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Is it the end of an era for librarian blogging?

22 May
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Flickr CC image by Thomas Hawk – click to view original.

 

Update: the day after posting this, I’m adding a little disclaimer: I am NOT saying blogging is finished! I’m saying a specific era is possibly coming to an end. And I still think blogging is, for information professionals, still extremely useful, very rewarding, and a great thing to do. Okay, glad that’s sorted.

Recently Andy Woodworth blogged about how he wasn’t blogging that much any more, and today @tinamreynolds sparked a debate on Twitter about whether the library bloggging community was slowing down, and if so, why?

I’ve definitely noticed this. There was a set of around 10 blogs that diverted into an ‘Essentials’ folder in my Google Reader which I read all the time, and there was at least 30 more that I regularly caught up with. But hardly any of the bloggers in question are producing regular articles in 2013. I don’t really use a Reader any more – I just pick stuff up via Twitter. I don’t blog nearly as much as I used to – and when I do it tends to be about things which happened ages ago (my last post, published late last week, was about an event which happened in February, 3 months back).

Lack of time is the biggest reason given for not blogging these days, and that makes a lot of sense. But I think it might be a changing of the guard, rather than an overall slow-down – a bunch of new professionals becoming older professionals, and newer ones attacking the biblioblogosphere with a fervor in their place. If we interact online in loosely defined sets (in my case, it’s largely ‘the people who were new professionals in 2009 when I went to the new professionals conference’) then it stands to reason that there would be a collective ebb and flow in our activity. As we get up the career ladder we become busier and have less time to blog, and we’re on similar cycles of activity, commitments, and enthusiasm…

I really, really enjoyed being part of a thriving, dynamic online community of info-pro bloggers. But I don’t miss it now it’s gone.

For me though it’s not just lack of time – it’s lack of energy for the profession itself. I think I’d make time if it was all as important to me as it used to be. Which isn’t to say it’s not important – I’m quite passionate about libraries, and still very passionate about librarians and our community. But I said a LOT of things on this blog in the first 3 years or so I wrote it, and that level of momentum – that fire – wasn’t really sustainable. There are librarians whose CPD is seemingly never subject to atrophy – I admire that, but don’t aspire towards it, weirdly.

I just don’t have that much to say anymore. I used to write posts like this one, about the state of play – I used to love it when lots of people commented and we had a big debate about stuff. But now when I write things on here it tends to be more focused and specific: the last four posts have been about an online tool, a marketing idea, an event, and a presentation. These kinds of posts don’t get as many views as the old debate type posts, but the blog gets more views overall because there’s now so much of it for Google to find!

So if you blog, do you blog less now than you used to? Is it the end of an era for librarian blogging? And if so, to what do you attribute this – is it just lack of time, or are there other reasons too?

p.s just as I was about to hit publish on this, I saw this tweet from @barlowjk which sums up one of the problems very nicely – we have finite mental real estate! And SO much stuff filling it up these days…

 

 

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Would you recommend librarianship? The results!

10 Jan

So, would you?

Most people have an automatic response to this question – many people will say ‘yes’ straightaway because they love librarianship and know it is largely misunderstood, while others will say ‘no’ straightaway because they’ve had a rough time of it.

What I’m interested in is, would you ACTUALLY recommend it to someone, who might then act on your recommendation? I was asked about entering the profession in an email recently, and my reply sounded, I realised as I re-read it, quite negative. That’s because I think you have a responsibility when someone wants your advice to actually think about what you’re saying! And there’s a lot to be said for not-entering librarianship (by the end of the decade who knows how many worthwhile jobs there will actually be, for example) just as there is a lot to be said for entering it (it’s ace). I sometimes worry that we’re so busy promoting our value and the value of the profession, that we blindly tell everyone to become librarians even though they might not thank us later if they become one.

So I asked Twitter, a brief and unscientific 24hr poll. 133 responses. It started off more or less equal, with recommending just about edging ahead of not doing so – when I tweeted something to this effect, the vast majority of the subsequent votes were in favour of recommending it. So I don’t know if that’s because people who hadn’t previously voted felt moved to ‘defend’ the profession, or just a coincidence.

So of the 133 respondents, 72% would recommend this profession of ours.

Pie chart showing 72% voted in favour of recommending librarianship, 28% against

Here’s the split by country. This started off VERY interesting because the US had 100% of voting no, but then every single other vote from that country was yes so it ended up being a landslide in favour of recommendation… Ireland, from this miniscule sample-size, doesn’t look much fun.

Chart showing that with a couple of exceptions, regional breakdown just follows the main results

Swedes: when it comes to Librarianship, they can take it or leave it

 

So would you recommend librarianship to a friend? I’d like to hear what you think in a comment.

Some reasons I can think of why I wouldn’t recommend it:

  • you can’t avoid starting at the bottom (can’t do the MA until you’ve had a year of experience, can’t get a higher graded job without the MA);
  • some career paths hit the buffers very early on unless the right person happens to retire / move etc;
  • the long-term future of the profession is far from certain;
  • constantly fighting peoples’ misconceptions of what we do and how valuable it is (I think the need to do this may fade over time because I’m far less fussed about it than I used to be);
  • there are far more capable librarians than there are decent posts;
  • the money isn’t amazing for the first few years (I know it’s very cool to not care about money but when you’re having to buy new shoes for your toddler every 3 months, you do);
  • you have to fork out a fortune to do the MA but, if you think about it, the difference between librarians with the Masters and those without it is very rarely the Masters. It’s a qualification that is both essential and of questionable value.
    .

Some reasons why I would recommend it (heavily academic-librarianship bias here):

  • it’s fantastically engaging;
  • the community (if you chose to be part of it) is kind, fun, and unremittingly helpful and happy to share information and advice;
  • you get to work in a role that helps people, which is genuinely fulfilling even for a partial-cynic like me;
  • unless you’re unlucky you won’t be expected to work longer than the hours of your contract (so many non-librarians I know work all the hours God sends, and are incredibly jealous of the flexitime scheme I’m on);
  • libraries are supportive employers, generally;
  • you get to investigate, write about and train people on stuff you’re interested in anyway, in my case;
  •  you can do academicy stuff like presenting at conferences and writing papers, without having to actually BE an academic;
  • once you get up the ladder a bit you get a lot of freedom and your time is self-directed as well as self-managed;
  • the people you work with are NICE.
    .

For me, my day to day environment is the most important thing. I’d rather live in a smaller house in a nicer area than a grand house further away from town. I’d rather work in a nice room with nice people who will understand if I need to go home and pick up my daughter from nursery, than have a high status job with a company car a career trajectory ending in a six-figure salary. My job is challenging but fun, it suits ME better than any profession I could imagine.

But everyone is different, and I’m already entrenched in this profession, whilst at the same time developing the skills to keep working if this profession ceases to exist – that’s a very different situation from advising someone to just now start applying for entry-level library posts with a view to doing their Masters in October 2014 and maybe, just maybe, getting a job they really want in 2017ish.

Where do you stand on this? What would you add?

 

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New Professionals! Get hold of a Library organisational chart and start plotting your path…

15 Nov
Picture of a path - CC pic by Brian Smithson

Nice excuse for a moodily-lit path picture (via Flickr CC, Brian Smithson)

 

I believe that as a new professional in the information industry, you’re better off with a plan of where you want to be, and specifically HOW you want to get there. Some people (who I respect very much)  have advocated a ‘relax and see what happens’ approach, pointing out the need to be able to try new things you’d never have thought of, and be taken off in new directions. I agree with this, but I still think this:

The profession is SO competitive now, if you can come up with a plan of how you’ll move through it then it’s worth doing so, even in the knowledge that it’s perfectly okay not to stick to it if something interesting comes up.

So how do you go about this? Well first of all you need to know where you’d actually like to end up. (And by ‘end up’ I don’t necessarily mean the job you’ll retire in – just the one you’re aiming for in the medium term.) There are various ways of getting a feel for this:

  • Talk to people in those roles (seriously do this – it’s MUCH more effective than anything else I can think of. If you’d like to chat about what being a Subject Librarian involves and the skills it requires I’m very happy to do so)
  • Try and get some work-shadowing in those roles, or an actual job in a more junior version of the same role
  • Read about how people got where they are today via the many excellent stories on the Library Routes Project
  • Keyword search the Library Day in the Life wiki for the kind of job titles you’re interested in, and see how people in these roles actually spend their days
  • (I’m probably missing something useful so please leave a comment with more suggestions if you have them…)
    .

Once you’ve formulated an idea as to where you want to get to (and keep in mind this may evolve or change completely as you go along, which is fine), you can start to plan how to get there. Relating to this there are two important things which I’ve mentioned on here before, and in talks to New Professionals.

Firstly don’t think of Librarianship as having a career-ladder, think of it is as having a career-climbing wall. Ladders go straight up and have evenly spaced rungs; climbing walls require a certain amount of traversing or diagonal movement, and a certain amount of inching forward followed by ambitions stretches, to get to the top of them. The example I always give is if you want to be a Customer Services manager for your library – the natural place to start is in Customer Services itself as a lending assistant (or whatever – the terminology is interchangable here but hopefully you know what I mean) but there’s often a 3 pay-grade gap between asssistant and manager, with no obvious jobs in between. It’s very, very rare for anyone to jump three grades in one go – so you need to go diagonally upwards so you’re high enough up the grade structure to get a high-graded role, whilst trying to retain the relevant experience necessary to become the Customer Services manager. This improvisation and flexibility is not very ladder-like, and much more akin to a climbing wall.

The second thing I always advocate is to find the job you really want (Head of Special Collections, Subject Librarian, Children’s Librarian, Law Librarian or whatever) and when you see it advertised at the kind of place you want to work, download the job spec and save it in a folder even when you have absolutely zero chance of being able to apply any time soon. Look at the person specification and make sure you shape your professional experiences to hit every single one of the essential and desirable skills over the coming years (either through jobs or involvement with professional bodies or writing papers or giving presentations or all four of these) so that you’re in a position to nail the application in the future. Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity as they say – every time a great job comes up, you have a chance to try and manipulate your future luck in your favour…

 The Organisational Chart

So to the point of this post, the Organisatinal Chart (known also as Organisational Structure, Staffing Framework and, apparently, an ‘organogram’). The Organisational Chart shows how the hierachy of any given organisation works – who is at the head, who is responsible to and for whom, how the teams fit together, and who manages what. It’s quite hard to get hold of ones for organisations you don’t work for, so I’d recommend finding your own library’s (it’s probably in the intranet somewhere…) and saving a copy into the same folder as your ideal job spec. Obviously libraries in different sectors have very different charts, so if you’re aiming to work in the academic sector then a public sector chart may not be of much use to you.

I can’t find a single Creative Commons example online (for obvious reasons) so here’s a link to a publicly available chart for a big library. Obviously the point of this chart is to detail the positions and how it all fits together, but for the excited new professional it’s a chart to literally plan an upwards trajectory with a highlighter pen (if you print it out – I wouldn’t recommend using one on your monitor). Ask yourself, which of the higher jobs than mine can I get next? Does it lead to the job I really want (or the job before the job I really want)? Could I stand doing X for a year if it helped me get to Y the year after, or am I better off doing Z for two years and getting more relevant experience outside of the workplace at the same time?

I think it’s particularly important to look at where the tree structure stops or hits a dead-end. Look at the role you’re in now – is the only position directly above that your boss? Is your boss likely to leave any time soon? If not, you need to make proper plans for progression or you’ll be doing the same thing you’re doing now in 5 years time. Is there a path which opens up lots of possibilities for you, as opposed to the ‘dead-mans shoes’ syndrome of waiting for one or two people to retire or leave? Is the division you’re in one with many holds on the climbing wall or just one or two (both of which someone else already has a firm grip on)?

I’m not advocating naked ambition – ambition for ambition’s sake is something I’m not a fan of at all. But you DO want to be fulfilled, and ultimately you will want to earn a decent wage rather than get stuck on an okay one forever. If your current path hits the buffers in one job’s time, think about the fact that you’re going to be in this for 20, 30, 40 years so even if it’s worthy and fulfilling now, it may not be stimulating when you’re still doing it in 2020. Because as much as the rhetoric around library jobs is often about how ‘none of us are in this for the money’ and ‘I just want a job I’m happy doing’ the fact is there are lot of frustrated librarians who have just got mired in a certain part of their library and can’t see an obvious path forward. So I really think it’s worth being aware of what the future possibilites are, so you can start planning how you’ll meet the challenges and achieve whatever it is that will make you happy.

It is, in my view, much better to be happy than successful. Being the ‘best you can be’ is only worth it if it makes you happy – I see a lot of people putting pressure on themselves, hitting great heights, but not being overly content. But forward planning never hurts, so even if you’re not aiming for Head Librarian (I know I’m not – I’m going to completely ignore all my own advice and stagnate in my current job forever, although I did a lot of the above into practice to get to this position that I actually like in the first place) then knowing what you ARE aiming for will help you stay fulfilled.

If you’re interested, there’s a whole page of essential advice for new professionals elsewhere on this website, put together from the quotes of loads of librarians who have been there and done that…

Good luck!

- thewikiman

 

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Library adventures in Latvia! (Plus, what we can learn from their approach.)

30 Apr

I’ve just got back from Latvia where I’ve been doing some work for the Father’s Third Son project – the part of the Ministry of Culture which looks after libraries, basically. This post is part ‘here’s what I did and how it went’ and part ‘Latvian libraries are pretty amazing – here’s what we can learn from them’.

I’ll get the embedded presentation out of the way first.

New librarians: this is your time

The first thing I did was based largely on The Time For Libraries is NOW, and the third thing I did was in two separate Prezis which would be a bit complicated to reproduce here, so I’m embedding the middle one. It was delivered to information science students at the University of Latvia, and is basically about how great our profession is…

(For Slideshare file-size limit reasons, I’ve actually had to take out about 20 slides and get rid of loads of the pictures, but you’ll get the general idea. Feel free to embed this wherever you see fit!)

New Librarians: This is your time

View more presentations from Ned Potter

The background

Father’s Third Son have been working with Bill and Melinda’ Gates’s Global Libraries foundation to revolutionise libraries in Latvia.

The name derives from Latvian folklore, a tale which is a bit like a gender-reversed version of Cinderella but with more emphasis on overcoming difficulties and flourishing – the same story also informs the shape of the National Library of Latvia, being built at the moment (see pic below).

It’s a project which has been running since 2007, and with great success. (Global Libraries works across 13 countries and Latvia tends to be held up as the example to follow.) Father’s Third Son found me via Twitter and later Slideshare and my blog, and asked me to come over and do some presentations as part of their programme.

Latvian libraries

The Latvian libraries system is pretty amazing; they’ve done some great things in the past 5 years. I learned a lot – it was great to talk to people who’d surmounted some of the problems we have in the UK and the US, and have different issues. It was eye-opening: normally when I talk to librarians we all seem to be going through exactly the same stuff! But this was a little different. Here are some Latvian library headlines:

  • They have 874 public libraries. For a population of around 2 million! I think that works out at around 7 times as many libraries per member of the population than we have in the UK.
  • Most library users come to the library on foot – on average, nationally, they’re an 18 minute walk away from their nearest one
  • Check out this map showing how densely populated the country is with libraries!
    Latvian library map
  • Father’s Third Son has revolutionised the infrastructure – all the libraries now have PCs with up-to-date Office Suite installed, 24/7 free wifi, and 1800 librarians have had 140 hour training programmes to equip them to deal with the new technology and help others get the most out of it
  • There is an information management undergraduate degree, which a lot of people take – but then don’t go on to become librarians. So they have a retention issue which we don’t have so much here, and not enough young people in the workforce. My second talk was intended to convince the students that this profession holds all sorts of interesting possibilities, so they’ll stick with it
  • They have a media briefing programme (which I was part of) – apparently one of the issues they have is the media are so positive about libraries most of the time, it’s hard to make the case for taking investment to a new level! Imagine that! So part of my role was to look at future trends and tech possibilities, to showcase that the work (and investment) shouldn’t stop yet…
  • They create little success story videos for different markets which illustrate how the library have helped people (brilliant marketing technique!)
  • Librarians are valued by communities as trusted sources of information, and have a very high satisfaction rating of 94%, among Government employees (compared with teachers 84%, and policemen with 48%!)
  • They have an internet portal which all libraries are on. ALL of them – the public libraries, the academic libraries, the school libraries. One place which unites all the libraries online – easy for the user, and great potential for a united, cohesive voice for the libraries, too
  • Did I mention they have a media briefing programme?
    .

I found it all pretty inspiring really (and I am quite cynical at heart…). The thing I was most impressed with is that Father’s Third Son have managed to take a top-down look at the entire country’s library system and implement changes from the ground up, and actually reach their goals and change things for the better. It’s hard to imagine the same thing happening in the UK or the US, but it’s good to know it can be done. What’s really striking is how much infrastructure is put in place on libraries’ behalf, I wish we had governmental departments working with us in that way. But we can definitely learn from their confidence of inviting the media, giving them lunch, working with them and escaping the echo chamber on a regular basis in a very direct way.

The trip itself and the presentations

It was a three-day trip, with day 1 mostly consisting of travel to Riga. I was then taken out to dinner by my very generous hosts, who told me a lot of useful info about the presentations I’d be giving. In the run-up to going away I’d been ill for two days so that lack of finishing off time, combined with learning a lot more about the context of the talks that evening, meant I was up late into the night using the hotel bar’s wifi to tweak my presentations!

Day two started with a presentation to the Latvian media. How good is that? They have a media programme, and print and broadcast journalists, not just from Riga but all over Latvia, come for a morning of presentations. It’s absolutely brilliant echo-chamber escaping, library media-narrative dictating stuff! The presentation before mine was about children’s drawings of the library. It was in Latvian but I’d been told enough about it to think it was a wonderful idea – basically they give kids pens and blank paper and say ‘draw your ideal library’ and give no other instructions than that. Some kids just draw a picture, some add notes as well. Then child psychologists come along and analyse the pics, and they feed it all into their future planning for library design.

IS THAT NOT FABULOUS?

Picture of a Slide in Latvian

I don't know what this means, but it says 'robots' in it so I'm pretty sure it's AWESOME

Seriously – the Latvian library system is ace.

Anyhow, I now had around an hour to present to the media. This amounted to around 30 minutes of stuff, to give the translator the other 30 minutes to put it all into Latvian. He was really nice – an English Professor at the University, who does a lot of work with movies to get them into the native language via sub-titles etc – and I made him promise not to stitch me up by saying things like ‘This guy is talking complete nonsense. I’m not even going to bore you with an actual translation’ etc etc.

The talk was mainly about the future trends in technology and the possibilities for libraries within that – it went quicker than I thought so I ended up ad-libbing a load of stuff about FourSquare which I’d had no intention of putting in there. There was also some stuff about the library at York, the new building and its associated technology etc. I don’t think my style of presenting suits big statements followed by gaps for translation but it seemed to go fine, they listened all the way through, and they laughed a lot about the gin part of the great library stereotypometer…

I was then taken to the University for the talk to the students (the presentation embedded above). Because of the whole ‘they complete the degree but then don’t necessarily go on to become librarians’ my brief was to convince them that our job has got all sorts of possibilities they may never had considered – I did my best! I’ve bought a clicker now to move the slides on, and I have to say I did feel much better being able to stride around the stage rather than being tied to the laptop. There was then an interesting panel discussion with academics in the department – most of which was in Latvian but some of it came my way and was translated into English. We ended up talking about the Widening Participation programme we run at York, the library going into Schools. I enjoyed it, it was fun.

Latvian for Ned Potter is apparently 'Neds Potera'

In Latvian there are apparently more than one of me

Day 3 featured a recorded presentation at a production company – about marketing and advocacy. The idea is that it will be sub-titled and then circulated on DVD to all the Latvian libraries. I focused on basic principles of marketing, why we need to do it, why strategic marketing is more effective in the long-term, the possibilities and best practices of marketing with social media and how we use it at York, and the echo chamber problem and how to overcome it. I was using two Prezis for this one and I couldn’t access them online (they were borked, although they seem alright now – great timing!) so I was incredibly relieved I’d decided to save them to a USB stick.  I had to wear a microphone unit and there were cameras and leads and screens, plus I couldn’t have the laptop on the presentation on because it was plugged in to all the recording equipment! I thought it was going to be a nightmare but I asked if the audience could move so I could see them and the big screen without having to turn away from them, and managed to get through it without any restarts. I think it was fine.

Then I met Sanita Maleja who lots of people had told me about in the previous two days – she’s like a local ceLIBrity (copyright – @lemurph) for her work with the New Professionals part of the LLA (Latvian Librarian’s Association). We had to do a little interview for the New Profs blog but she was kind enough to take me into the old town, which I’d not really been able to see up to this point as I was always on the way somewhere. This was brilliant – Riga is amazing and I really enjoyed just wondering about, plus Sanita and I have very similar views on libraries and on the profession. It was a great end to a great trip.

In the interests of tourism, here’s a pic I took, from a tower, of the National Library of Latvia, which is still being built…

Pic of the library

The National Library of Latvia, coming soon

The whole thing was very much in the category of ‘interesting things I never thought I’d end up doing in my job’. So huge thanks for Father’s Third Son for inviting me, and my bosses for allowing me to go, and to everyone for being so nice to me while I was there…

I don’t often do blog posts like this where it’s like a school report of what I got up to in the holidays, so for those of you who made this far I hope you’ll let me off on this occasion! :-)

- thewikiman

 

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