Pecha Kucha!!
Oct 22nd, 2008 by Karen
David Lee King, Stephen Abram, Rebecca Jones, and Nancy Dowd
Moderated by Greg Schwartz
This session flew by so fast that I couldn’t keep up. Below are a few key points and my reflections on the session.
Nancy Dowd was fabulous!!
I’ve never seen someone out present Stephen Abrams but Nancy did.
Tapping into your passions within libraries
Silos still a huge issue in libraries both in a systems and organization structure way
Teaching people how to tell digital stories in NJ
DLK talked about the librarian as product and Nancy talked about marketing. So I asked a question about how people in the “backend” of libraries market themselves. Stephen gave the most interesting response to this which was that by asking the question in the way in which I asked I illustrated the problem of silolization which exists in libraries. He was completely on the money with this comment. But it pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me squirm nonethless.
Afterwards I talked to DLK and him about how you can get organizations to shift to a less siloilized model. The talk made me realize just how difficult organizational change is and how much environment colors our world view.
While there are some things which are crossfunctional at UH, we are organized primarily in a traditional fashion rather than true teams. This doesn’t always work well particularly when it comes to the issues which I deal with which are truly spread through the organization. Which begs the question of how I get my team to be less siloized? I’m not sure I know the answer to that question what I do know is that it is something I need to try to find a way to do in order to best serve our users.
I appreciated that you asked that question, Karen, and I flinched at the answer. I’m not on the ground floor at the libraries unless I’m there user-testing. In my office, our new ILS librarian is working in circulation at one of the member libraries at least 4 hours a week. But I guess I’m confused. Does this mean that we want reference librarians doing cataloging or coding php?
For many of us working in Automation or library backends, we’re here because this is where our talents are. I don’t think of it as separate but equal. But I do know that evangelizing what we do to support the mission of the library(s) is really difficult.