what about having library liaisons in other industries?

In most Universities there is some kind of formal liaison between the library and the academic departments. Obviously all subject librarians are essentially ‘liaison librarians’ to their specific schools and departments, but often the department itself will have an academic who is designated the library-liaison, or a committee of nominated people on which the librarian also sits. This is to everyone’s advantage, as the library gets to understand the needs of the departments, and the department gets their needs heard. The library can also manage expectations etc, though having an established line of communication. Having a first point of contact in this way is extremely useful, because it creates a bridge between the two worlds. Even if the people designated as liaisons don’t always have to cross the bridge themselves, they facilitate others doing so by putting them in touch with relevant people.

 At a CILIP session the other day, we were discussing the idea of taking a version of the Graduate Day on the road (as currently most attendees come from London and the South-East, so it would be great to make the whole thing more readily available to those across other regions). We were discussing the fact that CILIP membership might be of relevance to people who don’t actually consider themselves librarians or Information Professionals at all, from other industries such as Law, Education, IT, the media, and of course the more closely related fields of archiving, museum curation and so on. How to advertise to those sectors that such an event as a regional CILIP day exists?

Wouldn’t it be useful if there was the equivalent of a library liaison academic in all of those other areas? Obviously in an area like Law there are plenty of very proactive Law librarians about, but even then is there any direct link between CILIP and BIALL, for example? It would only take a CILIP Liaison Officer at BIALL, and a BIALL Liaison Officer at CILIP, to establish a potentially fruitful direct link between the two organisations. Similarly, the National Union of Teachers or the Association of University Administrators or the Society of Archivists or even you-never-know-how-useful-we-might-be-to-each-other-until-you-try type organisations like the Association of Fundraising Professionals  etc etc. This would be mutually beneficial for all concerned, surely? CILIP and its members would have a route in to the resources and members of other organisations, and they would have a similar route into ours – a point of contact to facilitate others crossing the bridge. And presumably not a whole lot of work for each person involved, as the opportunities for collaboration and liaison wouldn’t be so much as to be overwhelming.

I’m aware I could be one of those people who happily ‘comes up with’ an idea which has in fact been doing the rounds for ages, or has been suggested and rejected as unworkable before, or which others simply don’t reckon there’s a need for… Maybe it’s already been done and I’ve just missed the news! But I’m fairly sure there would be circumstances where such a relationship with another organisation could bear fruit (and the organisations themselves could perhaps kick things off by giving free membership to a designated liaison officer from the others!).

I’m tagging (I think that’s what it’s called) Kathy and Lyndsay at CILIP, as they know about this sort of thing. I’m sure they’ll soon set me right if it’s a non-starter…

- thewikiman

p.s Incidentally, I read today that in the UK we import almost exactly the same amount of GingerBread as we export (465 tonnes in, 460 out - I've got an idea, how about we just import 5 tonnes and leave the rest of the GingerBread where it is), a phenomenon known as 'boomerang trade'. Similar trading parity applies to Chocolate Waffles (I've never even seen waffles with chocolate built in already), toilet-paper (we gave Germany 4000 tonnes of it, they gave us 5000 tones back - brilliant) and even Ice-Cream to Italy (what on earth do Italians want with our ice-cream for Chrissakes?!).

If ever there was an argument for liaising, and opening the lines of communication, that's it right there... 

a couple of articles up on the website, some frippery, and LinkedIn

A real mish-mash of miscellany, this blog post; all sorts of little things to report. Firstly, as part of a general improvement on the content of my website, I’ve added some stuff about the New Professionals Conference, CILIP Graduate Day, some CILIP Copyright Courses and HERON digitisation conferences to the Events page, and a couple of articles to the Papers & Presentations page.

The first is something which I’ve been meaning to add for ages – a PDF of my first ever publication, way back in 2006 when I was a fresh-faced young library person (literally fresh-faced – seeing the article again I was shocked to see it had the same picture of me as I have up on my site. I really must update the latter to show me gnarled and old as I am today). It is for the 2006/07 edition of Propsects’ (the careers organisation) Postgrad magazine, and all about how I worked during my first MA, the importance of getting work-experience as well as a qualification, and that sort of thing – little did I know that about a month later, I’d get a different job in the library and eventually conclude I needed to embark upon yet more post-graduate study to get an MSc as well. The article can be found at the bottom of the Papers page on my site.

The second article is about the Library Routes Project, as a sort of companion piece to Woodsiegirl’s Gazette article. It centres around this idea of whether anyone wanting to grow up working in libraries would find the job anything like they imagined it when they were kids, or whether the fast changing face of modern librarianship would have rendered it fairly unrecognisable in the interim period. It’s the top article on the Papers page. Thank you to Joel Kerry for inviting me to write it.

Also on the subject of adding, there’s been a Frippery page on my blog for a short while which I’ve not got around to telling anyone about yet – its purpose is to provide an outlet for stuff I want to say but which I’d feel guilty clogging up the syndicated feed with, so if anyone wants to read some Info-Pro related frippery they can do so by clicking the link in the Other Pages on the Blog section on the right of the blog's homepage or, because I want to cater for your every need, by clicking here. The current month’s post is about the absolutely crazy-hard job-at-Google Interview questions which were in the press recently, and what the library equivalents might be…

And finally, LinkedIn. Can anyone tell me a bit more about what’s going on there? Whenever you type an Information Professional’s name into Google, their LinkedIn profile always seems to be right near the top. It’s obviously a popular site, with good search-engine rankings, and lots of Info Pros signing up to it. But it looks fairly rubbish (as in, aesthetically it’s not up to the standards you might expect), and I’m not sure exactly what it is for. Is it a sort of purely professional social networking thing? Well okay I do know that’s basically what it is, but has anyone got anything positive out of it? I’d love to know more.

That's it for now!

- thewikiman

library semantics

 

The world of libraries seems to have a real on-going problem with semantics. Why is this? Perhaps it is a profession that naturally attracts a group of people to whom the detail is very important...

The Special Libraries Association are going through an apparently tortuous process in order to rename themselves - the current choice is ASKPro (swiftly and inevitably colloqualised as ASSPro) and this has caused quite the amount of fuss. I can understand the rationale (the old name no longer reflected what they do, and people didn't understand what it meant) but all modern name changes ever seem to do is show that, these days, it's almost impossible to think of a decent name.

Another semantic debate rears its head at regular intervals - what to call library users. Patrons, customers, or just users? Clients, even? We've heard it all before so I won't go into detail here - basically a lot of people are phobic of the term 'customer' and all that implies, as I was once; these people often prefer patron. But now I work for a forward-thinking academic library, I've come round to thinking that customer is essential terminology - it marks a shift in the way we used to treat our users (austerely) to the way we do now (with enthusiasm, and a level of customer-service which implies we'll bend over backwards to help rather than just tell them to shush all the time). I believe a customer expects a higher quality of service than a patron does, and we should be aiming to provide the former. Helene Blowers makes a good point also that traditionally patrons support institutions, whereas institutions support customers... All this stuff is important because, as I've now said lots of times before, libraries have undergone a seismic shift in what they do and the way they do it, but public perception is struggling to catch up.

Then there is the well-worn issue of what we should call ourselves. The rationale is similar to the SLA's - 'librarian' seems inadequate as a moniker, because what we do is so diverse these days. We could of course just accept that librarian now covers a greater number of bases, but so entrenched are the stereotypes about librarians (don't get me started on this) that there is a feeling we need a clean break - librarian will always mean 'old maid in an austere and joyless place of silence' however much we move in new directions, so we need a term for ourselves which shakes off the old associations and reflects our broader roles. I'd always been happy with Information Professional to cover the myriad things we do these days, until a recent conversation with a Norwegian friend who knew nothing of my job. I told him I was an Information Professional and, not being familiar with the term, he looked it up. He found this (the italics are my own):

An information professional or an information specialist is a person who works with information science, libraries, museums, or archives, although the field is changing rapidly to include other disciplines. [So far so good] Typically, an Information Professional is deemed as such only after receiving the degree of Master of Science in Information (or Library) Science from a university accredited by the American Library Association (ALA), the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), or comparable regional body. [Seriously?!]

For some reason, this requirement of a degree had passed me by. I've always been slightly confused about what paraprofessional meant, and all that stuff - now I'm starting to understand. I think it's a real shame that a good catch-all term for what we do gives off a slight aroma of elitism and has something of the 'us and them' about it. Not least because loads of otherwise excellent library staff (who are professional in every other sense of the word) are suddenly ruled out from being part of the group - perhaps they are every bit as able (and often more so) than those who have their Masters, but are unable to afford to do the qualification? I've been calling myself an Information Professional for ages - I didn't realise that it was only actually last Thursday, when I got confirmation of my MSc, that I became one...

For my money, Information Professional should just be a term referring to all those who work in the Information Profession. I want to know what others think about this too. Do you agree, disagree, or do you think we should all stop worrying about semantics entirely, for own mental health..?

the future of humans in a self-service library world

At the CILIP Graduate Day last month, a couple of questions came up both in the panel discussion and after my own presentation, about the future of actual living breathing staff in libraries. It’s a fair enough thing to ask about on a day designed to some degree to attract people into the profession – will there even be a profession to be a part of in 20 years time?  I answered positively at the time - I’ve since given my off-the-cuff analogy with drum-machines a bit more thought, so I figured it was time to make the great drumming and librarianship connection in a blog post…  

I’m a drummer, so this is a subject I know something about. In the early 80s, the advent of the drum machine seemed to sound a death-knell for drummers. Not only were drum machines cheaper by the hour than humans, they were part of a trend towards new technology which had the effect of making those artists clinging to the old ways look old-fashioned. (In the end, very few groups I can think of survived the 80s without taking on some drum-machine action, and partly as a result of this and largely as a result of the whole musical culture of the time, a hell of a lot of God-awful music was produced during the period. Even proper rock bands like Led Zep were determined to embrace the new technologies and not been seen as dinosaurs as the new decade dawned – I’ve convinced that only the end of the group caused by the death of their drummer, the great John Bonham, prevented them from taking a path into naff 80s technology led musical hell which would have been entirely prohibitive to the legendary status they enjoy today. But I digress…) A lot of drummers panicked, and many quit the music business entirely, to get proper jobs.

Two things emerged from this. Firstly, the smart drummers learned to programme drum machines, and were able to continue to earn a living by using the new technology rather than fighting it. Secondly, after the initial rush to use programmed beats, many people eventually missed the human element and went right back to employing real humans to play real drums. (There’s also a third aspect, which is that there is a big trend at the moment towards the live reproduction of programmed drums during gigs; through the usual ‘knowing someone who knows someone’ type sequence of events, I’ve been lucky enough to play drums as part of a house band at a live Hip-Hop night for the likes of Roots Manuva, Estelle, Omar and many other people who use programming on their records and a full-band live).

So the net result is a relatively happy coexistence between the technology and the human input, with many of those session drummers who stuck at it in the 80s still able to make a good living today. Now, I’m not saying we in the library industry should be learning to programme self-issue machines. But there is a clear parallel in that we can either beat a hasty retreat and lock ourselves in a cupboard, or we can work with the technology and trust in the fact that there is nothing quite like taking away human interaction to show how much it is ultimately valued by customers / patrons / users. If self-service machines are good for the library, we should embrace them – even if jobs are at stake in the short-term, what is right for the customer is right for the customer and should be seen as a positive thing. If it turns out that an all self-service model is not right for many customers (as I suspect will be the case) then we need to be ready to work either instead of or with the machines and the technology.

My all-time favourite drummer Vinnie Colaiuta was asked: In many situations , has the role of the studio drummer been reduced to simply to the "overdub guy" replacing pre-recorded parts? His answer could just as well have been to the question, In many situations has the role of librarians been reduced to simply ‘the person who offers help when the self-service machinery doesn’t suffice'?:

Yes- and just why should that be considered a "reduction"? What kind of attitude is that? It's still a job to be done, and either you do it or you don't. What's the big whoop?

In the context of the article, he expands upon this theme and talks about learning to work with the technology. Which is why you’ll find the name of this incredibly virtuosic musician, who has played with Frank Zappa and Joni Mitchell and Herbie Hancock and so on, listed on the liner notes of the Pussycat Dolls album, and the Destiny’s Child LP. He was able to be flexible, to adapt, and to carry on providing a service – just as we Information Professionals will have to do.

-   thewikiman