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I set aside my pre-LIANZA preparation to note that the theme for the past several weeks in LibraryLand is: be bold. (Warning, the following blog post is a babblish mish-mosh; I’m so busy I had to abandon plans to brew the White House beer for a local competition, let alone structure or revise this writing.)

Last week, Hachette Book Group announced it would “hike the price of backlist ebooks to the library market by 220% starting October 1″ — this, after ‘agreeing’ last May to re-enter the ebook market.

ALA President Maureen Sullivan organized a prompt and bold response, stating that librarians are “weary of faltering half-steps” and commenting, “‘Now we must ask, “With friends like these …’.” (To which Jamie LaRue added, “Maybe what we need is a smarter group of friends.”)

Sullivan has tasked ALA’s Digital Content and Libraries Working Group to develop “more aggressive” strategies — a great call to action, in keeping with her presidential focus on advocacy. This isn’t to suggest that anyone, including Sullivan, believes an ALA working group is the only response to an issue, or that the rest of us don’t have work to do, but it’s important that our association take swift, formal, and bold action.

Given that, it’s sad that one of the last editorials from Francine Fialkoff before her departure from Library Journal after a highly distinguished career was a meandering swat at ALA committees. Most of us understand that committees are part of the larger landscape of advocacy and action–not solutions in themselves, but nonetheless contributing to solutions.

I remember being told, ages ago, that 85% of information transfer among scientists is informal, and I’d be willing to agree that applied to library leadership, as well. Many a library leader germinated leadership skills, ideas, and powerful connections within the world of professional organizations. Look at the truly significant thought leaders, and most cut their teeth through organizational participation. To simply write off the role of committees is to encourage learned helplessness toward organizational action — to give up in advance.

Does ALA drive us crazy sometimes? Are there committees — even entire divisions — mired in dysfunction? Does a bear poop in the woods? All human endeavors are destined to be flawed and somewhat crazy-making; “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Work through and around the flaws (and if need be, shift your efforts away from the fully dysfunctional), and experience the usefulness.

Speaking of work to do and the faith and skills to make it happen, Jenica Rogers and peers in the SUNY network have spoken truth to the powerful journal publishers and their — no other phrase for it — price-gouging behavior: “SUNY Potsdam will not be subscribing to an American Chemical Society online journal package for 2013.”

To underscore just how radical this is, Jenica spells out that the American Chemical Society “is in the unique position of both approving programs and selling the content necessary for approval” — an egregious conflict of interest.  (I’m wondering how unique this is, actually.) For this, the ACS extorts free labor from faculty who have no choice but to publish (or perish) — free labor to the ACS, but certainly not free to the supporting institutions — then turn around to charge increasingly high prices for their product. Jenica notes that “the ACS package would have consumed more than 10% of my total acquisitions budget, just for journals for this one department.”

N.b.: this also points to the importance of including librarians — or at least librarian-informed judgment –  in the university program approval and review process; some universities understand this, while others do not. It is to Jenica’s credit that she has built the organizational relationships to make possible the necessary conversations to do what elsewhere would be unthinkable.

These collection conversations are being held in an interesting space of tension and change. Last Friday we held library design sessions all day, led by a professional library space planner.  At one point, in a conversation about reducing print collections to provide more study space, the planner commented that accreditors need to understand that the assessment of the value the campus library has to reorient itself from being heavily collection-focused to the services libraries provide.

In some ways I believe (or perhaps hope) this is happening. One clue to that is the workshops our regional accrediting agency is holding: I don’t see one on collection strength in libraries, but I do see one on information literacy. But to see how far we across LibraryLand have to go, look at the standards for elite research libraries. Of course the collections in these libraries are important. But in isolation, these statistics are not much more than collection-focused bean-counting. Would you really want to brag that your library was number one in microfilm holdings?  The statistics may provide some insight into the readiness of any university to support skilled research, but there are no meaningful indicators, beyond what can be inferred from personnel capacity, about the library’s ability to produce researchers.

And yet! As Barbara Fister keeps arguing (and as I wrote earlier this year in An ebook and a hard place), shifting the focus from beans to soup (as it were) isn’t an excuse for abandoning our responsibilities to the memory work that has been core to who we are for thousands of years. We are in tension with all of this: the shift from print to digital; the battles of ownership and access; the transformation from box-of-books to vital commons.

Imagine  if the university accreditors showed up and asked how many journal holdings were open access — or secured by LOCKSS — or published by libraries or universities. Imagine too if the ALA LIS program accreditation committee held schools’ feet to the fire for producing graduates who understood (as much as any of us do) the complex publishing landscape and our roles in it as advocates and defenders — measurable with a four-hour closed-book final exam. If I’m going to imagine, I might as well be bold about it.

Meanwhile, my brain is a jumble of PowerPoint, workshop handouts, Convocation, pants-hemming, two weeks of meetings to be squeezed into one, and packing lists, while visions of Lamingtons dance through my dreams.

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Pollyanna

Two years ago today I started my journey as a library director at Cupcake U (as I sometimes call My Place Of Work).  These first two years have been exhilarating, challenging, growth-inducing, hair-graying, mind-bending, mirth-generating, and never boring. (I’m always surprised when librarians say budgets are boring. There’s nothing boring about money! Yum, yum, money!)

I have the following 15 reflections. Many are not new revelations for me–not in this job, not even in this career. But they are the reflections that resonate with me when I think about where I’ve been since October 30, 2009.

1. It’s worth repeating: it’s my job to stay positive, and to build that point of view in others in and out of the library. Plus staying positive feels good. That doesn’t mean I can’t see or respond to problems; it just means that I intentionally hold at bay what Karen Armstrong calls our “reptilian brain.” My proudest moment was when someone referred to me as “Pollyanna-ish.” Radical optimism? Bring it on!
2. Practicing radical hospitality in a library is spiritually profound. It makes me a better person to constantly ask, how can we serve our users better? How can I go the extra mile for them? How can I surprise them with better service than they expected? How can I grow our extravagant welcome? (That can mean everything from improving the foyer signage to adding a fantastic new service to communicating better to dealing with difficult people and enforcing reasonable guidelines.)
3. I am getting a fresh lesson in the signs of a welcoming organization: people sleep in our chairs, eat at our tables, hang out just to hang out, ask to hold events in our rooms and spaces, joke with us and at us, run into my office to ask if I have any pain reliever (or a pen or a piece of paper or whatever), respond in droves to our surveys, sign up for our Vision Task Force, and above all, use our services. Print circulation — which I had written off as dead, and frankly wasn’t focused on — has tripled from a year ago, with no one single driver responsible. Everything else–walk-in traffic, e-resource usage, event attendance–is growing.
4. With all that, I still have to remind myself that I’m working in a library that has had almost no updates in over 50 years, has a computer lab with 9-year-old PCs, is hot in the summer and cold in the winter, etc. I continually force myself to step back and see the library with the eyes of prospective students or faculty (as well as the eyes of a librarian who has toured countless libraries, often with camera in hand).
5. Building and maintaining relationships is my core library service. I think of it as a bus. I am always asking, who’s on board? Who needs to get on board? Who’s moving toward the door?
6. The buck really does stop here. A stopped sink or a student worker who doesn’t show up is my problem. It may not be something I solve directly, but I own it.
7. Success is never owned; it’s shared among many. It takes a village.
8. Higher education is fascinating. I mean that sincerely. It’s also extremely predictable, and again, I mean that sincerely. You can bet that any time you see a situation or observe conflict between agencies, or note a pattern of behavior in a particular species (Homo Facultus, for example), it’s not even close to sui generis.
9. It is easier to problem-solve around enduring traits than to try to chang
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Are you a spork?

We’ve posted another position at My Place of Work — one that like the last position for Head of Access Services (now filled by an excellent librarian-to-be) is designed to be transformative. Not to mention fun, absorbing, interesting, challenging, and greatly satisfying.

I’m a little — well, really, quite — unhappy with how I worded the conclusion of the job ad:

This is a position ideally suited for a librarian with a solid grounding in traditional library services who seeks more responsibility and a wide range of job knowledge.

What I meant was “the technology part is really, really important — not just what you know, but your worldview and your ability to synthesize and evolve — but you also need to be a strong, upbeat library generalist with a penchant for learning.”

And what THAT means is you need to know a little MARC and a little XML, have a great teaching presence, have some insights into the database acquisitions process and a knack for working with vendors, get along with faculty, students, and staff, be able to switch quickly among tasks and know when a good B+ is acceptable and when it needs to be an A or a C, enjoy the challenge of working in a resource-limited environment, and be familiar enough with modern circ, reserves, ILL, and acquisitions practices to do everything from pitch in at the desk as needed to provide mile-high oversight for our book selection process, which is being reoriented toward faculty selections and shelf-ready materials.

And then, as needs change and evolve, do other things As They Arise.

Short-range, the most pressing leadership opportunities for this position are information literacy and electronic resource management. (For you non-librarians out there, ERM is its own library specialty — them what’s in charge of the databases.)

We are rethinking information literacy: how it’s delivered, to whom, and by whom, and when; its assessment models, its benchmarking — all of it. This is not just a teaching responsibility, but a planning, sales, and evangelism position. The community is open to change here, but they need leadership. Plus you have to be able to see around corners and know what’s ahead.

(Speaking of which, immersed in spreadsheets galore, I’m already beginning to feel like the little old administrator who’s completely out of it… at MPOW folks were talking about Chrome for the Mac, and there I was peeping, “Chrome came out for the Mac? What?”)

ERM is currently juggled between me and our systems person, who is also responsible for educational technology for faculty. You do not need to be steeped in ERM experience, but you need to know what ERM is and why it’s important, and have the requisite technical and organizational skills to keep the ERM ship afloat — from remote-access configuration to thinking hard and strategically about the resources we license — so that I can spend  more time shaking the money tree and, if it yields fruit, gathering its harvest, while continuing and expanding events, outreach, and communications.

The list goes on. Recently the Education department agreed to a pilot for electronic theses. A peer university shared their policies and procedures. We even have a clean, empty ContentDM instance. Now it just needs to happen. The faculty are also clearly ready for a liaison program, and we need to divide responsibilities and plan that out. And so

Rainbow by Flickr user Proggie

My Place Of Work is one of the most diverse universities in the United States. That’s a fact we’re very proud of, and it’s an environment I enjoy. Diversity was a matter-of-fact reality in the middle-class San Francisco neighborhood I grew up in, and throughout my life, when I’ve been in environments flavored with only one or two dominant ethnic groups, I have missed God’s rainbow.

So when friends recommended the rather spendy but well-regarded ACRL-Harvard institute for new academic directors, I was intrigued to see that ACRL offered a “diversity” scholarship, until I read the fine print:

ACRL is pleased to announce the availability of a scholarship to support participation at the 2010 ACRL/Harvard Leadership Institute. The scholarship covers the cost of tuition ($2,600) and a $1,500 travel stipend. In support of ACRL’s commitment to librarians serving diverse communities, the scholarship is for individuals currently working in Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges or Universities, or those employed at Hispanic Serving Institutions.

In other words, ACRL’s “diversity” is limited to institutions serving dominant majorities of ethnic groups.

I have no quarrel with these universities being eligible for this scholarship. I went to a women’s college (well, two, to be precise–Mills and then Barnard) because I was seeking my own “dominant majority” experience, and I appreciate how important that can be, and I salute ACRL for their attention to these institutions.

But ACRL should think beyond such a narrow definition of diversity and include institutions that are doing the very hard work of serving highly diverse student bodies.

We have challenges at MPOW: many of our students are first-generation college students; many arrive woefully unprepared for their first year of college; many struggle financially. We also have strengths, perhaps the most notable being the ineffable benefits–professionally, but also spiritually–of living, studying, and working inside this numinous rainbow.

For that matter, why not add income level to the mix? Those of us in higher ed know the powerful ties between family income level and risk factors for student success. Isn’t economic status its own diversity challenge–the issue that Martin Luther King graduated to in his last years on this planet?

Not only that, but some schools have more money than others, and tuition-dependent schools serving first-generation students are the least likely to have $4100 sitting around. I feel very well supported by MPOW–this is the best library job I’ve ever had–but the need is great in so many directions here, and I’ve already been cannibalizing important line items to do things like update our ancient public computers, last “refreshed” in 2002 and 2004.  I’ve already robbed Peter to pay Paul, and I can’t turn around and hit up Mary for some dinero.

ACRL means well, but if it were truly committed to “librarians serving diverse communities,” it would broaden its definition of “diversity.” Meanwhile, I’ll keep scraping together my leadership education from my peers at equally diverse universities, while I continue enjoying life within the rainbow’s beautiful spectrum.

Going into ALA’s Midwinter Meeting last month, I knew Twitter was going to play a much more prominent role than it had in the past. It’s been used heavily at other librarian conferences, but usually in a more social way or as commentary on content during the event. However, Midwinter is a different beast, as it’s primarily a business meeting for the Association, so I wondered how much of that work would happen on Twitter this time around.

Most of the people on ALA’s staff, like most people anywhere, have never heard of Twitter, let alone used it, so I wanted to give them a heads up in case it came up in meetings or in conversations. A couple of years ago, the IT department at ALA implemented monthly update meetings open to all staff, and since we had one scheduled right before Midwinter, I took advantage of the opportunity to highlight Twitter, what it is, and how a few units are using it.

And then we all headed to Denver.

And wow did Twitter play a big part. Kenley Neufeld sums it up pretty well, and even notes how fun the experience was. If you had asked me, I wouldn’t have predicted that four councilors would tweet from the floor during council sessions, thereby providing an effective, real-time transcript of what was happening. Even beyond that, though, I got to participate in meetings I wasn’t physically at (from within other meetings), as did people who weren’t even in Denver. And good things came from all of it (including a helpful guide for what *not* to do).

So when we got back, I decided to do a presentation at the February ITTS Update meeting about Twitter on ALA. Not ALA on Twitter, but Twitter’s effect on the Association and the story of Midwinter that Twitter produced. Luckily, many of the people who tweet about us have a sense of humor, so there were some good laughs in the screenshots, especially about our content management system (Collage). So thank you to everyone who publicly tweeted about us in January, especially at Midwinter, because you helped me illustrate a moment in time when something changed for ALA. I definitely think communication and conferences will never be the same for our organization, and I’m fascinated to see where this all leads.

The only problem with doing these two talks for staff is that I’m so buried in work on launching ALA Connect that I don’t have time to do any training right now. Earlier this month, Timothy Vollmer, an ALA employee at our Washington Office tweeted, “in horrible ironic moment, U.S. Congress is moving faster than ALA.”

For the last month, that’s how I’ve felt at ALA. Units are moving faster than I can, and several have started new Twitter accounts. On the one hand, huzzah! On the other hand, they’re flying a little blind (so please cut them a little slack while they get their Twitter sea legs).

Since I really don’t have time to do training right now, I wanted to pull together a few resources to point my co-workers to until we can do something more formal. I’m also including some explanations for how I track ALA on Twitter in case others want to try these strategies, too.

Since I think it could be useful to others, I’m posting the list here, rather than just sending the information out in an email to staff. If you have additional suggestions, please include them in the comments.

1. Make sure you read up on some of the best practices for using Twitter. There are many out there, such as Twitter 101: 8 Tips to Get Started on Twitter and How to Succeed at Twitter. At bare minimum, make sure you add an avatar and fill out the bio section, including a link back to your website.
    
2. I use Twitter personally, and I use the ALAannual and ALAmw accounts for work. It’s not easy to track two accounts throughout the day. So here’s the routine I’ve established to this point.
   1. First thing in the morning, I search Twitter for references to ALA. If it’s something I can respond to, I do. If it’s not something in my area (IT), I pass along the information.
   2. I use TweetDeck to try to track my Twitterstream throughout the day. It’s easily the best tool I’ve found for two reasons. First, it lets me set up different groups of people I’m following, so I’ve set up a group showing all the ALA Twitter accounts and another of friends I want to track more closely. Second, it lets me do a search within groups by filtering for a term. So a couple of times a day, I’ll filter everyone I’m following for the term “ALA.” I can usually get a heads up about anything major just by doing this. At the end of the day, I do another search of Twitter just to make sure I haven’t missed anything. ALA staff, if you want to try TweetDeck, I think ITTS will have to install it for you, so contact us to request an install. There’s also a helpful video explaining How to Tweetdeck Like a Pro.
       
3. I have a NetVibes page set up to track ALA as a term across multiple sites. For example, the Twitter search appears here, although I don’t find it as easy to scan as the list on the Twitter site or in TweetDeck. But I also have RSS feeds from news sites and FriendFeed displaying on this one page, so it can be handy for a quick scan. ALA staff, if you want help setting up something like this for yourself, please let me know.
    
4. If you have a blog or other useful, not overwhelming RSS feed, use TwitterFeed to automatically have notifications of new items sent to Twitter.
    
5. If you’re not using TweetDeck to automatically shorten URLs, you can use TinyURL or is.gd. A URL like http://www.ala.org/heading/subheading/anotherheading/anothersubheading/title/index.cfm should *never* appear in a tweet.
    

As I was getting ready to hit the “publish” button, I saw Phil Bradley’s post about CILIP and Twitter (or lack thereof). It made me realize how far ALA has come, and how lucky I am to work in an environment where I’m allowed to experiment in these spaces and help integrate them into the Association. I live in a really special place right now, both professionally and personally, and I don’t take that for granted.

I’ve really been feeling my Gen Xness the last few months. I dislike framing Web 2.0 or Library 2.0 as generational issues (I think it has far more to do with whether you’re used to creating and sharing content overall), but the rise of Twitter and FriendFeed in particular have made me feel like even more of a bridge because I get stretched thin trying to explain both sides of an issue to two groups who aren’t really talking to each other about these things. Like Johnny Cash, I walk the line.

As a GenX bridge, one side of me understands the Boomer confusion at these public posts and wonders why these folks can’t just call, email, or text a person who could actually do something about the problem they’re encountering. Recently, I felt this most acutely when Jason Griffey took the time to write a blog post disagreeing with two rules for submitting questions to ALA presidential candidates on YouTube. I’m close enough to the traditional, Boomer norms of communication that when I first read Jason’s post, my immediate reaction was to sigh and wonder why he couldn’t have just contacted someone at MPOW to request that the rules be changed. The “direct” approach seems like the logical one for affecting change and having your voice heard.

And then the Millennial side of the bridge kicked in and I chided myself, because Jason actually cared enough to take the time to write that post instead of just a 140-character rant. He explained his reasoning in what has (surprisingly) become a long-form medium online (blogging). In hindsight, his post helped change one of the rules he disagreed with, so it was better that he posted publicly where everyone could read it and comment, including us. And honestly, some of the comments on microblogging sites are complaints that someone did try to call or email a human being and didn’t get a good response, so it’s not that these generational preferences are exclusive. Writing a blog post these days is a pretty high level of engagement, and caring enough to post a tweet or FriendFeed comment is right behind that in terms of trying to get our attention (hey, at least MPOW isn’t mediocre).

My personal lesson from these recent experiences is that it’s important for associations (and libraries) to understand that every blog post, every tweet, every FF comment is like a letter to the editor or someone standing up in a membership meeting and voicing a complaint. They’re the 21st century equivalent of a phone call or a conversation in the hallway at a conference, and we have to take them just as seriously and respond to them the same way we would those 20th century methods of communication. It’s not that Boomers want to help any less, but I think they’re used to helping people one-on-one, even online. For many members who likely trend younger, the new channels are their preferred ones for these types of comments, and not just for complaints. There isn’t anything wrong with either approach, but they’re ships crossing in the night, and they don’t lead to conversations between the two sides that would improve communication.

Sometimes I think attacking MPOW is a national sport, so it can be depressing being the person constantly relaying what’s being said about us online. But it’s important for those of us in the middle to be that bridge and find compromises that work for everyone. So I especially appreciate those folks who take the time to comment online in a constructive way (regardless of the channel), because it helps me build that bridge.

This strain isn’t new, but I’m curious to know if other Gen Xers are feeling an increase in this area due to microblogging sites? Have you found successful strategies for improving communication around these new channels? I have some ideas that I’m going to try to implement at work, and I’ll report back here over time, but I’d love to hear how others are handling being at this intersection.

One of the fun projects I’ve gotten to shepherd at work is now available for you to play with - the READ Mini Poster Generator. It’s just like the generators on fd’s Flickr Toys because it was created by John Watson, Mr. fd himself. Choose from one of four templates and just click the button to upload a picture from your hard drive. (One hint - leave some room above your head in the picture.)

Useful for web badges, profile pictures, and especially graphics for events such as Banned Books Week (which is coming up in September). Here’s my first one.

Today’s National Library Week video is all about a game, in this case Go Fish. (More NLW videos here.)

I've got a little work to do, so if you would kindly bookmark your place, I'll be back shortly.

Some fun bookmarks:

If'n Books + Marks (Love the one that says: "My life is much more complex than this character's.")

Mirage Bookmark ( Who knew there was an Exhibition of Bookmarks? I'm fond of this one and this one.)

And if you've ever wished to be Amy March, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jane Austin, or Anne Shirley...or leave a calling card just like them...pay a visit to Small Meadow Press. They have just the perfect thing for you. (And you must give me one if we ever meet!)