Telling the Library Story through Video: the Toronto Public Library

I just watched this video about the Toronto Public Library and I was impressed. This six minute video, available for free on YouTube since November 2008, really shows the value and values of the public library. The Library contributes to literacy, to the city’s economy (e.g. by assisting businesses in conducting research), providing employment opportunities, by offering community space and more. The high quality editing and variety of interviews told a very compelling story. Well done, TPL!

Book Review: “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis

After reading his Internet and media blog, Buzz Machine, I became interested in learning more about Jeff Jarvis. When I recalled that a librarian I met at the CLA conference, Jason Hammond of the Regina Public Library, mentioned Jarvis’s book, “What Would Google Do?,” I decided to pick it up. My opinion about the book is rather mixed, but on the whole positive. Before turning to its many  good points, I would note one or two general weaknesses. The first issue is the tendency to generalize and make broad observations on a mix of some ancedotes and speculation. This combines with the other weakness, at its greatest extent in the “Google Generation” section, involves indulging in what might be called “Internet triumphalism.” Ultimately, the writing often reminds of Seth Godin blog posts  (which are short pieces of writing that often contain very interesting speculations and thought-provoking questions) which are good, but fall a bit below what I would expect from a book. One odd neologism from the book – at least, I have not encountered it anywhere else – is “Googley” (as in, “Googley restaurants can also use the web to become stars.” page 156).

The book has two sections; the first where Jarvis explains the “laws” of the Internet as understood through Google and the second where these observations are developing into speculations (e.g. “What would a Google airline look like?”) Despite the title, the book is not really about Google. Rather, it is about the trends, values and ideas of the social Web, blogging and social networking. Given the inchoate state of the social Web, using Google as a metaphor does make some sense. The rules section covers a lot of ground: “there is an inverse relationship between control and trust,” “make mistakes well,” “get out of the way” and so forth. Of all the many rules and laws offered in the book, the one concept that sticks is the notion is trading control for trust. Most of the examples are drawn from Google, other technology companies (though Apple is considered exempt from all these laws simply because it is so good, apparently) and other commercial settings.

The much more speculation second part of the book imagines how the rules and ideas exemplified by Goolge and the social web could be applied to fields such as: book publishing, manufacturing, restaurants, utilities, insurance, finance and other sectors. While many parts of this had me thinking and asking questions, particularly, “Google U: Opening education,” I found it speculative. I would certainly agree that analyzing large volumes of data can be useful (though I think this story is much better told by Ian Ayres in Super Crunchers, see my review of it), that transparency is needed more and that organizations can learn more from working with their users, I can see issues with taking these ideas and drafting them into a business case and implementing them. Jarvis dismisses privacy near the end of the book and that attitude will not win many allies in the library sector, not to mention others, where such values are protected.

Despite some reservations on the occasional weak evidence and overly strong rhetoric, I think there are ideas of value here. Good meetings could be had discussing chapters of the book, certainly. I wonder if anyone else I know out there has read it.

Knowledge Management through story

Last week, I finished reading Daniel Pink’s book, “A Whole New Mind: How to thrive in the new conceptual age,” (which I originally heard about in this EconTalk podcast) which argues that “right-brain thinking approaches” (design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning) are increasing in importance. Instead of writing a full review of the book right now, I’m going to quote a particular section that interested me. It involves a large financial institution that many may be familiar with from the headlines:

Dan Pink tells the story of Steve Denning (author of several books on organizational storytelling) who:

“… an Australian who began his career as a lawyer in Sydney and later became a midlevel executive at the World Bank. “I was a left brain person,” he says. “Big organizations love that kind of person.”

Then one day, in a World Bank shake-up, he was booted from a job he loved and banished to the organizational equivalent of Siberia: a department known as “knowledge management,” corporate jargon for how a company organizes its vast reserves of information and experience. Denning became the department’s chief. And – grudgingly at first – he underwent a transformation… As he sought to understand what the World Bank knew – that is, what knowledge required management – Denning discovered that he learned more from trading stories in the cafeteria than he did from reading the bank’s official documents and reports. An organization’s knowledge, he realized, is contained in its stories. And that meant that if he was really going to to be the top knowledge honcho at the bank, he had to go well beyond the L-Directed [Note: This is Pink's shorthand term for left-brain thinking styles that emphasize formal logic and other similar approaches] lawyer-executive approach he’d learned in the first twenty-five years of his career. So he made the World Bank a leader in knowledge management by making it a pioneer in using stories to contain and convey knowledge.”

This struck me as an interesting contrast to a presentation I saw on the Bank’s knowledge management processes at the SLA Conference in Washington D.C. last month. That approach emphasizes organizing existing, explicit information such as documents and reports – no small challenge in an organization that employs thousands of economists and other people from all over the world. I have been thinking about how these two methods  can work and how to engage staff with both of them. Organizing documents, data-sets, internal records and other materials is something familiar to me, but I wonder how stories can be accessed and organized (are stories classified by theme? Inspiration? How-To?)

Can the act of story telling (including capturing and organizing such stories) assist organizations as much as Pink and Denning suggest? Such suggestions (including Pink’s example that Xerox’s database of stories has an estimated value of $100 million) and examples lead me to think that seriously story-telling KM is well worth pursuing.

What’s one story you know from working at your organization that could benefit from wider circulation? Would it inspire? Would communicating it in a story – rather than a memo or report – help others remember it better?

Some observations from museums

Recently, I have been to several museums and found some of the practices there to be interesting. Just as librarians ought to stay informed about trends in publishing, I think staying informed about trends in education and communication is also of value. I have found both good and bad points in physical layout and in communication that we can learn from. While I love visiting museums and could go on and on about them, I will focus on three themes in this post: signage, audio guides and the gift shop.

Signage: In one case, the signage was lacking enough that I not only got lost but ended up mising a fair portion of the exhibit area. In a more thoughtfully designed museum, progress through the institution was clearly marked. At the last museum I visited, progress through an area was marked symbolically so that one clearly knew how many rooms an area had in total and how far along one had progressed. In the latter case, I clearly knew where I stood.

The Lesson: Signs (this applies to the digital environment as well) should serve to orient the user. If there are steps to a process or procedure, indicate progress to the user.

Read the rest of this entry »

PubMed Central Canada; another chapter in the open access story

From the CASLIS Ottawa Blog, I recently learned that a wealth of Canadian health information will now be available online. The new resource is set to launch in the fall of 2009 and it looks promising. A number of American universities have recently adopted open access policies for faculty research, but I gather this is a first for Canada. The project, “PubMed Central Canada” is a collaboration between the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM).

The CASLIS blog post describes the resource thus:

“PMC Canada will be a national digital repository of peer-reviewed health and life sciences literature, including research resulting from CIHR funding. This searchable Web-based repository will be permanent, stable and freely accessible.”

I look forward to exploring this resource when it is launched and I wonder how it will work. Will past medical studies conducted in Canada be included? Will references to studies elsewhere be included (I gather the NLM has a method for coding references to facilitate cross-references) as references? Assuming the primary users of this tool are physicia, medical students and others with a background in medicine, how will consumer/patient issues be handled? A health librarian is one good option to consider, but system design should also take account of this.

CLA Conference Report is up

Earlier this year, I had the privilege of attending the Canadian Library Association conference in Montreal, Quebec. This trip was made possible by a grant from the Faculty of Information Alumni Association (where I now serve as Treasurer). My report (and thus of others who received the grant) is now available.

Here is my report:

Participating in the Canadian Library Association Conference was a valuable experience for me to meet others in the profession and share my ideas. The conference sessions themselves offer a range of opportunities to learn from other information professionals across Canada. In addition to traditional presentations, I also benefited from the poster sessions where Meghan Ecclestone and I presented results from our research project that examined the professional development activities of students at the Faculty of Information. I also learned from several other poster presenters on everything from studying the relationship between travel and reading, serving multicultural communities in Red Deer and how Canadian librarians have partnered with libraries in Africa. If I could give a single piece of advice to new students, it would be to participate in conferences – the opportunities for networking, learning new skills and more cannot be matched.

Welcome to the Library; a case study on orientation

“If no one knows about [the] library and how it can help its community meet its goals, the library will not – and should not – continue to exist.”
- Judith A. Siess, The Visible Librarian: Asserting Your Value with Marketing and Advocacy (2003)

Communicating the value of library services to users is one of my professional interests. On this blog, I have previously posted a review of Brian Matthew’s book on marketing the academic library. It is a subject that interests me in other contexts as there is good research that shows that librarians undersell themselves and the value that they provide. That research also shows that we have a language problem – users don’t understand technical terms like “information literacy” or “reference.” It is a tall order to expect non-librarians to understand that sort of specialized terminology – we need to use language that people understand already.

In addition to general principles of marketing, I like to look at specific case studies. this article about the marketing efforts at the University of Western Ontario and its effort to connect with students during orientation week (sometimes called “frosh week” or “freshman week”). The motto of the 2005 orientation program for the library was, “Just Try to Graduate Without Us!” which strikes me as a playful challenge. The librarians running this campaign also measured the impact of their outreach in engagement with students. Beyond the statistical data, there is one quote from this article that really captures the spirit of the piece: “Undergraduate students who had no affiliation with the library offered to volunteer in the Tent in order to encourage their peers to learn more about Western Libraries.”

The concept of orientation could be applied in non-academic contexts as well. For example, when new lawyers or accountants are hired in a firm (or government or a non-profit), do they meet a librarian on their first day or week of work? They should. There are several different ways to go about this. One method is to ask people to visit the library (or comparable area) and offer a presentation (maybe snacks too?). Another approach, which strikes me as possibly more successful, is to offer to meet each new person. Go to their office instead of having them come to yours. This may not work with everyone but I think it is important to make a positive impression as much as possible.