Category Archives: academic libraries

Am I where I should be professionally?

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Steven Bell is a fellow librarian whom I’ve never met but whose voice is strong, reasoned, and influential for me.  I think he wrote his best blog post to date when he discussed how he has gotten to his current position in the library world, and points out the hills and valleys that we all must go through to be where we want to be.

Steven and I apparently share a few things in our histories, more than just our first name.  One of those things is that both of us went straight to library school after completing our undergrad programs.  By now I feel over the hill, but like Steven, I was only 23 when I started my first job as a serials cataloger at The University of Chicago.  It was my first professional job but also my first full time job, ever.  Looking back, I was incredibly young and naive.  I wonder how my colleagues there put up with me.  Fortunately some of them seemed to see something worth cultivating, otherwise I wouldn’t be where I am today.  That first supervisor can be so critical, positive or negative, in the early days of a career.  As I’ve noted many times before, I was really fortunate to have an excellent supervisor who pushed me to excel and made sure I had opportunities to do so.

I’ve been in this career for 16 years and at times I still wonder about the same thing:  Am I where I should be professionally?  If I had done this or that differently, would I be a director of some library somewhere by now?  Do I even really want to be a senior administrator of a library any more?  Many colleagues look at my varied career path and openly wonder about all of the changes and the variations in library settings I’ve been in.  Even in this day and age of great mobility in terms of jobs (geographically and otherwise), it seems like most of my friends have stayed in the same library where they started, or at least have stayed in the same type of library (e.g. academic) throughout their career.  I’ve jumped around quite a bit.

There have definitely been peaks with a lot of valleys mixed in.  I still feel uncertain as to whether I have done all I should have done, accomplished what I should have accomplished, thus far.  I see other people my own age or younger who have advanced far more probably than I ever could hope for, in a shorter period of time.  I worry that I have burned too many bridges, been too vocally critical, too willing to push for change or to seek out change, too lax in completing things I’ve promised to do.

However, one of the things that tends to come with advancement in age is perspective.  Maybe I could have and should have done better in my career.  No doubt about that.  However, I am where I am and that’s fine for now.  I have made a ton of mistakes and I have questioned — so many times — whether I really wanted to stay in the library profession at all.  About four years ago I thought for sure that I would be able to pursue a PhD in LIS, a dream of mine for many years.  Circumstances have changed and I doubt that will ever happen.  I am more at peace with all of that now.  I know I am lucky to have any kind of job at all.  It may not be what I envisioned for myself years ago.  But I am thankful for it.

As Steven mentions in his post, family can play a huge part in defining or shaping a career.  The biggest change for me of course is that I have been blessed to become a family man.  My wife and children take first place, always.

I particularly noted Steven’s mention of the exposure that blogs provide for librarians.  I think this is quite true and that we need to step back once in a while and see how very different (and for the most part, better) our library world is now than, say, 10 or 15 years ago.

Analysis of federated search

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There are many things I’m still getting used to in terms of corporate vs. academic librarianship.  One of the differences is the types of information/current awareness sources that can sometimes be found in the corporate environment.  For example, I regularly read reports from Outsell, Inc. and find almost all of them very useful and instructive.  This is a source I had never heard of before I began work in a corporate library, and I don’t think most academic or public librarians are familiar with them, either.  I have been quite impressed with their analyses and think their analysts have a very good grasp on many of the current and future trends in library and information science.  On the (significant) downside, Outsell, Inc.’s reports are pricey.

The other day I received an electronic copy of their latest report, entitled “Information Management Best Practices: The Future of Federated Search.”  (An abstract is available here.)  The report discusses federated search; who are the players in this field; the differences between enterprise and what they term “open web” search.  Google is in the latter category. The report’s authors argue that due to basic differences in philosophies and approaches, it is unlikely that open web providers such as Google will make significant inroads into corporate search.  Their succinct but  — I think — accurate delineation of basic differences between open web and enterprise search was illuminating.  Another point that I found interesting was their discussion of survey results showing that more time in the past five years has been spent on adding more information into enterprise search, with less time spent on actually analyzing that information.  The report’s authors argue that federated search vendors haven’t much to fear from Google, and they go on to articulate why this is the case.  They see a good future for federated search.

If you can get access to this report, I think it’s worthwhile to read.  One of the things I find frustrating with reports like this is that yes, they articulate important trends for information management and are written in a highly palatable form, but in doing so, they tend to highlight the reality of what truly can be accomplished in, say, a corporate business environment.  Meaning, the reality is often far behind the vision or trends articulated in such reports.

The "dark side" discussion [Updated]

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The main reason I was able to go to NASIG this year was that Anne McKee, program officer for the Greater Western Library Alliance (apparently known as GWLA, pronounced “Gwilla”), kindly invited me to participate in a panel discussion about alternative library careers for serialists. I jumped at the chance to present with friends and colleagues including Anne, Christine Stamison, Beverley Geer, Mike Markwith, and Bob Schatz. Anne represented consortia (the aformentioned GWLA), Christine brought the perspective of working for a subscription agent (Swets), Beverley with a journal publisher (Sage), Mike had a subscription agent (WT Cox) as well as PAMS1 background (TDNet), Bob represented book vendors (Coutts), and I came with a background working for a ILS vendor (Endeavor Information Systems, Inc., now Ex Libris Group) and in a corporate library.

Each of us limited our remarks to 7-8 minutes at Anne’s request in order to maximize the question and answer time with the audience, which numbered around 150 people. That isn’t much time to both describe our backgrounds, why we made the career decisions that we did, and offer pertinent advice as to what it takes to work in an alternative library career.

If you’ve been in the world of libraries for any length of time you will know quite well that there are persistent stereotypes and divisions between various forms of librarianship. For instance, cataloging people and acquisitions people are always supposedly against each other, public services conflicts with technical services, professional librarians and paraprofessionals, and on and on. One of the deepest rooted of these is the continual reference to the “dark side” — meaning, working in the for profit sector. There are many people in this profession who feel that theirs is a higher, better calling if they work in a public or academic library, i.e. a non profit environment. Often there is a lack of respect shown to those who “dare” to look for better wages and sometimes more challenging work in the business world. (Thus the reference to the “dark side.”)

This session, then, was an opportunity to highlight some of the many positives, and negatives, about working for a vendor and in other alternative situations.

One of the things that came up during everyone’s presentations as well as during the Q&A session afterward, was this issue of the “dark side.” I think the highlight of the entire session was when Eve Davis, who works for EBSCO, stated: “We joke about the divide, yet we seem to be perpetuating that very thing by mentioning it so often. Why don’t we stop using terms like ‘the dark side’ even in jest?”

[Updated June 11, 2007: I realized after I had posted this that my narrative just ended without going into any further detail about the session's content, so what follows is what I meant to write originally.]

Here are some of the impressions or things I especially recall from what other presenters had to say:

  • Several mentions by those on the panel of having a sense of impatience with the status quo. I thought this was interesting and noteworthy. Christine Stamison, for instance, talked about the process of implementing a new serials check-in form via a committee at The University of Chicago Library, and how that discussion took six months to come to a resolution. If I recall, she made some quip about how difficult it was to “turn the Queen Mary around.” I worked with Christine in the same environment and I can attest to the truthfulness of this observation. Sometimes things change too quickly in the for profit world, but it seems like all of the presenters preferred a faster pace of change and fewer meetings.
  • Anne, Christine, Beverley, Mike, and Bob all spoke about the supposed glamour of travel, how it really wasn’t that glamorous after all. Mike illustrated this by mentioning the number of times he warmed his McDonald’s hamburger on top of his hotel room’s TV set. Christine mentioned the fact that this kind of work life can be really lonely, and that you have to have a strong sense of self, that you have to really like who you are. Bob mentioned how much he regrets that travel takes away from time with his family.
  • MLS as union card. Beverley made this point, that in her view, the library degree is nothing more than a union card. That doesn’t mean it has no value (Anne also made this point); on the contrary, it establishes important common ground with clients. All of us agreed that we are librarians first and foremost. Anne mentioned, for example, filling out paperwork for her children’s school where she was asked to state her profession, and that she always answers the question with ‘librarian.’
  • It was funny to learn that Bob’s first job out of library school was at a taco shack of some sort in Oregon (his home state).
  • Support for professional involvement. Everyone on the panel agreed that they receive strong support for professional involvement from their employers. In some cases (and this has been my personal experience), such support is often stronger than what we would have received in an academic or public library. Christine mentioned that she requires everyone who reports to her to become NASIG members and to attend the conference each year.

Some of the points that I tried to make in my portion of the session:

  • Be sure to build a record of accomplishment. Then be willing and able to articulate what you’ve done and how it benefits you in various situations. What I was thinking of here, but failed to say explicitly, was the need for project management skills. That is huge. In every job I’ve ever held, the ability to plan and execute projects has been critical.
  • It’s not all about money. Yes, the grass is almost always greener on the for profit side of the fence. I pointed out that this was a motivating factor for seeking a job on “the dark side” (and I think this is true of the other panelists as well) but that it was far more important for me to have work that is challenging, fulfilling, and where I learn new things every day.
  • It is really important to be a quick study, meaning, be willing to learn and learn quickly. I pointed out that many of the jobs I’ve held were ones for which I had no prior background, but that I was able to succeed in them because of working hard to learn all necessary skills.
  • Have specific career goals in mind. Review them regularly, and understand that they may change over time. The example I gave was the difference in my career made by becoming a husband and father. When I was single, I devoted 95% of my time and energy to my career. Now that I have a family, they take precedence.

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1 PAMS refers to Publication Access Management System, a class of vendor-supplied services that helps libraries manage the e-content to which they provide access.

The value of quality in metadata

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I have known this to be true for years (I started out as a serials cataloger, after all), but the value of quality in metadata has recently been reinforced for me. Quality metadata is absolutely essential to building robust and flexible applications involving search, taxonomy, and retrieval of information for libraries (and for other organizations, too).

In previous posts I’ve described some of what I’ve worked on as a team with others in my library that relates to creating a better way for our users to find information. This includes “turning the catalog inside out” in order to integrate cataloging metadata (MARC) into our new portal web environment. This metadata supports several dynamically-generated A to Z lists of e-journals and e-books to which we provide access. It is also the foundation for keyword searches (what we are calling “Quick Search”) when results for e-books and e-journals are integrated with results from other kinds of library resources such as our extensive product literature database.

Using MARC data in new and more flexible ways is wonderful and exciting to me, but the excitement recently was replaced with anxiety when I realized that key pieces of data from those MARC records were not well maintained — not of good quality and reliability. This included something as deceptively simple as the ISSN(s) associated with each journal record. Once the problems were understood, I immediately outlined a project to update and, if you will, upgrade, the metadata for every e-journal to which we provide access. That’s around 1,600 “for cost” journals in addition to potentially ten times that amount in open access journals. That’s just a smidgeon of what many other libraries, especially large, academic libraries, have in terms of the scope of their e-journal collection. Still, it’s a very large amount for my library to handle and with our already lean technical services staffing, we could sure have done without the extra effort and time that’s required to apply the fixes.

When I arrived in this job I was told that cataloging standards were much looser here than in a typical academic library, and this was deemed to be “a very good thing.” Maybe so, but I can’t help feeling that a little more care and effort to follow national cataloging standards throughout the years would have saved me and my staff a lot of extra effort at this juncture. I am very thankful for such freely available software tools as Terry Reese’s outstanding MarcEdit program, with which I have been able to minimize this extra effort as much as possible.

One of the more memorable sayings from my first boss (and he was full of memorable sayings) that relates to this issue is “Don’t gild the lily.” By this he meant, let’s not waste our time trying to create the perfect cataloging record; he argued (and I agree) that there really is no such thing. I’m not saying that my predecessors should have had staff create perfect records. Rather, I am saying that more attention should be paid to key data elements to make sure they are up-to-date and accurate. I know many would say, “Oh, yeah, there’s the rub.” Meaning, the real question is, what are the key data elements to which we need to pay attention and keep in good shape, and who gets to decide that? I’ll leave my answers to those questions for a future post.

Turning the catalog inside out

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I’ve mentioned before that I am annoyed when universities don’t link to their libraries on their home page, forcing me to hunt for the link through some other link (e.g. to “Academics”) or dropdown menu.

What if, on a library’s home page, there was no link to its online catalog? What then? It may sound odd but that’s exactly what has happened in the case of the library where I work. Perhaps even more bizarre is the fact that I don’t mind it at all :-)

The reason for my lack of concern is simple: Our library catalog data is deeply integrated into our website in various forms of search, browseable lists, subject lists, and so forth. Catalog data underpins just about everything. The online catalog still exists and is still maintained, but instead of forcing our users to use its interface to find stuff, we have turned the catalog inside out and integrated its data into our library portal in numerous ways.

I’ve worked on this for months. I knew that this new way of thinking was rather unusual or different but it didn’t really hit me how different it would be until our new portal went live a few weeks ago. I remember looking at the homepage and instinctively hunting for the link to the catalog before realizing, “Oh yeah, it’s not there. And oh yeah, that actually makes sense!” There are links to the catalog deeper into the portal, just not on the home page.

I’m still working through the implications of what, for me anyway, is a radical shift in thinking and approach.

The Abbott Report

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I recently read a final report from the task force on the university library at The University of Chicago, written by Andrew Abbott, a professor of sociology there. It is fascinating reading and I hope it will receive widespread attention because it touches upon many issues that large academic and research libraries are facing. The angle at Chicago may be somewhat different than some other places but I think it is broadly illustrative and informative. It is interesting to note Abbott’s discussion on the theory of library research. For example, he boldy states the following:

“There is a good deal of writing about libraries and library knowledge from an informational science (IS) standpoint, but the theory of knowledge it presupposes is rooted, like IS itself, in engineering-based theories of information that turn out to be largely irrelevant to what it is that humanistic research actually produces. And in any case the information science literature arises basically within the professional debates, which to this writer seem driven more by the familiar dynamics of interprofessional competition than by deep thinking about knowledge.” (emphasis mine)

Another highly interesting point made in this report is that research data on library usage at Chicago points to the fact that the dramatically increased availability of e-resources such as e-journals, e-books, and databases has not replaced reliance by Chicago students on traditional library material. As Abbott puts it:

“There is no evidence whatever of substitution of electronic for print resources at the individual level. The two seem synergistic.”

This is great stuff because it flies in the face of assumptions that we too easily make about e-resources vs. print materials. We often assume, in other words, that print resources are less valuable, less often used with the advent of e-resources. Granted, the mix of students and the culture at Chicago may be somewhat unusual, but even so, this conclusion has significant ramifications.

There is more, much more here to enjoy and to stimulate thinking about the role of libraries.

Visibility of library on organizational websites

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It has always bothered me when a link to the library of a particular organization is not prominently featured on the home page of its website. This is particularly bothersome for educational institutions given the de facto role of the library as a centerpiece of learning. In fact when I browse the web or go directly to a known institution and do not see a prominent link to the library, this gives me a bad impression of that institution. In a previous job when I was responsible for library websites, the issue of placement for the link to the library was a battle that I had to fight with non-library campus IT folks, and fight fairly aggressively. In the campus website that existed when I came into that position, the link to the library was buried somewhere in a category for Academics, if I recall. Noone could find it. This, in spite of the fact that the library site was one of the most heavily used in the entire campus web structure. Fortunately after a campus website redesign, the link to the library was placed prominently on the home page for the institution.

So it was with a lot of interest that I read Steven Bell’s summary, posted to ACRLog, of a discussion on the COLLIB-L discussion list regarding this issue. One portion of Bell’s post particularly caught my attention:

Tom Kirk, library director at Earlham College, also brought up the value of examining web site data, but made the observation that data alone would hardly yield the information we need about student behavior in using institutional and library web sites. Until we do know more about how students use our web sites, Tom said, we may be unjustified in arguing for what belongs on a home page. As for alternatives, Tom suggested that many of our institutions have specialized portals for communicating with current students and faculty, where a more prominent library link could be placed. He also suggested that having the library under “academics” has “become a de facto standard alternative to a link on the home page?” So if they do move your library link from the home page to academics, don’t take it too badly.

This statement from Tom Kirk frankly astounds me, especially the part about having the library under “academics” being the “de facto standard.” Not true! And even if it is fairly common, I vehemently disagree that we should be satisfied with that! Furthermore, we should and often do have the data to back up the assertion that the link to the library belongs on the institution’s home page. And we should and do have data on how our students are using our sites. I would ask the question, are other campus wide sites being asked to adhere to this same requirement? Maybe, but in many cases, I doubt it, based upon personal experience.

One more point I’d make is that the library is not just for students, it’s for the whole institution including faculty, staff, and alumni. Even more than that, it is for the broader worldwide academic community. In other words, library websites, especially for educational institutions, have a worldwide audience and this is often overlooked. I mention this because one of the arguments I faced when in charge of library websites was to keep the library websites publicly available versus putting them behind a firewall and accessible only via an intranet. The argument for this restriction (made by non-library IT people) was that library resources and information was only for existing students, faculty, and staff, so therefore it needn’t be available to anyone else. Of course this is true when we think of licensed e-resources but this approach would make the library’s online catalog and other freely available resources invisible to anyone else.

I am not arguing that the library website deserves high visibility “just because.” But I find it troubling that the library’s online presence needs to be defended so often, and that there is frequently an assumption that the link to the library should be buried somewhere within an institution’s site.

State of the library blogosphere, 2006

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blogwithoutalibrary.net » state of the library blogosphere, 2006

Amanda Etches-Johnson of blogwithoutalibrary.net has produced some interesting graphs about the state of the library blogosphere. (When writing this, I just noticed that she didn’t use the term “biblioblogosphere” — thank goodness.) Of particular interest to me was the statistic that 12% of academic library blogs have been inactive since the last time Amanda did her survey. She notes some of the reasons that might explain this and I can concur with most of them from personal experience. Sometimes blogs — and wikis — are greeted with much enthusiasm by library administration because they give the impression of being progressive and change-oriented. But these new tools (and that is how I think of them, as tools) require a significant amount of ongoing investment, and it is this part that is ignored or overlooked sometimes.

My big news

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My big news is that I will shortly begin a new job. Yesterday I accepted a job offer from one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, to manage their library’s systems as well as their technical services operation. I am really excited about this opportunity. I’ve worked for two large, academic research libraries, for a small college library, and for a library systems vendor. Now I will find out what it’s like to work in a corporate library environment. I submitted my resignation today at Endeavor Information Systems, Inc., and my last day there will be May 17. I start my new job on May 22. In the new job I will still be tied somewhat to Endeavor but in a new and different way. This corporate library uses most of Endeavor’s software products, including Voyager (a traditional integrated library system consisting of an online catalog and other stuff), Meridian (their electronic resources management system, or ERMS), Discovery: Finder (formerly, ENCompass for Resource Access, which is a federated search tool), and Discovery: Resolver (formerly, LinkFinderPlus, Endeavor’s OpenURL service).

This opportunity is a real answer to prayer. Now my family and I have a sense of direction, of where we’re going in the coming months. It’s going to be pretty stressful because we will be looking for a new home, a new community to live in, and moving again. At the same time I will be starting a new job, teaching a graduate course, and finishing up a book chapter.

Gaming @ UIUC Library

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Game On: Home

A lot of discussion and news has been shared about gaming in libraries lately. Just about all of that seems to me to involve public libraries. That makes it all the more interesting that the university library of my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has recently announced an initiative around gaming, mostly targeted at undergraduates. The library is working collaboratively with other departments and units on campus to collect and preserve access to games and learning systems being developed as part of classwork and research at UIUC. Interesting.