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about dismantling the echo-chamber…

29 Jan

It's an escape valve for a dam. Only *some* of the water is getting through, you see...

As the #echolib debate goes on, I have a confession to make. When I first appropriated the phrase echo-chamber to try and kick off this whole discussion, I was quite selective in how I interpreted it… So the part of the Wikipedia definition which describes the echo-chamber as ‘…any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an enclosed” space’ – that suits my purposes perfectly. But the bit about ‘…like-minded people then repeat, overhear, and repeat again (often in an exaggerated or otherwise distorted form) until most people assume that some extreme variation of the story is true’ – that bit I didn’t really apply to our situation in the library community. I don’t mean to suggest that we’re kidding ourselves about stuff, and that by only listening to similarly minded peers we’re blind (or rather deaf) to dissonant voices. I should have made that clear earlier, and Andy’s post – Dismantling the echo-chamber – on his Agnostic, Maybe blog has brought home the need for clarification. I wrote a veeeery long comment in response to the Andy’s post – it was so long, I decided to release it as a blog post all of its own, so here it is.

Perhaps a better analogy for my particular take on the echo-chamber would be the library blogging community on one side of a mirror, firing all sorts of brilliant and important ideas towards the mirror. For the most part, the ideas bounce back into the same group of already-forward-thinking people – whereas those on the other side of the mirror (ie the wider library community, and the people who are entirely indifferent to us and what we do) are only receiving the very small percentage of ideas that get ‘through’ the mirror.

So an ASCII representation might look like this, where > is an idea, and | is the mirror:

[like-minded library bloggers] >>>>>>>><<<< | > > > [everyone else]

Hmmm… Anyway, point is: many more ideas are fired at the mirror and bounce back, than get through. Like the dam picture at the top – there’s a hell of a lot more water contained the other side of the dam than is escaping through the pipe.

I love that Andy follows blogs he doesn’t agree with (see his original post), that’s a truly reflective practitioner! He’s absolutely right, it is good to know what detractors are thinking, and it does help focus your potential responses and defences. I find that just by virtue of choosing a 2.0ish medium of communication, many library bloggers seem to be people who think along similar lines to me, and vice versa, anyway. Not on a detail level, but a meta-level. I’d be interested in who anyone else’s ‘team of rivals’ is. But it’s a great principle, and I will try and adopt it.

Incidentally, about this whole thing, I think there’s a curve of interest in libraries which corresponds to how and where we should devote our energies. So on the far left there’s the actively hostile – it isn’t worth trying to ‘convert’ them or otherwise try and force people into libraries who have no need for the services we provide. (But we should defend ourselves with well-honed arguments if they publicly attack…) Then at the other end on the right there’s the library super-fans – we should be harnessing their advocacy, but not putting too much effort into telling them how wonderful we are, because they already know. Then there’s the people in the middle – currently indifferent, but if they knew what we could really do for them in 2010, their informed opinion might be that we are a resource they should utilise. Those are the people who are beyond the echo-chamber, and who we should be trying to reach.

- thewikiman

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Posted in Information Professional Stuff, The Web

I’m Ned Potter – here’s 3 days in my life

27 Jan

Oh hi! I blog under the nom-de-2.0 of thewikiman, but actually my real name is Ned Potter, and I’m an Information Professional. This is my contribution to the Library Day in the Life Project; Day in the Life offers an opportunity to increase awareness of, and potentially change public perception of, what we really do these days, and how and where we do it. Communicating that kind of information doesn’t work well within the confines of anonymity. As such I want to take full ownership of this post, of my job, and of these three days in my library life.

So. I work for the University of Leeds Library – I used to run the service which offered digitisation to support learning & teaching, but this year I’ve been seconded to the LIFE-SHARE Project. This is what I looked like about five minutes ago, when I took a photo of myself outside my house, using my phone:

I’ve made it black & white to make it look moody, rather than just a picture of someone looking entirely expressionless, but you get the idea. If you follow the link later, you’ll see a picture of my wife; she’s much better looking than I am.

Day 1: internal communication

On the train to London by a painful 7am – off to JISC headquarters for a workshop on communicating effectively with internal stakeholders. As JISC provide so much funding for the LIFE-SHARE Project on which I am working (see the website, the blog, and the very embryonic Twitter account), they want to ensure that the libraries and their wider Universities involved (Leeds, Sheffield and York) actually know about what is going on and take an active interest in the project. Embedding these things properly is something I am all for; too many interesting projects fail to become integrated with the whole, and are forgotten about 6 months after completion.

A lady is asleep over the plug-socket on the train, so I cannot plug in ancient Laptop which can hold less charge than is required to boot up Windows. But an email from Joel Kerry is interesting enough that I labour through the process of replying with my iPhone! We’re discussing a workshop I’m running at the CILIP Yorkshire & Humberside Member’s Day in April. It was originally going to be called Marketing the Profession or some such, but with all the #echolib discussions it seems like a really good opportunity to talk about moving beyond the echo-chamber. Turns out Joel had thought the same thing (he’s the Events Coordinator for the region) and, more spookily, had also had the same idea that had been forming in my mind of getting a certain fellow professional involved in presenting too… She’s currently away in sunnier climes but I’ll ambush her with it when she gets back.

Arrive at JISC – never been before, it’s in an absolutely prime location just opposite the South Bank complex, and a very plush premises indeed. I meet the lovely Ben Showers for the first time (he’s looking after all the projects in the e-Content funding strand which ours resides in) and settle down for what turns out to be an INTENSE day of marketing stuff, led by the dynamic, excellent, and unrelenting Rosemary Stamp. It is serious stuff – we even had to work during our lunch… But, it was really useful, full of marketing information which makes you think “that’s so obvious and yet I am not doing it – why!?” and featuring a nice package to take away with you and reuse. I’ll probably have to devote an entire blog post at a later date covering all that we learned, but basically it was a very productive day. I also saw one of my best friends on the platform of King’s Cross – this always seems to happen. I think Londoners just hang around waiting for the rest of us to come down to them so we can stumble into them in public places.

On the way home the plug-socket is free, and I finally write an article about Library Routes for ALISS Quarterly. They approached me and Woodsiegirl earlier in the month about contributing something to the journal, and it was decided that I should handle this one; hopefully I’ve covered all the important points. My laptop (as well as having precisely no battery life) has this brilliant thing where there’s several thick, immovable white lines down the middle of the screen, so you can’t read one word in ten that you’ve written. Makes for good times writing articles on a train, I can tell you.

Day 2: presentations

I’m working from home this morning as we have a presentation for LIFE-SHARE in York in the afternoon (part of the embedding process) and as I live in York, there’s no point in commuting to Leeds for half a day. This is where I am working – I took the pic using the Hipstamatic app to try and make it look more interesting that it really is:

If you look very closely, you’ll see that this picture of my home office-space has my PC in it which has Lauren Pressley’s Day in the Life post showing on the monitor which has a picture of HER office in it - pretty meta, no? Also, if ever there was a visual metaphor for the way in which my work / fun balance has shifted in recent years, it’s the sad site of my work-related cup of coffee sitting on one of my turntables – SAD TIMES.

I haven’t had a chance to write any slides for the presentation yet, so this morning is all about getting something good down quickly. My part is about the Leeds and Sheffield case-studies – digitisation to support collection management, and digitisation for preservation and access respectively. I decide that less is more and go with only two slides in total (only having a few slides has worked well for me before) but I write a bunch of notes to go with them and try to memorise them. With memorising presentations, it’s all or nothing for me – I either have to not look down at my notes at all, or I have to check them all the time even though I can remember what’s coming. Otherwise I inevitably end up in the dreaded situation of staring down at my notes, trying to find where I’ve already done up to, as a long, agonising silence descends on the room…

Interesting email exchange with Bobbi Newman after she blogged on the subject of the echo-chamber – really glad she’s got involved with this meme. We both noticed with some awe that David Lee King, who left a comment on Bobbi’s post, has 6000 subscribers to his blog. Wow. I guess there’s different levels of echo-chamber…

After lunch I walk up to the University, meet up with my fellow Project Officer and my boss, and we go over our presentation and refine certain things. Then we go to a room in the lovely Borthwick Institute and deliver our presentation – it seems to go well, and we’re repeating it to a larger audience on Friday morning. I found myself doing it from memory and therefore not able to look down at my notes even though I had them there – God knows how much of it I forgot to actually say out loud.

Day 3: minute by minute

Hilariously, I get up ridiculously early to watch a Webinar about preservation, having worked out the difference between EST and GMT in the wrong direction. Come back later, the screen tells me. It doesn’t need to add: it’s 7am, what are you doing, this doesn’t start till 9pm your time, you fool. But I bet that’s what it’s thinking.

I take the opportunity to work on the minutes for the inaugural LIFE-SHARE meeting which took place the previous Friday. We Project Officers have to minute these meetings, and they are huge – nearly 20 people are on the Advisory Group (there are people from JISC, JISC Digital Media, Leeds, Sheffield, York, the British Library, and the ULCC) and go on for two hours plus lunch, so I was mightily relieved to have borrowed a laptop from the Systems Team to write everything down on. My handwriting is so appalling that by the end of two hours of solid scribbling, nothing at all would have been recognisable as words. It was a really productive meeting though.

Once I later get to work I carry on working on them – it takes absolutely ages to do, as pretty much all that was said is pertinent in some way. Here is the LIFE-SHARE office in all its splendour (that thing pinned to the board is a GANNT Chart I made which maps out the entire 15 months of the Project, with special shapes for the bits I have to do myself…):

After a quick lunch with the even-lovelier-than-Ben-Showers Mrs Wikiman, I have my probation meeting with my boss. I’ve worked here for 4 years but whenever you change grade you have 6 months probation, so we go through objectives and all that stuff. It’s easy to do with LIFE-SHARE as all the objectives are clearly laid out in the Project documentation; much more straightforward than in my previous role, where we’d be searching for meaningful objectives beyond the standard “continue to deliver an excellent service” etc. Project work is very focused – you have certain objectives that need to be accomplished by a certain time, and you just juggle them and do them until they’re done. I enjoy that.

I then spend about a million hours putting all the hyperlinks into this post, and get ready to click ‘Publish’. I will sadly be back online at 9pm, to attend the bloody webinar that I thought was this morning…

- thewikiman

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Posted in Information Professional Stuff, LIFE-SHARE Project

#echolib – the Seth Godin Uber-Echo Disaster

21 Jan

Just to add some more context to the discussion of moving beyond the echo-chamber (which is gathering pace on Twitter and in the blog comments here and in particular on Organising Chaos ) – I was discussing this whole thing with someone in an email, and it forced me to articulate the problem a bit more, so here’s an extrapolation of what I said.

The echo-chamber problem as it applies to the information profession, just to be clear, is good ideas being conveyed to like-minded people who then repeat it back to other like-minded people, who all agree about the ideas, but the whole process doesn’t ever reach the people who were not of like mind to begin with. Wikipedia describes the echo-chamber like this: “…any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an “enclosed” space.”

The biblioblogosphere in particular is jam packed full of absolutely ace ideas, trends, memes, and inspirational people; the problem is how ‘enclosed’ the space is. I’m generalising here, but it seems like the people who really get the whole need to reinvent and revitalise libraries, and the role of the information professional, are the ones already online and reading what each other have to say. The dyed-in-the-wool librarians who like to kick it old-school and refuse to engage with the problems we’re facing, aren’t likely to be reading blogs, or sifting through Twitter, in the first place. So the initial problem is the best ideas are being kicked around in an enclosed space that only reaches people who start off receptive to exciting ideas, rather than getting to those who are resistant to change.

(A sub issue of this, as I’ve discussed previously, is that a lot of the newer professionals who spend time learning a whole host of insightful stuff via blogs etc, are not yet in a position of sufficient responsibility to apply what they learn to their 9-5 jobs.)

The wider issue is, we’re not reaching beyond the library in a lot of cases, either (or breaking out of the library ghetto, as Matthew Mezey so succinctly puts it!). So there’s me thinking I’m highlighting important issues at last year’s New Professionals Conference, talking about the way in which librarians are portrayed in popular culture, about how we are really, and about what we can do to change perceptions. But really, it was into the ech0-chamber – I was talking to other new professionals, and no one outside the library sector will have heard what I had to say, let alone been influenced to change their mind about librarians. (The version of that talk I gave at the CILIP Graduate Day was better in this respect, as non-librarians and potential librarians attended this.) I know some of the real uber-bloggers with thousands of followers do reach beyond the realm of the info pro, and that’s fabulous. But in a lot cases, the people getting to hear about all our cool new ideas are our existing users, and other Information Professionals.

The whole Seth Godin thing was something of a frustrating example of this. For anyone living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, Seth Godin is very, very popular and influential marketing guru, who recently turned the attention of his blog to the future of the library. Seth’s blog post asked the question, what should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age? The first sin, right there, is assuming we aren’t already relevant in the digital age. He went on to say: “Here’s my proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative.” Sin number two – this is a great idea, which is why we’ve been doing it for years already. And he also says: “…the net turns things upside down. The information is free now” which of course is massively over-simplistic (ie basically it’s not true) and so constitutes Sin number three.

What happened next was quite exciting, in that a lot of extremely articulate library bloggers took Seth to task on all the points above (and more) and really broke down what he said and set him straight. Andy Woodworth wrote an excellent article about it, in which he provided a list of quite a few of the other good responses, which I’ve copied here: SarahGlassmeyer(dot)com, Digitization 101, Lucacept, Neverending Search, Blue Skunk Blog, Schooling.us, Justin the Librarian, A Curious View of the World, The MLXperience, Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts, Library Idol. Of particular note is the post on theanalogdivide, which was one of the first responses to Seth’s original post and was widely re-tweeted (kicking off this whole thing), and has lots of extremely well argued points from Info Pros in the comments section – as well as a slightly bemused response from Seth himself; if you only have time to read two, read that one and Andy’s (his blog is the absolutely awesome Agnostic, Maybe).

This was inspiring stuff – a brilliantly reasoned, passionately articulated explanation of what we do, and a real statement of our value. The great and the good of online librarian presences combined to mount a spectacular defence of the profession, and of the library.

BUT. Seth Godin’s blog does not allow comments… so, the vast majority of the argument for the relevancy of libraries in the digital age etc took place in the enclosed space of the information professional’s online community echo-chamber. This is incredibly frustrating – because Seth’s global audience is massive, and will have all read his indictment of the profession, but the fantastic response from the profession will have fallen largely on the ears of our own community. And not only is he influential, he represents the views of a massive amount of potential library users – people do think libraries are not relevant in the digital age, they do think all information is free, and so on and so on. So the point of #echolib is to discuss how we can respond to this kind of thing beyond our enclosed space, and in the public arena…

- thewikiman

[EDIT: I have just had it brought to my attention that the Huffington Post article (which I'd read and enjoyed but shamefully forgotten to include in this blog post), was in fact written by Mr Theanalogdivide himself, Toby Greenwalt... This is a 100% proof fantastic example of well and truly escaping the echo-chamber - this is the kind of thing we need to be doing! So have a read of it, and take note of all the fantastically positive comments...]

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Posted in Information Professional Stuff, The Web

#echolib – how do we get library advocacy beyond the echo chamber?

19 Jan

Myself and woodsiegirl (@woodsiegirl on Twitter) would like to look into how to move library advocacy on beyond the echo-chamber. That is to say, not just tossing good ideas around among ourselves, and not just preaching to the converted – but reaching the unconverted too.

Plenty has been talked about the image of librarians and libraries etc, but how do we go about addressing the misconceptions on a wider basis? At the moment, I reckon a very (very) crude representation of library advocacy might look a little like this:

One-way traffic

The point being, the library skeptics aren’t really being reached, and many of the excellent ideas we have are going into the echo-chamber of our own Information Professional community.

So we’d like to look into this further, and see what people think. Please use the comments below, or on Woodsiegirl’s post, or particularly if you are on Twitter use the #echolib hash-tag, and let us know what you think. In particular: