GUEST POST #15: “Shedding Our Obsolete Baggage” by Genesis Hansen
November 16, 2010Note from Will: Many thanks to today’s guest poster, Genesis Hansen. Here is her self written bio:
I started my first job at the age of 11, working summers at my grandfather’s hamburger stand on the beach in San Clemente, CA. It’s still on my list as one of the best jobs I’ve ever had, and it’s where I first discovered that I actually enjoy working with the public! I’ve had a number of customer or public service jobs since then, including retail and government organizations and a lengthy stint in a church office, but in libraries I’ve found my passion.
I got my MLIS from San Jose State in 2003, and since 2004 have worked at the Newport Beach Public Library. At different times I’ve been a Reference, Young Adult, and Web Services Librarian, and have supervised several departments within the library, including Technical Processing and Circulation. I currently oversee Reference and Web Services. I’m a fellow of the 2008 Eureka! Leadership Institute, and returned to the 2010 Institute as a mentor. I’m also on the Advisory Board for Infopeople.
I’m interested in providing customers with the best experience at every point of contact with the library, including designing the website for better usability, improving wayfinding in brick and mortar locations, enhancing collections and developing creative and dynamic programs. I believe that the best PR person is a happy customer, and am always looking for new and creative ways to wow customers with exceptional programs and services. It’s a really exciting (and yes, challenging) time to be a librarian, as there are so many opportunities for us to adapt existing service models and explore new ones to keep pace with technological and social change.
I live in Capistrano Beach with my husband Eric and my 22-month-old son Calvin. I keep a blog where I talk about library issues and other things that challenge or interest me. It’s called Wrong Again: http://wrongagain.wordpress.com/
“SHEDDING OUR OBSOLETE BAGGAGE”
Times are tough – I don’t need to remind anyone of that. Libraries are having to make cuts – to budgets, to staff, to hours – some of them drastic. In the midst of this, we have to continue looking forward and make sure that we’re making the choices that will ensure our relevance and value to our communities for the long term. It’s hard enough to be innovative and forward-thinking in the best of circumstances, and with resources stretched so thin it may seem impossible.
If we are going to move forward, it seems pretty clear that we will have to jettison some things. In his book Leading Without Power, Max DePree speaks about leadership in non-profits and a great deal of what he says is applicable to libraries. He says non-profits should be “places of realized potential.” Isn’t that a great phrase? DePree has several qualifications for such organizations. Here’s one of my favorites:
“A place of realized potential sheds its obsolete baggage. It’s a place where people understand the significance of abandonment. No one has infinite budgets or energy or other resources. If we’re to take on new projects, new challenges, we must be prepared to abandon the obsolete. In the work of organizations, innovation and renewal are related to our ability to abandon the less important and the unnecessary.” [emphasis DePree’s]
I suspect most of us have already eliminated the easy targets, but if you still have a book club that’s limping along with only 2 remaining members, it might be time for a little graduation ceremony. Then take a look at your languishing formats. Are you still allotting money and space for VHS and audio cassettes? Do the circ stats justify that? Demand varies from community to community, but if you are holding on to a format to avoid the complaints of a handful of die-hard users, I guarantee you are not making the best use of your resources.
At my place of work we struggled to find the right balance with computer training. We used to have two types: small group classes, and one-on-one training for those who needed more help. Both services were really popular, but eventually we found with the one-on-one sessions that we were seeing the same people over and over, and that they weren’t making any progress. We dug a little deeper and talked to the customers who were coming and as it turned out, most of them were never practicing what they learned outside of their training session because it wasn’t really the training they were interested in. For many it was more about the social interaction that they had with the librarian during their sessions. Now, that may point to a legitimate need in our community, but we felt that using an hour of a librarian’s time to teach computer skills to someone who doesn’t really have an interest in using them was not the best way to meet that need. We referred people to other programs and activities in the library where they could find the interaction they were looking for, and also to activities at other places (local senior center, performing arts center, etc.) and killed off the one-on-one training. That freed us up to focus on other things, including beefing up our small group training classes which have been more effective.
Pick the low-hanging fruit first, but eventually you will get to the point of making some very tough decisions. Where are you investing your time, energy and money, and are those things worth the investment? Everything goes under the microscope: electronic databases, print reference, programs, staffing models, you name it.
One of my favorite passages from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life is this one:
The line of words is a hammer. You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years’ attention to these things, you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. Duck.
Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality: this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work and start over.
My questions to you, Unwinders, are the following:
1. Is it better to do as much as you can and do a passable job, or focus your energies on a few things and do them really well?
2. What can we stop doing? What’s essential to our mission, and what can go?
3. Are our core values and practices still sound, or do we have to knock out some bearing walls?
4. Or, is all of this just fear-mongering? Do you think libraries can survive just fine by doing what we’ve been doing all along?
We have to do lots of things well in an academic library. What we refuse to do is rein in our hours – we have fewer people than ever and our administration is talking about extending hours. Electronic resources are available 24×7 – keeping a building open until midnight when there are, on average, just three students? That’s mighty low hanging fruit but there is a “cannot reduce hours” mentality here. Unfortunately there isn’t a corresponding “no overtime” policy – the professional staff has been told in no uncertain terms that we can be worked as long and as hard as need be. That that attitude conflicts with Cathoic social justice (we are a faith-based institution) matters not a whit.
Out of curiosity, does the “cannot reduce hours” mentality come from the library, or is that pervasive in the entire institution?
Does the president care? Probably not, but other high muckety-mucks do and our director works at their behest. Contracting our hours would be good for the students – we wouldn’t be so thinly stretched. Several of us refuse to share our cell phone numbers with administrative types – I am not paid enough to be on call 24×7 and it isn’t in my job description.
I’m having flashbacks to working at a Catholic women’s college in the 1990s. I really appreciated the social justice mission of the sisters, but there were more than a few faculty meetings where our lousy pay was under discussion. We were among the lowest paid faculty among the private colleges in the area. Quite a few faculty voiced the thought that maybe social justice should start at home.
My questions to you, Unwinders, are the following:
1. Is it better to do as much as you can and do a passable job, or focus your energies on a few things and do them really well?
This is sort of like asking if a broad undergraduate education is no longer valid. I think we are generalists and so should remain with our specialties as we individually like them.
2. What can we stop doing? What’s essential to our mission, and what can go?
Anyone still have a vertical file? Does it have good stuff in it? Is it still used? But it is old of course so of course it can go, since nothing old is of utility or value…huh? How’s that again?
3. Are our core values and practices still sound, or do we have to knock out some bearing walls?
Our core values and practices have not been terribly sound since forever; especially if you go with ALA’s. Instead of fighting against filters – we should have built them. Instead of ignoring the “WWW” we should have started indexing it with a vengeance. Instead of railing against this that or the other foreign adventurism in ALA Council we should have been honing in on our core missions and professionalism…sigh…seen any change on that front? Didn’t think so.
4. Or, is all of this just fear-mongering? Do you think libraries can survive just fine by doing what we’ve been doing all along?
Oh I don’t think it’s fear mongering at all – I think as soon as Google and company finish digitizing the majority of the texts – they are at about 10-15% now of the corpus – we are out of business as we know it as professionals. “People get ready, a change is coming…”
In the ensuing chaos there will be opportunity – if the profession can seize upon or not remains to be seen. If not – we’re done.
Okay, say we do seize upon the opportunities present in the chaos and are able to survive – at what point do we cease being libraries and become something else?
Any library director who is doing the job properly is always scanning the horizon for opportunities and constantly evaluating the services being offered. So that’s nothing new.
Which core values? I gave up on ALA years ago. I go by my library’s mission statement tempered by the reality of how popular individual services, programs, materials, formats, etc., are. I’ve got a small library, and everything has to earn its space and budget dollar.
Fear mongering? We’ve been declared DOA for the last 20 years, and yet my library (and many libraries around me) just keeps getting busier. Know your community, stick to your mission, success follows.
Leslie, has your library’s mission changed at all over the years, or has it remained constant?
We discuss the mission annually, and amend it very occasionally. The mission ought to remain a relative constant, it’s the way we fulfill that mission which needs to be in step with the times. For example, meeting the educational needs of the community has meant, in terms of the reference collection, changing from a paper based reference collection to one more populated with electronic materials and online access points.
[...] week as well as writing the final post in the Blazing Trails series. In the meantime, I wrote a guest post for Will Manley’s blog, Will Unwound. Not only is Will’s blog great, but there’s [...]
Funny about the computer classes; we find individual ones effective in terms of addressing that particular person’s needs–haven’t had the experience you describe about just wanting a social outlet. We offered small-group classes about various computer topics but found that the preparation is a significant amount of staff time compared to the number of attendees (although there were always some people interested).
I agree that everything should go under the microscope (and be evaluated as often as possible so as to switch priorities as the community dictates). Libraries can’t survive by just coasting along with what’s been done in the past; that much is for sure.
Responding out of the given order.
4. No, it’s not just fear-mongering. Things have changed and will continue to change. Libraries must also change.
1. and 2. It’s a matter of community needs, expectations, and support. Those differ from place to place, so any given response will be inappropriate for most libraries because of their differing situations. But keep in mind that the more sharply or restrictively you try to define library services, the more you are likely to be wrong and to miss what others regard as important, even critical. And don’t put all your trust in market research, which is wrong as often as it is right.
3. Since there is not complete agreement on our core values and practices, determining what is load-bearing and what isn’t is risky business. But the metaphor points out the risk involved: if you take out a load-bearing wall, you either replace it or the building becomes a different structure. Would it still be a library? Would calling it a library actually make the public see it as a library?
I have always been of the “if you’re going to do something, do it well” school of thought. I feel the same way about library services. If you are going to focus on programming, do great programming and promote it well. If you’re going to collect a new format, really invest a chunk of cash in it – don’t just buy a handful and say “Look! we have Blu-ray!” However, my fear is that we are moving away from our core values and focusing on our energies on popular/populist/bookstore model stuff, instead of doing what we have always done well. I fear that we will outsource the important stuff, like selection and cataloging, and put MLS trained people to work hosting gardening speakers.
To me, it’s like when a really good pizza joint starts serving fried chicken and burgers…and suddenly the whole place goes downhill. It’s not that people stopped eating pizza, it’s that the restaurant panicked because a burger joint moved in down the street.
Crap. Now I’m hungry…
Every organization must adapt to stay vital. I don’t think our core mission has changed or needs to change, but the way we carry it out must continue to evolve. In many ways we now have much more powerful tools to carry out that mission than we did when I graduated from library school back in the early 80s. When we get in trouble is when we get distracted by the noise and lose the focus of how a service or acquisition fits into that core value.
Two years ago one of my members asked if they should be buying blu-ray. I live in an area of extreme haves and have nots, with a very, very thin buffer of middle class in between. At the time not that many people had blu-ray players yet, regular DVDs played on blu-ray hardware but not the other way around, and blu-ray cost more. Blu-ray struck me as a customer service nightmare and a poor use of limited collection development funds. But it was the library’s call, not mine – at least until they started asking me to make the public realize that the title they were requesting through the OPAC was blu-ray, etc. I think in libraries we often feel the pressure to appear cool and do things that just don’t make sense at the time. How often do we base decisions on solid information and how often do we go with perceptions, be they right or wrong. For people who are experts at research we are sadly prone to going with what we think we know.
I am concerned about the disaffection with ALA that shows up on this list. ALA is the only organization devoted to speaking out for librarians and their issues at the national level. ALA needs to be looking very hard at what needs to to change for the rank and file librarian to see it as a valuable asset for libraries. I’ve often wondered if a group could put together a ‘slate’ of candidates for council who pledged to sick closely to library and information policy issues only. The way Council is now, you couldn’t pay most of us to run.
I think that ALA and ALA Council get painted badly by those who do not participate, and don’t look at all that ALA and Council do. Council never gets credit for doing good things, but always gets blamed for even talking about some things (witness the current pseudonymous blogger who is, yet again, bashing ALA and Council over a conversation!!!!
I have been on Council. I was there when Hawai’i was bashed for outsourcing its collection development, and there were some very good discussions and policy statements which came out of that.
Council has adopted things like a statement of core values for the profession.
But what some people like to talk about are things like Israel, Iran, etc. some of which resolutions come from the cabal which can easily take over a Membership Meeting because those who are opposed don’t bother to show up.
Running a slate has been tried. It has had (at best) modest success. Council is large and diffuse. 80% of the membership is not elected by the general members, but comes from the parts of the organization (chapters, divisions, round tables, Council itself).
ALA, through its staff and the various division and publishing activities is a voice for change. Look at things like Techsource which has people like David Lee King, Michael Stevens, Michelle Boulle, (formerly, I think) Karen Schneider, and Michael Porter as contributors.
Libraries do need to jettison old baggage. As a former director, I can tell you that is very hard. From the top it is hard when the staff doesn’t want to toss it. From the bottom it is hard when the leadership does not. Id does need to be done.
Sorry…that last line should be:
It does need to be done…
Wait…that 80% should be 45% I did bad math in my head. There are 100 elected at large, 53 from chapters, 12 from divisions, 6 or 7 from round tables, and 8 who are elected from Council to serve on the Exec Board.
ALA advocates for libraries, not necessarily librarians. The interests of the two groups — libraries as institutions constrained by budgets, librarians as professionals who wish to advance their status and pay — are not necessarily congruent.
I believe in ALA and have participate actively in divisions and round tables since 1983, but I’m finding more and more that many librarians do not see a value in the organization. I have suffered through division executive board meetings where we were giving direction to our council rep on things that were so tangential to libraries that I wanted to run screaming from the room.
This seems to parallel the declining interest in unions. Some unions are indeed corrupt and useless but in general people have forgotten the huge improvement in working conditions and betterment of life for workers brought about by the union movement. Just as many people today have lost sight of the value of privacy, so too many are so wrapped in their own little (electronic) worlds, they don’t see the strength in numbers. Ten people in a group can accomplish what ten individuals cannot.
My questions to you, Unwinders, are the following:
1. Is it better to do as much as you can and do a passable job, or focus your energies on a few things and do them really well?
That is a very interesting question and it is sort of the glass is half empty or full type of a thing in that there are usually two major and opposing view points. I’ve always been something of a perfectionist and I try not to wipe myself out energy wise at work by trying to do everything exceptionally well. I do realize after 20 years in the library field that you do have to pace yourself but I find it difficult to only do a passable job at anything – although I am better at not sweating the smaller details than I use to be.
Having said that I absolute cannot simply do a passable job at anything not by choice anyway– so I suppose you could say I have something of a type A personality and try to pace myself while also trying my best to do each task to the best of my ability.
2. What can we stop doing? What’s essential to our mission, and what can go?
I see public libraries as living growing things that both reflect the core values of our society and which correspondingly offer services based on those values. And of course over time, from a historical perspective, what is important to the members of a society changes so we have to keep that in mind while offering services, programs, purchasing materials and discarding items. So as to what can go – I think that depends upon patron usage and demand and both staff and monetary resources.
3. Are our core values and practices still sound, or do we have to knock out some bearing walls?
4. Or, is all of this just fear-mongering? Do you think libraries can survive just fine by doing what we’ve been doing all along?
As far as our core values and fear-mongering goes…
I think our core values – that being free access to information, library services, and programs for all people regardless of their race, religion, beliefs, affiliations etc. is still the same — I just think libraries in the west, like the west itself, are undergoing a technological revolution which is changing both libraries and the way citizens of western nations live…
Drat — sorry about the spacing I thought I had it all spaces correctly…
The Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians addresses some of these issues nicely: http://www.blyberg.net/2009/04/03/the-darien-statements-on-the-library-and-librarians/
In a nutshell: “Why we do things will not change, but how we do them will.”
Genesis! Terrific guest post, and I’m sorry for taking so long to respond to it. Mr. Jessa and I have the flu, so things are a little, um, high-maintenance around here. o.O
“1. Is it better to do as much as you can and do a passable job, or focus your energies on a few things and do them really well?” Is this as libraries or as librarians? I think it’s good that we tend to specialize within our field. Cross-training is great, but I’ve never met an adult reference librarian whose heart yearned to run Babies’ Lap Time. As libraries, though, I think by definition we have to generalize. If we decide that we don’t do all relevant formats, or programming, or publicity, or advocacy, we’re toast.
2. “What can we stop doing? What’s essential to our mission, and what can go?” That varies by community, no? I’ve worked in libraries that lived or died by their programming. I’ve worked in others that found their collection was the single most important thing to their users. I think that as long as we are connecting the community with the means to improve or exercise their literacy skills, we are working within our mission.
3. “Are our core values and practices still sound, or do we have to knock out some bearing walls?” I’m not sure what the bearing walls of librarianship are these days. Hmm. Thanks for bringing this up; I’ll be thinking about it for a while!
4. “Or, is all of this just fear-mongering? Do you think libraries can survive just fine by doing what we’ve been doing all along?” Quite frankly, I don’t know. I know that we have to keep listening to our patrons, and we have to keep articulating to them why we provide them a good return on their investment. Other than that, I leave the question to sharper minds!
Thanks again for writing about this topic. It’s always nice to see what others have to say about it.
Jessa – Libraries here in Upstate NY have been very short-staffed over the past couple of weeks due to illness. Sorry to hear it has affected the west coast too. If it’s the same thing going around here, it’s a doozy! Hope you are feeling better.
This is kind of a tough question. I once read something that inspired me. It went something like – “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well is hogwash. Some things HAVE to be done, but are not worth taking the time to get
perfect.” The trick, of course, is figuring out what those things are so we have more time to spend on things that really count.
I also find that often patrons don’t demand perfection from things the way we do. Several libraries in our region have recently gone “Dewey-free,” and, naturally, it’s been discussed hotly in the librarian community. But, frankly, from what I can tell, most patrons don’t really care if it’s Dewey or bookstore topic shelving. They are just very excited that the library has lots of great new materials in a variety of subjects. Same thing with story-times. Some librarians are much better at these than others, but the thing that seems to affect attendance the most is the time the storytime is offered.
However, at some point programs need to be cut if you can’t do them well. I once worked for an organization that had several programs mandated by the state, but very little funding for them. As much as I didn’t want to lose my job, I had to admit that it probably would have been better to just abolish these programs. What’s the point of having a program if you can’t fund it to actually DO anything? In fact, I think keeping the program on paper is a disservice to the public because they are under the impression that the state is taking care of such-and-such because there is a program with that name, but in reality such-and-such is not being addressed.
Thanks, Jessa! As far as question #1 goes, I was thinking more of libraries than librarians. My reason being thus: I love to experiment and play with new ideas, programs, services, etc. But at some point you have to draw the line, right? If we are trying to do too many things, we’ll end up doing none of them well, and I think that’s a problem. At the same time, I often find it hard to decide what to let go, which is why I was curious to see what the Unwinders would say