Bias: Nothing Personal This is Business

One of the things that I have always tried to remain wary of in the library is my own personal bias. It has gone through several different phases during the course of my career. Let me take you through it. First, you try to impose your favorite things on the library collection. This is what I call denial. You cannot possibly understand why someone may not love a genre or type of music as much as you do. You cannot possibly fathom why this would occur, so you try to force people to love what you love. This is pointless if you have no evidence to back it up, namely statistics. Another mistake people make is they read too much between the lines within these statistics. These librarians read way too much into something when there is really nothing but air. 

I learned this firsthand when another person took over my area and weeded all the stuff that I loved and thought would go out like gangbusters. This did not occur, but in fact the exact opposite took place because many of my favorite books just collected dust. I gradually came to terms with this, but I still found myself relying too much on that good ole' personal bias. This phase I call Experience and Education. This is where you learn to distinguish between purchasing something based on your own librarian expertise, not my favorite hobby when I go home at night. One of the best exercises is to ask yourself, why do I want this book so badly? Upon answering this, look to see if you come up with excuses that stretch the actual logic to purchase something. You need to know the difference between a professional purchase and a personal purchase. One is done for the overall good of the library, while the other is done partially out of ego and selfishness. 

I told you this book would be painfully honest and I feel librarians who purchase materials disproportionately to the reality of the collection needs and budget are selfish in that they are using taxpayer money to really massage their own ego and spread the gospel on stuff they like. The final stage is acceptance. You have accepted the fact that this is not your money, this is not your bedroom, and you already have an Amazon.com account. I hate to say the word apathy, but you have to develop an attitude that you could care less. You do not need to see the book when it arrives, no need to touch it, look at it, skim it, read it. If you want to read it, you can walk over to the shelf and get like any other patron.

 A couple of times in my career have I seen people lose absolute focus and buy too much in one area, while other areas suffer because of it. This in the words of Peter Griffin, "really grinds my gears." My question to these selectors was when did you decide what is more important for a collection to own. Now, if you show me statistics that back this up, then fine I will be quiet about it, but if your proof, how shall I put, let me see, sucks, then we have to talk. This is why the best solution to this is having someone check your purchasing, but not just your manager. I am not talking about purchasing with another person. I mean here is to have colleagues review your purchasing. Each person is assigned to another colleague. I know you are saying that this is the manager's job. I would reply that sometimes a collection can be too vast and expansive for one person to get a handle on.  This creates checks and balances within the department.

 This also takes care of the tattle tales. I am so sick of other staff members telling me I am not doing my job correctly, then proceeding to incorrectly put into context or not include all the details on what I am doing. You are bringing in a third party that is invested in the process because you could be the check on an area they select in. I have grown tired of this whole he said, she said culture that uses hearsay and not enough facts. This is an absolutely critical ingredient to all of this. If you are going to tell the manager that someone is inadequate in their purchasing; the evidence must be demonstrated in a flawless manner. No more of this crappy anecdotal evidence that suddenly becomes the rule, not the exception. My simple answer to that scenario...Screw all that.

Readers Advisory Devils Advocate

I have got something that this librarian needs to get off of his chest. I did not join this honorable profession because I love to read. People always ask me this and I always answer that reading for pleasure is something that I simply do not like to do. Reading a book cover to cover does not come up high on my list of priorities. I do enjoy skimming various books from history to computers to movies to literature, but I love to skip around a lot. This is particularly true of fiction. I hate reading fiction. I do not hate the fiction itself but the act of reading it. This is because I love to write fiction and sometimes simply do not have the patience for cover-to-cover reading. Every single time I read a good work of fiction I feel like writing creatively, not sitting there on the bed reading this book or that book. I simply cannot sit still until I am writing something of my own. Now, I am becoming increasingly more involved in Readers Advisory, where I have quickly made an interesting observation. Readers advisory programs and many resources primarily cater to people who read for pleasure. I know you are going to say, duh. Let me expand upon this point. I go to programs for continuing education and the only thing we receive is one long list of books to read. Discussions can become glorified book discussion groups. I say this not to disparage such groups, but only to highlight a greater need to treat readers advisory as an art where we need to look at the techniques in much the same way collection development has techniques. Currently, I think of it mainly as a situation of either you know it or you don't. The programs sometimes assumes basic readers advisory knowledge.  I tend to see more often than not situations where you get a whiteboard and write down authors and titles all day long. I am just not seeing enough at that these programs where they talk about what to ask patrons in the readers advisory interview, best resources for someone not familiar with a certain author, and most of all, tricks to make it look like we are familiar with a genre or author. Here is an example. What do I do when I don't even know if the author is a man or a woman? Where is a place to look for techniques not readalikes or new titles? How do I develop my own questions for a book discussion? Where do I find book discussion questions? How do I handle group dynamics in a book discussion? You do receive some of this information at these programs, but not nearly enough as I sometimes hope. Are there deeper questions than what do you usually like to read. I know what you are thinking. I want a shortcut to readers advisory glory. I am not saying this at all. I am saying that as librarians we need to be sharing these sites that offer up the best knowledge to the less fortunate. The less fortunate being those like myself that do not eat, sleep fiction. I will still do the work reading reviews and listening for new authors or under the radar authors, but tell me where to look. I want to be challenged, but I just need a darn compass. Those that live, eat, sleep, breathe fiction should be more pro-active in helping us less fortunate souls with our readers advisory. These are those leading some of these programs. The way I see it those that speakers are almost talking exclusively to others that eat and sleep fiction in a particular genre. Those that do not eat and sleep fiction need some of that knowledge too. We are mere novices in some cases and I do not believe there has been a heck of a whole lot of training out there to answer these crucial questions that require a base of knowledge on who are the big writers in a genre, who are up and coming, who are those to avoid, and what are the key issues facing this genre. 

 I am not saying that you could not have these more advanced discussions that we often see in readers advisory programs about the literature itself, but I as a librarian need more than lists of literature and where to look for more literature lists. I need to see techniques that would assist me in the act of readers advisory communication. Tell me how to Google search for genre recommendations. Tell me what libraries offer the best genre guides. Give me a for dummies version on how to conduct a readers advisory interview and have no clue who the hell Debbie Macomber is. Let me also point out that if you ever want to be a better librarian, embrace collection development in areas you hate. Purchasing, maintaining, and weeding in areas you love is always the easy part and the fun, but doing it in an area where you have no prior history offers you great perspective. You will begin to see things much different and this will help you in the areas that you love purchasing in.  For example, techniques employed in sci-fi might actually work in graphic novels, even though you hate sci-fi with more heat than a fireball from the sun. A 4 letter word will begin to rear its ugly head here and you need to watch out for it...Bias. People who love something will also have opinions on what the best titles are and what titles are not worth a crap. You may feel the need to do so off the top of your head due to prior experience, please resist this temptation. Use statistics, reviews, other feedback to form your collection. Simply put, be open-minded. Finally, let me just say this I love recommending a good book, even though I do not love to read. I love reading reviews of new books, even though I do not love to read. I am fascinated by the ideas and stories of literature, but sitting down and actually reading is not my cup of tea. I am not alone in this fact. You can still be successful in readers advisory without the extensive background knowledge that some of the more voracious readers/librarians have. This may even help them in the genres like graphic novels that they do not embrace. I see  I think readers advisory programming should reflect that need, not a book discussion. I can go to my local library for a book discussion.  

Dewey Decimal...Code or Rulebook?

Judge Garrett: In this courtroom, Mr.Miller, justice is blind to matters of race, creed, color, religion, and sexual orientation. 

Joe Miller: With all due respect, your honor, we don't live in this courtroom, do we? 

-Philadelphia 

And thirdly, the code is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner . 

-Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl 

Neo: What are you trying to tell me? That I can dodge bullets? 

Morpheus: No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to. 

-The Matrix 

Dewey. Dewey Decimal. Dewey Decimal System. Dewey 23. People love it. People are indifferent to it. People hate it. People make jokes about it. Yet, in the library world sometimes Dewey can become some serious fucking business. This can also bring up passions in people you never knew were there. I see such things everyday in my position at a public library. Strong discussions or even battles occur over how to use Dewey standards. Some librarians like to use it as a loose set of guidelines like a compass for a sailor at night on the open sea. Personally, this is how I see it and have always seen the Dewey Decimal System. Let me just stop right there and say that I never thought for a minute at my library school graduation I would be writing an essay ten years later about people fighting about the Dewey Decimal System. That sounds absolutely fucking ridiculous. Let me show you exactly what I am talking about. 

I have noticed that one primary trend has always been the conflict between those who like to keep Dewey to a strict standard. These librarians look upon it as the Bible, the Gospel, the Truth, and going away from it is bordering upon some library degree mortal sin. They find compromising hard and look upon the Dewey book as if it held the location of the Holy Grail itself. Okay, I exaggerate, but you get my drift. Yet, there are others who look upon those same Dewey standards as more of a set of guidelines. I find Geoffrey Rush's line from Pirates of the Carribean so funny and so unbelievably appropriate. These are the librarians who will adapt, customize, change the rules of the collection to fit the collection, instead of changing the books themselves. This is why I found the quote from The Matrix so relevant because as in The Matrix Neo and company realized there are rules; some rules can be broken, bent, changed. The other quote from Philadelphia is meant to show that the people who create Dewey do a great job, but have they ever been to every library in the entire world? This would be impossible and I know for a certified fact that every library in the world is different. With such variety, why would you want to stick to a strict set of rules that does not reflect your collection? 

People need to realize that the whole point of Dewey is flexibility. Its purpose was to change, expand, contract itself. In this way, you can look at it in the much the same way that the Founders looked upon the Constitution. These founders knew that they could not create a perfect system that would never ever need to be changed. This seems unrealistic on any planet that has libraries. Like Denzel, "We do not live in this courtroom." People sometimes get too fired up about the Dewey system, but one of the things certain people need to do is one simple thing, take a deep breath and calm the fuck down. This is not life and death. We are not betraying the principles of library science or any other subject area by going against the norm and placing a discipline in something completely different than the usual place. You need to answer the simple question, "What is the best place for this kind of book in this library? Where are patron will easily find it? Please I implore you to make this place somewhere everyone can live with.

The Challenge Ahead

This little book would be doing you the reader a disservice if I did not try my best fulfill the title, Devil's Advocate. Now in the next few pages, I am going to talk about a couple of issues that may be looked upon as very critical, but these criticisms do not make my observations any less honest. The first of these is the idea that sometimes we employ certain practices at the library level without thinking about the repercussions. This means that sometimes libraries make the decision, especially with technology, to do things because they can, but never address the question as to whether they should do that.  

 Many of these practices came to my attention attending conferences like state library conferences, Internet Librarian, and Computers in Libraries. I would sit there in astounded disbelief as I listened to various libraries wax poetic on their latest ideas. For example, I remember one program on eBooks spoke about Calibre and how you could use this product to strip the DRM copyright protection on an ebook. Although the speaker said, I am not telling you to use this. The message sent loud and clear was: I am going to show you exactly how this works and if anything gets back to me; I know nothing about it.  Another example was a program that spoke about how their library converted YouTube videos into downloadable video files for kids to put on their Powerpoint presentations. I do not know, but does that violate copyright in some way? I would venture a guess that if an action even comes within a football field of copyright violation; you should probably not do it. I know there are those who will say that fair use is in play here, but can you really take that chance? To recap, the first reason to not do something technology-wise is that it could be seen as possibly just plain wrong.  The next observation emerges in libraries that jump on a bandwagon before we are even sure that it is a bandwagon worth jumping on. Early in 2012, Pinterest exploded and everyone began to say that it is the next Facebook. Let's be clear. It was not the next Facebook, not even close. The idea behind it seemed interesting, but many questions still remained. Despite these questions, libraries began to offer training sessions on it. I found this to be incredibly quick as it was still in beta making memberships hard to come by sometimes. As I have noticed now, the initial excitement over Pinterest has slowed down to a crawl. Another example of bandwagon jumping comes with the example of Windows Vista. I am sure many libraries trusted that Microsoft would not issue another version so quickly after purchasing Vista. This is another example of being a little patient and not saying to  yourself, I want to be the first anywhere. Vista was adequate, but everyone very quickly found out that it was flawed. I know you will say that it does not matter for libraries with places like Tech Soup. Yes, this is true. Yet, that should not stop us from looking back at a situation to reconsider the fact as to whether we jumped the gun  on a product or service. Where do situations like this leave us librarians? I think that we need to show patience and dilligence when deciding to offer anything up for the public. This means anything from a new service for our patrons to sharing information with our colleagues. I was reminded of this when we received our license for the Freegal Music Service. We were made very aware of certain statements we could say about Sony and certain statements we were not allowed to say in our press releases. If any lesson can be gained from this, dot all your I's, cross all your T's, and do a little research before jumping into the deep end of the pool.

The Art of Learning

One of the things that always surprises, shocks, astounds, amazes me is the idea that the Internet allows you the access to find the answer to anything. Any information is out there to be absorbed as long as you have a basic knowledge of how to search Google. The answer to just about anything is there waiting to be plucked out of the air. The other astounding thing is the fact that people continually refuse to go that extra step to find out the solution. 

 The lack of curiosity on the part of the average person always surprises me. First, you will actually be learning something for yourself and becoming more self-reliant. Second, you do not have to wait around for someone else to help you. I am not sure if it is out of fear that people refuse to go and explore whether or not they can find an answer for themselves. I, for one, find it unbelievably satisfying to know that I solved a problem on my own. I also think that if you are to be successful with technology, this need to always be looking for an answer is absolutely crucial. Technology changes at the speed of light, so there comes a need to critically adapt to the changing technology. Let me also mention that finding answers will not always be easy. You will sometimes have to dig under several rocks to find your answer.  Sometimes you will not find an answer that will completely fix your issue. People always think I am some brilliant computer whiz when it comes to issues that may arise, but truth be told, I just know how to do a Google search and can read at more than a 3rd grade level. You simply need to show patience and a good work ethic not to give up when looking for an answer. I take great pride in this and use it as a kind of game where I look upon it as a quest to not get any help. In contrast, I see all kinds of people more than capable of finding that elusive answer simply never taking the time. Perhaps this is a statement about our times where people want answers, solutions handed to them on a silver platter. I have got news for those folks. There is no easy button like in the Staples commercial. Perhaps even thinking about solving an issue makes a person's head spin too much. For me, I would hate to continually ask for someone else's assistance in such a helpless way. I just simply cannot fathom why so many people, patrons and staff alike, that refuse help themselves. Am I the exception that simply does not get it?  Yet, despite these misgivings, it is our duty as librarians to help in such situations without rudely telling our patrons they are dumb. This should always be a primary concern. We do not want to ever come off as being seen as resentful of our very own patrons.      

Now, staff that do not want to learn is an entirely different ball of wax. This is even more important because you work with these folks on a much more interpersonal level. First of all, be patient and never try to talk down to them. This is a fatal mistake where an imaginary hurt or slight can sometimes emerge. Never look upon these staff who are computer novices as anything less than your equal. Never assume any kind of knowledge, so always go slow when helping a staff member. If it is fairly obvious, they are not interested in learning, then do not push it upon them because it will only produce a confrontation. The best thing you can do is promote learning in every way possible by offering up new tips and tricks for beginners as much as possible. This does not have to be in a formal setting. You can walk up to a person in the hallway and say, "Hey, this is cool on Microsoft Word..." The techies need to understand that some of these staff members do not see some of these things Word or Publisher enough to become proficient in them. You cannot expect someone to see something once for an hour and then go out and be an expert in it. As a technology librarian, you must always stay positive and never let it get out ever that you have a certain level of frustration about helping. Stay upbeat and never let the frustration show because you do not want some unwarranted tension occurring during the staff Christmas party. I think the best way to look at this for staff and patrons is that you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot drink it for them.     

Statistics, Damn Statistics, and Liars

Statistics. The future is held in the statistics. That is a mantra that librarians should start to chant to themselves. We need to embrace statistics as if it were going out of style.  If you go to a ton of effort to design a site or a Facebook page, then keeping strong statistics is an absolute requirement. I would make the similar analogy of putting $1000 in your bank account and never looking to see where you are spending your money. Too many times are we unable to define specifically what the public is doing because we rely on subjective statistics. We rely on what we see from our desks. Too many times I will always hear that I always see a patron do this or that. This is the wrong approach. One person out of ten actually does this making it the exception, not the rule. If you think by being a librarian, you know how people search, then you are wrong. Searching behavior can be as unique as a one-legged man in an ass kicking competition. Research is the key to understanding what happened before, what is happening now, and what may happen in the future. Statistics are the lifeblood of this research. I do not need to know what you think patrons are doing. Tell me with assurance what you know for a fact because of the statistics. We are in a new frontier as far as assumptions to be made for services like reference. No longer can we simply look at the circulation figures and say we are doing badly because those figures are down. This worked ten years ago, maybe five years ago, but today we are in a whole new world where we need to reconsider almost everything we do. Services like Google Analytics can help you in this endeavor. People may still be using library services to get their information. They just may not be getting them from the traditional sources. We need accurate, documented statistics from ebooks to databases to the website to social networking. This is a new frontier because it may call for a cross analysis where we look at all these statistics and try to find something in common. To say that something like reference is dead based on circulation statistics is like a blind person saying, "Damn, that sun is bright today." Without research and more to the point, statistics, we can never understand our current situation.  Speaking of social networking, this brings up a whole new ballgame. Libraries do need to be involved with social networking, but they cannot follow traditional statistical methods. They simply do not apply. We are in a whole new world with social networking metrics. This is something we must embrace and try to understand as much as possible. I think the key here is to remember that social networking becomes more about qualitative research, not quantitative. For example, we cannot take a Facebook page and judge it based on the number of likes we have received.  You need to go deeper underneath the surface to understand what our users are actually doing with us.  Social networking is dependent upon interaction. How many times have you liked a page to simply ignore its existence completely? We have so many technological services to offer that we must understand completely how they are being used in order to maximize them. We must try to move away from the former looking glass because the world has changed. Leave tradition for the Fiddler on the Roof, while we look at these new kinds of  statistics.         

Google and Librarians

I read this in a blog the other day and it gave me pause.  Libraries already act like Google in many ways. Or I should say instead, Google acts like libraries. It is the mission of both to organize the world’s information, to make it openly accessible, to find and present the most authoritative (by many definitions) sources, to instill an ethic of information use in the public, to act as a platform for communities of information, to encourage creation. . . . Over and over, you will hear the same argument about Google and its search engine. They have or will eventually replace librarians with its technology. Patrons will no longer go to the librarian for these questions when they can quickly use their Internet connection from home , library, or on their smartphone. Too many times have I heard that the librarian is going the way of an 8 track tape, but is this really the case? In this article, we will take a look at what Google can do that has helped this argument gain momentum. We will also take a look at reasons why Google can never take the place of the librarian. Finally, we will consider ways in which the two entities can work together. 

Let us first look at the facts about what Google does well for the world. Eric Rumsey says that “Google made the Web usable” — A user-friendly place where people can actually find what they’re looking for — Just like libraries do for their users.” This is a key ingredient of what kind of game changer Google has become. Not only has Google been able to organize the web in a much more manageable manner, but changed the speed of it from the equivalent of sound to light. You are now merely seconds away from an answer to your question. Much like libraries, Google has a mission of opening the web to everyone. Anything you wish to search can be done through Google without paying a dime. The library is the same way. The two entities both believe in open access. For example, take a look at the ambitious book digitization project. A company interested in fee-based access probably would not spend so much time doing so. Some will say Google is only interested in making money, which is true, but the way in which they make their money is different than other companies like Apple. They do so through advertising, while giving the user the free access to an abundance of services including the search engines they have perfected over time. Let us now think of life before Google. Someone approaches the reference desk, “I need to find a phone number.” I would then say, “Is it a local number?” The patron would say, “Yes, but I only have the address. I know it is a business, a coffee shop in Chicago.” My immediate reaction many years ago would have been, “Let me go look it up in the criss-cross directory.” If anything, Google has saved many a librarian from many more paper cuts as well. With the power and speed of Google, I am able to narrow down this ready reference information in a matter of seconds. In a nutshell, Google has done this for the reference librarian everywhere for the past 15-20 years. Yes, they have branched out into other search engines and services like Books, Scholar, Docs, Calendar, and more. Yet, Google organized the Internet making it searchable from addresses to recipes to articles to filmographies to books to whatever you can think of. This is an undeniable fact and this fact leads one to say without any argument that Google is a significant improvement over traditional reference service. 

Yet, if Google is so great, then why do we even need librarians? The answer is a great number of people in this world who use Google are not very skilled at it. I see it again and again as I observe technology skills from the reference desk. People have lesser than average searching skills when using Google at the library. I do not mean this as a negative thing because they have never been trained it and Google gives off the impression that its search engine is so easy that a 3 year old could do it. The question now becomes what are some of the key flaws in how people search. First and foremost, some people do not know how to keyword search very well. They do not know ways in which to limit their number of search results, expand their search results, and specify the best possible search. Second, users do not always explore the various other search services available to them through Google like Books, Blogs, Education, Government, Shopper. All of these things bring a much more focused result for the user, but many people simply never explore that facet of Google. Third, users are simply not that familiar with the interface and how it works. For example, some people simply cannot distinguish a valuable site for their research and a link that is your basic advertising. This leads to the next point: many users still have a hard time distinguishing a good site from a bad site. There are ways to do this on the site itself, but you can also see this by being able to recognize certain information in Google’s brief matches. For example, the url can always tell you something about the site you are using. All of these factors emerge as barriers for the average user when Google searching at the library. This is where the librarian fits into the equation. Neil Gaiman once said, “Google can bring you 10,000 results, but a librarian can bring you one.” The argument here is that one of our areas of expertise is in Google searching or it should be. This is our professional expertise and narrowing down the results to the best possible results is our goal. The librarian knows tricks that the average user may not be aware of when they tried to search for the same thing.  I wish Google were so easy it did not require the librarian, but it does require a guiding hand. The other adage remains true here as well, practice makes perfect. Librarians work on Google searches everyday all day long. We are damn good at Google searching. Librarians like I said know tricks, new search engines, bad sites, and most of all how to search outside the box. Most librarians have been trained in how to search, which requires the ability to search outside the box as I call it. This means that the user will put in every possible combination of search terms to get a successful result. This will lead to failure many times, but you will also gain valuable matches too. This philosophy requires both patience and persistence that the average user may not necessarily have. May I even venture to say that a lot of reference librarians actually enjoy Google searches. 

As I began to think about this article, I started to consider the reference profession. Key questions began to emerge in my mind that I do not know whether they had been strongly considered previously. Should a librarian feel guilty about immediately going to Google for an answer? This came up when thinking about all these other services that the library pays good money for a subscription. The librarian should always go there first without question or we are just wasting our expensive resources.  My answer to this is that we should not feel guilty about using Google to answer a patron’s question. Any tool that helps to answer a question should be utilized in order to help someone. One should never get caught up in the fact that the patron could just as easily use Google from home. I have had multiple encounters where they have done Google searches from home, but I am able to come up with better results. Without tooting my horn too much, this is where the searching skills of the librarian come into play. We  can quickly analyze the information that can be helpful on a particular topic. Once again, I will emphasize that librarians search and search everyday making us much more aware of what keyword combinations and keyword vocabulary work the best. Sometimes the information is there if you can only tell Google what the heck to look for. Now, the mistake some librarians make is that they will exclusively go to Google, find something, anything for the patron, and then ignore their premium databases. This is the lazy librarian for it is the job of the librarian to find information for the patron, but also to find the best quality information. I am not going to say that you should go to your databases or Google first on an exclusive either/or basis. This all depends upon the context of the question. For example, if you know the answer is ready reference, then Google will be the obvious first choice. Yet, if the request is more open ended as a research inquiry, then you may go to your magazine database at first. Yet, for any query like this, the worst thing that you can do is ignore one or the other. A good librarian will always exhaust all of their resources before calling it a day. I compare this to an example of where a basketball coach is down three points and doesn’t want to use the 3 point shooter sitting on the bench just waiting to enter the game.