Back to Library content for a post.

Jessamyn West posted a link to The Usable Library – basically a small site hightlighting things that make a library usable with some very good advice.

Via The Librarian in Black I’ve discovered tht the Library Journal now has a new column on User Experience. As a librarian who has moved into user experience work this makes me rather pleased.

User experience is incredibly important and I think even more so in libraries. Especially when you think about the standard OPAC available at many libraries. So many of them are awful to use, clunky and badly designed and really need a good looking at.  And often this carries across to the physical space itself. As the author, Aaron Schmidt, points out in the first post, even something as simple as moving the location of a stapler to make it more accessible to patrons can result in a huge improvement to the users experience of a space.

I’m of the opinion that more librarians need to have a basic awareness of user experience principles, so I’m pleased that someone is tackling this. I hope it gets widely read and leads to an increase in fantastic experiences at libraries everywhere.

The European Commission recently released a statement regarding Europeana – the European Digital Library that will be opening in November of this year. I haven’t heard much about this, but the plan is to build a portal to European digitized collections, allowing the public to have access to the historical riches of Europe. It’s quite a neat idea, but I can’t help but think that the goal of having “an Irish art lover to get close to the Mona Lisa without queuing at the Louvre” might be a little far-fetched.

It seems to be very public oriented, looking at broad, thematic areas such as music, crime and punishment, travel and tourism. They’re hoping that they’ll get researchers to use it as well (though why they wouldn’t use the sites/databases of the primary providers is a bit beyond me), but it is primarily aimed at the ‘interested public’, whoever they are.

It’s being funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, which is a programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable, which is a laudable, if rather vague goal. The project is being run from the national library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, and has partner institutions throughout the rest of Europe.

The idea is that it will just be a portal site, with federated search across all the member organisations collections, and with the complete digital object staying on the site it belongs to – the Bundesarchiv or British Library, for example.

I think it’s kinda a neat idea – digitisation is a good idea, at least from an archival point of view, if nothing else – but I’m not entirely convinced that it will be used. I expect it’ll end up languishing, like much of the public-oriented Europa sites, unnoticed, unusable and neglected. I don’t really know who they’re aiming it at – they might get a little further, and make it a little more practical if they did just aim the project at the researchers and academics that are far more likely to use it, rather than pretending that there is this great public desire for digitised historical documents. The public should certainly have access to such things, but it isn’t really high on the agenda for your average European citizen.

It might behoove the Commission to think a little more about who they’re marketing these things to, and how to market it appropriately, before spending all this money on projects that no one will use.

In the New Jersey Express Times yesterday, there was a truly depressing story of a public librarian putting up signs on the computers in the library in which she works urging people to ‘Just Say No to Wikipedia’

Isn’t it time we moved on from this attitude? Now I know that Wikipedia can be inaccurate, and it certainly isn’t the beginning and end of online research, but it does provide a valuable service. Though I do think it’s important to warn students of the potential problems of using Wikipedia as a key research tool, and encourage them to look farther afield, surely education about how to use Wikipedia properly is more important than scaring people away from it?

I’m sure that students (especially high school aged ones) probably overuse it, and don’t know how to use it properly (I’m sure there a great many non-students who do too). But surely it’s our job as librarians to help broaden our users scope, rather than closing it off? Put up signs pointing them to other online resources that they might want to view, or to the reference desk, or to the hard copy encyclopaedias even, rather than just telling them to not use the site. Encourage further avenues of research, point out places they can go. If you’re in a position to be educating students, get them to critique Wikipedia articles, to discover for themselves where the inconsistencies are, and learn some critical resource evaluation skills in the process.

One of the best uses of Wikipedia is as a pointer to further information. I use it frequently, usually to get an overview of topics that I know very little about. I’ll usually read the first paragraph or so, and then go straight to the links section at the bottom the page, which always seems to turn up sites that I probably wouldn’t have found on my own. And yes, I do take any of the content that I read there with a grain of salt, but honestly? I’ve found it to be right far more than wrong.  Admittedly, the type of articles that I tend to view on Wikipedia (predominantly tech, legal and economic articles, when I come across an area I’m unfamiliar with) are the better written – these don’t really get as much malicious tinkering, or polarised opinion as some of the more contentious articles – but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t valuable information in an article on the American Civil War, or the crisis in Darfur, for example. I use it not just for personal research, but also in my work (though never as a primary resource – there are some professional standards to maintain!), and I’m happy to do so.

The trick, I feel, isn’t in not using Wikipedia, it’s in learning how to use it critically and carefully.

Recently Librarian in Black had an interesting post regarding honesty and blogging about work. She came to the conclusion that there was no happy medium – honest blogging is both career suicide and honest sharing at the same time. And I rather agree with her.

This isn’t an issue we talk about a lot, but it has been coming up more and more recently. There has been some critique of the bibiloblogosphere, saying that we’re not critical enough, and that we don’t deal enough with contentious issues. There isn’t enough dissent and there isn’t enough discussion of what actually goes on in the workplace. And I think that this is an interesting issue to address.

I can’t help but think that this is (or should be) more of an issue with library blogs – we are, inherently blogging about work (you may be a librarian by vocation, but it is still ultimately a job), but everyone is still too scared to talk about the specifics of what we do. There is, as LiB said, too much of a fear of reprisal. It is, however, this fear of reprisal (and the reprisal itself) that I find disappointing and strange.

We’re not, by and large, a cantankerous or troll-y bunch. I can count the kerfuffles I’ve seen in the bibiloblogosphere nearly on one hand, nothing like the average of most internet communities (and even when there are slight dramas, they are very rarely on the scale of internet warfare seen elsewhere). We’re not likely to say things that are massively detrimental to the workplaces in which we work, or the people whom we work with. At worst, I expect we may be slightly snarky, and there may be a slight workplace politics hiccup following a potentially ‘difficult’ post, if there were any at all. And, essentially, we are librarians blogging for other librarians. Where we work within institutions, our non-library colleagues are very unlikely to see what we have written, even if we are well known within the library-blogging fold. And our library colleagues and peers are likely to be sympathetic to the workplace troubles and frustrations that we all share.

But, sadly, our workplaces tend to be unsupportive of this honesty and sharing. It is uncomfortable, and unfamiliar, and they don’t know what to do with it. They may approve of, or at least accept, blogging as an academic medium, in which we can wax lyrical about the state of the information profession, and where the industry may be heading, or as a forum for letting more interested people find out about interesting new tools and services. But they are uncomfortable with what I think of as business casual – the ability to be professional, and take your work seriously, whilst still being a separate person, with ideas and opinions that may not always align with what is best for the company. I see my role in this blog as a business casual role – this is something I do for myself; I love the reading, writing, and conversations that I get to participate in from being part of it, and I would be (and was) blogging in some other capacity if I didn’t have this blog. But this is also a professional venture – this is a way of meeting other professionals in my field, expanding on my knowledge of the sector, improving my skills, and, ultimately, being better at my job, and any future jobs I will hold.

It is this business casual idea that makes me understand why in other professions it doesn’t put you at a disadvantage to have a blog. In industries where it’s ok to wear business casual to work, it’s probably ok to be writing business casual as well – think advertising, design, consultancy, and other types of web work and bleeding-edge millenium industries.

And this is where I think the frustration lies. We are web-workers – we are sharing in the zeitgeist of new technology. We know what the most engaged minds of our generation are thinking and doing. We are using the tools that they are using, and sharing the thoughts that they are thinking. We engage in the same communities, and participate in the same practices. But we are not them. They work from without, while we work from within. They work in industries where free-thinking and opinions and open-ness are valued, whilst we still, by and large, work within large dinosaurs of organisations, unable to keep up with the changes, even when they would like to.

I can’t help but think that it’s somewhat unreasonable to expect bloggers to never hold, or at least express, a negative opinion about their workplace, but would indeed, if I were employer, rather than employee, relish and appreciate the honesty and personality of my employees being able to express such an opinion. But, at the same time, I know that it’s hard for our lumbering dinosaurs of organisations to keep up with the nimble leaps and jumps that modern webworkers make.

And I don’t know what the answer to this is. If we challenge the system we will get knocked back (note: my shocking absence on Twitter and Facebook during the working day at the moment). But if we don’t challenge the system we won’t change anything. Personally, I believe in pushing the rules as far as they will let me go and to hell with the consquences! What do you think?

Last week Fiona Bradley asked what I thought was a very pertinent question on Twitter – where are all the blogging UK librarians?

Since moving from Australia in 2006, I have seen the Australian library blogger population flourish, with many exciting bloggers and events. There has been the West Australia Lib 2.0 Unconference, Information Online 2007, and New Librarian 2006.

There is the upcoming State Library of Queensland Unconference, Australian Blogging Conference, Information Online 2009, VALA 2008 and IFLA 2010 has been announced for Brisbane (all of which I would love to be able to attend! why did I move to the UK again?)

There are wonderful blogs such as the aforementioned Blisspix, Kathryn Greenhill, Exploded Library and Connecting Librarian, amongst others.

(I focus on Australia, because obviously the US contingent has been kicking it hardcore for a very long while *g*)

But here in the UK, there is not so much…

There are the few of us legal library bloggers (all, you know, six or seven of us). And there’s Phil Bradley and Karen Blakeman. And quite a few universities and public libraries have institutional blogs. And whilst institutional blogs are both great and very important, they’re not quite the same as personal library blogs. They cover different issues and are not, generally, so much a place for discussion and community.

Where is the discussion, the barcamps, the unconferences, the passion? There’s Internet Librarian 2007, but quite frankly, the program is just not that exciting, dealing with a lot of issues that are a bit, well, 2005 (e-learning, portals and wikis at work, virtual libraries – these are not new and challenging concepts). I envy all of you Australian and US bloggers, with your exciting conferences to attend and projects to get involved in. It just doesn’t seem to have caught on here yet, and I’m not sure why. Are we too caught up in tradition and the old ways of doing things? Too resistant to change? Too scared to make a fuss or get into trouble for blogging our opinions? I’m not sure…

Or maybe I’m wrong, maybe there are lots of UK library blogs and events going on that I just can’t seem to find. Some secret underground community of subversive UK librarians, maybe? (and if there are, please let me know!)

Following on from my earlier post about image and perception, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we perceive ourselves in the profession, and how others perceive us from outside it.

But first, an anecdote. Last week I went to the dentist and it set me to thinking. I have a good dentist, professional and skilled, and snarky, in the way that the best dentists seemed to be. And he was oh so very cranky at me for not looking after my teeth as well as he thought I should – amazed and annoyed that I wouldn’t spend the time to floss three times a day. And it occurred to me that, being so embedded in his profession, so caught up in what he does everyday, that he had forgotten what it was like to be on the other side. It wouldn’t occur to him that his patients might value their time differently, and not want to dedicate a half hour a day to their teeth, or that they might not know the best and most effective ways of brushing and flossing. As a professional in his field, dealing with these issues every day, they are of the utmost importance to him, and he couldn’t imagine anyone else feeling otherwise.

I can’t help but think that in the library profession, particularly within law firms, that we tend to be blinkered in the same way. Dealing with our work everyday, we can’t help but value it very highly. And we should value it – we’re providing a professional service to the users in our firms. But I just don’t think our users value it as much as we do. And not just in the general, ‘oh those silly lawyers, they don’t know half the work we do for them’ kind of way, but in a more tangible way, I don’t think that our work is as immediately important as we would like to think it is. So much of what we provide, particularly in the way of raw data, needs to be filtered and refined in some way – usually by an overworked PSL or trainee – into something more relevant for the fee-earners. Whilst we have the skills to find the information, and provide somewhat of a refined product, we generally don’t have the skills to interpret it, nor the place within fee-earning departments to have the knowledge of exactly what is needed and when. What we provide is important, yes, but it’s often a raw product, and not the end in itself.

I think that much of our frustrations within firms stems from this – it’s not that the lawyers don’t value what we do for them, but that they often don’t know what we do for them. Our research and work feeds into many aspects of the firms information flows, but the source of this information is rarely acknowledged. Our information arrives in their inboxes or on their desks seamlessly or silently, and they, understandably, don’t really know the work that went into getting it there. And most lawyers, unless they have had a lot of experience with a good librarian, won’t know what we can offer and what skills we have. They will hold faint memories of librarians from their university days, or maybe from their days as a trainee, not knowing that we can give them much more. They don’t know, and they wouldn’t even think to ask – it’s just not within their sphere of interest. They feel that they need to know the details of what we do as much as they need to know exactly what their finance or IT or HR departments do.

Buried in our work, and knowing it’s value so completely ourselves, we complain that people don’t value us, but don’t spend a lot of time thinking about why that might be. We need to step into the minds of our users and think about how they gain their perception of the library. What do we do for them that they can see? That they can’t see? Where does the information that we provide flow throughout the organisation? What can we do to make our presence more visible and more valued? What can we do to educate people in the services that we provide? When do we need to step back and realise that what we’re providing isn’t as important or valued as we think? And what are we going to do about it?

How do you all feel about this? Do you think that we are placing an unrealistic expectation on our users to value us? Or do you think that your firm or organisation values your service as much as you would like?

Meridith Farkas of Information Wants To Be Free, and Social Software in Libraries, is conducting another survey of the biblioblogosphere (the results from the 2005 survey are here), which you can participate in here. I think the results will give interesting insight into the biblioblogosphere and the way that it has been changing and growing. It’ll be nice to have a bit more of a presence from UK and legal library bloggers as well – I think we’ve grown a lot in the last year, and it would be good to see how much.

Go forth and participate!

Ryan Healy had an interesting post last week on Brazen Careerist about work-life balance and independence. The general gist of it being that when we were in university we were taught (in theory) how to manage our own time – no one was making you go to class or study or party or sleep, or any of the things that needed to be done. It was up to the individual to produce the results at the end of the day. And if you didn’t hand your assignment in, or missed a valuable tidbit of info cause you didn’t go to class? Pretty much your own fault.

However, for some reason, within the corporate environment, it’s like we’re back in high school again. Have to be in at a certain time, couldn’t possibly leave twenty minutes early, need to be doing certain tasks at given times – the independence to choose our own tasks and own best ways of working has been taken away from us. There is a move though, towards a better way of working – what he refers to as the Results Oriented Work Environment – where it is not the hours that we are in front of our computers that are important, but the results that we turn in at the end of the day.

This is a really popular issue, particularly in the States, where this kind of flexible working (particularly for information workers) has really taken off.

Now, whilst I don’t agree with quite everything he’s saying (I don’t think it would be refreshing to not be able to distinguish at all between my working and non-working time – I like being able to turn off some of the time), I do think that work-life balance is something that is often overlooked within our sector. Unfortunately, though, we are fundamentally a customer service industry – someone needs to be here to man the reference desks and circulate journals and do all those other hands on jobs that need to be done.

In theory there’s no reason why I couldn’t work the reference desk from at home (even if it only was for a day or a morning a week). Most, if not all, of the resources I need are available online – I don’t need to be in the physical library space to answer queries. Indeed, as an information worker, I could be anywhere to do the majority of the tasks for my job. It would be nice just to have that flexibility. I don’t think a nine-to-five day is the best answer for me personally, and the way I best work – I’d love to have the option to time-shift and work an eleven-to-eight day, or work from home a few days a week. But most of my job works better with me being in the office – it’s good to have face time with our users, sometimes you just need that hard copy text, and our work is not so autonomous and web-based that we can get away with not being in at all.

Sadly though, I just don’t think that flexi-work in this kind of way is really practical for the library environment. As much as I’d like to work a time-shifted day, my lawyers are in the office from nine to five (well, give or take), so that’s when I need to be there too. And someone needs to be here to do all those physical tasks that need to be done. It’s great to see that other professional areas are taking up this idea, and that there is progressively being a move away from the traditional nine-to-five. It just isn’t something that is really practical for the library sector just yet (well, at least not for the corporate library sector, anyway). Or is it? Anyone out there with flexible working arrangements, teleworking, anything like that? I’d love to know how it works for you (even if it is just to wish and dream that I could do it too!)

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about web 2.0 technologies, and how to go about implementing them in the library. Particularly, implementing them in the law library – traditionally one of the hardest places to get any sort of new idea off the ground. My immediate co-workers and I are all really quite keen about the idea, but there’s not much institutional support, and not likely to be any time in the forseeable future. But we want to get something started, and I think that starting from within the library is the best way to go.

We’re not going to beable to convince partners and lawyers to buy expensive enterprise level rss programs, we’re not going to be able to force our budgetaround expensive aggregated search tools that would let us create rss feeds of our current awareness. But we can start small and local.

We don’t need to have a staff training manual – we can have a team wiki instead, where we add information that we think is important, and we can all add and edit and play away with it to our hearts content. And it’s not tied to a file that might get lost or corrupted. It’s not all trapped in one of our heads. It’s online and searchable and there tomorrow should a colleague decide to move to Guatamala (or whatever) and take their harddrive with them, and we were to suddenly find ourselves with an information shortage that we have no way of fixing. (Peanut Butter Wiki and WikiSpaces are good examples of free web-based wikis that you can start as easily as a blogger account).

A shared del.icio.us account is a much easier way of sharing links and online resources and all those little important tidbits of information that any team is constantly emailing to one another. Why search back through outlook emails (and I don’t know about you, but my work gets kinda cranky when the inbox size starts creeping up and up and up) when you can post them all to del.icio.us and find them again much more easily. And, again, no information is trapped with any particular individual. That’s the joy of this sort of technology – shared information is the way of the future (I know I’m preaching to the converted here, but still).

These will both take time to set up, and will probably take up more time for us than the equivilant tasks currently, but once their in place, then they’re there, and the infrastructure is in place to continue sharing, learning and collaborating our knowledge.

Once we know how it works, and have been using it in our day to day jobs, getting stuff done with it, seeing how much better it makes our working life, and how much easier collaboration and sharing is this way, then, maybe, we can think about making a business case for it. It’s gonna be a while til the law community catches on (sadly, it’s just the nature of the industry). But that’s no reason not to start using it where we can.