Fix-it-Friday: Three Librarians equals Seven Opinions

Most people do not realize that the major problem with the field of library science is one of making a decision. A friend of mine once said, "If you put three librarians in a room, you will get seven different opinions."

Librarians, library staff, and library directors often have problems making decisions mostly because of the nature of our profession. Every reader his/her book is a daunting task. This is what makes the digital future like in the Long Tail so amazing. If you could offer everything, then you would not have to decide on purchasing one book over another, you can just make everything available and then everyone will get their individual book, song, or movie.

However, we are bit off from libraries providing that. In the mean time, we are stuck in committees trying to make decisions over minor matters and making big deals out of it. What should the Marc number be, should we put the CD that came with the book inside the book, or separate, what happens if we let patrons in and they destroy all of the books? It becomes analysis paralysis.

As a manager, it is important to keep staff on task and not bogged down with such decisions. Sometimes committees can be formed, but that is a sure way to slow down a process. I find it best to gather all the information, create a document, then let staff adjust it so they can give input. Otherwise, you will spend hours, days, weeks, months, even years creating a document and getting things done.

1. Identify the problem (is it REALLY a problem?)
2. Determine its severity (is this a crisis, or a back burner project?)
3. Gather information (first person information is very valuable, it lends weight to your final decision and more importantly, allows you to make a better decision)
4. Talk to other people (your staff, patrons, your vendor, other libraries, what are they doing?)
5. Make a decision as to the action plan
6. Create a procedure (update procedures)
7. Put people in charge of it (sometimes that is you)
8. Set its priority
9. Monitor the progress of the project
10. Adjust as you go.

Procedure manuals are always good things, just remind your staff to use good judgment, and talk to them afterward when they do. Reward them if they did a good job, with a thank you to start, provide explanation if they didn't. Don't criticize them if it was something unexpected that they could not handle. You can always coach them to think more critically about a situation.

Fix-it Friday: Too Much Success

There is such a thing as too much success. It typically comes when all of your plans have succeeded. You did your strategic plan. It worked! You are getting all these new people getting library cards, checking out materials, using computers, using the library, and talking about how great it is!

Unlike a business, a public library, or any government entity, will experience a gap in service, between the success and the money. You realize that you are really successful, but then you realize you don't have the space, the computers, the collections, or the staff to sustain it.

You must trust that your library will receive the rewards of the success. Hit all of your budgetary authority, general public, and key figures with everything you have measuring the great success, especially when that success is in an area dear to some of those stakeholders. It will not always happen. When it does, it is great! When it doesn't, it makes staff very frustrated. Trust the system, because by denying a successful library, they are denying what their community wants. I have read it over and over again, about communities with no libraries, who demand it. One can see it in areas like Johnson Ranch, Goodyear, El Mirage, and Mesa, Arizona. There will always be a demand for library services, but never enough to go around. Things will turn around; one must always be vigilant to stand one's ground, to get what the community wants.

Here are some tips to make your library a priority in your community:

1. Find out what your budgetary authority prioritizes (Whether that authority is City Council, County Supervisor, Dean, whomever.) Anything they could possibly prioritize is an aspect of library services: education, economic development, workforce development, small business assistance, literacy, technology, fiscal responsibility, can all be demonstrated library impacts.

2. Create a Strategic Plan to help you find out not only the budgetary authority's priorities, but the community's priorities. You find that most of the priorities are the same. The more people you get, the more voice the library will have in the community.

3. Get advocates- sure you need more money, space, staff, and resources, but you it will always be you who asks. You need to get other people to ask as well. A request from the President of the Chamber of Commerce will go father than yours in many cases. (Plus the budget authority will see that person more often, making it harder to say no to them.)

4. Demonstrate impact in any which way you can. Typically, you need to send in reports, or demonstrate some sort of progress on library services. This may be the only time you can demonstrate the impact of library services. Make it clear, clean, and precise. Try to use as little data as possible. (Of course I don't always follow that, but the eyes of non-library people will glaze over if you don't.) The human impact is more powerful than data alone.

5. Advocate- Indoctrinate patrons, your staff, anyone who will stand still for five minutes. Every conversation is a segway to a conversation on the need of library services, even with those who have a complaint (especially a complaint).

6. Be flexible with your services. When we did our strategic plan, we didn't get any new staff or resources, but we were able to prioritize services and re-allocate staff to those needs. With some staff training, you can create adult literacy programs, teen programs, lifelong learning, and technology programs.

7. Find the need and make it public. When you see a huge need that you are servicing, make sure everybody knows about it. Contact the local newspaper, other new organizations, talk to community leaders, important people, and make sure no one turns around in your community without seeing it.

8. Market your library services, create email lists, rss feeds, podcasts, a running library news section in your local newspaper, magazine, and anything else that will reproduce print or talk to your audience. If something new happens at the library, EVERYONE should know about it. When our library broke 20,000 circulations in one month for the first time, we found the person who checked out the 20,000th book, gave her a goodie bag of library items, called the local newspaper photographer, and the picture was in the paper.

9. Engage the community- Put your services in your patrons' hands. Electronically or physically, they need a reminder that you are there and to know where they can find you. Outreach programs, books by mail, bookmobile, just get out and about and let them know you are there. They can perform their genealogy research from home by going to your website. They can repair their vehicles with the library's help, or learn a new language. Find services that will blow their minds. I will always remember something David Keeber, Director of the Sedona Public Library, told me, "People need to wake up and see the library like Mecca. How do we connect today?"

10. Thank them for their patronage. Our community passed a bond and we thanked them in the library's weekly news bulletin, in the newspaper, via email, and the website. The best signs I have seen are for the Chandler High School Bond. They placed signs advertising "Vote Yes" for the bond, and then when the bond passed, they placed a thank you sign on all of those signs. That makes you feel warm and fuzzy. It feels more personal.

Fix-it Fridays: Technology Training or providing more for patrons than you do for staff

This Fix-it Friday will focus on meeting the needs of your patrons, but failing to do so for your staff.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, the library is going through major transformations in providing technology for our patrons. We are making attempts to bridge the digital divide and knowledge gap so that our community produces a competitive workforce and informed citizenry. We will more than double the amount of public access computers at our library and provide all the latest software to meet user needs. If you go to any public library in Arizona now, libraries that have received Gates Grants have all these new sleek black computers, lots of RAM, they can do almost anything. It is fantastic! What strikes me as funny is that we are trying so hard to make sure our patrons are trained to use computers and then providing them with the latest technology, but we are forgetting about doing the same for our staff members. The realization hit when you stand back and look at all these beautiful new machines, and then turn around and see these old white clunky dinosaurs with TV type monitors. You have a back to back comparison of the latest technology versus the 1990s technology. Yikes!

The problem with computers for staff is that we have to rely on the city’s schedule. They will replace all of the computers on a three year cycle. Cities and libraries don’t have the advantage of a Gates Grant or applying for any grant that just covers administrative overhead or basic infrastructure. No one wants to fund a grant like that, just the same as not many people would vote for a bond to renovate their own city hall building. The funding agency should be able to cover its own internal matters. So as a library, we forced to sit back and wait for our city IT to move its own infrastructure into the 20th century when the citizens its serves are moving at the speed of light. I guess that is good and self-less, but it doesn’t feel good for those who work for the city and don’t get the same attention.

We are doing the same thing with training opportunities. We have this great line-up of classes and programs for the public. It teaches them information on financial literacy, information literacy, and all sorts of literacy type stuff, but we are not doing the same things for our staff. We have technology classes twice a week to teach basic computers, internet, email, and even e-bay, but we are doing the same things for our own staff. Granted, they have this basic knowledge. When they first came on board, we taught them how to use our Integrated Library System, we taught them how to use the internet and the basics of a computer, so these same classes are not needed. However, we still need to teach and re-train basic computer and catalog concepts. What we really need to do is transform our staff into computer techie people so that they can trouble-shoot and assist our patrons more readily. The problem with this is that only I and one other person really have those technology skills to teach. We need to teach our staff how install and un-install programs, how to troubleshoot simple computer and internet problems, we need to teach them basic IT things so that they can provide some sort of triage before calling in the cavalry (IT). The problem is that I have to squeeze time to make this a priority. I need to sit down and write a manual and teach it. We are in the process of forming our technology plan and I am writing the manual, but all these concepts will take forever to teach all of them.

How will I ever find the time to teach them especially when we are so thinly staffed most of the time? All of the technology manual concepts will be forever changing. That was one of the reasons we stopped teaching our computer maintenance class, it is too complicated and takes too much time to keep up on the concepts that are needed to help ourselves and our public. The only training opportunities are over an hours drive away and we can’t afford to send everyone to the training. Usually, it is not even library specific. I am looking into using several techniques to help our staff become naturally inquisitive about technology. One of the problems is that they don’t want to touch anything on the computer. It is too intimidating. I need to break the habit and get them to learn concepts on their own. My plan is to develop a library technology manual, some of it will be developed with the help of Webjunction and some from our Library Technology Plan Consultant that was funded by a Library Services and Technology Act from the Arizona State Library Archives and Public Records. (I try not to use acronyms) I also plan to use some Library 2.0 training concepts. I am using a modified 43 Things concept I found from the Information Outlook, February edition called 23 Things. I am planning on creating incentives for staff to learn on their own. Just don’t want them to get spoiled and then not want to do anything unless they get a cookie. That is always a tough line to walk. I hope the plan works, it seems like it is working over at Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County County (PLCMC). I will keep my fingers crossed.

Fix-it Fridays: Ahhhhtomation or press 0 to get angry

Today’s Fix-it Friday will discuss automating your services and the problems they create.

The use of technology in a library has many advantages to save your library staff time, stress, and deal with the lack of staff to meet user demand. It is typically a reactive program instead of a proactive program. As demand goes up and you can’t keep up, buy some technology and have the users serve themselves just like the grocery store. Check-out your own groceries, your books, renew your own books, go online and user our services. These work great for people in a hurry or are technology savvy. In most urban environments, it is not a problem. However, in a small or semi-rural community, people can’t figure it out, and then they get very angry at you.

In the August edition of American Libraries, the latest Will’s World column derides the use of automation as a way to solve problems. He would rather speak with a person. Well, wouldn’t anyone?! The problem is that when you do a cost analysis, it is much cheaper to buy a piece of technology and have IT come fix it when it breaks rather than employing a person to make everything friendlier and easier. No one looks at automation and thinks this would be great customer service. What the library is trying to accomplish it to push simple tasks to the users so that staff have more time to handle the more advanced tasks. However, simple is a very, very relative term.

About a year ago, the library employed a phone tree, an automated phone notification system (telephony), a self-check machine, and a little before that put up our catalog page which further allowed automation. Of all of this technology, it was the phone system that caused the most problems. We simply could not afford to call every patron for their hold or overdue book. We hold books for seven days, but by the time we were able to contact the patron, they only had three days to pick up the book! So our policy had to be changed to three days even though in the system it gave them seven days. We also could not pick up the phone because our philosophy is to serve the patron in front of you first. So patrons were leaving angry messages left and right with much of the time, they just wanted to know when we were open, or where we were. The first thing we did was implement a phone tree.

The gigantic revolt from the phone tree was heard around the world. People complained to the city manager, constant messages were left on phones complaining about the system. To this day there are still complaints, but we have no choice in the matter. It is either they can get a phone tree and get quick information through the phone tree, or leave a message and wait for someone to call them back sometime next year. As a result of the revolt, we were forced to make 0 the first option so that patrons knew they could press 0 to talk to someone. This of course did not alleviate anyone’s problem. We still can’t answer the phones unless I hire a secretary or remove someone from the front desk when we have a 20% increase in walk-in business every month. We stuck with the phone tree. We further exacerbated our patrons by changing all of the city’s phone extensions. We just added a zero on the end of the extensions. However, patrons used to working the phone tree ended up dialing three numbers instead of four. For some reason, it always took them to our Spanish language prompt. They did not appreciate that. (However, on a side note, it does let them know how difficult it is to navigate in this country if you cannot speak the language. I mentioned this in a previous post how it is vital for our economic development for employers to get monolingual Spanish speakers bi-lingual.) We ended up having to bounce the calls to increase our pick-up chances. When someone dials “0” they get the circulation desk, when they cannot pick-up, they get the reference desk, when they can’t pick up it goes to me. The thought process here is that someone should be able to pick up after that, and if I even can’t then they know who to complain to when they leave a message. This didn’t solve the problem, but I could usually smooth things over with the patron by the time they got to me or my voice mail. Of course, we made the problem worse with our telephony system.

Our telephony system makes outbound calls with an automated voice. It tells the patron it is the library and they have books on hold or overdue and to pick them up. People hated this as well. They of course wanted a warm voice on the other end telling them that they have a book on hold. A personalized service, just like Cheers where everyone knows your name and what you read. So of course, they hated that as well. “I don’t want to talk to a machine I want to talk to a person!” Again, we can’t afford the time for staff to call people to pick-up holds. It took 4 days to get to call the person and that left them 3 days to pick up the book instead of 7. No one had enough time to pick up their books. Again, there was a revolt, but they got used to it. Until I can get more staff, I can’t afford not to automate. However, automation causes you to push your staff costs onto IT. Staff time is never really saved unless the technology never breaks. Don’t we wish it wouldn’t? Customer service is lost with patron talking to machines instead of people. No new revenue for the city means any new staff for me, usually not the highest priority anyway. Until I can hire another person just to do this or reduce face to face time with increased telephone coverage, there is not much I can do. I don’t think anyone sees automation as a solution; it is just a way to get by with what you have. Some things works, like our time management system for our public access computers, but like I have said in the past, self-service only works when the patron really, really, wants to use that service. If not, it is simply a barrier and a reason NOT to use the service.