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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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Posted in Future of librarians, Information Professional Stuff, New Professionals, Professional Development, The Future of the Library

 

Libraries! Let’s stop underestimating simplicity. (Simplicity is user-friendly)

07 Nov
Simple image of a display on a bare wall

Simplicity can be delightful. (Flickr CC image from MarcelGermain)

I think one excellent way forward for most libraries would be to adopt an aggressively pro-simplicity stance. We often make decisions about services or models based on the need to accommodate everyone - the need not to put anyone out, rather than the need to really inspire people to use what we have. It’s very difficult, perhaps impossible, to be both inspirational and compromising at the same time. Look at loan periods as a really basic example. Most libraries have a lot of them – this is an attempt to make sure everyone is catered for. But sometimes it’s so complicated as to be detrimental to the users.

Simplicity is great for many reasons.  It allows focus. It allows us to market with clear messages about what we do. It helps the user feel like they know where they are. It stops the model being too diluted by attempts not to offend. And – and this is the key point I want to make in this post – people can often prefer simplicity even to desirable options.

Think about your own experiences. Let’s take a mundane example – sometimes it’s nice to go to a coffee shop and have a choice between an Americano, an Espresso and a Latte, in two sizes. Even if you really like cinnamon lattes or whatever, you might prefer the simplicity of options to 7 different types of coffee, in three different sizes, with syrup options ago-go.

There’s all sorts of retail experiences like that – booking hotel rooms or flights, for instance, or choosing a sandwich in Subway… – where options that are designed to personalise the experience to suit you actually just get in the way of some sort of essential process.

So I think (and I’m thinking about all this because I suggested it at a work meeting the other day) that all new processes and models and services should be designed to be simple and to make an impact, rather than to cover all the bases. (I realise librarians often feel a sort of moral obligation to make sure we’re not disadvantaging anyone, and I’m definitely in favour of that as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of our actual future.) And I think any services we re-design should be re-designed at least partly with the question ‘What would users who’d NEVER EXPERIENCED THE OLD SYSTEM really want her?e’ uppermost in our minds, as well as the need not to offend existing users. Chances are, they’d want something efficient, non-complicated, and easy to understand.

- thewikiman

p.s some of the themes in this post are also covered in my previous one

 

 

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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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Posted in Conferences & Events, Future of librarians, Information Professional Stuff, Marketing, New Professionals, Presentations, Professional Development, Professional Library Bodies, The Future of the Library

 

‘Assume that discovery happens elsewhere, and focus on fulfilment’

24 Jan
An observatory, and lots of pretty stars

Tenuously linked 'discovery' type picture by darkmatter, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons

I came across the phrase in the title when browsing through Tony Hirst’s review of the Arcadia project from a couple of years back. (You can read the review here, in PDF format. The Arcadia Project is a programme looking at the role of the academic library in the digital age – you can read more about Arcadia here.)

The sentiment is one every right-thinking information professional will now be familiar with, but I’ve never seen it encapsulated quite so perfectly. It is an eloquent riposte to those who believe we should still be clinging on to an anti-Google or anti-Wikipedia stance, rather than embracing as ‘let us help you with that’ mentality.

In fact, I think you could adapt it to ‘Assume that discovery happens everywhere, and focus on fulfilment’ and you have a mantra for all of libraries going forward, a subtle repositioning to better deal with all the “asynchronous and asymmetrical threats” (Stephen Abram) we face in the modern age. We are the service, rather than the container.

- thewikiman

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