All our Gifts – Diversity and Inclusion in the Academy

In John Kerry’s recent book “Every Day is Extra” he talks about having looked death in the eye and survived, and therefore he was given the gift of another day. For Kerry, his experience in Vietnam and subsequently his surgery for cancer reinforced his life decision of trying to make a difference. “Finally, every day is extra” means living with the liberating truth of knowing there are worse things than losing an argument or even an election -- the worse thing of all would be to waste the gift of an extra day by sitting on the sidelines indifferent to a problem.” – Foreword – John Kerry, Every Day is Extra.

While Kerry certainly grew up in a privileged world, at many points of his life he stepped outside of his privilege to make a difference. While most of us did not grow up with this type of privilege, (foreign travel, prep school, prestigious college, etc.) the level of privilege does not equate with a meaningful life, nor one that makes an impact of making the world just and humane. At one point he talks about using “all of our gifts” to make a difference. This struck me as one way to think about diversity and inclusion. Everyone comes to life with gifts; talents and graces with the potential to make the world better. Systemic racism and prejudice, not only denies people of color, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized groups the ability to use their gifts to the fullest; in many cases denies that these people have any gifts at all.

Over the past half-century, we have seen barriers to access fall, allowing people of color and others to enroll in colleges and universities. While the original fight was just getting the universities to open their doors, the battle of survival was not, and unfortunately still is not easy for many. Diversity and inclusion programs, while well-intentioned, do not necessarily change hearts and minds, and usually, do not break through and change the historic and systemic racism that are part of our organizations.

I currently live in Southern California, one of the most wondrously diverse areas of the country. While I certainly enjoy the diversity of people and languages and food, I am not so naïve as to think that there are parts of greater Los Angeles, where African Americans, Asians, Hispanics, or LGBTQ people would feel unwelcome. Translating this experience to higher education, a radically diverse campus, can at times be as intolerant and unwelcoming as one that is 95 % Caucasian. Being diverse does not necessarily translate to being inclusive.

As I look across the higher education space, I do think there are some encouraging signs, despite the increase in hate crimes and other acts of discrimination that have flared up since the 2016 Presidential election. More and more I see student services organization within the university recognize the need for providing “identity spaces” where students of color can gather, while at the same time building “brave spaces” where difficult issues of racism, prejudice, and hatred can be discussed and tackled. More faculty and staff of color are being hired; not with just the intent of increasing the “numbers” but of giving students an opportunity to interact with faculty and staff who have their lived experience. Both of these movements, even when they are not as robust as they should be, are examples where we are allowing those unlike us to use “all of their gifts” with the realization they have a valuable contribution to make both to the university and the world at large.

 A third area that gives me hope is the increasing focus on helping our students be global citizens. The majority of the world is not white and speaks languages other than English. They are people of a myriad of faith or none at all. Given the current xenophobia in the United States, it is critical that our students realize that all of those people out there are not to be feared. Being a global citizen is a gift.

Later this week, my daughter Rachel and I will be heading to Washington, DC for the American Library Association Annual Conference. While it will be great to catch up with friends and colleagues from across the country and around the world, I am really excited about the wide variety of speakers and programs that will challenge us not only to be better at our core profession, but more importantly will challenge us around issues of social justice, systemic racism, and prejudice.

It is easy to come to a culturally rich conference like this and be blind to the ways that racism and prejudice affect librarians of color and other marginalized groups in subtle and not so subtle ways. The gifts of humility and respect for others will go a long way in making the conference a positive experience for all.

“All of our gifts” really has a myriad of meanings. It certainly does mean the gifts that each and every one of us brings to the table. For me, it also means the gifts that people very different from me bring to the world. It means the gift of leadership that those in ALA and the library profession who are committed to making the profession a welcoming and inclusive space; people like Loida Garcia-Febo, Carla Hayden, Trevor Grigoriev Dawes to name but a few. These people are not only a gift to the profession, they are people who are using their gifts to change the world. “All of our gifts” also means those very public individuals who stand up and make a difference; people like George Takei, Sonia Sotomayor, and Jason Reynolds.

Every day is extra- What gifts will you use this year to change the world?

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!

Cement trucks, Undifferentiated Services and Collections, Google, and Library Discovery Systems

Every morning when my daughter Rachel and I are heading to South Coast Plaza for our morning hour of walking, we see at least one cement truck. It does not matter if we take the freeway or city streets, we consistently see at least one. Considering that greater Los Angeles seems to be the concrete capital of the U.S. this isn’t particularly surprising. None the less, it is a bit of a running joke for us.

If you’re familiar with cement trucks, they are pretty big. They’re built for carrying a massive load, and designed to dump it quickly; not in a particularly precise fashion. That said, they are pretty efficient if you just need an undifferentiated 8 cubic yards or 40,000 pounds of concrete.

I think that in the past libraries have approached their information provision much in the same manner as the cement truck – we gave them everything in a huge undifferentiated pile, without even understanding what they may want or need. As we’re not the only information game in town, it is important to customize our approach to help users appreciate and navigate our services. Here are a couple of places where I think we could start.

·         Print collections: In most libraries, our print collections occupy large swaths of floor space, without any signage other than a call number, leaving users with no idea of the wealth of materials at their fingertips. For them, it is as undifferentiated as the pile of cement. Most of today’s users take their cues from retail, be it the local bookstore, grocery store, or large clothing store. All of these are replete with signage and other visual cues that help users navigate the physical space.  Perhaps we should take a cue from the work that is happening at the Arizona State University Libraries where they are experimenting with how they can use their collections as a means of intellectual and strategic engagement. Their white paper “The Future of the Academic Library Print Collection: A Space for Engagement” is quite insightful.

·         Reference services: Most academic libraries are still offering some sort of reference service be it in person or online. While the service may be branded as “research help” or “reference”, or “research consultations” the average user still is likely to see this as an undifferentiated service that they do not know what to do with. Perhaps some examples of what “reference” or “research help” means would be helpful. This might include things like “help find peer-reviewed articles for your assignment” or “how to know if sources you find with Google are credible”, or “help finding primary sources”. A poster that I once saw at Dickinson College in PA gives a good example”

·        Database A-Z list:  Almost every academic library has an A-Z list of database that usually runs more than 200 entries. While vendors have made some progress in naming databases, for many users the names are still pretty opaque. There are misleading database names, like “Web of Science” that implies it is only science content even though it contains vast amounts of social science, arts, and humanities content. There are names like “Scopus” or “arXiv” that give the uninitiated not a clue as to their content or use.  Libraries should be providing searchable database descriptions and subject groupings for their databases. Fortunately, this is beginning to happen in at least some libraries.

·         Microfilm, Government Documents, Maps:  In large research libraries, microfilm, government documents, and maps fall into the undifferentiated category that most users ignore. Microfilm is the most problematic, not only because it is a difficult to use format, but library collections of microform typically have no coherent collection structure. The cabinets will have a mix of journals, monographs, reports, and dissertations. It isn’t easy to help users see this mass in any way that would prompt them to use its resources. Likewise, maps and government documents are not arranged in ways that invite use. Government documents are often as opaque as the government itself can be and libraries have increasingly eliminated government documents reference services, leaving large collections of documents as an unnavigable block. Perhaps better signage or ways to visually display the content might help users find these intellectually rich treasures.

Google, as well as our library discovery systems, also resemble the cement truck and the imprecise dump of data. A search on Google for “global warming” yields 112 million results and in a discovery system like the Cal State University Libraries Ex Libris Primo, about 1.1 million hits. It is little wonder that users are frustrated and do not go beyond the first page or two or results. What are users expected to do with that much data, especially when some of it does not seem to relate at all to the search query?

Google attempts adds some structured resources that might help the users in parsing the search results. These are things like showcasing articles from Wikipedia, spotlighting some images, and creating a “Top Stories” section. While these can be helpful, the users are still faced with 112 million hits and no way to really sort them, or to filter them in a way that is useful.

Library discovery systems are somewhat better as they offer fielded searching and a set of filters that allow users to narrow down the results. Even so, the results are still confusing in that the user often cannot understand, based on their search query, why these particular results are on the screen.

As a librarian, I consider myself a fairly well informed and skilled searcher, and I still find both of these tools incredibly frustrating and limiting at times. Here are some areas that I think need attention by Google and by the vendors of library discovery systems.

• Better algorithms: Google and most library discovery systems have moved away from strictly relying on metadata to using the full-text corpus as the basis of search. While the addition of the full-text does provide the ability to discover needed information buried in the middle of an article or book, the sheer mass of text often works against “search” and results in a slew of false positives. Google and library discovery system vendors need to improve their algorithms as well as incorporate some of the machine learning research that is being done, in order to improve search results.

• Better metadata for precision searching: While traditional metadata (author, title, journal, publisher, etc.) is no longer the total basis of online searching, it is critical when a user is interested in precision searching, especially in cases when they are searching for a known item. Library discovery systems make reasonably good use of this metadata in their fielded searching capabilities, but Google appears not to think this is important. Vendors should demand better metadata from information providers.

• Ability to specify when punctuation should be included or excluded. Google and most library discovery systems throw out all the punctuation in their indexes. This works OK in many cases, but in some cases, the presence or absence of the punctuation changes the meaning of what is being searched. For example, recently I was searching in Google Scholar for articles on the concept of “identity space” and about half of the results on every page showed results where the two words were together but there was a comma or a period in between them, and therefore not the concept of “identity space” I was looking for. There was no way to filter the 8,300 results to get rid of the results with the punctuation. Because the punctuation was thrown out in the search algorithm, Google presented the results as if “…identity. Space” was equal to “identity space”. This leaves the student or researcher to labor through pages of results to find results that a search engine or discovery layer should have been able to present.

• Ability to search only specific fields. While most library discovery systems provide for some level of fielded searching (e.g. title, author, journal, publishers, etc.). Google or Google scholar do not. Often students or researchers are searching for a known item and it is very frustrating when they input a search query, in quotations, and it either fails or retrieves so much ”garbage” that the user tries over and over hoping that they will get what they want/need.

• Better image searching. This is often, in my opinion, one of Google’s biggest fails. Searching for an image of a known person may or may not get you a picture of the person, but you certainly will get pictures with images that may have mentioned you in a document or from someone else’s picture on Instagram where you commented. Google needs to do a better job so that you don’t get millions of pictures most of which are totally irrelevant to your search. For example, if you search my name “Clem Guthro” in quotes, you get thousands of hits but I am only in 21 of the pictures, with many of the others showing no relation to me or to my work. It has been most frustrating when I have been looking for pictures of a particular university library and end up with a slew of pictures of a library from a different university, sometimes not even on the same continent. Certainly in today’s world of AI and machine learning, and advanced algorithms, Google can do better.

•  Linked Open Data:  Linked Open Data is the de rigueur for much of the web and we can see this in action in the Google searches that pop up a Wikipedia blurb or a marquee of movie covers on the same topic. There has been some talk of including Linked Open data in library catalogs and there are some elements seen in the RDA standards. To date, library discovery systems are not making much use of Linked Open Data, and publishers are not making enough of its content in this form. Wikipedia has gained such prominence, despite the groaning and protestation from some academics, precisely because the entire Wikipedia content is out there as DBpedia in Linked Open Data format for Google and others to use. Might it not be transformative if every encyclopedia and dictionary that libraries license were available as Linked Open Data?  Every time a user did a search in our discovery layer, in-depth academic content from these resources would immediately pop up into the results.

 We need to move beyond the cement truck approach to be more agile and customizable in our approach. It is what users need and want, and what they experience from most of the web and from the apps they use.

Intellectual Nourishment / Intellectual Engagement and Libraries

Several years ago I wrote a blog post entitled Starbucks, Chocolate, and Libraries, reflecting a bit on the role that café spaces in libraries might play as a space for intellectual nourishment. Sitting in a local Starbucks today catching up on professional reading as well as working on a new article, while my car is getting repaired, I thought it appropriate to revisit the ideas of intellectual nourishment and intellectual engagement.

Two years ago, in an open session for a new Provost, a history faculty member asked the candidate for his plans for creating intellectual conversation on campus, and the candidate, unfortunately, did not have an answer. The question was a genuine request for an opportunity for the university community to be a home for intellectual dialogue; a chance for faculty colleagues to do what we want our students to do – wrestle with the ideas from the past and present, and make the world a better place. She felt the Provost’s role was more than bringing faculty together around policy, curriculum reform, and faculty governance.

While a Provost could address this issue as one of her/his priorities, it is more likely that other priorities will occupy their time and the intellectual conversation on campus will fall to the various academic colleges and academic departments. In this lacunae, libraries have an opportunity to play a major role.

In an article that I recently published, “The 21st Century Academic Library: Six Metaphors for a New Age” https://journals.tdl.org/llm/index.php/llm/article/view/7334 , “library as café” is one of the metaphors. People who know me well, and my penchant for spending time at Starbucks, may think I am proposing a model of “library as Starbucks”. While I am always intrigued to see how people use their local Starbucks (study, writing, work as an independent contractor, community activism, etc.), for me “library as Starbucks” is too limiting.

Library as café harkens back to the European coffee house tradition where the intellectuals, politicians, and business leaders of the day gathered to discuss the issues of the day: ideas were exchanged, arguments and counter-arguments given, deals made, and ideas advanced. The power of the café society was so prevalent in Europe, that it is was one of the things that the Nazis quashed as they came to power and conquered various countries. They saw this free exchange of ideas and the intelligentsia as a danger.

If you look at the grand academic and public libraries of the past you would have encountered architecture that evoked “library as temple of knowledge”. Besides the inspiring spaces, there were often inspiring quotes on the role of books and knowledge. These were meant to be a form of intellectual nourishment that would alter the reader; they were meant to inspire. As our academic libraries are transforming into more user-centered spaces, perhaps with fewer visible collections, and” inspiring quotations” it is important not to lose the role that libraries can and should play in intellectual engagement/intellectual nourishment on campus.

While I’m not suggesting you recreate New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room or LA Public’s critically acclaimed ALOUD Lecture Series (https://www.lapl.org/whats-on/aloud-lecture-series), we can use our spaces and collections to engage, provoke, and nourish the mind of our students, staff, and faculty.

Some examples might include:

• Build and install a collection of artworks that represent the ethnic and cultural heritage of the student body. This could come from professional artists or from student artists.

• Instead of the traditional quotes on library buildings that have typically only represented the Western tradition, use some of the blank wall space in your libraries and cover them with quotes from the diversity of the world’s cultures and literatures, concentrating specifically on those that represent your students.  

• Host an annual global poetry slam during National Poetry Month with poetry readings in languages from all the languages spoken on campus.

• If your campus doesn’t do a “common read” program, consider working with student affairs, and the local public library to do so.

• Use one or more large flat screens to highlight interesting “primary source” materials from the collections that engage the campus.

• Host fun events that encourage student creativity. This might be game night or a build with Lego event with a challenge to build something that represents an event or concept. The first Lego event we did at the Colby Libraries, students were challenged to build something that represented “Revolution” as that was the campus-wide Arts and Humanities Theme for the year.

• Create a small music performance program that brings short musical events to the library. This not only provides an interesting option for students it also shows that the library recognizes the scholarship of performance. See UCLA Library’s Mindful Music in the Library https://www.library.ucla.edu/events/mindful-music-concert-series as an example.

• Create a faculty noon-time talk series that features faculty from across campus sharing their research.  Providing coffee and cookies helps to make this a great event. 

• If you have space, offer to host guest lectures that other academic colleges or groups bring to campus. This hopefully will allow more exposure to these talks with a larger audience of students and faculty across campus.

• Of course, if you don’t have a café in your library, plan for one, and then invite faculty to use the space as a venue to have conversations with their students.

     Let the intellectual nourishment begin.