Building a Culture of Collaboration

People say that librarians are collaborative by nature and I think that for the most part this is true.  We regularly and easily lend from our collections, we willingly share our expertise, and our history shows successful collaborations such as OCLC, Digital Public Library of America, and the HathiTrust, to name but a few.

Collaboration has been a major part of my career, with one or more collaborative projects being a part of almost every job.  Most of these collaborations were multi-institutional with some projects having a defined begin and end date and others starting and expected to go on indefinitely. My first major collaboration was helping put together a resource sharing consortium (MORE) in Western Wisconsin. At Macalester I helped develop a metadata standard for e-journal collections for the CLIC consortium.  In Maine I helped build a collaborative collection development model for Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin, and developed the Maine Shared Collections initiative to provide long-term stewardship of print collections across the state.  At Cal State Fullerton I helped develop a partnership with Athletics for a new initiative to provide information literacy training for student athletes.  I partnered with classroom faculty to develop a new campus wide lecture series and with campus IT to develop a Makerspace.

While libraries and library staff are collaborative, our first allegiance is to our own libraries and our own institutions. We must be careful that this allegiance does not blind us to collaborations that, in the long run, will be beneficial.

In general, while academic institutions compete against each other for students, prestige, rankings, sports; their libraries do not compete in the same way.  Sure there is some good natured comparisons and benchmarking against each other. Libraries also compete with each other in recruiting the best staff.  This non-competitive spirit allows us to collaborate in ways that our parent institutions often cannot.

Collaborations between libraries, often, but not always, start at the Dean/University Librarian level. Talks about collaboration are often aspirational (wouldn’t it be great if…) or strategic (we need to accomplish …) and or course sometime they are a mix of both. For collaboration to be effective and successful, it is important relatively early on in the discussions to get some librarians/staff with operational experience into the discussions so as to think through/ferret out potential roadblocks as well as to build support for the project.

There are a number of elements that I think are helpful in building a culture of collaboration

·        Need: Typically collaboration grows out of some need; a need identified by the library or libraries, or perhaps by the institution (s) involved. The need should be big enough that a single institution cannot solve it alone, or should not solve it alone, or it is a need that should be solved at scale.

·        Healthy sense of self:  For collaboration to get off the ground, it is critical that a potential library feel that it has something to contribute to the collaboration/partnership. This something might be money, staff, space or expertise/enthusiasm.

·        Humility: Collaborative partnerships are often uneven. Too much ego in the room doesn’t help.  If one or more libraries feel they are there to solve or fix things for others then the collaboration may not be successful.

·        Time: Collaboration takes time; usually a significant amount of time and it is critical to support the staff involved in collaborative projects by providing then the time and other resources to make the collaboration successful.

·        Trust:  Collaboration takes trust on the part of all the partners.  Building trust comes through time, and in my opinion, meeting face to face, and not just via Skype of some other technology. As a Dean/UL it is also important to trust your own staff to do the work without micromanaging the collaboration.

·        Vision/daring: While some collaborative projects may be mundane, it is important to be daring and to envision something bigger or more radical.  Jim Neal, University Librarian Emeritus from Columbia often urged “radical collaboration” as a way of moving things forward in more dramatic ways.

·        Leadership: The Dean/UL provides one level of leadership but also must allow other librarians/staff to take on leadership roles in any collaborative projects. The Dean should be involved enough to show that that the collaboration is important but hands off enough to let the staff involved do their work.

Moving forward I’m looking forward to developing more collaborative projects and a culture that supports the type of work that only can be achieved as libraries and other partners work together.

Preach, Pray, or Die: Speaking up, Being Mindful, Following Your Passion

Who we are is shaped by our life experiences, our families, our friends, our religious and cultural traditions. I grew up in Eastern Canada in a religious tradition that was predominantly shaped by Methodism. Two degrees in religious studies also shaped my understanding of some of the world’s major religious traditions as well as my understanding of the world.  While I have been a librarian for more years than I can count, I often go back to my first degrees for inspiration or sometimes provocation.

The Eighteenth Century British cleric and theologian, John Wesley, expected that his Methodist ministers would be ready to preach, pray, or die at a moment’s notice.  While this might seem an odd mantra for a library blog, I think there are some interesting lessons that can be drawn from this saying.

Preach (Speak Up)

While librarians do not preach in the religious sense, we do speak, talk, advocate, and debate heatedly about libraries and their impact.  The idea that librarians are a quiet, reserved group, is a movie caricature, and one that should be discarded.

Over the years I’ve been told that I needed to have an “elevator speech” – a pithy two or three sentences about the library in case I had a couple of minutes to talk to the university president, a donor, a faculty member, or students.  I think the elevator speech idea is too simplistic, as if the work and impact of a university library can be so glibly distilled.  Rather I think there are a series of stories of impact that can and should be developed that provide a richer and more nuanced view of the library and the library staff and the work they do. People are seldom moved by facts and figures (number of books, or number of visitors) but rather they are moved by stories of what difference the building, the services, or parts of the collection have made to students or faculty, or the public.

Jim Neal, University Librarian emeritus, Columbia University, once stated in a presentation I attended, that every librarian should find a way to have a voice- to present their work, their ideas, and their impact beyond themselves. This is sage advice and one that I have been attempting to follow.

In today’s highly politicized environment it is even more important to speak up about things that matter. It is sometimes easy to think that one voice doesn’t matter but I’ve learned that every person’s voice counts, especially in changing the world for good.  This year, for the first time I participated in the Women’s March. Along with my daughter Rachel, we joined more than 650,000 others in Los Angeles to speak up for women, their rights and their role in our society.  It was amazing to see the passion of people to change the world for the better.

Pray (Be Mindful)

In today’s society there is, for many, a recognition that prayer, or meditation, or mindfulness plays an important role for individuals and for some communities. In my more than 30 years as a librarian, I have found that rather than prayer, meditation, or mindfulness, we often see busyness, frustration, exhaustion, and sometimes burnout. Our work life, our commute, our use of social media consume a greater and greater part of our day and week.  Each of us in the library profession want to make a difference, to do good work, to change our work and our world for the better, but we often feel frustrated or unable to move forward in a positive way. We often put off the important for the urgent.

One of the significant educational/professional development events in my career was the ACRL/Harvard Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians.  While the people in the program were interesting, the instructors were great, and the material was thought provoking, the most valuable part of the week long program, for me, was the opportunity to be reflective.  Where in our very busy work and personal lives do we have the opportunity to take five full days and think critically and reflectively about our work, our profession, and ourselves?

As I have some extra time these days, I have been reflecting on what is important to me, both personally and professionally. Are there projects that I’ve been wanting to do but I’ve put off for another day because of work, or fear of failure, or general busyness?  Are there friends and family that I’ve been neglecting because I’ve been so busy.

I’ve also been reflecting on people who are not like me and what their experience of the world is like. I live in a very diverse part of the US where the majority of people I see don’t look like me. Right now at Panera Bread where I’m sitting to write, I see a well-dressed African American man doing some work and I’m wondering how he feels in light of the arrest of two innocent African American men in Starbucks this week. I see Asian and Hispanic students and wonder how they experience the world and what sort of systemic prejudice they deal with on a regular basis. I think of my own adopted Hispanic children and think on how to make the world better for them.

Reflection, prayer, or mindfulness should lead us to awareness of ourselves and others and move us from inaction to action. It should lead to appreciation and thankfulness, and hopefully to some forward movement.

Or Die (Find Your Passion)

John Wesley expected that Methodist ministers would live in such a way that there would be no regrets if they died at any time.  I think the value of the “die” section of this mantra for us is not about dying but on how we spend our time and our passion while we have time.  

In general, librarians are very passionate individuals. We are passionate about many things: the right to privacy, the right to read anything and everything without interference, the needs of our communities and our students to name a few. Librarians, for the most part, are passionate about social justice, even if at times we get things wrong.  We want our world to be a better place. We want people to be treated fairly and equitably.

One of the things that I think plagues librarians is that we want to do everything. We are passionate about so many parts of our work and about so many issues in our country and world.  My challenge to myself is to focus part of this time of reflection on the one, two, or maybe three things to be really passionate about and to devote serious energy to. I am expecting that I will work another 10 years before I retire and I want these ten years to be meaningful for me, my family, my profession, and the world.

My challenge to all of you is to Speak up, Be Mindful, and Find Your Passion.

My life in libraries: an homage for National Library Week 2018

We come to the end of National Library week and our celebration of the many ways libraries contribute to our society. During National Library Week we rightly celebrate the role of libraries in society and the difference they make. We seldom talk about the difference libraries make on those of us who have spent our careers in them. This is my brief ramble on my life in libraries.

Having spent my whole adult life working in libraries, I will admit that I am biased.  I’m even one of those librarians who visit other libraries when on vacation, either in the US or abroad. As a kid I was an avid reader. I grew up in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, in Eastern Canada in an era where we had only two channels on TV and even Saturday morning cartoons weren’t always available. Books, for me, were a way to have a new adventure. I remember as a child going to the library with my mother to borrow books as books were expensive and my parents were poor and the library had hundreds to choose from.  I was fascinated by how many books there were and by the wonders of the card catalog.  I was also one of those nerdy kids that used the school library, especially in high school.

I never expected to be a librarian, I had wanted to be an architect until I took a drafting class. Growing up I was fascinated by both history and geography and went off to the University of Manitoba to study history and become a history professor.  After the first year with an incredibly awful history professor and a highly engaging religious studies professor I changed majors.  As one can imagine both history and religious studies were quite book intensive and I spent hours in the library.

In 1977 I went to San Diego to Point Loma Nazarene University; a wonderful camps of 90 acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  As an international student (from Canada) I could only work on campus and the only person I knew in California was Dorothy Thomson, a librarian at Point Loma.  I went begging, hat in hand, for a job. In my two years there, I got some rigorous experience. I worked the circulation and reserves desk, checked in print and microform journals (on print Kardex cards) and in my second year, got to be a reference intern where I spent 20 hours a week providing reference service.  This was before any computers so I had to quickly learn all the periodical indexes and most of the reference collection. I also worked for Esther Schandorf, the head librarian, doing bibliographic verification for a major bibliography she was working on. This was my first introduction to OCLC on a then modern beehive terminal. The librarians started saying that I should be a librarian and I, the typical cocky grad student, said no thanks. 

Returning to Canada in 1979, with an MA in theology, I got a job at the University of Manitoba Libraries and applied to a PhD program at the University of Toronto.  Working in current periodicals and helping check-in 13,000 titles and claiming those that didn’t come, taught me the joy/frustration, and sometimes absolute crazy world of journals.  My supervisor said I should be a librarian. I said no as did the University of Toronto.

About a year later I went to work in the library at Canadian Nazarene College, serving as a jack of all trades.  I physically processed collections, shelved, learned to catalog, ordered books, and even assembled and disassembled shelving.  My mentor, Muriel Weston, a retired school librarian, can be credited with finally convincing me to go back to school to become a librarian.  She also helped me buy my first computer. Three successive and very intensive summers later, I graduated with an MLS from the University of Western Ontario in October 1985.

In 1986 I accepted a job as a reference and instruction librarian at Point Loma Nazarene University and once again returned to San Diego. Two years into the job I transitioned to be the cataloger and then the Head of Tech Services and Systems. One of the advantages of working at a smaller and understaffed library is that you get to do a wide variety of tasks. I did library instruction for the Nursing program and developed an interest in medical information. I did a significant amount of original cataloging and authority control and gained an appreciation for the intellectual exercise that it takes to be a great cataloger. One of the big jobs that shaped my career was automation and building a case for automating, choosing a system, doing retrospective conversion, barcoding a collection, and going live.  Every job since has had some aspect of library technology. My boss, library director, Jim Newburg, supported exploring new ideas and gave me many opportunities to grow. My colleagues Ann Rupert, Vernell Posey, Robin Lockerby, and Sharon Bull provided helpful insights to a relative newbie to the profession.

In 1994 I moved with my wife, and twin daughters to West St Paul MN.  During the next 9 years I worked at Northwestern College (Senior Reference Librarian and Systems Librarian), Chippewa Valley Technical College (Library Manager), and Macalester College (Team Leader for Collections Management). Library systems, played a predominant role during this time. I was instrumental in starting the MORE consortium in Western Wisconsin and wrote the RFP for its systems, and I led the systems migration for the 13 library, 8 institution CLIC consortium in MN.  I also had the opportunity to develop collections expertise both in monographs and serials, and had my first opportunity in managing and spending a budget of over $1 million dollars.  Library director Sheila Carlblom (Northwestern), library director Terri Fishel (Macalester) were both influential in my development as they afforded me many opportunities for interesting work. Library staff member Dani Roach (Macalester), a brilliant serials & Microsoft Access guru taught me much about the importance of the workplace environment as well as about diversity and inclusion.

In 2003 I moved, with my wife and three children, from Minneapolis/St Paul, MN to Waterville, ME to become the Director of Libraries at Colby College. In 2004 I finished my EdD in Higher Education Leadership from Nova Southeastern University and a few months later, in 2005 we adopted a sibling group of four from Colombia, South America.  Over the fourteen years that I spent at Colby I was privileged to have many opportunities that helped the three libraries grow in collections, services, and expertise. During my tenure we built an on-campus storage facility, did a comprehensive renovation of the main library, and built a digital media lab in the art and music library. I got to collaborate with colleagues and Bates College and Bowdoin College to build a shared collection that supported all three schools. In 2010 I wrote a successful $821K IMLS National Leadership Grant to devolve a print retention strategy with the 8 largest libraries in Maine. .At the state level, I spent 11 years as the Vice Chair of the Maine InfoNet Board, helping with strategic planning, expanding the reach of the consortium, and upgrading the ILS technology infrastructure.  In conjunction with directors from Bates and Bowdoin, helped start the NExpress consortium, a resource sharing consortium in ME, VT, and MA. Colby, being part of the Oberlin Group, I was able to participate in the annual Oberlin Library directors meetings which were a source of both inspiration and an opportunity to grow.

It is hard to note all of the library people in Maine who made an impact both personally and professionally. From the Colby Libraries, Joann Curtis Allen who never said no to any challenge big or small. Eileen Richards, my go to person for information on how things worked on campus, and genuinely funny and true friend.  Colby Librarians Marilyn Pukkila, Peggy Menchen, Sara Prahl, Alisia Wygan tand Darylne Provost to name a few. Bowdoin college librarian Sherrie Bergman with whom I had a Hanukkah lunch every year and her wonderful colleagues Judy Montgomery, Karl Fatig, and Carmen Greenlee. At Bates, VP Gene Weimers, and his colleagues Laura Juraska, John Harrison, and Sharon Saunders we’re influential in my time in Maine. My many colleagues on the Maine InfoNet Board; James Jackson Sanborn, Linda Lord, Jamie Ritter, Barbara McDade, Joyce Rumery, Judy Frost, David Nutty, Steve Podgajny, Sarah Campbell, Pauline Angione, and Dick Thompson.  These folks and I made a real difference for academic and public libraries in Maine and they continue to do so in my absence.

In 2017, I moved back to Southern CA, with my wife and four of the seven children, to become the Dean of the Library at Cal State Fullerton. We had severe budget challenges, and a building that was inadequate for 41,000 students. Greater Los Angeles area is a minority majority area with people from almost every ethnic and racial group from across the globe. CSUF is the most diverse place that I have worked, with more than half of the students being first generation students.  The students were wonderfully engaging; very happy for the opportunities that were provided. They came to the library in droves, with more than 1.75 million visits per year. I was privileged to work with a great, dedicated, and creative group of librarians and staff who were totally committed to making a difference for students. Even though my time at Fullerton was short I will carry very fond memories of the library and the students, and over time many I worked with will be added to the list of people who have shaped my life.

My life has been shaped by the libraries that I have worked at and by the librarians and library staff in each and every one. My daughter Rachel recently graduated with an MLIS from University of Western Ontario, so the tradition continues. I have also been heavily involved professionally in ALA, ACRL, and IFLA, as well as other related organization such as the Coalition for Networked Information, the Center for Research Libraries, SPARC, and the HathiTrust.  I have many friends and colleagues in small and large libraries across the United States and around the world, as well as colleagues in the technology and academic publishing space.  Notable people that have influenced me, to name a few: Jim Neal (Columbia), Mary Ellen Davis (ACRL), Courtney Young (Penn State), Trevor Dawes (Delaware), Maggie Farrell (UNLV), John Szabo (LA Public), Maureen Sullivan (Consultant), Rebecca Jones (Dysart and Jones), Jane Burke (ProQuest), Caroline Brazier (British Library), Pam Bailey & Irene Hoffman (OCLC). Each of these wonderful people and so many others are part of what makes libraries an exciting place to live and work and make a difference and they have made a difference in my life and career.