Library adventures in Latvia! (Plus, what we can learn from their approach.)

I've just got back from Latvia where I've been doing some work for the Father's Third Son project - the part of the Ministry of Culture which looks after libraries, basically. This post is part 'here's what I did and how it went' and part 'Latvian libraries are pretty amazing - here's what we can learn from them'. I'll get the embedded presentation out of the way first.

New librarians: this is your time

The first thing I did was based largely on The Time For Libraries is NOW, and the third thing I did was in two separate Prezis which would be a bit complicated to reproduce here, so I'm embedding the middle one. It was delivered to information science students at the University of Latvia, and is basically about how great our profession is...

(For Slideshare file-size limit reasons, I've actually had to take out about 20 slides and get rid of loads of the pictures, but you'll get the general idea. Feel free to embed this wherever you see fit!)

New Librarians: This is your time

View more presentations from Ned Potter

The background

Father's Third Son have been working with Bill and Melinda' Gates's Global Libraries foundation to revolutionise libraries in Latvia.

The name derives from Latvian folklore, a tale which is a bit like a gender-reversed version of Cinderella but with more emphasis on overcoming difficulties and flourishing - the same story also informs the shape of the National Library of Latvia, being built at the moment (see pic below).

It's a project which has been running since 2007, and with great success. (Global Libraries works across 13 countries and Latvia tends to be held up as the example to follow.) Father's Third Son found me via Twitter and later Slideshare and my blog, and asked me to come over and do some presentations as part of their programme.

Latvian libraries

The Latvian libraries system is pretty amazing; they've done some great things in the past 5 years. I learned a lot - it was great to talk to people who'd surmounted some of the problems we have in the UK and the US, and have different issues. It was eye-opening: normally when I talk to librarians we all seem to be going through exactly the same stuff! But this was a little different. Here are some Latvian library headlines:

• They have 874 public libraries. For a population of around 2 million! I think that works out at around 7 times as many libraries per member of the population than we have in the UK.
• Most library users come to the library on foot - on average, nationally, they're an 18 minute walk away from their nearest one
• Check out this map showing how densely populated the country is with libraries!
• Father's Third Son has revolutionised the infrastructure - all the libraries now have PCs with up-to-date Office Suite installed, 24/7 free wifi, and 1800 librarians have had 140 hour training programmes to equip them to deal with the new technology and help others get the most out of it
• There is an information management undergraduate degree, which a lot of people take - but then don't go on to become librarians. So they have a retention issue which we don't have so much here, and not enough young people in the workforce. My second talk was intended to convince the students that this profession holds all sorts of interesting possibilities, so they'll stick with it
• They have a media briefing programme (which I was part of) - apparently one of the issues they have is the media are so positive about libraries most of the time, it's hard to make the case for taking investment to a new level! Imagine that! So part of my role was to look at future trends and tech possibilities, to showcase that the work (and investment) shouldn't stop yet...
• They create little success story videos for different markets which illustrate how the library have helped people (brilliant marketing technique!)
• Librarians are valued by communities as trusted sources of information, and have a very high satisfaction rating of 94%, among Government employees (compared with teachers 84%, and policemen with 48%!)
• They have an internet portal which all libraries are on. ALL of them - the public libraries, the academic libraries, the school libraries. One place which unites all the libraries online - easy for the user, and great potential for a united, cohesive voice for the libraries, too
• Did I mention they have a media briefing programme? .

I found it all pretty inspiring really (and I am quite cynical at heart...). The thing I was most impressed with is that Father's Third Son have managed to take a top-down look at the entire country's library system and implement changes from the ground up, and actually reach their goals and change things for the better. It's hard to imagine the same thing happening in the UK or the US, but it's good to know it can be done. What's really striking is how much infrastructure is put in place on libraries' behalf, I wish we had governmental departments working with us in that way. But we can definitely learn from their confidence of inviting the media, giving them lunch, working with them and escaping the echo chamber on a regular basis in a very direct way.

The trip itself and the presentations

It was a three-day trip, with day 1 mostly consisting of travel to Riga. I was then taken out to dinner by my very generous hosts, who told me a lot of useful info about the presentations I'd be giving. In the run-up to going away I'd been ill for two days so that lack of finishing off time, combined with learning a lot more about the context of the talks that evening, meant I was up late into the night using the hotel bar's wifi to tweak my presentations!

Day two started with a presentation to the Latvian media. How good is that? They have a media programme, and print and broadcast journalists, not just from Riga but all over Latvia, come for a morning of presentations. It's absolutely brilliant echo-chamber escaping, library media-narrative dictating stuff! The presentation before mine was about children's drawings of the library. It was in Latvian but I'd been told enough about it to think it was a wonderful idea - basically they give kids pens and blank paper and say 'draw your ideal library' and give no other instructions than that. Some kids just draw a picture, some add notes as well. Then child psychologists come along and analyse the pics, and they feed it all into their future planning for library design.

IS THAT NOT FABULOUS?

Seriously - the Latvian library system is ace.

Anyhow, I now had around an hour to present to the media. This amounted to around 30 minutes of stuff, to give the translator the other 30 minutes to put it all into Latvian. He was really nice - an English Professor at the University, who does a lot of work with movies to get them into the native language via sub-titles etc - and I made him promise not to stitch me up by saying things like 'This guy is talking complete nonsense. I'm not even going to bore you with an actual translation' etc etc.

The talk was mainly about the future trends in technology and the possibilities for libraries within that - it went quicker than I thought so I ended up ad-libbing a load of stuff about FourSquare which I'd had no intention of putting in there. There was also some stuff about the library at York, the new building and its associated technology etc. I don't think my style of presenting suits big statements followed by gaps for translation but it seemed to go fine, they listened all the way through, and they laughed a lot about the gin part of the great library stereotypometer...

I was then taken to the University for the talk to the students (the presentation embedded above). Because of the whole 'they complete the degree but then don't necessarily go on to become librarians' my brief was to convince them that our job has got all sorts of possibilities they may never had considered - I did my best! I've bought a clicker now to move the slides on, and I have to say I did feel much better being able to stride around the stage rather than being tied to the laptop. There was then an interesting panel discussion with academics in the department - most of which was in Latvian but some of it came my way and was translated into English. We ended up talking about the Widening Participation programme we run at York, the library going into Schools. I enjoyed it, it was fun.

Day 3 featured a recorded presentation at a production company - about marketing and advocacy. The idea is that it will be sub-titled and then circulated on DVD to all the Latvian libraries. I focused on basic principles of marketing, why we need to do it, why strategic marketing is more effective in the long-term, the possibilities and best practices of marketing with social media and how we use it at York, and the echo chamber problem and how to overcome it. I was using two Prezis for this one and I couldn't access them online (they were borked, although they seem alright now - great timing!) so I was incredibly relieved I'd decided to save them to a USB stick.  I had to wear a microphone unit and there were cameras and leads and screens, plus I couldn't have the laptop on the presentation on because it was plugged in to all the recording equipment! I thought it was going to be a nightmare but I asked if the audience could move so I could see them and the big screen without having to turn away from them, and managed to get through it without any restarts. I think it was fine.

Then I met Sanita Maleja who lots of people had told me about in the previous two days - she's like a local ceLIBrity (copyright - @lemurph) for her work with the New Professionals part of the LLA (Latvian Librarian's Association). We had to do a little interview for the New Profs blog but she was kind enough to take me into the old town, which I'd not really been able to see up to this point as I was always on the way somewhere. This was brilliant - Riga is amazing and I really enjoyed just wondering about, plus Sanita and I have very similar views on libraries and on the profession. It was a great end to a great trip.

In the interests of tourism, here's a pic I took, from a tower, of the National Library of Latvia, which is still being built...

The whole thing was very much in the category of 'interesting things I never thought I'd end up doing in my job'. So huge thanks for Father's Third Son for inviting me, and my bosses for allowing me to go, and to everyone for being so nice to me while I was there...

I don't often do blog posts like this where it's like a school report of what I got up to in the holidays, so for those of you who made this far I hope you'll let me off on this occasion! :-)

- thewikiman

Spoon feed them, then give them the spoon, then chuck away the spoon

I seem to have a different view to a lot of information professionals in that I'm all for spoon-feeding. It's a loaded term - I'm actually all for the process it involves, rather than the philosophy it evokes. Above all, I think libraries are there to provide information and we should do this in as straightforward a manner as possible. Crucially, I think we can spoon-feed the students AND give them the skills they need to ditch the spoon entirely over time.

(There's an on-going debate in academic librarianship about spoon-feeding - should we give students all the help they need and make things as easy as possible, or should we be looking to educate them so they can fend for themselves? For example, providing digitised materials via the VLE - many people object to this, because if the reading is put on a plate for them, how will the students learn to find good quality literature? Etc. Simon Barron wrote a very thoughtful post on the subject yesterday, and linked in the comments are other bloggers' views on the same subject: Jo Alcock, Georgina Hardy and Sian Blake.)

Ideally, though, spoon-feeding should be the first step in a structured approach to helping students navigate their way through a degree, with the library embedded and responsive at all stages. I'm all too aware of where the phrase derives from because I have a 17-month-old daughter (or "17 month-yearold" as I always seem to call her) - we feed her with a spoon. We also give her a spoon of her own so she can feed herself. We're just starting to get rid of the spoon, and let her loose on a fork. The point being, spoon-feeding isn't a directive or a philosophy or an way-of-life, it's a stage - just as it should be with information in education.

She absolutely had to be spoon-fed at first because she couldn't feed herself - it was spoon-feed or no food at all. This is analogous for undergrads, for me - I think we underestimate how stark the change is from school and Further Education to Higher Education, and they have a LOT to adjust to in their first term without the library contributing to their problems as part of some misguided belief that it's for 'their own good'. If possible, we should be digitising all the core readings for undergrad modules, and putting them in the VLE, so that the students definitely get to read what they need to read. This allows them to participate fully in their lectures and seminars, which is more important than their level of information literacy at this stage. I used to run a digitisation service that did this, and the lecturers loved it because it allowed them to teach in the knowledge that EVERYONE had done the reading - without it, there were always people who couldn't get hold of the book in the library in time.

One department had a pedagogical objection to the digitisation programme and didn't use it - they said this wasn't preparing the students for real life because they didn't have to come to the library, learn to use the catalogue, find books on the shelves etc. But of course, real life isn't like that - real life is using Google because in 99% of cases that's perfectly adequate. I liked this quote from Georgina Hardy:

We must be very careful not to value process above principles.  Because, let’s face it, the skills of getting good results from a Library Catalogue, remembering to reserve books over a month in advance in order to photocopy a single chapter, and negotiating a complicated, publisher-specific, multi-stage login procedure to access journals from off-campus are skills only useful to those students who wish to go on to become Librarians.

Or, indeed, researchers / academics...

Once students get past the crazyness of their first couple of terms, that's when we can start trying to help them develop the skills to find stuff for themselves. I'm currently looking after English at my institution, and I really like the approach of one of the lecturers - she's requested that the core readings be digitised, but she's got me in to do a workshop (or 7 workshops, actually...) in the second term all about how to find secondary readings, via e-journals, Google Scholar and so on. This is just right, for me - give the students what they need to function, AND teach them how to get stuff for themselves. It doesn't have to be one or the other - spoon-feed whilst teaching them to use the spoon is surely the way forward?

Ideally the library shouldn't be only involved in teaching at the start and the end of the degree. This is often how it works - we do loads of stuff during induction (literally week 1 of their academic lives!) and then get parachuted in at the end to provide much needed aid on the eve of exams or dissertations. Ideally, we'd do some stuff in the 2nd year - guiding their hand as they use the spoon themselves - and again at the start of their 3rd year - getting rid of the spoon and giving them the skills they need to find food for themselves from any number of sources. This 2nd and 3rd year intervention should be based on the level the students have reached, and the needs they have then.

This way, we get to be helpful in the way students actually want (and in the way that will ensure good NSS scores which is, of course, The Only Thing That Matters In HE) and will expect for their 9k a year, and we get to teach them to help themselves in the way they actually need in the long-term. Quite apart from anything else, if the students are getting what they perceive as a good service from us (i.e. we have the provision they need to help them study, so they spend their time studying rather than searching for materials) they'll be more receptive to our instruction about info/digital/all-the-other literacies later.

Spoon-feeding is a useful service to provide, at the beginning of the student lifecycle; we shouldn't eschew it entirely just because we want to teach them to fend for themselves later on.

- thewikiman

Why the 2nd job you ever get in libraries may be the most important of your career

I have a theory: I think the 2nd job you ever get in libraries is the most important. We’ll come on to the why in a minute – first of all I wanted to see if others’ experiences backed up my hypothesis. I put a poll on to Twitter, asking this: Which job was most significant in getting you to where you are in libraries now? Which most influenced you onto your current path?

I didn’t want to prejudice the outcome so I didn’t mention my theory. The results were interesting – they did seem to (just!) back me up:

Now, this is a very specific question. I’m not asking which factor is most significant to where people are now (a lot of people would say professional development outside of their 9-to-5 jobs, or their Masters perhaps) and I’m not asking which job is the most important in terms of people being in the information profession at all (presumably that’d be the first job for the vast majority of people) – it’s all about where you are, the path you’re on, the area of librarianship you’ve ended up in or the role you’re currently doing.

So I believe the 2nd job you ever get in libraries is arguably the most important because it dictates much SO of what happens to you afterwards. Obviously all jobs have an effect on what comes after them to some extent, but the 2nd job is something of a tipping point whose significance is, I’d imagine, not appreciated at the time most people are applying for it. Most people’s first library jobs fall into one of two categories – securing an entry-level position prior to doing the Masters (or becoming a graduate trainee), or securing an entry-level position because you’ve sort of stumbled into libraries accidently, and then finding it was a lot more interesting than you thought, so you stay in the sector. As has been discussed before, almost no first library jobs are beyond the entry-level – even people who have the Masters have to start at or near the bottom.

So – as a result of this, there’s not much proactive career choice about your first library job: you just need a job. Most people start as something like a ‘Library assistant’ – often a customer facing role, in the library itself, issuing books and helping with queries etc. You only really start to mould you career when you apply for that 2nd job – and my argument is that you need to make a really sound choice here, because it has a vital domino effect on your subsequent career. And actually, it’s tricky to divert off the path you choose for yourself at that 2nd job choice, because the 3rd job will (probably) be a higher up or better or related version of that 2nd job and (probably) pretty good, meaning you build a career off the back of it.

I’m obviously generalising here, and of course there will be exceptions – and throughout I’m imagining someone staying in more or less the same place, rather than having accrued several jobs at the same level on their CV simply because they’ve relocated a few times. But generally speaking, if you’re in that position that so many of us were in – you’re in your first library role, thinking it’s actually pretty good, wondering about making it into a career – you need to think carefully about the path you choose and, not least, how long that path is in reality.

I’ll take the academic library as an example, because that’s what I know best. Your first role was in Lending Services on the desk, so where do you go next? If you choose to stay in Customer Services then you’re looking at a Reference / Enquiries Desk role perhaps, otherwise there’s a big jump up to something like Customer Services Manager or Site Manager. If you go into the cataloguing side of things you could go for an Assistant Cataloguer post. You could try and move towards the subject librarian side of things by going for a Team Assistant post in an academic librarian subject team. Or there might be a ‘Digital Library Assistant’ type role, to do with digitisation or e-Resources. Whichever of these you choose, your 3rd job will probably also be in this area, is my point. And your 4th job too, perhaps. Of course people change all the time, but it’s quicker to develop a career in a roughly straight line. (I know this, because I didn’t - and have only in the last few months arrived at the job I actually wanted to do all along, and have much younger colleagues who took a more direct route…)

Part of the reason I’m writing this is because I know some people who’ve been working in libraries a good while, and are just sort of treading water – because that second job took them down a path, and now that path is blocked for whatever reason. There just aren't any more senior jobs than they're already doing, in the area they've come to specialise in. So I’d recommend getting hold of one of those organisational structure charts for your library (or the library you’d like to work in) and literally plotting your ideal route upwards, seeing what’s feasible, where the obstacles are, when you’d be waiting an age for people to retire or leave, etc. Some paths have very few destinations so are more competitive. Some might not even exist by the time you get to the good bit. Some paths might look like their beyond you in terms of expertise, but actually you could get there over time. Some paths have loads of destinations but aren’t well paid. Money certainly isn’t everything, but progression means a lot – you don’t want to get stuck in a rut.

It would be nice just to live in the moment, just to ‘be’ and not worry about all this stuff. But librarianship is a hugely competitive profession, with far more qualified librarians than there are jobs for qualified librarians. So it’s really never too early to be thinking about the career path you’re embarking upon – ideally, you need to start making informed choices almost from the very start.

If you’ve made it through all that - do you agree with my 2nd Job Hypothesis?

- thewikiman

#libday7: a Multimedia Journal

It's Library Day in the Life time again! Here is a week in my life as an Academic Liaison Librarian - works best in full screen mode:

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(Here's a link in case you're viewing this in Google Reader and the embedded content doesn't display.)

I don't normally write much for this (last time round I did a video) because I think people are often over-saturated with LibDay posts - but I'm making an exception this time because my new job is so much more interesting than previous roles! Also, subject librarian is one of those roles which people find very difficult to really get a handle on - no two days are the same, so finding out what subject librarians actually DO is tricky. So the journal above is a fuller account.

Let me know if you have any questions about the job, particularly if it's an area you're wondering about going into yourself...

- thewikiman

The Great Library Stereotypometer!

Okay here it is... After EXTENSIVE RESEARCH (I asked people on twitter what they reckoned) I proudly present (and then immediately duck behind the nearest sofa) the Great Library Stereotypometer - a new, up-to-date, piercingly accurate and entirely NON-SERIOUS look at library stereotypes!

As the caption says, click it to view full-size. Feel free to use it anywhere. Don't take it seriously. (Seriously.)

More to add? Why not create your own! :)

- thewikiman