Hot topic! CILIP and the Media

There seems to be a discrepancy between what CILIP believe to be its media responsibilities, and what its members believe to be its media responsibilities. Hearing both sides of any story is so, so important. I can't think of ANYTHING I've got angry about, or railed against, that I haven't softened my stance on once I've learned a little more about the other side of the story. There's almost always a good reason why people do things that seem inexplicable at first glance. So I am prepared to have all this explained to me and to think to myself at the end of it all - okay, I was being naive, I can see how difficult this must be for CILIP. But either way, there is a problem here that needs to be addressed - whether the problem is one CILIP is contributing to, or is unable to do anything about. There is still a problem - and I get the impression, though only from a small pool of online responses to these issues, that CILIP's members see it as more of a problem than CILIP itself appears to.

• In my opinion, CILIP are not prominent enough in the media
• In my opinion, CILIP do not do enough to mitigate or respond to negative news stories about libraries, or to place positive ones
• In my opinion, CILIP should be able to escape the echo-chamber and are not currently doing so with sufficient frequency or success (although they are moving in the right direction)
• In my opinion, CILIP should not have allowed the first BBC Newsnight debacle to happen as it did because a: they should have had someone on Newsnight instead of a children's author 'representing' libraries and b: they should have ensured Newsnight were NOT able to claim library circulation was 314,000 books per annum when in fact it was 314,000,000 - responding to this afterwards simply isn't enough
• In my opinion CILIP seem too much like 'one of us'- ie indignant and often impotent. Our professional body needs to be 'representing us' - ie getting someone on the programmes that may cause damage to libraries' reputation. Various CILIP people have said you can't just 'get' someone on Newsnight (they were saying this off the cuff - it doesn't represent an official CILIP statement) but that isn't strong enough, for me. If you can't, then CILIP needs to take steps to force a change of attitude and increase its influence.
• In my opinion, that CILIP were unable to accept an invitation on to the second newsnight debacle is an absolute TRAVESTY. They were offered a 1 minute slot at very short notice, and couldn't get anyone to the BBC studios to fill it - Newsnight were unwilling to settle for a video link. I appreciate those are difficult conditions. But you HAVE TO MAKE IT HAPPEN! By whatever means -surely someone could have taken a cab across London and stepped up? I can imagine that Newsnight thought, right, we got lots of angry corrections from CILIP when we messed up the last feature on libraries, so we know all about them this time and we'll offer them a slot. Then they say no... So next time, we'll go back to ignoring them. [EDIT: I've learned today - 25th June - that CILIP actually contacted Newsnight, rather than the other way round. So while clearly it's a shame that CILIP were unable to make it happen, it's much, much better that they were chasing the opportunity, rather than passively impotent and unable to respond to it..]
• In my opinion, and apparently in the opinion of other library bodies too, it is not the members' responsibility to face the media, it is CILIP's
• In my opinion, CILIP should be getting someone on the Dispatches programme, not trying to get its members on it - at least not on their own. I think calling for people to go on that programme, and to produce a 1 minute video explaining the value of libraries, is great. But it should be part of a supporting strategy of member advocacy, with a primary strategy of CILIP appearing in the media itself. To take a presidential analogy: it's like we're being asked to be the foot-soldiers in Obama's famous harnessing of web 2.0, youtube, and the power of grass roots activism - but without Obama himself going out on the campaign trail to lead us.
• In my opinion, CILIP seem unwilling to step up and assume a prominent role in the media
• In my opinion, there have been opportunities in recent months for CILIP to step up, and it feels like a crippling sense of inertia is preventing them from doing so.  A change of culture is needed here.  Chief Exec Bob Mckee says: "It’s easy to sit back and say “CILIP should have been on Newsnight” or indeed on the Today programme on Tuesday morning. But how many of us could go head-to-head with Jeremy Paxman on live TV and give a clear and compelling justification of libraries and librarians in just one minute or less?" God knows, I couldn't - but it only needs one of us! And that one of us should be employed by CILIP - it should be YOU if necessary. Is there no one in the organisation for whom the challenge of facing Paxman is an exciting opportunity rather than a prohibitively intimidating threat? If none of the current staff feel able to represent the whole industry in the media, appoint someone who is! And if that isn't possible right now, make plans to do so when it is possible.
• On the one hand you have someone like Phil Bradley being invited back onto Radio 5Live after a successful appearance, and basically offering to drag the post-Newsnight  response forward on CILIP's behalf (see the comments section), on the other hand we have CILIP unable to grab Newsnight opportunities. Am I the only one who thinks there's a problem here?

I really, really want feedback on this. Please tell me in the Comments whether you agree with me, or disagree with me, or know stuff I don't know. I welcome all comment and debate on this, and I want CILIP to respond to this too. I wouldn't normally ask this, but please tweet a link - http://bit.ly/9EnejP - to this post  to encourage as many people as possible to engage in the conversation.

I have said before that I think we should not be so quick to attack CILIP, and that everyone I've met or spoken with who works for them is doing a great job. It's very easy to criticise from the safety of a blog. I don't want to belittle their efforts from the easy position of not having to represent an entire profession in the media. But, as I've said above, whether the problem is one CILIP is unable to control or is complicit in the perpetuation of, something has to change.

-thewikiman

Libraries in 2020

As part of CILIP's admirable efforts to get the community's input on defining our professional future, they have encouraged debate, blog posts etc on these subjects:

• What will the Knowledge and Information domain look like in 2020?
• Where will a professional association fit into this domain?
• How will you engage with this professional association?

You can go to the CILIP netvibes dashboard to monitor the debates across many platforms - WELL DONE CILIP for setting this up!

Here are my thoughts - it seems to me to be sensible to look at what the world will be like in 2020 first of all, then how libraries will fit into that, and then how professional bodies in general (and CILIP in particular) will best serve their members in that environment.

Technology

Technological progress increases exponentially. This article by Ray Kurzweil has lots of graphs illustrating this, and some eye-popping insights. Everyone can see that things are speeding up – what is interesting and quite scary is that the speeding up is itself speeding up! In other words, we’ll see a century’s worth of progress in the next 25 years (rather than in the next 100) – because we are doubling the rate of progress every decade.

What does this mean for libraries in 2020? Well for a start, using the model described above, we will make the equivalent of 20 years of progress between now and then. (I think that's how the maths works... :) ) Think of what we’ve done in the previous 20 years – 1990 had no mobile phones! (They’d been invented, but were only first generation and not used widely by any means.) No internet, not really - let alone 2.0... Hard to know how any of us functioned at all, eh? What the bloody hell will be going on in 2020 that’ll make us look back on the current era as positively stone-age? Who knows. As Information Professionals we are becoming increasingly good at being early adopters, so that bodes well. Perhaps the library will have a role to play in aggregating, explaining and training on all these new technologies?

Our technology will be mobile, but will we?

An interesting dichotomy I can see for 2020 is, everything is going mobile but we might be increasingly bound to our desks. At the moment we're all on the move all of the time, so it makes sense to access important information in a mobile phone. But a decade on the world will be more crowded, travel will be more complicated (and perhaps even socially frowned upon; there may be climate-change refugees by then, which would make driving 200 miles to a conference seem like a pretty indulgent thing to do) and employers in all sectors may have less money to spend on training and travel. So, training and conferencing will surely take place more at our places of work, presumably through some kind of virtual means.

Anyway, everyone knows mobile technology is the coming thing. Gartner reckons that phones’ll overtake PCs as the most common method of accessing the web by 2013. I don’t know about you, but I’m guilty of viewing this development as a full-stop rather than part of an ongoing process. Really, though, with rate of progress increasing so quickly, who’s to say phones will still be number 1 by 2020? I'd fully expect mobile technology per se to rule the roost, but not necessarily in combination with a phone as we understand it today. I'd rather access the web (and my documents, and my games, and my videos, and my music) on something like this:

Surely by 2020 we'll have what are, in effect, multi-tasking-ready iPads which one can roll up and stick in a pocket? Perhaps we'll just use phones for phoning. (Perhaps they too will be thin and bendy, and able to fit into the credit-card bit of our wallets - that would be ace.)

This time it's personal

You could argue that the first thing the internet did was make everything available to us; what it is doing now is personalising and customising it to suit us individually. I could imagine that Libraries will go through the same shift, by 2020. We will do our best to protect people from the Tyranny of Choice!

Context is everything. Another, more intriguing insight from Gartner, is this:

By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web. Whereas search provides the "key" to organizing information and services for the Web, context will provide the "key" to delivering hyperpersonalized experiences across smartphones and any session or experience an end user has with information technology.

So, perhaps this is why mobiles will be important - MY device will give ME a completley unique and bespoke service based on my needs and habits. So let's think about that in terms of a professional body - at the moment CILIP sends round weekly emails, rounding up things of interest that have been happening in the world of libraries and information. Perhaps that could be much more comprehensive, perhaps an RSS feed rather than an email, and perhaps it could sift out the stuff I'm not interested in, and learn from the links I follow to provide me with more stuff I am interested in next time.

Is FourSquare the most annoying thing in the world? Yes - yes it is. Hey I just became the Mayor of Nobody Wants This Crap Cluttering Up Their Twitter-feed! However, FourSquare is leading the charge in location-based applications and this will surely be huge by 2020. Assuming we can navigate through the murky waters of privacy and data protection (or perhaps we'll all have given up by then), could CILIP use this to their advantage? Let's say we don't travel as much in 2020, so opportunities to meet up and network become increasingly valuable. CILIP could facilitate meetings without having to actually be part of them itself - imagine if you're in South London, and CILIP auto-messages you saying '3 of your network from [insert area of library interest here] are also in the area - would you like to meet them'? If people say yes to the meeting request, the CILIP app (or whatever it is) could suggest a suitable venue equidistant between all parties...

Librarians in the cloud

Do you think the concept of a self-employed Information Professional could exist by 2020? There are already entrepreneurial examples in existence - but what about people performing current information roles but not as part of an organisation? Perhaps that's too far fetched - but perhaps the organisation could exist without the physical space we call the library. It may not be feasible to keep all of them open, but there's no doubting that the modern Information Professional's skill-set will be more valuable than it ever has been, so perhaps we can exist without libraries in some form or other. If that is to be possible, CILIP and other professional bodies would have a big responsibility to support their members in such ventures - and of providing a network that everyone in the profession will be part of, even if they work alone, to ensure support, comparing of experiences, and an effecient system of refferal when you can't help a client yourself.

On a related note, I'd like to see Information Professionals being more active than passive in the exchange of skills and services. We often out-source stuff to other sectors or organisations - how come they don't out-source stuff to us? We should be bartering our skills - our increasingly essential skills - to the commercial sector, in exchange for stuff. Again, professional bodies could play a role in facilitating that.

CILIP specifically

I agree with pretty much everything Phil Bradley says in his article about CILIP in 2020. (I'm a big fan of Bethan's views also.) In particular, I'm passionate about the idea that CILIP should lead rather than follow in social media (etc) developments - and if there are other people forging ahead, harness them! I'm passionate about the idea of CILIP representing libraries more in the mainstream media - I don't want to hear an item about library closures on the news without a CILIP spokesman fighting our corner.

I'm very keen for CILIP to go where the conversation is. There was much fuss a while ago when CILIP's CEO, Bob McKee, debated whether CILIP should be using Twitter, and how. It's a no brainer, of course they should use it - but it's not TWITTER per se that is important here, it's whatever medium the rest of us are using. Right now, that's Twitter - but whatever it is in 2020, CILIP need to anticipate and move swiftly to be there, too.

And finally I'd like to see CILIP treated with respect. People are so often dismissive, scornful or even outright abusive of CILIP - they attack CILIP the abstract entity, but of course what CILIP really is, is the sum of its employees. Every single person I've met at CILIP has been enthusiastic, engaged and engaging, nice, and on our side. Perhaps there are exceptions to this, but I'm yet to find them. These are people who are doing their best as part of an organisation which is trying to rethink itself to suit the times - I find it very hard to criticise people I know are trying really hard, although that's by no means to say they don't deserve criticism... Just that it must be constructive - less of the huffy 'CILIP does nothing for me' and more of the 'I'll explain to CILIP what it could do for me'.  So let's hope that this whole process leads to more mutual respect between the organisation and its members.

- thewikiman

on the Jay Leno library jibe (you might not like this)

There's been a little bit of fuss over Jay Leno's monologue last week - you can view the offending spiel via Library Journal. He's talking about the L.A Mayor's budget cuts, and he says "People here in Los Angeles are upset that the mayor's proposed plan to cut the budget of libraries... This could affect as many as nine people." Lolz.

So anyway, the City Librarian sent him a letter, and I'm going to take a leaf out of Library Journal's book (or should I say 'journal!' Yeah - eat it Leno! You're not the only comedian around here!) and embed the letter here:

GomezLettertoLeno

I don't want to rain on another librarian's parade, particularly one who is fighting the good fight, but I'm not sure how useful getting upset about this can be. I very much approve of stepping up and fighting back when people criticise - wherever possible, I believe if someone says something derogatory and misinformed about libraries, we should use the same platform they originally used, to set them straight. I've tried to this myself in the past. But comedians... Comedians joke about stuff, it's what they do. Leno has writers who write his monologue each night, and they pick something topical and have a go at it. Such is his status, it doesn't even have to be funny (in fact he delivers this particular joke pretty badly) but it's just something to say. Who cares? Much more awful things crop up in comedy all the time.

In the letter, Martín Gómez says Leno's joke added insult to injury. Well yes it did - but the injury is so significant, the insult is really here nor there. It's made a really bad situation infinitesimally worse, possibly. Admittedly there might be some 'floating voter' type potential library user out there who sees Leno and says 'you know what? Libraries ARE useless - I'm going to decide against visiting one after all!' but surely we can give people more credit than that. What might happen, though, is the story becomes (to the people who matter, ie potential users - we as librarians should have thick enough skin not care what Leno says, it's a decent enough throw-away gag the likes of which we all probably make about other struggling industries all the time) about how 'librarians got all fussy and upset - again' when they were insulted, and look, they wrote a letter. Which would be a shame.

I want to make clear I am in no way belittling the plight of libraries in California, or their staff, or their users, or the commendable efforts of librarians to stand up for themselves. But you have to pick your battles. Sense of humour failure very rarely helps anyone - it has the potential to be particularly damaging for Information Professionals because of the joyless legacy we're trying to shake off.

Despite this, I like the last paragraph very much. We should ALL do this sort of thing - we should be saying, as Gómez does, don't take our word for how good libraries are; come and visit one. As I've said a bunch of times before - we can only show people what we do and let them make up their own minds as to whether they need us. The biggest threat we face is a lack of understanding as to our value stemming from a lack of awareness as to what we're really like.

- thewikiman

the curve of engagement

On a number of occasions now, I've banged on about where we need to focus our efforts ('we' being the LIS community) in terms of marketing, promotion, advocacy and so on. I've mentioned in my own blog and in comments on other peoples' a sort of curve of engagement - I suspect we may put too many resources into targeting those at either extreme-end of the curve, when in fact it's those in the middle who we can actually change. Anyhow, as part of my preperation for the Escaping the Echo-Chamber talk I'm doing with Woodsiegirl (which has yet to be rescheduled but I'll let you know when that's sorted) I've actually created a graphic of the curve! Oh yeah. There's nothing new here, but nevertheless here it is - click it to go to the CC version on Twitter.

The point being, as I'm sure you'll have worked out by now, that we're wasting our energies on those who literally hate libraries and those who literally love them. The former are not convert-able, and the latter are already so converted they'll be fine on their own. The regular patrons shouldn't be ignored, which is why they're lower down the curve; it's easier to retain a customer than it is to snare a new one. But it is the currently indifferent we really ought to be targeting - those who don't use libraries, but might do if we can tell them what we do these days. (People like Andy's Dad...)

- thewikiman

PS: Caveats for this post - 1: obviously some attention should be paid to the superfans - they are the holy grail if they're word-of-mouth advocates for libraries but don't actually work in them, so ought to be treated with utmost respect. But they don't need a whole lot of marketing to. 2: Similarly, I do think we should engage the actively hostile - wherever possible using the same media they use to attack libraries - but only to rebuff their offensives, not to try and market the hell out of them till they 'come round' and love us and our buildings... 3: Regular patrons are nearer the top of the curve than the bottom - this is because I'm talking specifically about marketing and advocacy resources, rather than resources per se - of course we should prioritise our existing patrons most highly of all.

I'm off on holiday for a bit now, so see you on the other side.

you are only as good as your last customer interaction

I've said this before in papers and presentations, but never as blog post of its own - a recent Agnostic, Maybe post about library advocacy has reminded me of it.

Sport is riddled with cliches, and one of the less vapid ones is "you're only as good as your last game."  Of course, your reputation should actually be the sum total of all your actions, but the most recent of these actions is by far the most important in forming opinions. Your reputation can be absolutely stellar right up until the point at which you choke in the final; at that point your reputation will be 'choker' rather than 'silver medalist', most likely.

The same applies in a very real way to library customer service. The reputation of each library is only as good as its last customer interaction. There are, of course, a million and one caveats to this, but I'm trying to learn the art of briefer blog posts so I won't insult your intelligence by listing them here. Serve every customer superbly and there will gradually be a net gain in the reputation of your institution; serve one rudely or lazily and there may well be an instant reputation plummet. Word of mouth is so important, and everyone knows the majority of people are more likely to pass on bad experiences than good ones; it's just the way we are.

I wanted a nice pithy definition of 'reputation' to use here, so I looked it up in the OED. Turns out there isn't really a useful summary you can fit into a single sentance, but the gist of it is this: reputation is the general esteem in which something or someone is held.

This general esteem is easy to percieve as a fixed constant, a largley solid and static 'thing' which is sometimes influenced by particularly significant events. The reality for something like a library is that reputation is a constantly updating, evolving and shifting entity, held in the collective (and individual) conciousness of both the library's users and even people who've never set foot on its premises. The reputation of your library is in part informed by you - literally you, as an individual, based on your actions as a member of its staff.

I'm going to pull out my favourite quote here - it's from Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, in Information and Library Manager 5 (3) 1985:

"The library is not an abstraction. It has an identity, an identity created by the staff contact with the users."

Two things strike me about that quote - firstly it came from someone who wasn't a librarian (Dame Esteve-Cole, as she later became, was an academic and two years after writing the article I'm quoting from she became the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum) and secondly I was five years old then, and I'm not entirely sure her message has got through over the last quarter of a century. Library advocacy is a complicated issue and something of a problem for the industry, but the one thing we can all do as indivduals to improve reputations is good customer service. If 100% of librarians are nice 100% of the time, people will start to notice...

It's really hard to do, by the way. It doesn't take a genius to point out that being nice to people will improve reputations; of course it will. But actually applying that maxim to the full, particularly five minutes before you're due to close with an annoying patron who isn't showing you any courtesy at all in return, is often easy to duck out of. But it's worth sticking with it, for the good of all of us.

- thewikiman