on the Jay Leno library jibe (you might not like this)

There's been a little bit of fuss over Jay Leno's monologue last week - you can view the offending spiel via Library Journal. He's talking about the L.A Mayor's budget cuts, and he says "People here in Los Angeles are upset that the mayor's proposed plan to cut the budget of libraries... This could affect as many as nine people." Lolz.

So anyway, the City Librarian sent him a letter, and I'm going to take a leaf out of Library Journal's book (or should I say 'journal!' Yeah - eat it Leno! You're not the only comedian around here!) and embed the letter here:

GomezLettertoLeno

I don't want to rain on another librarian's parade, particularly one who is fighting the good fight, but I'm not sure how useful getting upset about this can be. I very much approve of stepping up and fighting back when people criticise - wherever possible, I believe if someone says something derogatory and misinformed about libraries, we should use the same platform they originally used, to set them straight. I've tried to this myself in the past. But comedians... Comedians joke about stuff, it's what they do. Leno has writers who write his monologue each night, and they pick something topical and have a go at it. Such is his status, it doesn't even have to be funny (in fact he delivers this particular joke pretty badly) but it's just something to say. Who cares? Much more awful things crop up in comedy all the time.

In the letter, Martín Gómez says Leno's joke added insult to injury. Well yes it did - but the injury is so significant, the insult is really here nor there. It's made a really bad situation infinitesimally worse, possibly. Admittedly there might be some 'floating voter' type potential library user out there who sees Leno and says 'you know what? Libraries ARE useless - I'm going to decide against visiting one after all!' but surely we can give people more credit than that. What might happen, though, is the story becomes (to the people who matter, ie potential users - we as librarians should have thick enough skin not care what Leno says, it's a decent enough throw-away gag the likes of which we all probably make about other struggling industries all the time) about how 'librarians got all fussy and upset - again' when they were insulted, and look, they wrote a letter. Which would be a shame.

I want to make clear I am in no way belittling the plight of libraries in California, or their staff, or their users, or the commendable efforts of librarians to stand up for themselves. But you have to pick your battles. Sense of humour failure very rarely helps anyone - it has the potential to be particularly damaging for Information Professionals because of the joyless legacy we're trying to shake off.

Despite this, I like the last paragraph very much. We should ALL do this sort of thing - we should be saying, as Gómez does, don't take our word for how good libraries are; come and visit one. As I've said a bunch of times before - we can only show people what we do and let them make up their own minds as to whether they need us. The biggest threat we face is a lack of understanding as to our value stemming from a lack of awareness as to what we're really like.

- thewikiman

two new publications

Just a short post to mention a couple of articles I've recently had published - the below is copied and pasted from the Papers & Presentations page on my website:

• The Library Routes Project An article about Library Routes, from ALISS Quarterly, Volume 5, no. 3: April 2010. It details how the project came about, the methodology and so on - the article can be downloaded here, in PDF format. This PDF is actually the whole edition of the journal, by permission from the editor - my article is at the back, the last one in there.
• Why are we still defined by our building? (the short version...) The full version can be found below [on the papers and presentations page linked above]; this is a much reduced edition, published by Impact (the Career Development Group Journal), as part of the prize for winning best paper at the 2009 New Professionals Conference. Available here in PDF format.

  (Plus...)

• The Unspeakable Truth This is a copy of the essay which was one of the winners of the LISNews Essay Contest - it's about the future of libraries, and the positive lessons about reinvention we can learn from other industries. Downloadable here as a PDF.

So if you aren't bored of hearing about the Library Routes Project, and you've sometimes wondered what the Defined by Our Building thing was all about but didn't fancy ploughing through 4000 words of the full version, this is the blog post for you!

Thank you to Woodsiegirl who went through the ALISS article with a finely judged scalpel and made it a lot better. Cheers to Chris Rhodes for getting hold of the Building PDF for me. Bobbi and Buffy, you each get brief mentions in the Library Routes article, by the way...

- thewikiman

the CILIP Manifesto is a good step forward

CILIP has launched its new Manifesto - six priorities for the next government. You can view details of it on CILIP's website, or click here to download the whole thing - it's only a 4 page PDF.

The six priorities are

1. Make school libraries statutory

2. Promote and protect the rights of users within copyright law

3. Build a successful knowledge economy

4. Preserve the UK's digital cultural heritage

5. Fund and enable the effective co-ordination of health information

6. Develop a set of library entitlements for public library users

Leaving aside the colour of the thing, I like this a lot. It is short, to the point, clearly laid out, and with basic information you can take in at a glance and more in-depth stuff too if you have time to read it. Here's a quote:

"A copy of every book published in the UK is deposited at the British Library and, by request, at other national deposit libraries.This is not so with audio-visual or digital material and much unique material has already been lost. There are eight million websites in the UK domain but, for example, no contemporary web records exist for the death of Princess Diana or the unveiling of the Angel of the North."

It makes its point well, highlights the dichotomy of the traditional perceived role of the library and the one we actually have to serve now, and gives a solid and tangible example of what failings need to be addressed.

All six priorities are important, and the chances are one or more of them is relevant to either your work or your other professional activities - for me, the whole Preserve the UK's digital cultural heritage business is fundamental to the LIFE-SHARE Project.

I like that there is are instructions and suggestions on how to use the document for lobbying and advocacy, including an email template to write to your MP, and details of how to go about contacting your local media. This is what a public and national library body should be doing - empowering its members to act, and providing the tools and the guidance to help them do so.

What I really like, though, is how widely CILIP has distributed this Manifesto. It's gone to a LOT of people, including all parliamentary candidates. (There's more than two-and-a-half thousand of them.) It has also been sent to political Party HQs, senior Information Professionals, and a press release has gone out. Much effort has been made to escape the echo chamber - this is not a Manifesto just for us to read among ourselves, but to communicate what we all say to each other to the wider country. I've thought for a while that libraries sometimes seem under-represented in popular culture - as well as all the funding cuts, the well-worn cliches, the closures etc, it doesn't always feel like we've got enough fire-power to fight back in the public domain, via the media and so on. This is the first time CILIP has sent out a message to so many people (and so many potentially important, policy-forming people at that) and I really applaud them for it.

In other CILIP related news, the Diversity Group Conference 2010 has been announced: "An Inconvenient Truth: Race, Class and Libraries". It takes place on Monday 14 June 2010 at CILIP HQ, and you can find details of the programme, prices, how to book etc on the Diversity Group's web-pages. The talks look really good, and Bonnie Greer, no less, is providing the keynote. So check it out. I have a special set of circumstances this year which means I've used up each and every iota of leave and / or conferences-not-directly-related-to-my-9-to-5-job allowance for this cycle so will have to miss this, as well as Liver and Mash, and some other good looking conferences and a couple of events I was asked to speak at, which is sad times (although all in a good cause) - so I can't go, but I wish I could. It's an important issue, race in libraries; we seem to be a very un-diverse profession. It's particularly noticeable in Leeds where I work in the UK - the population of the town has myriad ethnicities, as does the student population, but this doesn't seem that well represented in the library staff. So if anyone reading this goes to the Diversity Group conference, I'd be interested in hearing what gets said...

- thewikiman

you are only as good as your last customer interaction

I've said this before in papers and presentations, but never as blog post of its own - a recent Agnostic, Maybe post about library advocacy has reminded me of it.

Sport is riddled with cliches, and one of the less vapid ones is "you're only as good as your last game."  Of course, your reputation should actually be the sum total of all your actions, but the most recent of these actions is by far the most important in forming opinions. Your reputation can be absolutely stellar right up until the point at which you choke in the final; at that point your reputation will be 'choker' rather than 'silver medalist', most likely.

The same applies in a very real way to library customer service. The reputation of each library is only as good as its last customer interaction. There are, of course, a million and one caveats to this, but I'm trying to learn the art of briefer blog posts so I won't insult your intelligence by listing them here. Serve every customer superbly and there will gradually be a net gain in the reputation of your institution; serve one rudely or lazily and there may well be an instant reputation plummet. Word of mouth is so important, and everyone knows the majority of people are more likely to pass on bad experiences than good ones; it's just the way we are.

I wanted a nice pithy definition of 'reputation' to use here, so I looked it up in the OED. Turns out there isn't really a useful summary you can fit into a single sentance, but the gist of it is this: reputation is the general esteem in which something or someone is held.

This general esteem is easy to percieve as a fixed constant, a largley solid and static 'thing' which is sometimes influenced by particularly significant events. The reality for something like a library is that reputation is a constantly updating, evolving and shifting entity, held in the collective (and individual) conciousness of both the library's users and even people who've never set foot on its premises. The reputation of your library is in part informed by you - literally you, as an individual, based on your actions as a member of its staff.

I'm going to pull out my favourite quote here - it's from Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, in Information and Library Manager 5 (3) 1985:

"The library is not an abstraction. It has an identity, an identity created by the staff contact with the users."

Two things strike me about that quote - firstly it came from someone who wasn't a librarian (Dame Esteve-Cole, as she later became, was an academic and two years after writing the article I'm quoting from she became the director of the Victoria & Albert Museum) and secondly I was five years old then, and I'm not entirely sure her message has got through over the last quarter of a century. Library advocacy is a complicated issue and something of a problem for the industry, but the one thing we can all do as indivduals to improve reputations is good customer service. If 100% of librarians are nice 100% of the time, people will start to notice...

It's really hard to do, by the way. It doesn't take a genius to point out that being nice to people will improve reputations; of course it will. But actually applying that maxim to the full, particularly five minutes before you're due to close with an annoying patron who isn't showing you any courtesy at all in return, is often easy to duck out of. But it's worth sticking with it, for the good of all of us.

- thewikiman