LITA Opening Keynote

Googlezon, Episode VI: Return of the Librarians

Roy Tennant is always as hilarious. In the first five minutes of his talk he made five jokes and complemented bloggers who were blogging the session. He had a great little video to show the developments over the last ten years that have dramatically impacted libraries. The amazing thing is that Google is a big part of these developments. He points out that many of the things he highlighted in the video have happened in the last two years. This illustrates the speed at which change can happen.

Time for us to get our act together. We must act as if our jobs are on the line because they are.

He then went on to discuss where libraries should be going and the ways in which we should be responding to current challenges and opportunties.

If you can’t beat them, join them

We need to increasingly be where users are. We serve users better than by forcing them to come through us. Current examples of this in action are: OpenWorldCat and Google Scholar.

Brief fire alarm intermission which involves everyone neatly filing out and then back in.

Take the concept and run

The theme here is to use existing technologies and concepts and make them our own.
RedLightGreen is a great example of this.

Stop putting lipstick on pigs (Andrew Pace)/ Stop polishing the turd (Ross Singer)

Stop trying to make failed systems better by tweaking them to hide user hostile aspects. Catalogs are a perfect example. Small changes rob time and make you feel like you are making progress when we aren’t. Our catalogs today are not much better than card catalogs on wheels.

Be user focused

We have made the mistake of thinking that users should be taught to search like librarians. We need to build information services that users don’t need to be trained to used. In order to do this we need to:

• Needs Assessment
• Usability testing

The bottom line is that we need to minimize the number of clicks from the front page of the library to fulltext.

Keep what works

Some things we have work. Things that seem to work best for us do one thing well. OpenURL resolvers are an example of this. We need to have systems made up of interoperable components that can be combined in a variety of ways. Roy made reference to a book entitled Small pieces loosely joined

Fix what is broken

We need to build compelling finding resources. Our current catalogs suck as finding tools. Worse yet there are types of information which the users are interested in that they do not contain. They are also inflexible. For example, publishers are increasingly putting more information into ONIX records. This type of information is not included in catalog and cannot be used in the catalog. Additionally, the catalog is only used to find specific types of resources and we have to point our users to places other than the catalog to find certain types information ie. article databases. The end goal should be to create highly taylored finding tools that are based on user feedback and information.

Strive for efficiencies

Stop spending out time pushing material around. Requires little skill and doesn’t add any value. Circulation and Acquistions are problem areas where greater efficiency is needed. Self-service models need to be implemented in circulation to raise efficiency.

Foster agility

• fostering imaginative problem solving – no way for ideas to come up from front lines to decision-makers
• Learn as we breath all the time without thinking about it.
• We are saddled with silolized systems, that are inflexible

Check out the article “The disintegrating world of library automation” – Library Journal

We don’t have to wait for vendors to get a clue we can go open source with systems like Koha and companies like Liblim ready to provide support.

United we stand, divided we fall

• We need to collaborate much more deeply and throughly.
• Sharing ONIX records, digitization of table of contents.
  
  A good example of this is Talis- structure for libraries to share book review
• Breakdown the walls that prevent deep collaboration

There is no-one but libraries focused on the long haul and we answer to a very different group from Google and Amazon.

Audience Comments and Questions

Andrew Pace talks about a project at North Carolina where they are harvesting the data from the MARC record in they’re catalog and reindexing it in new ways using multiple relevance algorithms.

There are multiple user group and you have to customized based on these distinct groups.

Another librarian within the audience discussed the fact that one of the biggest challenges is getting buy-in from collegues particularly public services librarians. Roy talked about the fact that he is giving many talks at more traditional library conferences. He emphasized that it is important to get buy-in. Be on committees, speak up in meetings, implement things that work. “Never move at the speed of your organization” Use prototypes to show people what you are talking about and use it to get buy-in.


Roy says that often it is “Better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.”

Start with understanding your users. Not rebuilding the library website or the library catalog. These are two very different things.
University of Rochester – Public services staff do the usability testing and user study.

Haven’t done very good evaluation of specific tasks. ie How to find a few good articles for my paper.

An audience member asked How do we speed up the process? We do a lot of talking, planning but seem to be very slow to respond.

Roy’s response

Need to be moving at many different levels. Libraries need to build a Library Alliance to deal with some of this stuff. Google has lots of $$ but we have more people. Give people at a number of different organizations time to solve common problems. Fix things at the macro-level instead of the micro-level.

Ironically, SUNY as a whole was talking about this before I left. It was one of the reason I ran for SUNYLA (SUNY librarian association) present. As far as I know, it hasn’t gone anywhere tangible yet.

Overall a great session. I always get reinvigorated when I hear Roy speak. He is one of those people that I use a “reality check” of where I should be trying to take my library. It feels good when I realize I’ve been thinking about the same stuff as he has.