Dealing with criticism

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I was reading Meredith Farkas’s report from the Computers in Libraries conference and spotted a criticism of MPOW.  She writes:

"Other vendors send salespeople to conferences who don’t know their products. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense! Question: would I dislike [MPOW] any less if they had someone cool going out and speaking at conferences? Answer: Probably not."

What can I say?  Do I take this criticism personally?  No, not really.  Does this criticism bother me?  Yes, to an extent.  It bothers me because things could be different, but due to choices and decisions and priorities waaaaay beyond my control, they aren’t.  I guess what bothers me is feeling to some extent like I represent, and therefore somehow need to defend, the indefensible, by working for a vendor.  It makes me feel, as I’ve so often felt throughout my career, like "neither fish nor fowl."  I’m a librarian first and foremost, and I’m in no way ashamed of that.  But I need to fit in to an environment in which many do not seem to share a passion for libraries, a passion for serving users, a passion for service, period.

On the other hand, such criticism bothers me because so often, as I’ve pointed out before, some of it is undeserved or flat out wrong.  There are at least two sides to every story.

So where does that leave me?  Feeling a bit weird, a feeling I’m used to.

  • http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/ <![CDATA[Meredith]]>

    Well the people not knowing their products was not an allusion to Endeavor, though it was an allusion to a few others at the conference where I seemed to know more about their products than they did (which is sad, because I don’t know all that much).

    Look, I had a friend in Chicago who also worked at Endeavor and his take on it was that he had very little control over the things people were griping about and all he really could do was his best in his little corner of the company. You can’t take criticisms seriously if you are in a position where you can’t do much about them. If you are in a position to do something about them, well then you should take them seriously. But I wonder whether the people who should be listening to criticisms from their customers actually do.

    What I want to see: a clear vision for the future, some sense that the company is working to make the catalog more usable, some sense that they are keeping up with the other vendors (Talis, SirsiDynix, Innovative), good communication of vision and future plans, and for people to return my systems librarian’s calls. Really the last one is the one that makes me the most annoyed. If you can’t serve your customers, if they have to call you for weeks on end before getting an answer to a question, you are not doing a good job. Case closed. (And that criticism is one I have heard from other libraries in Vermont as well). I have issues with EBSCO from time to time, but what I love about them is that they are responsive and are always quickly answering our questions. They know the value of good customer service.

    Look, I get criticized by students for things at my library that I have no contol over — like not having wireless in the library and our catalog being impossible for the average student to use. You just do the best you can with the things you can change and try to work on the real decision-makers who can actually change those things.

  • http://www.familymanlibrarian.com/ <![CDATA[Steve]]>

    Meredith, thanks for the comment. There’s not a whole lot more I can say; in fact, I’ve probably already said too much. My problem isn’t with you or with your criticism, that’s all.