Libraries in a VUCA world

In Jonathan Rose’s recent book, The Well-Tempered City: What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach Us About the Future of Urban Life, he talks about the concept of VUCA and how that applies to thinking about the future of life in cities. VUCA, an acronym for vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, originated with students from the US Army War College to describe the times after the Cold War. While Rose specifically adapts the concept to help talk about life in modern cities, I think it also can easily be used to describe the ecosystem of academic libraries and modern research and scholarship.

We live in a world where the only constant is change. Within the academic library world, the changes in the past twenty years have been monumental and in some cases unanticipated. We have fortunately adapted to many of these changes and continue to provide exceptional services to our students and faculty. That said, we often have a sense of angst about what is coming next and how we will adapt and change. While we expect budget challenges and changes in IT, and in the higher education landscape, many of us were surprised by the negative cultural changes, and “war on diversity” that became clear after the 2016 presidential election.

Volatility: the quality or state of being likely to change suddenly, especially by becoming worse (https://bit.ly/2W2d4L4)

·         Budget: Library budgets have been volatile for the past several decades; complicated by decreases in state funding for higher education and/or rising materials costs (books, journals), and new technology costs. The continual battle for dollars has resulted in reduced staffing and collection decisions that sometimes compromise the library’s ability to effectively support students and faculty. Budget volatility also compromises a library’s ability to be flexible, innovative, and quickly respond to new opportunities or to develop new services that support scholarship and student learning.

·         Google: When Google first appeared on the scene, many librarians felt a bit off-kilter, as if their world had tilted. As we have adjusted and taken advantage of Google over the years, there remains an element of volatility with Google. Google is a commercial company that looks out for its own interests and products or services that we have used and come to depend on may or may not be part of Google’s long-term strategy. One example is the Google books project where there was the promise that Google would digitize most of the worlds knowledge; not so much anymore.

·         Xenophobia: Most of our universities have prided themselves on their ability to attract and retain large numbers of international students. These students from many of the world’s countries bring a very real global perspective to our campuses and to our libraries. The rise of xenophobia and some current federal policies has drastically affected international students’ ability and willingness to come to the US to further their education. This volatility in international student enrollment affects many individual academic programs but also diminishes the cultural richness of our campuses. Because international students are limited to working on campus, many international students end up working for the library, often one of the largest student employers on campus. These international students bring new perspectives as well as language and cultural expertise that many libraries need.

Uncertainty: a state of doubt about the future or about what is the right thing to do (https://bit.ly/2YEWy0m)

·         Politics: On any given week, there is likely to be news from national, state, or local politics with laws, policies, or budgets that impact the work of higher education, and the students and faculty that we serve. Political uncertainties, such as the future of the DREAM Act, or protections for LGBTQ people, TITLE IX, or free speech rulings, all impact our students and faculty, and the type of services and information that we need to provide to meet their needs.

·         Technology: Technology has had the most change and has brought the most promise as well as the most uncertainty to our work. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will bring new uncertainties as well as new opportunities. AI is likely to assist with basic reference questions, and might also provide new algorithms that improve book selection for highly specialized fields. Robots in the library may provide new delivery services for in house book retrieval. While these technologies might make some jobs obsolete, it will likely also give rise to new and more complex jobs.

·         Anti-intellectualism: The rise of anti-intellectualism, the disregard of science and evidence-based policy, and the concomitant “fake-news” has added significant challenges to higher education, and made it more uncertain that the general public sees higher education as a public good. Students more than ever need good information skills to seek out and evaluate information for both their professional and personal lives; our information literacy efforts do matter.

·         Staffing: As the library world continues to change, there is a growing need for new types of expertise to meet new demands and to provide new and more complex services to support student learning and faculty research. It is uncertain, given limited resources, which of the many needed types of expertise that a library can develop and sustain over time. Library deans and directors need to be very strategic and creative in building new staffing expertise.

Complexity: the state of having many different parts connected or related to each other in a complicated way (https://bit.ly/2QaBzzw)

•  Open Access: Open Access and libraries’ roles in supporting it continues to grow in complexity. While it is clear that most libraries and many scholars are moving the scholarly production towards open access, the means of getting there for all scholarship while still meeting faculty goals for journal prestige is complex. Recent moves away from the big deal with Elsevier (University of California system) is encouraging libraries and faculty in pushing publishers towards a sustainable open access business model. The hybrid publishing world that we currently inhabit provides added complexity to library resource management units that need to manage and make available thousands of licensed and open access resources through their catalogs and discovery systems.
• Data: We live in a data-intensive world and libraries role in discovery, purchase, creation, and stewardship is complex. We offer data management services to faculty. We purchase/license data sets and license large scale digital corpora to enable text and data mining.  As many scholars are still unclear in their own minds on how they handle their research data for the long-term, it is incumbent on libraries to work with researchers, campus IT, and subject-based data repositories in proposing long-term solutions.
• Artificial Intelligence: AI and machine learning make many people feel a bit uneasy. Will AI take over our jobs and makes us obsolete. While there certainly is a level of vulnerability, it seems, from my perspective that AI will provide us with additional capabilities and provide libraries additional opportunities to play a significant role in much of the new scholarship that is developing.
• Diversity and Inclusion: Our work on building a diverse and inclusive library has a level of complexity as every institution is somewhat different and brings different resources, expertise, experience, and cultural awareness to the task. The complexity is exacerbated by our blindness to the systemic racism that exists in our institutions and libraries.

 Ambiguity: the quality of being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness (https://bit.ly/2WhRamy)

• Library future: Our future is open to one or more interpretations, and in my opinion, that is a good thing. Libraries have become more dynamic and more involved in the process of research and scholarship than at any point in their history. We have the opportunity to be proactive and invent our future.
• Print collections: Long the backbone of academic library collections, the print collection on any one campus has an ambiguous future as circulation of the print collection continues to decline. While print as a collective whole in the academy is somewhat more secure, individual campuses are likely to make a host of different decisions around how much of the print collection to keep in a readily accessible format. There is certainly no single right answer. Schools with Ph.D. programs in the humanities and social sciences are likely to give preference to their rich and deep monograph collections, while more STEM-focused schools will divest themselves of parts of the print collections in order to meet other scholarly needs.
• Higher education: For many in the wider public community, the future of higher education is indeed ambiguous as parents, businesses, and politicians question the value of a university degree. Even within the higher education community, there are campus leaders that are changing the way education happens. Libraries can play a role, at least in their local communities, in showcasing the groundbreaking work of campus faculty, as well as student research that is helping solve real-world problems.

VUCA, as a framework, was created to help explain or frame a difficult and perplexing time. While I think it is an interesting framework to think through a variety of library and higher education issues, it should not, in my opinion, be taken as a framework that echoes Dante’s “Abandon all hope ye who enter here”. In this VUCA world, there are opportunities to show leadership and create value on our campuses.

John Mertz, a business thought leader, proposes that in the face of VUCA, leaders be reliable in vulnerable situations, trustworthy in uncertain situations, direct in complex situations, and understandable in ambiguous situations. Krista Skidmore from Flashpoint Consulting advises leaders to have Vision, Understanding, Clarity, and Agility as a means of dealing with a VUCA world.

As a library’s greatest strategic asset is its people, it is important not to let VUCA forces demoralize people. Regardless of our approach, library leaders, as well as individual librarians and staff, can respond to VUCA times by being proactive, creative, and developing an agile mindset that allows our libraries to quickly respond to new opportunities and challenges without taking a year to plan. Libraries that truly embrace diversity and inclusion and fully empower its people to contribute to future solutions and reward them for their work will have an advantage.

Perhaps a rewrite of our approach to VUCA could be as follows:

Volatility: In the face of volatility leaders can validate strategy, value their staff, and show some verve.

Uncertainty: In the face of uncertainty leaders can unite people, be upbeat, and unleash the power of a shared purpose and vision.

Complexity: In the face of complexity leaders can champion the library, celebrate faculty scholarship and student learning, connect the library to the campus and the community, and cultivate administrative and donor support.

Ambiguity: In the face of ambiguity library leaders can acknowledge they do not have all the answers, activate an inclusive leadership approach, and adopt an agile approach to library strategy.

Dishonor on your cow. Recovering personal and professional identity in times of difficulty

One of my favorite animated Disney movies is Mulan, the story of a young woman who joins the Chinese army incognito to keep her injured father from serving, and to protect the honor of her family. Early in the movie, while she is struggling to prepare for “boot camp”, the miniature dragon Mushu, assigned by the family ancestors to protect her, expresses his frustration with Mulan as she continues to “break all the rules” and not follow his advice. The dragon, played by the inimitable Eddie Murphy, in complete exasperation utters a curse. “Dishonor! Dishonor on your whole family! Dishonor on you! Dishonor on your cow!”

Somewhere in our lives and our careers, we probably have heard similar words; words that wound, or anger, or perhaps cause us to doubt ourselves or our abilities. We become vulnerable. These comments may have been made to us directly, or perhaps to our colleagues or our bosses; people with the power to inflict more hurt. Unlike Mushu, who really was on Mulan’s side, our antagonists are not.

After suffering a personal or professional blow that has damaged your sense of self, and also damaged your career, it is important to take steps to reassert yourself and to rebuild both your personal sense of self-worth as well as your career. While these words could apply to many professions, it is written in the context of being a librarian.

Here are my suggestions:

Reflect: Being reflective about your life and work is important to a healthy psyche. It is especially critical in difficult times as you sort through thoughts, feelings, and conflicting advice. Being reflective means being self-aware; taking the opportunity to think about your experiences and how they have affected you, and what you have learned from them. Reflective thinking also provides an opportunity for self-empowerment: a chance to plan a future and make changes to move forward. During very busy times, having significant time for self-reflection is difficult. If you are faced with lots of downtime, take advantage of the time and be reflective.

Self- care: When bad things happen, our first reaction is often to beat up on ourselves, to get less exercise, and to eat more than we need. Pretty understandable in the short-term but toxic as a long-term strategy. While looking after yourself (good nutrition, exercise, and sufficient sleep) does not change your situation, it does put you in a better frame of mind to deal with the difficulty.

Network: Building your network is critical to success. In times of personal and professional difficulty, it is important to have a network of friends and professional colleagues who you can turn to for advice and support. However, do not wait until there is trouble before beginning to build your network; a network is also a powerful tool for when things are going well. You can build your network through LinkedIn, Facebook, as well as in person through conferences and other professional meetings. For me, I feel blessed to be part of the library community, one of the most connected professions in the world, and one where other librarians, even those I do not know, are usually willing to lend a hand and share their expertise and advice.

Write: Writing is a powerful act. For some, a difficult period in life might evidence itself in a short story or a novel; for most of us, the writing will probably be more prosaic. Writing, for me, provides both a creative as well as an academic outlet. Not having a day job, the writing has allowed me to explore many of the ideas in libraries, scholarship, and higher education that I had been thinking about or trying to implement. It also provided a sense of purpose as well as a way to keep the brain sharp and fully engaged. Share your professional writing through Twitter, LinkedIn posts, a professional blog, or by publishing in an academic journal. This gives you both a sense of professional accomplishment and also shares your thoughts with your professional world.

Take back power: When we encounter difficult situations or where we feel we might have been abused professionally, it is easy to let these events define us both professionally and personally. While you cannot remove unwanted content from a Google search, it is important to take charge of what people see you as, especially as you appear in Google searches. Your LinkedIn profile is one of your key professional windows to the world. Ensure you have a positive description of your professional identity and capabilities; your education and your Vita, and your profile picture is current. You can also include professional recommendations written by your colleagues. Check to ensure that all of your other personal professional profiles, such as Facebook, ChronicleVitae, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and any others are current. Post regularly on LinkedIn to show your professional competence as well as to highlight what you are working on. These strategies put power for your professional brand back in your hands.

Learn: Many of us heard the old adage “learn something new every day” when we were growing up. In today’s economy of rapidly evolving industries and changing technologies, continuous learning is the only path to career success. If you find yourself unemployed, it is critical to find ways to learn every day. Monitor professional listservs and follow key people on Twitter. Read professional journals and research reports. Take out a professional membership on LinkedIn and take advantage of the thousands of free online courses that you have access too. Participate in professional webinars and if you can afford it attend the professional conferences in your career area. All of these keep you sharp and ready for the next professional opportunity.

Read: Reading is one of the key intellectual and emotional tools at your disposal. Read broadly, not only within your profession but widely; fiction and non-fiction. Not only does reading feed the creative mind, many books also provide inspiration for life. Some books may provide ideas for your writing; others will challenge your way of thinking; still, others will allow some moments of escape. I have always enjoyed books, both the act of sitting with a physical book and reading, as well as listening to an audiobook; especially those with a good narrator. In the past 14 months I’ve managed to listen to over 240 books; a crazy mix of history, biography, serious and light fiction. I have also been doing some serious academic writing, so there have been about 100 or so academic articles as well. All of this reading has helped me stay intellectually sharp and ready for the next challenge.

Stay professionally engaged: It is critical to stay engaged with your profession. While waiting for good things to come your way, staying fully engaged in your professions allows you to keep abreast of developments and making you ready to take on new challenges. As a librarian, with membership in the American Library Association, Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Library Leadership and Management Association, I try to keep on top of developments in the field, and when possible contribute to the discussions that are happening.

Be who you want to be: One of my favorite bloggers is Dean Bokhari (https://www.deanbokhari.com/blog/ ); a young man who is attempting to get people to be passionate about their lives and work and not to settle for the mediocre. In one of his most recent entries, he talks about the GPS formula – greatness, passion, and service. He notes we need to decide what we are great at, where is our passion, and where do we best serve others. We too readily let ourselves be defined by others and not by our passions, talents, and service. These are important words to guide how we think about our personal and professional life.

Let go and be thankful: It seems to be human nature to hang on to the things that have hurt us and to create scenarios of what we could/should say to the people involved. If there is no readily legal or administrative recourse to address the wrongs that were done, then one of the most liberating things you can do is just let it go. Giving voice and energy to the people who wronged you does nothing to them, and only prevents you from moving forward. Couple this action with being thankful. You’re not necessarily thankful for what happened but you can be thankful or all of the good things in your life, spouse, children, health, parents, friends, or a good cup of coffee. This is not “behind every cloud there is a silver lining” but just an opportunity to give thanks for the good things in your life. This is “counting your blessings”. Letting go and being thankful can help change your life.

So when a voice whispers in your ear “Dishonor! Dishonor on your whole family! Dishonor on you! Dishonor on your cow!” say “I have honor, I am capable, I will survive, and thrive.”

Thinking and Leading with Generosity

One might think that generosity is a bit of an odd term to append to thinking and leading, especially within the library realm. Generous, in today’s parlance, is usually tied to money, and after all, librarians aren’t generally rich. However, if you look at the etymology of “generous”, it comes from Latin, meaning magnanimous or courageous. While, also from the Latin, it refers to noble birth, the etymology does not talk about money or giving.

The role of a library dean encompasses many things, some things pragmatic, some strategic, and some aspirational. Because the dean’s role is significantly larger than fits into a traditional “40 hour work week”, it can be tempting to focus just on those tasks and not think more broadly about the larger academic library world and the potential for doing transformative work. Transformative work, which I believe, most of us are interested in, takes a huge dose of generosity because it requires us to think and lead beyond our own capacities and institutions. Generosity is certainly more than money, but also includes a commitment of your time, intellectual capacity, and social and political capital.

For me, I tend to do my best generous or aspirational thinking when I am at a conference, often sitting in a keynote presentation or other program presentation. It is not that I’m not paying attention (ok, perhaps sometimes I’m not) but there is something about that venue that frees my mind to dream big and to look at my work challenges in a different way. I often come out of those sessions not only with new ideas from the speaker but also a slew of other ideas of things I want to try, or projects that could be transformative. Almost all of them will require being generous with time, money, and expertise.

Moving to the more pragmatic, here are a few suggestions on how to think and lead with generosity:

• Mentoring: One of the ways to be generous is to be a mentor for others. One of the great opportunities is to be a mentor for an American Library Association Spectrum Scholar. These new librarians of color are an exceptional group of individuals that will enrich your life, and also give you an opportunity to listen, to ask questions, and to share some of your expertise. If you’re not chosen to mentor one of the Spectrum scholars you can reach out to library directors and deans in your area to see if there are new librarians that might need a mentor.  

• Giving others a hand up: Throughout my career, others have been generous in providing opportunities for me to grow and they readily served as references when it was time for me to move on to new opportunities. The library dean’s role is to provide opportunities for growth and development for librarians and staff. This means even helping them develop expertise that you know they will eventually take elsewhere. It also means leveraging extra resources to help newer librarians get to conferences and participate in training. New professionals are at salary levels that usually don’t support their participation on their own and this is the time in their career they can especially benefit from these opportunities. Your generosity will be part of your contribution to the profession, and also build your reputation as a leader who really supports people’s career development. 

• Professional Development: While this is part of “giving others a hand up”, I call it out separately here to emphasize the importance of finding ways to generously support people for signature programs; these are things like ACRL/Harvard Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians, Leading Change, ACRL Information Literacy Immersion, or Educause Management Institute. Programs like these are transformational for your people, and they make an impact on the library.

•  Participating up: One of the things I have learned over the past 30 plus years in the library world, is that no library or group of libraries has the perfect solution for every issue or problem that is encountered in the academic library world. I have spent the majority of my career in liberal arts colleges but have had some wonderful opportunities to work on projects with librarians from top research libraries. It could be easy to be intimidated but be generous to yourself: you have something to contribute. Two examples here might be helpful. In 2008, at a Coalition for Networked Information meeting, Dr. James Shulman, then President of Artstor, brought together a number of attendees to talk about the possibility of collaborating with Artstor, to create a digital image management system. While I was one of only a handful of liberal arts college library directors in the group, I jumped at the chance because it would be an opportunity to work with research libraries to build an interesting product that would be helpful to my library. In early 2009, the project coalesced around 8 partner libraries; Harvard, Yale, Cornell, NYU, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, University of Miami, Colby, and Middlebury; quite the group. For five years I attended quarterly steering committee meetings in NYC and regularly made contributions to the direction of the project. One of my key contributions was shaping the development of the project to be small and flexible enough for Colby while being able to scale large enough for Harvard.  Smaller libraries have expertise that they can contribute and need to be generous in contributing to groundbreaking projects. A second project grew out of my concern for how the libraries in Maine could collaborate to provide long-term stewardship for their print collections. An $821K IMLS National Leadership Grant and three years of work later, we had created a long-term retention strategy for monographs in Maine and were the first large scale print retention project to record retention commitments in OCLC’s WorldCat database. More importantly, we were able to share our experience and expertise with others. Our project was influential in the development of the Eastern Academic Scholars Trust, and also referenced in the University of California’s shared collections work.

• Reaching for the impossible: For me, one of the fun things to do is to dream big and look at those things that seem impossible, and then thinking about how we might make them happen. Thinking generously means being courageous and not let current funding, staffing, and other things to immediately shut down an idea. In 2009, at a lunch meeting with several local academic library directors in Central Maine, they suggested that there really needed to be a professional development day for academic libraries as the Maine Library Association was predominantly focused on public libraries. This seemingly casual suggestion prompted the “what if” question in my mind, followed quickly by “how, when, and where”. It seemed like an impossible idea, but I took a chance, spent some money, and in April 2009 launched Maine Academic Libraries Day. From a small beginning of about 65 attendees from about 8 or 9 institutions across the state in soon grew to an annual event with a national speaker and attendees from most of the academic libraries in the state. If you don’t reach for the sky, it remains out of reach.

•  Supporting others: One of the roles of a library dean is to encourage and support creativity and innovation. Some staff are primed and ready to go and just need the “OK” to proceed, while others might need some encouragement. Generosity plays a role here in a couple of ways. Some of those creative/innovative ideas need some small amounts of funding: others need the dean to be generous and let people explore new ideas to accomplish the mission and vision. Generosity also allows people to try and fail and get back up and try again. It is critical to allow front-line staff, who often have a very different perspective and understanding of the work and workflow issues, to provide input that shapes the work. Managers don’t have all the answers on process improvement.

• Doing the right thing: At the most recent Coalition for Networked Information meeting (April 8-9, 2019 in St Louis, MO), Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University, gave a keynote address addressing the idea of generous thinking and reclaiming the university’s role in supporting the public good. (Check out her talk here). For me, the basic take away is that our universities, and our libraries, need to rethink how we work together to achieve what none of us can or should do on our own. In days of shrinking funds, it is even more important to be generous in supporting projects that enable us to create large scale projects that support scholarship for students, faculty, and the public.

• Align our budgets: Early in my career when personal computers were just getting established as a critical tool I remember visiting a university campus where the university provided a computer in every residence hall room. When asking how the university managed this, the library director who played a critical role in making this happen, said quite simply “you fund what you value”. This very simple but profound statement has stuck with me. We can all say we value print and digital collections. However, we also say we value collaboration with others, with professional development, with open source projects, with open access, with leading-edge technologies, yet when we look at the budget, it does not reflect these values. I think there is an opportunity to think generously on how we do transformative work to support our students and faculty and align our budget priorities to support it. 

None of this is easy; but it is necessary!