he would purchase textbooks published by John Wiley in Asia, import them into the United States, and resell them for a profit. Despite the fact that Wiley had marked these books for limited international distribution only, Kirtsaeng insisted that because the items were legally purchased overseas, the Doctrine of First Sale still applied. Wiley disagreed, sued, and won. Although the 2nd Circuit acknowledged the murkiness of the law and predicted that its ruling would no doubt generate some controversy, nevertheless it found that First Sale protections could not be assumed for items that were manufactured overseas.

Unlike Costco v. Omega Watch, a lot of librarians took note of 2nd Circuit's ruling in John Wiley and Sons v. Kirtsaeng. To my profession's credit, I see a lot less hand-waving and a lot more hand-wringing this time around, but is it enough? With Fair Use itself being called into question in the ongoing Georgia State University copyright case, you don't have to be paranoid to wonder whether there isn't a concerted effort going on to rig the table in favor of a new licensed business model for content where every time a patron or user accesses a given item, money changes hands. Publishers have made it clear that they believe they deserve a cut from the used game/book/CD/DVD market for years, and now that they have the technological wherewithal to make that happen it's just a matter of squelching those pesky laws and legal exemptions by which alternate business models are currently suffered.

Whether or not libraries are being deliberately targeted right now is quite beside the point, because by then it will be way too late for us to do anything about it. Now is the time for libraries and librarians to mobilize, educate, and advocate. A great introduction to copyright, its intent, its limits, its abuses, and its exemptions is Teaching Copyright, a collection of readings, links, and other instructional materials collated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Find out if your library has a copyright guru, and if it doesn't either ask why not or become one yourself. Share what you know with your colleagues. Libraries depend on a fair reading of copyright law and vigorous exercise of its many exemptions for their our existence, which means every librarian is a part of this struggle, whether they know it or not! Make sure they are aware of what's at stake here.

Everything I know about management, I learned from Gary Gygax

Today's post is inspired by GenCon, which just wrapped up this past Sunday in Indianapolis. While I didn't get a chance to go this year, I've been catching up with the blog/Twitter/Facebook posts from those who did, so when I sat down to write this morning the pieces of this theme that I'd been kicking around for quite some time just seemed to fall into place finally. So put on your robe and wizard hat and enjoy!

Full disclosure: I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons since I was in elementary school in the early 80's, when thanks to Jack Chick and a fearmongering movie called Mazes and Monsters (starring a very young Tom Hanks) owning a set of polyhedral dice was tantamount to consorting with Satan himself. Although I have struggled over the years with my identity as a gamer, this soul-searching never actually prevented me from playing or running various roleplaying games-- mostly running them, as it turned out, as I found worldbuilding a much more satisfying outlet than simply playing the part of one character in said fantasy world.

Indeed, as I look back on my years behind the Dungeon Master's screen, I realize that in addition to scratching that creative itch, I was busy building the exact skill set that I would draw upon as a library manager later in life. Okay, maybe there are no funny dice involved in running a library office, and if the dragons in your workplace aren't of the metaphorical variety you might want to contact OSHA or your local shop steward, but being able to manage a group of several individuals of varying ages, backgrounds, and temperaments through a shared goal-based narrative while keeping things both fair and entertaining is pretty damned close to my current job description! Therefore, I present to you a primer in Gygaxian Management, named of course after Dungeons & Dragons creator E. Gary Gygax. To wit:

1. It's about having fun. Remember my post a couple of weeks back about the importance of fun in the workplace? Well, this is where it comes from for me. When I sit down to run a session of D&D, it is my ultimate goal that everyone walks away from the table happy-- even if their characters encounter adversity and their best-laid plans go off the rails. Bad die rolls and unexpected character deaths are just as much a part of the gaming landscape as unhappy patrons and unanticipated workflow disasters are in the library workplace. My job in either situation is to keep spirits high while finding a way to keep things going, so that my players/workers actually feel like coming back even if nothing that day turned out as planned.

2. Rules are rules, but there isn't a rule for everything. Despite the fact that D&D (and myriad other RPGs) have made a cottaqe industry out of selling rulebook after rulebook to its deep-pocketed base of hardcore gamer customers, your players will invariably want to do something which is not governed by the small library of tomes amassed on the gaming table. Similarly, one of the most frustrating aspects of a service-based job like library management is that while there are so many rules that you can't possibly master them all no matter how many years you spend in your position, you will frequently find yourself asked to adjudicate on a matter where even the best-documented policies and procedures will fail you.

Both behind the screen and in the office it falls on my shoulders to analyze the situation, consider the spirit and intent of the existing guidelines, and then make my best informed guess as to proceed. Making field rulings is a large part of what a manager does, because otherwise progress would grind to a standstill as every last extenuating circumstance was hashed and rehashed to death; the same is true for a Dungeon Master, who needs to balance playing the game "by the book" with keeping the action lively for all players involved.

3. Die rolls are meant to be fudged, and rules are made to be broken. Sometimes however the problem is not that a given rule doesn't exist, but that its application in a particular circumstance would be contrary to the spirit of play. Say the party of adventurers are in the thick of battle and I roll a series of critical hits for the monsters they're fighting that I know will result in the death of the entire group (otherwise known as a Total Party Kill or TPK). Do I let the dice fall as they may, or do I pull my punches somewhat so that the group is able to prevail, but only by the skin of their teeth?

Following the rules to the letter and respecting die rolls is actually quite a bone of contention in RPG circles, but I've always believed that it is a Dungeon Master's duty to err on the side of Awesome. Ditto for the library manager. When a patron chafes against a local policy, instead of getting your back up, ask yourself whether the rule is in fact helping or hindering your patron's library experience. For example, if your patron is trying to finish his/her dissertation and really needs these 20 ILL articles ASAP, does it really make sense to hold that person to a daily request limit for the sake of honoring an arbitrary policy? Rules speak to the general, whereas every player or patron has specific wants and needs. This is by no means an invitation to make things up as you go along, but never let a stupid rule keep you from doing your job.

4. Retcons are bad for party morale, so use them sparingly. All of the above about breaking rules having been said, you must take care to be clear and consistent when you do make a field ruling or reverse a decision at the table. Players crave continuity, as it allows them to more fully immerse themselves in your RPG setting-- violating the rules of the shared universe that you've agreed upon, even if your intentions are good, will therefore often be seen as a "retcon" and be seen in a negative light. Similarly your staff also desire to operate in an environment with well-defined rules and clear cut expectations. While you may feel like a library superhero whenever you swoop in and ask your direct reports to reverse X, Y, and Z at a patron or colleague's behest/request, managing to the exception will quickly erode your staff's morale and inevitably lead your them to think that you do not trust their own judgement and expertise.

So doesn't this advice directly contradict what I told you in points 2 and 3? Yes- yes, it does. Welcome to management! Yours is a constant balancing act between trying to do what is fair for your patrons and what is fair for your staff. This means being as transparent as possible about the decisions you do make, so that even if someone disagrees with your ruling, they understand that you are doing your best to act in good faith.

5. A well-balanced party takes all kinds. As Dungeons & Dragons has evolved over the years through several successive editions (it is currently in its 4th such incarnation), it has increasingly focused on "game balance" as one of its design goals. To be fair, D&D has always favored a well-balanced party of adventurers: fighters for muscle, clerics for healing, wizards for offensive magic, and thieves for picking locks and disarming traps.

This propensity for balance at the table goes beyond mere character classes, however, and into the personality of the players themselves. Every table has its "theater major," who loves hamming it up during the actual roleplaying portion of the game; the "minimaxer," who delights in exploiting the limits of the RPG's mechanics itself; the "rules lawyer," who will call the DM out for inadequate or incorrect rulings; the "powergamer/munchkin," who takes winning very seriously and may storm away from the table in a huff if his/her character dies or they blow a critical roll; and the "natural born player," who just loves the game itself and enjoys any opportunity to play it, regardless of how their dice roll.

To be successful, a gaming group needs a healthy mix of these archetypes, as they both complement one another as well as serve as checks against each others' worst tendencies. This is the same for a successful office as well-- in order to succeed, I need staff who are customer-friendly, staff who push the limits of our policies/procedures, staff who are good at enforcing said policies and procedures, staff who take their work so seriously that it can cause them agita when things don't go quite right, as well as staff who simply appreciate the job and can provide some much-needed perspective for those of us who occasionally get a little too emotionally invested in the daily grind. Too much of any one of these groups is a recipe for disaster, but find just the right balance and you are golden, my friend.

6. Don't play favorites. Cultivating a balanced table means that you can't favor any one player just because he or she is your best friend, or because their style of play is similar to your own (i.e., selection bias). It also means making sure that you are not inadvertently shutting people out just because they don't speak up as often or as loudly as the other players. While some players simply favor less active engagement than others, it is your job to make every effort to be inclusive at the table, so as not to exclude by omission. It goes without saying of course that you should never, ever take out any personal animus on a player, even if the only things at stake are hit points and imaginary treasure. A good Dungeon Master doesn't need to be best friends with everyone at the table; a truly great DM could run a successful game with his mortal enemies.

Now it is time for a painful admission: back when I was a young and foolish Dungeon Master, I needlessly harassed my little brother. Instead of being delighted that he had shown any interest in D&D whatsoever, I went out of my way to torture his poor character until he left the game in tears, never to return. Sure, this was probably more about sibling rivalry than anything else, but even so I ended up driving him away from any interest in roleplaying games whatsoever in the process. Who knows what could have been, had I not been such a jerk? Maybe my brother and I would have had gaming in common throughout all these years, along with our other shared interests.

It is easy to see how this basic rule also holds true for the workplace. Whether it is intentional or not, feelings of exclusion are absolutely toxic in any office environment, and can lead to more serious performance or morale problems. "The boss is not your friend" is a cliche often evoked in a negative context, but if you think of your role as the facilitator of your office you can see the wisdom it is meant to encapsulate.

7. It's not whether you win or lose. The last point is simple, short, and sweet. Whether I'm winning or losing at the gaming table, I enjoy every moment of it, and try to make sure that my players share in this enjoyment. The same goes for my workplace. I may not be able to control every outcome, and there may be days where the workflow and patron needs are so overwhelming that the best we can do is hang on for dear life, but I will do my best to make sure that my staff leave at the end of the day feeling valued and with a sense of accomplishment. We may not always be able to slay the dragon, but in the end it's the struggle itself which makes the whole endeavor epic, and not the outcome itself.

So thanks, Gary. You taught me more than I could have possibly imagined. Now let's roll for Initiative before attacking the rest of the day...

On 800-pound Krakens and missing the boat

On her excellent blog Attempting Elegance Jenica Rogers has a great post about the current brouhaha surrounding Netflix and its recent announcement that it would be changing its pricing structure more or less to disincentivize its DVD business and shore up its streaming revenues in advance of what are going to be catastrophic increases in digital licensing fees over the next year or two as its current sweetheart deals with content providers expire.  Rather than express shock or outrage at Netflix, Jenica says the only surprise here should be that any of us-- especially those of us in the library community-- are still surprised:

Why is anyone surprised by this? Or outraged? If you’re an information professional paying attention to the information economy, why did you  not see this coming? Why are we doomed to repeat our shock and horror over and over and over again? What is with this naivety we have that somehow The Next Big Corporation won’t actually act like A Big Corporation about their information commodities? This is our world. This is the information economy. Elsevier, Wexis, the American Chemical Society, HarperCollins, Amazon, the RIAA, the movie studios — they don’t love libraries (or the consumer) the way we think that we should be loved. And they sure as hell aren’t looking out for our best interests. No one is. Only us.

This has been more or less my reaction as well.  The beauty of Netflix's streaming online video is that it so successfully flew under everyone's radar for as long as it did, but perhaps by doing so they actually did us a massive disservice.  For one brief shining moment Netflix seemed to be offering a product that embodied everything that the techno-utopians said the Internet should be offering us.  Instead of paying cable companies a cool C-note every month for a paltry selection of "on demand" television shows and movies (many of which we had to pay extra for anyway), the slayer of Blockbuster comes along and gave us a thousand times the selection for the price of a small cheese pizza.  How could Netflix not succeed?  It seemed to good to be true.

Guess what?  It was too good to be true.  No one expected Netflix to make such a bold end-run around the content providers and traditional lines of distribution--  least of all the companies that had been disintermediated-- but as soon as it became clear that this is indeed what happened and that Netflix represented a clear and present danger to the home entertainment market the battle lines were quickly drawn.  Internet service providers suddenly started to rediscover the joys of bandwidth caps (even while the prices of delivering hi-speed broadband services were dropping), while rightsholders began jacking up the aforementioned digital licensing fees or denying permission altogether for content that Netflix had originally been able to license for a song.

The old media dinosaurs may be slow on the uptake, but they can still be quite ruthless.  Personally I don't blame Netflix in the slightest for doing what they felt they had to do in light of such organized resistance to their business model, and I suspect that a lot of the animus currently being unleashed at Netflix for its pricing changes would be directed elsewhere if the company had done a better job of explaining to its customers exactly why it was doing what it was doing:  i.e. "They are trying to kill us."  Netflix instead chose to downplay the context of these changes, and thus missed a unique opportunity to enlist us in their battle to provide a better entertainment alternative.

There's an unprecedented amount of anger and mistrust towards traditional content providers out there right now, and I think Netflix underestimated how much they were tapping into that as part of their business model.  Whether or not they can regain the trust of those whom they have alienated remains to be seen.  Meanwhile, Jenica wonders if we as librarians are not yet again ignoring the window of opportunity that the Netflix fiasco has reopened regarding the proper balance of access to information and the fair remuneration to content creators and/or rightsholders in the new digital marketplace:

More important than my personal frustration, I think that libraries have a moment in the next 48 to 72 hours in which someone in our community could draw the line publicly connecting our information brokering challenges and The Netflix Thing. The public is furious about this, and there’s an advocacy moment that we should leap on. “Libraries are in trouble and suffering — just like you are.  This is part of a bigger problem, and we’re feeling the pain, too. Think Netflix and the studios suck? Check out THESE stories about ebooks!”

Jenica is exactly right-- this is part of a bigger problem.  And I think she's also right that we as librarians will collectively miss the boat in seizing the moment to address it.  This boat will be missed because we have not yet learned to advocate as a profession on the digital front, as we do on other issues such as the right to privacy and intellectual freedom.  Part of the reason for this is that a given library or consortium's access to digital content is dependent wholly on whatever individual contract it is able to secure with the provider, creating a divide-and-conquer situation in which our collective advocacy powers have effectively been disrupted.  But I suspect that the real reason that we're unwilling to to do so is the very real prospect of getting sued for testing the waters beyond what has been established as being absolutely safe.  This is the 800-pound Kraken that nobody wants to talk about, but it's lurking out there nevertheless, waiting to sink anyone impetuous enough to steer their boat out past the metaphorical bar.

We have been told over and over that we as librarians need to be more vigorous in our interpretations of Fair Use, while at the same time we are watching Georgia State get the pants sued off of it for doing just that.  Already our institutional legal counsels are as a whole gunshy about pushing the boundaries of copyright law-- what do you think will happen if the publishers carry the day against Georgia State?  No one wants to be a target, but unfortunately U.S. Copyright Law is designed such that the only way to fully exercise your rights to Fair Use and other perfectly legal exceptions to the rights of the copyright holder is to paint a bullseye on your chest.  Is it any wonder then that few if any individual libraries or librarians are willing to take a stand on this issue?

What we fail to realize as a profession, however, is that none of the other advocacy that we do as librarians will amount to so much as a hill of beans if we allow the digital future to be written wholly by other parties.  If we don't collectively demand a seat at the table on this issue, the content producers and their providers are perfectly happy with locking us out the restaurant for good.  How I wish we could permanently enlist someone like Cory Doctorow-- a friend of libraries and outspoken critic of current intellectual property laws-- to help mobilize librarians around this cause as he so clearly has with other issues, but fundamentally it rests on the shoulders of every librarian to recognize that our very enterprise is at stake here.  Like Jenica, I'm not optimistic at all that anything will happen this time around, but I still hold out hope that we will get our shit together before it's entirely too late.

UPDATE:  Who better than iCarly's Jerry Trainor to offer some closing thoughts on l'affaire Netflix...