Leader's Digest July 2007
From PLN
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Leader's Digest July 2007
by Leslie Dillon
July 2, 2007
Leading technology-driven change: Theory and practice
The LAMA-LOMS Program at ALA Annual, Leading Technology-Driven Change: Theory and Practice (featuring speakers Kathryn Deiss, Content Strategist, ACRL; Joyce Ogburn, University Librarian, University of Utah; and Felton Thomas Jr, Regional Branch Services Director, Las Vegas-Clark County Library District) began by differentiating managers from leaders. Managers focus on the short-term and on program administration; leaders focus on the long-term and on innovation and challenging the status quo. One blog post lists several excellent books on leadership and links to LibraryThing’s entry for Warren Bennis’ On Becoming a Leader, which is interesting in and of itself, particularly for the list of great titles on leadership generated by LibraryThing’s recommendations machine.
steps in technology-driven change include making sure we define the purpose of this change. We need to be clear on how this change will create public value. Next we ask: what are the central elements of the change and how will they be implemented? A good source is Joan Giescke’s “Scenario planning in the learning organization” in Scenario Planning for Libraries. Other possible resources include another great list from LibraryThing. The vast number of choices and possibilities available today can overwhelm us. Will we be the victims or the masters of the new technologies? “In the end, we have to be able to describe what we will make from the change.”
Some quotable quotes:
- Ogburn:
- Universities are “untidy organizations” that operate on “delayed confounded feedback.”
- From Patricia Battin: “Past strengths will become our liabilities.”
- Effective leadership’s challenge is to enhance your mission rather than the mission being defined by the technology.
- Thomas:
- From David Seaman on libraries as agents of change: “We’re moving the profession one funeral at a time.”
- On leaders carrying the burden of change: “It’s like going hunting and carrying the dog.”
- Deiss:
- Change is about two things: managing the action and managing the emotions that come with the action.
- From David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous: We all have a need to categorize (not just librarians!). The old model is “everything has its place.” With the explosion of technology, this has become “everything has every place.” The goal needs to be how to deal with this change and imagine new ways to structure ourselves and our services to reflect this new reality.
- On “choice overload”: A leader’s role is to get people to focus on what they need to see rather than being paralyzed by seeing too many things.
(Infomancy, June 23, 2007 and Z. Smith Reynolds Library Blog, June 23, 2007.)
LITA Top Technology Trends
Some of the trends identified by the LITA Tech Trends experts at the recent ALA Annual should come as no surprise: open source proliferation and ease-of-use, next-generation catalogs and improved discovery (including going where our users are), social software and user-created content. In addition to those trends, I’ve included some others that I thought were worth your attention.
- Jeremy Frumkin (Gray Family Chair for Innovative Library Services, Oregon State University):
- Discovery-to-delivery (D2D): OCLC’s WorldCat local; the University of Rochester’s eXtensible Catalog project, Oregon State’s LibraryFind and a variety of vendor-based products. But despite “new and better technology to facilitate unified discovery, there is still the basic issue of the business models behind content provision to libraries.”
- Beyond D2D: Looking “at how users manipulate the information they acquire...Zotero is one example of a tool developed to address users’ abilities to store, organize, and use information.”
- New ways to interact with technology: Products like the “iPhone and the Nintendo Wii will start to drive user interface design and user experience beyond its current paradigm.” The keyboard/mouse monopoly may be challenged and the increase of new display technologies like e-ink/e-paper will help create new tools.
- (LITA blog, June 24, 2007.)
- Karen Coombs (Head, Web Services, University of Houston Libraries):
- Dominance of XML: Bottom line: if you’re a librarian who works with the web or in technical services, get fluent in XML.
- End user-created content: Who is taking responsibility for preserving the cultural memory of our society in digital format? Libraries need to think about capturing this content.
- More interactive, collaborative web: The web is dramatically changing the way we consume media.
- Digital as the format of choice: More and more users prefer and expect to get their content in digital format. Libraries need to be ready to deliver digital content.
- Line between desktop and web applications obliterated: Desktop applications have hit the web, e.g.,Google Docs & Spreadsheets, etc.
- (LITA blog, June 20, 2007 and [http://litablog.org/2007/07/02/top-technology-trends-ala-annual-2007-part-3/ podcast, LITA blog, July 2, 2007.)
- Sarah Houghton-Jan (Information & Web Services Manager, San Mateo County Library, CA ):
- Concept of the Commons evolves and integrates: Social software (think Wikipedia) is creating information commons. For libraries, the question is: how do we access and advertise the information commons to our constituents?
- Turning online stalking of our users into online “pushing”: It’s not enough just to go where our users are; we need to push out new information and alerts to them, linking calendars, images, videos, podcasts to these presences.
- Libraries accept third party applications: Libraries need to link to and advertise the wealth of free, 3rd-party applications (e.g., LibraryThing, Library LookUp) that can enhance our users’ experiences.
- (LITA blog, June 20, 2007.)
- Marshall Breeding (Director for Innovative Technologies and Research, Heard Library, Vanderbilt University):
- Truly redefined library automation industry: Major changes among ILS vendors are and will continue to be disruptive for libraries.
- (podcast, LITA blog, June 28, 2007.)
- John Blyberg (Head, Technology and Digital Initiatives, Darien Library, CT):
- New methods of materials handling: We need to look at RFID and other new technologies to accommodate changes demanded of us to support the distribution model of the long tail.
- New interoperability: ILS vendors will need to decouple OPACs from the rest of their systems and enable systems to talk to each other.
- (podcast, LITA blog, June 29, 2007.)
- Karen Schneider:
- OPACs: Lots of “tinkering with the catalog.” The goal of this tinkering is to improve discovery, but Endeca isn’t necessarily “the sine qua non of reinvented discovery.”
- Broader trends: Others are extending “into realms we traditionally thought of as ours.”
- (Free Range Librarian, June 15, 2007.)
- Meredith Farkas (Distance Learning Librarian, Norwich University VT):
- Capitalizing on user contributions: Shining examples of this important trend: Ann Arbor District Library, Hennepin County Public Library and the University of Pennsylvania.
- Social software--sustainably: Social software initiatives need to be maintained. There’s a “huge number” of abandoned library blogs out there.
- Going where our users are or letting them use our stuff where they want it: A lot of libraries have created profiles on MySpace, but the “really effective MySpace library profiles are designed to be another branch of the library.”
- (LITA blog, June 15, 2007.)
Is Endeca really the next Google?
At the recent Red Herring East conference, a panel of search gurus from Answers.com, Ask.com, Truveo/AOL and Microsoft said that “it’s not the technology holding things up. It’s figuring out how to monetize all these new things.” The panelists were impressed with search engines like ZoomInfo.com (a job candidate search engine) and Mahalo (a search engine that uses human-created results for popular searches), but the big money is in enterprise search engines. Endeca (which powers the online catalogs at North Carolina State University and Phoenix Public libraries), will do about $100 million in business this year and will be “the next billion-dollar company in Boston,” according to a manager of search at Microsoft.
(Candace Lombardi, “Is Endeca really the next Google?” CnetNews.com, June 28, 2007 via ContentBlogger, "Headlines for 28-29 June 2007.")
Ask.com takes lead in displaying search results
Both Google’s and Ask.com’s new systems are designed to spare users extra steps in getting to different types of content. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Ask.com’s is by far the superior design.
Ask.com’s Ask3D is named “for its 3-paneled search results which represent the three stages of each search: type a query, review results, and click through to content... Ask3D shows all three steps on a single page, to align more closely with the way people actually search.” The left panel contains the search box and the right panel “contains search results that go beyond Web links, such as images, news headlines, encyclopedia articles, videos, weather information, local time and, where relevant, music clips you can play without leaving the page.” Hover over image thumbnails, and they enlarge.
“Google deserves credit for universal search... But Ask’s new design is much more compelling and well worth a try.”
(Walter S. Mossberg, “Ask.com takes lead in designing display of search results,” Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2007 and Kevin Newcomb, “Ask.com launches major updates,” SearchEngineWatch, June 5, 2007.)
Wikipedia--the new Information Commons
If you haven’t already read the story on Wikipedia in the July 1 New York Times Magazine, read it now! If you can't, read this.
Whether you hate Wikipedia or love it, you can’t deny its success--6.8 million registered users worldwide, 1.8 million English-language articles and it now “accounts for a staggering one out of every 200 page views on the entire Internet”.
One of the more interesting things about Wikipedia is that it’s becoming a news site as well as an encyclopedia. The article describes how the all-volunteer Wikipedia members get it right.
A few of the main points:
- Wikipedia works because it’s a collaboration.
- The Wikipedia culture is radically decentralized.
- Wikipedia’s mistakes are most often the work of deliberate vandalism.
- Many of those who do the “hard-core editing on a breaking news story” are young--often high school and college students.
- The only way to get into a “position of authority on Wikipedia is to care about it enough.”
- Wikipedia’s chain of authority consists of 1,200 “admins”; above them are the “bureaucrats,” who are empowered to appoint admins; at the next level are 30 stewards, appointed by the seven Wikipmedia Foundation Board members.
- “Pride of ownership” is what drives Wikipedia members to get their facts right.
- Wikipedia’s aim is to function as a “bias-free digest of what others have already reported elsewhere.” There is no original research.
- Many Wikipedia entries are deleted within days, hours or even minutes by its gatekeepers.
- Wikipedia is “centered almost entirely on the carefully written word.”
- Wikipedia is also very much about the community behind it.
(One of the things that puzzles me is why librarians haven’t embraced Wikipedia more. We know how well collaboration can succeed. We believe in and support information commons. I sure would like to see more initiatives like the one at University of Washington’s Digital Initiatives unit, which is inserting links into Wikipedia. Here’s an http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may07/lally/05lally.html article] in D-Lib Magazine on the project if you want to read more about it.)
(Jonathan Dee, “All the news that’s fit to print out,” The New York Times Magazine, July 1, 2007.)
July 13, 2007
Harvard Business Review
The July issue of Harvard Business Review has some excellent articles that library managers can benefit from reading. Here are brief summaries of two of them.
Building a leadership brand
Do you want your library to be a “leader feeder”? That’s an organization known for its leaders. These organizations build a “leadership brand”--a reputation for developing exceptional managers with talents geared to fulfill customers’ expectations. “A company with a leadership brand inspires faith that employees and managers will consistently make good on...promises.”
Building a strong leadership brand requires that organizations follow five principles:
- Do the basics of leadership—like setting strategy and grooming talent—well.
- Ensure that managers internalize external constituents’ high expectations.
- Evaluate their leaders according to those external perspectives.
- Invest in broad-based leadership development that helps managers develop skills needed to meet customer expectations.
- Track their success at building a leadership brand over the long term.
By adopting these five principles, an organization “can create a leadership brand that differentiates the organization to employees inside and to customers...outside... As leaders at all levels of the company learn how to master both the core skills of leadership and the essence of the leadership brand, they will increase the value of their organizations.”
(Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood, “Building a leadership brand,” Harvard Business Review, July/August 2007. Available on EBSCOhost or from Harvard Business Online for $6.50.)
The four principles of enduring success
A team of researchers studied some of Europe’s oldest and best companies for four years to try to understand why some companies have performed at a very high level over very long periods of time and what can be learned from them. Although the organizations studied were European companies, the results of the study have implications for all organizations, including libraries.
The project yielded four main findings, which the researchers call the “four principles of enduring success”:
- Exploit before you explore. Throughout their history, great companies have emphasized exploiting their existing assets and capabilities over exploring for new ones.
- Diversify your business portfolio. Good companies tend to stick to their knitting, but the great companies know when to diversify. They are careful also to maintain a wide range of suppliers and a broad base of customers.
- Remember your mistakes. Great companies tell and retell stories of past failures to make sure they don’t repeat them.
- Be conservative about change. Great companies very seldom make radical changes--and take great care in their planning and implementation.
These four principles have helped the companies endure and even prevail during times of amazing upheaval and turbulence. “There is no reason why we should not be able to use the same chart to navigate the stormy seas of global competition and disruptive information technologies today.”
(Christian Stadler, “The four principles of enduring success,” Harvard Business Review, July/August 2007. Available on EBSCOhost or from Harvard Business Online for $6.50.)
Scenarios to help plan the future of your library
SOLINET convened a series of meetings throughout the Southeast inviting members to discuss the future of libraries. These discussions used scenarios developed by the Planning Committee of the Board of Directors to explore ideas about the evolution and direction of library services, collections, buildings, staff and technology. The results of these meetings were compiled into a report available online (9-page PDF). The scenarios are also available online to lead discussions in your own library.
The report states that the library environment for the next three to five years will focus on:
- New service models for libraries (outward focus on users; engagement in planning; importance of collaboration).
- Changing role of collections (including library as creator of resources, especially through digitization of special collections).
- Staff transformation (including creating and adding staff who are forward-thinking, technologically-savvy, and service oriented).
- Re-purposing buildings (Social space, quiet space, collaborative space).
- More assessment (of user needs, of performance and return on investment).
- Keeping up with and in control of technology (possibly with Google as the primary catalog and access point to library collections).
(SOLINET Member Scenario Planning Discussions, Summary Report from the Planning Committee of the SOLINET Board of Directors, Apr. 23, 2007.)
Global collaboration and the future of the OCLC cooperative
A speech given by James G. Neal, vice president for information services and university librarian, Columbia University, at the OCLC Members Council meeting in February 2007 appears in portal:Libraries and the Academy (Vol.7, No. 3). I highly recommend that you read it in full, not because it’s about OCLC or because I’m a former OCLC employee. It’s really about libraries and the challenges they face. But if you can’t read his talk or listen to it in full, I’ve excerpted a few of Jim Neal’s remarks below.
Libraries are facing new levels of accountability and new measures of success, new pressures for market penetration and diversification. We need to align our resources more rigorously with our priorities; to focus less on strategic planning and more on strategic action. We need to focus more on risk capital, competition, business planning and sustainability, and to respond to “the ATM expectations” of our users.
Libraries will be legay, (responsible for societal records); infrastructure (space, technology, systems and expertise--our facade); repository (guaranteeing availability and usability of content); portal (sophisticated, intelligent gateways to expanding multimedia content); and enterprise (leveraging our assets, advancing innovation, and building new markets and capacities.)
Neal urges OCLC to intensely observe eight trends. Libraries need to watch them as well:
- The transformation of the cooperation to competition continuum in the library community.
- The schizophrenic organizational frameworks and structures in which libraries are evolving.
- The expanding anxiety over workforce development in libraries, including our shallow commitment to staff development and lifelong learning, and the changing makeup of employees in libraries, where as many as 50% of professional staff don’t have MLS’s.
- The renewed vigor of standards development.
- The expanding calls for more rigorous accountability and assessment. Libraries need effective measures of user satisfaction, market penetration, success, impact, cost effectiveness and usability.
- Developments around cyber infrastructure and around text and data mining tools.
- The convergence among libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural organizations.
- The innovations and experimentation around emerging technologies. Where do libraries fit into these ventures?
Libraries, in partnership with OCLC, need to develop a more rigorous entrepreneurial capacity so that they can leverage their assets. As libraries seek new customers and new markets, they need to acquire business development skills. The library community needs a research and development agenda and capacity. “Librarianship is largely an information-poor profession.” Instead of using data from well-designed studies, we usually make decisions through intuition and by the seat of our pants.
Neal urges OCLC to invest in leadership development for libraries. The aging of the library population will create an increase in open positions in the next 10 years, “but without a generation of leaders eager and ready to assume these positions.”
(James G. Neal, “Global collaboration and the future of the OCLC cooperative,” portal: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2007. The speech is also available here.)
