If you're going to use a stick, you'd better have a big enough stick

Twitter has been alive with the sound of mutiny for the last few days, in response to Harper Collins announcing a 26-time lending limit on their eBooks. In case you've not seen this news, the short version is that the (huge) publisher has somewhat shafted libraries by imposing a pretty small limit on the number of times their e-books can be borrowed, before they need to be re-purchased. (A fuller explanation can be read here on LibrarybyDay, including links to a whole bunch of articles on the subject.)

One of the responses to this has been a call to boycott Harper Collins. There is a special website for it and everything. I can see why people are in favour of this, and it's nice to see some aggression from the library community in the face of a threat. However, this boycott fails on two fundamental levels, in my opinion:

ONE: the stick you are trying to beat the publisher with is not big enough. They can get by despite a library boycott.

TWO: there is no point in protesting about / boycotting ANYTHING unless you are presenting a viable alternative. (Student fee protesters take note.)

This excellent post by Sarah Glassmeyer does the maths and concludes that libraries simply don't make up enough of publisher's revenues for a boycott (which would only ever be partial if it happened in earnest at all) to be a game changer. There is no point in starting a fight if you don't have a chance of winning the fight - you'll end up bloodied, or having to back down.

And as for point two, there is no way Harper Collins would do this without giving it some serious, long, hard, thought. They would also have anticipated an angry reaction from the library industry - and they have gone ahead anyway. Therefore, what are the chances of them caving in because of librarians protesting now? I think you have to put a viable compromise on the table to be taken seriously, not just lash out because it's unfair. The library industry is acting like a wounded animal, when cooler heads are called for. Where is the alternative model for Harper Collins to consider?

Other things that spring to mind about the boycott idea:

• It doesn't make the library industry look too good
• As many others have said, you've got more chance of making change happen from the inside than from the outside
• We've been screwed by publishers for years (I used to work in e-Resources, trust me) so why particularly call for collective action now? What do we do if the other publishers fall into line - boycott all of them? We have a duty to our own customers to actually provide them with stuff
• Yet again, we are an industry divided. We need to be on the same page to move forward! But I realise that is very hard to achieve.

.

Just my opinion.

- thewikiman

Library advocacy 2.0. Converting the Internet, one random stranger at a time

I decided to try some library advocacy of a new kind, today - I went to Omegle and took on some strangers. Omegle connects you to a random stranger, and when one of you disconnects that's it, conversation over. So could I win over some people to the library cause..? The results are below - I have to say, at first it seemed too easy! Random Strangers love libraries, apparently. :) Attempt 1: already loves libraries...

Attempt 2: I end up asking him more questions than he asked me...

Attempt 3: FINE DODGER!

Attempt 4: thewikiman fails to excite conversational partner

Attempts 5 and 6: surely SOME people don't like libraries? Otherwise how come we're in such crisis?

Attempt 7: It's a tough sell, but someone has to step up to the plate. Censored for your own protection, he really was a filthy little man (or woman)

Attempt 8: finally, a conversion! This makes it all worthwhile...

:)

- thewikiman

Buy India a Library illustrates the power of social media once again

Last month I wrote a blog post outlining the Buy India a Library project, and calling for donations. We wanted to raise, in an ideal world, £1,350 - enough, remarkably, to build a library in a book-free zone in India, AND to build a donkey-drawn mobile library that would travel around Africa. This month we will hand over the unbelievable £2,420 we raised in just two weeks, to the charity that administers the donations.  If you're time poor, you can just have a look at the slides below to learn a bit more about it - and thank you if you got involved!

I seem to be genetically programmed to try and break-down things I've used / done / been involved with / learned about, and repackage them for consumption by the wider community - so if you're less time-poor, read on below the slides for some of the stuff I learned from the experience, about using social media for a campaign like this.

Thank you from Buy India a Library - we did it!  

View more presentations from Ned Potter.

The power of social media, writ large

A lot of people talk about the power of social media, and it can tend to polarise people - either you get really put off by all the fuss, or you become a social media evangalist yourself. For me, this was conclusive proof of the power of social media, as it was the mechanism by which we could communicate with people, and draw together a community of librarians (and non-librarians) who wanted to get involved. Crowd-sourcing was made easy by Twitter, and our conversation reached people none of us had previously connected with.

Aaron Tay has written in detail about four recent campaigns for libraries (including Buyalib) that use Social Media.

Working together

It was great working with Justin, Andromeda and Jan (and huge thanks to Andromeda for suggesting we do this at all). All of us brought something to the table that made the foursome a really strong unit. Not 'more than the sum of our parts' as such, it's just that the sum of our parts was a lot more than any of us on our own (obviously). I'm not sure it would be possible to have done this invidually, and why would you want to? Collaboration is ace.

We didn't use any particuarly advanced communication methods, by the way - just emails (lots of 'em!), Twitter DMs, and a Google Docs spreadsheet. Plus of course a Wordpress.com blog which we all had access to.

If you're planning something similar...

I wish I had some peircing insights into what we did, or top tips about what unique things we employed to get it done - but I don't! We just tried it, made it as we went along, and it worked. But a couple of things that I noticed along the way:

• There is huge momentum for this kind of thing initially - you need to capatalise on this before people get bored! Lots of people got excited about the idea, and RT'd, and donated - but after a few days that momentum had ebbed away and I was worrying we were starting to annoy people by constantly tweeting links and demanding their money. So I'd say, for a campaign like this, don't launch until you're completely ready - you need to be around to really push it when you do launch and make the most of the initial good-will.
• Mix up the information you provide. We had a lot of info and things to say about the project from the get-go, but we aggregated it in several blog posts over time. You need new things to say, new angles to come from when you blog about it - otherwise it's just 'we've made X, please give us more!' every time, and people won't keep reading.
• It was a Twitter campaign, but moving it off Twitter got results too. We pitched buyalib as a 'let's crowd-source the money to build a library, to build a library' type campaign, but obviously Twitter is a bit of a bubble. After a while, everyone who is going to donate has seen your tweets. Looking at the timings and frequency of donations, it's clear that when people blogged about the campaign this provoked a surge in donations. This is probably for a number of reasons - first and foremost you're bound to be reaching people who aren't on twitter but who do read blogs. Secondly when the blog posts weren't written by members of the Buyalib team on their own blogs (ie other Info Pros felt moved to blog about the campaign) the argument was more powerful. These bloggers were, in effect,  champions of the cause, disseminating information about it - rather than people directly associated with the cause, promoting it. That gets round the 'well of course they think it's a good idea!' issue that comes with blogging about your own projects. The power of word-of-mouth is not to be under-estimated. Thirdly, a blog post can explain something in a lot more detail than a tweet. The maximum most tweets about buyalib could be was an invatation to click a link and read more - that only works on people who are willing (and have the time) to click the links and engage. With a blog post, the reader has already made the commitment to read it, and all the information is right there with no further action required on their part. It's only a little thing, but we do live in a world of information overload - people don't have time to click all the links they see.
• People really want regular updates! They really, really do. Even if you have nothing much new to add, you need to blog or otherwise provide updates on the total raised, because people have an emotional investment (as well as a financial investment) in the whole process - they don't want to just donate and feel like that's the end of it, they want to follow the whole thing through.
• Thanking people takes a long time... Make sure you leave a good chunk of time to assemble and collate all the donors so you can get in touch to thank them. It takes a while (we had 100 people donate), but it's a vital step. I only just finished thanking all the people I personally knew (or knew via social media) - sorry it took me so long!
• A good hashtag goes a long way. No evidence for this one - I just get the feeling that the ease of writing, saying and understanding #buyalib as a hashtag helped the campaign. As everyone knows you only have 140 characters to play with on Twitter - using too many of those up on a hashtag is a cardinal sin, as it inhibits peoples' ability to discuss it. But then also a cardinal sin is having a hashtag which means nothing to anyone. I think #buyalib worked well - better than #buildanIndianlibrary, or whatever, might have done. .

Thanks again to all who got involved! And if you're just reading about this now and wish you could have donated, I'm afraid we've closed the campaign now but you could always go direct to GoodGifts.org and buy a library of your own.

In the meantime, stay tuned to the Buy India a Library blog because when we get updates on building progress etc, we'll stick 'em up on there!

- thewikiman

One step forward, two steps back in library-land

There was a couple of really nice things I read yesterday. Firstly, Katie Birkwood got out of the Echo Chamber and presented at Ignite London 4, a non-library event, and talked about libraries. This is absolutely brilliant - a central tenant of the echolib philosophy is to go where librarians aren't, and preach to the unconverted. By the sounds of things she succeeded in converting some of them, too - you can read about it on her blog, here.

I wanted to embed her slides here because I think they are absolutely fantastic:

Just a Room Full of Stuff? Why Libraries are Great / Katie Birkwood

View more presentations from Katie Birkwood.

Another positive thing (for me) was seeing Emma Davidson's blog post about the LISNPN competition - she contrasted the energies being directed at down-playing the positivity around the SaveLibraries campagin, on the LIS-Profession mailing list, with the energies being directed at trying to improve things a tiny bit, via our competition. That was a nice way of looking at it. Emma said:

"I think it’s extremely interesting that one cohort is choosing to spend their energies deploring the current situation, whilst the other is doing their best to get people to do something about it.

Of course, some of the points made on the discussion list are extremely valid, and equally one might argue that a bunch of random acts of advocacy won’t necessarily make much difference to the overall picture, but I know which general approach makes me proud to be part of this profession, and which route fills me with gloom."

Generally speaking I think those JISC-mail lists seem to bring out the worst in people a lot of the time, I don't know why. Lots of gloom mixed in with the odd flash of anger. They can be very productive at times, though, so I stay subscribed and look for diamonds in the rough.

My own views on SaveLibrariesDay, both the positive and the cautioning, are encapsulated better than I could say it myself by this excellent piece on Use Libraries and Learn Stuff.

Anyhow, these nice things were offset by a pronouncement from David Cameron in the Commons. He's on a bit of a roll for making idiotic public statements of late, and this one was really depressing from an information professional's point of view.

"We all know a truth about libraries, which is that those which will succeed are those that wake up to the world of new technology, the internet and everything else, and investment goes in."

How utterly depressing. Needless to say in the echo chamber of this blog, we all know that we have of course woken up to the world of new technology (and THE INTERNET - thanks Dave, public libraries have offered internet access since the nineties for God's sake) a long time ago, and it is ignorant for him to pronounce otherwise. Has he been to a library recently, or is he just making it up? Has he been to his own library in the House of Commons which, despite being closer to the Victorian ideal of a library (the one that everyone thinks all libraries are like) than the vast majority of libraries in the world, still contains computers? I like the idea that if we DO 'wake up' to this stuff that we've been awake to for two decades, 'investment goes in' - well that's settled then, invest in us you fool.

Everyone tells you that living under a Tory Government will be rubbish, of course, but you really have to experience it for yourself to get the full forlorn, listless, faith-in-humanity eroding, fear-mongering, banker-pandering, xenophobic, misogynist, racist, homophobic, equality-ignoring hatefulness of it all. Good times.

Anyway, hearing David Cameron talk about libraries reminded me of an email exchange I'd had with Chris Rhodes, and he gave me permission to quote something he said which is very important, and very true, about the whole Save Libraries thing:

“The problem with the save libraries campaign [is] even highly educated people have no idea what libraries do.

‘Save the local bus route’ is an easier campaign, prima facie, because public perception of what the local bus route does and what it actually does are not that different. With ‘save the local library’ there is a massive disparity between what the library does and what people think it does.

The campaign has to both explain the role of libraries and explain why they should not be cut.”

I think he's absolutely right, and it does make the whole thing massively, massively harder.

*bangs head against desk*

Sorry, normal cheerier service will be resumed with the next blog post. :)

- thewikiman

Learning from the Orteig Prize - the sky is the limit for libraries!

It was from this Freakonomics Radio podcast, which I've refered to on this blog before and which provoked a huge number of comments, that I learned about the Orteig Prize. It's a really fascinating story, it inspired the LISNPN competition mentioned in part one of this post, and who knows what else we can learn from it - so bear with me while I go through the events of the early 1920s.

A little history

In 1919, a New York hotelier called Raymond Orteig put up a prize of $25,000 (equivalent to over $300,000 today in pure inflation terms, but actually a lot more in terms of what that money could buy) for the first aviator to fly non-stop from New York to Paris, or the other way around. For the first five years, no one could claim his prize as the technology wasn't advanced enough. But in those five years people worked enormously hard, because that was an enormous amount of money.

Eventually, in 1927, Charles Lindbergh makes the flight successfully, and wins the prize. It took 33.5 hours in a single-engine plane (the Spirit of  St Louis) and was a minor miracle of good fortune allied with supreme skill, but he made it safely to France. Lindbergh was only 25 years old at the time, and he used the massive fame he now enjoyed to promote commercial aviation. He was obviously one of those polymathic people who just operate on a higher plain (no pun intended) than the rest of us - he later became a prize-winning author, an environmentalist (can't of been too many of them at that time), an international explorer and an inventor!

This was of course a fantastic achievement, but the existence of the competition catalysed massive progress in the aviation industry by loads of people, not just Lindbergh himself. In fact, $400,000 worth (in old money) of innovation happened from the combined entries to the competition - and Orteig only had to pay out once! The results of this expenditure were immediately quantifiable - the year before Lindbergh's flight, just 6,000 people travelled by air as passengers; 18 months afterwards there was 180,000 commercial passengers. Even in the months remaining in 1927, the year of his flight, applications for pilot's licences tripled and the number of registered aircraft quadrupled.

(Another ramification of the competition was, as you might expect with experimental air travel, a huge loss of human life. Many pilots died failing to win the prize. Hopefully a library equivalent won't place its entrants in such jeopardy...)

The Legacy

Apart from the 30-fold increase in commercial air-travel, which effectively gave birth the multi-billion dollar industry we know today, the prize had another legacy. Inspired by Orteig's competition, Peter Diamandis set up the X Prize Foundation. This offers a more modern prize of $10,000,000 to achieve huge goals such as commercial flight into space - again, far more than $10,000,000 is invested, in total, by all the entrants combined, so the field moves on apace. Not only that, but the Foundation themselves don't put up the prizes! They are funded by organisations and philanthropists, eager to making progress happen.

The LISNPN competition

As I'm sure you've realised, the LISNPN competition is a very (VERY) small-scale attempt to do something similar. We're offering prizes we think people will really value, and will be willing to work hard and innovate in order to have a shot at winning. Although entrants will retain full copyright of their ideas, LISNPN will be able to show-case ALL of them, and hopefully ALL of them should reach a new audience not normally involved with libraries at all. We're only giving out two prizes (again, put up by generous people who want to encourage the enterprise, rather than paid for from the - non-existent - LISNPN coffers) but hopefully the profession will benefit from lots and lots of advocacy efforts.

Are there other things we can do with competitons and libraires?

So is there scope for more library innovation on a much grander scale, adopting the Orteig prize principles? I think there must be. Other bodies must be able to run other competitions, the entries for which could be public-facing and progressive. I'd love to see one around technology in libraries.

And this links to another thing I've often thought, which is that libraries (certainly in the UK) don't appear to be as good at attracting philanthropy as other comparable areas. We need to be something that rich people and foundations think of when they're wondering where to put their money in a charitable way. Perhaps an innovation inspiring competition is a way to achieve this? What do you think?

In the meantime, good luck with the competition if you're entering.

- thewikiman