Library Revolution

Rochelle Hartman posted a great question on her blog (”I won’t call it a meme,” she says), and got some equally great responses.What she wants to know is what areas of technology are you NOT savvy with?

I responded to the post with an admission of my total lack of competence with phones. Sorry, I just can’t handle voice mail. Or phone trees. And don’t even try me with call waiting. I guarantee that I will hang up on you… but not on purpose.

Other areas where I experience technology “brownouts”?

The clock in my car would not even be in the right decase if my husband didn’t set it for me. And forget the radio presets. I can’t work a VCR to save my life. And record players might as well be from another planet.

This is such an important question for those of us who “work with technology” to answer now and then… especially when we are responsible for training others. We all have particular strengths and weaknesses when it comes to dealing with technology. Acknowledging and sharing our weaknesses is very important when you are trying to help people gain a comfort level with a technology that may be on their “TechNOT” list.

And who knows? If I can connect with someone and help them set up a wiki orrun their statistical reports, maybe they’ll help me get my voice mail.

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Not all users do things the same way we do… especially when it comes to the use of technology. It’s a simple yet important point for librarians to keep in mind. Jenica Rogers-Urbanek wrote a great post about getting out and taking a look at different technology users. Not only do folks use different technologies, but the ways in which they are used varies significantly from user to user.

I feel like technology use is a very personal thing - it fits into the lives of our patrons in such vastly different ways! It’s so important to take the time now and then to look at the different ways people use technology so that we don’t get over-saturated with the narrow definition of technology use we have established for ourselves. To quote Jenica: “We, with our particularly echo-y vision of technology, are not our users.” (And yet, we are!)

BTW I love the list of different users she encountered… if you haven’t already, read her post!

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A couple of people have asked me lately what 2.0-ish technology has been the most useful to me. I thinks some folks who are just trying to get started with this stuff are looking for a place to begin so they don’t get too overwhelmed. Good idea!

For me, it definitely has to be the use of a feed aggregator.

I started out small, with just a few interesting professional feeds, plus some things of personal interest to me. Now that I look back at the past few years, it’s amazing how my list of feeds has grown and changed. As I commented to one person the other day, I rarely read a newspaper from cover to cover any more - but I do skim about 300 sources on a daily basis.

If you had to pick just one, what would it be?

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I love the basic theory - free Wi-Fi for everyone, wherever you go.

But I’ve been really skeptical of all of the hot air being blown around for a while by Suffolk County politicians about really making it happen here.

And now, they’re starting to test…

I don’t know. Something just isn’t right here. I guess I’ll  believe it when I see it.

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Can someone please answer a very dumb question I have about Second Life?

Why are there so many chairs? 

I guess I’m just showing my complete lack of understanding, but I really wonder that. I mean, I was just exploring a little in SL and couldn’t get over the number of places there were to sit. Funny thing is, I am feeling pretty comfortable in my recliner right now. My little avatar isn’t tired in the least.

I guess I still don’t get it…

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A little item on Slashdot today touched on something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

Their take: Web 2.0 may be a threat to IT job security. (Interesting comments on this!)

My take: Web 2.0 empowers folks to get many jobs done themselves “without involving IT.”

It’s something I think about every time I hear someone in a library talking about “giving that to the tech guy” when it comes to posting something to the Web site, blog, wiki, whatever.

These technologies are designed to be easy to use, learn, and maintain. But we’re so used to giving the assignment to the “person who handles that,” that I often see librarians who could have done the job themselves in about two minutes playing the handoff game - which starts to add up to days and weeks of waiting for the task to get done.

Yes, we’re all busy. Yes, we should be able to delegate duties as necessary. Yes, the library’s “tech guy” is very important to it’s survival and shouldn’t be ushered out the door (please no! We need you!!!) But we’re very lucky to have access to great technologies and resources that give us the power to stop relying so much on other people when it comes to using technology.

We don’t need a specialized person to handle everything remotely connected to a computer. We can do it ourselves. We don’t have to wait. We can put our professional skills to use in designing and maintaining many of our services without a middleman.

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Thanks to Ryan for a great post about the future of accessibility in libraries. I love technology, but this is something I really worry about. He’s right - when you work on Web stuff for libraries it really does seem hopeless… but he has some good suggestions for things we can do to help make our resources more accessible.

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Bravo, Dorothea!

One of the most common things I hear myself saying to the library staff I train is: “Play with it. You can’t break anything!!”

But I know that a lot of them are reluctant, or downright terrified of the idea of just jumping in and trying things out.

Read her full post about the “training wheels culture” and cataloging… I think it will ring true with many of the frustrations felt by many of us who find ourselves doing training for library staff. And she pulls no punches in venting these frustrations.

Librarians are a timorous breed, fearful of ignorance and failure. We believe knowledge is power, which taken to an unhealthy extreme can mean that we do not do anything until we think we understand everything. We do not learn by doing, because learning by doing invariably means failure. So a librarian just won’t sit down with AACR2, Connexions, and the AUTOCAT mailing-list archive and work out how to catalogue a novel item. Nor she won’t sit down at the computer and beat software with rocks until it works.

She’ll sit passively, hands in lap, and ask for training, feeling guilty the whole time for displaying ignorance.

And

What they need is to kick off the training wheels, honestly. Their locus of control vis-a-vis technology needs to move a long way inward. There is nothing more frustrating than dealing with fear-based apathy. I don’t mind intelligent skepticism; I’ll prove a given tool’s worth or I’ll abandon it. I don’t mind dealing with genuine problems. They happen.

I do mind, quite a lot, having to stand over a grown professional’s shoulder teaching her to use a set of essentially self-explanatory web forms because she cannot be bothered to learn by doing. And I do this a lot.

My husband and I picked up a new wii game last week. Did we:

A. Sit down with the manual and try to memorize all of the controller movements and their proper applications

B. Call Best Buy and ask that a member of their “Geek Squad” swing by the house to thoroughly train us in how to use the game

C. Refuse to play the game because it was unfamiliar to us

D. Pop the disc into the slot and start shooting away at bad guys until we figured it out

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I think a lot of librarians could learn a lot from playing more video games.

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I just love this so much that I had to post about it even though everyone else has the same idea.

I love seeing all of the answers, all offered this way in the respondant’s handwriting. It’s so effective.

The answers are great and wide ranging. But here are a few of my favorites:

Motivating

Where I am, tailored to my interests and delivered in the format required. i.e. virtual or hard copy

Social Connected Seamless Mobile

A Place ASpace Where I want to be

An Option on your i-pod

Ubiquitous

Like McDonalds: Everywhere, easy to find, with a big menu and a tasty product!

In my pocket

The New Black

Bloody Awesome

And my very favorite:

Looking Towards 2027

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I sometimes get criticism on this blog for insisting that many librarians out there lack the kinds of basic technology skills that many of us take for granted. While these librarians are obviously in the vast minority, I must continue to contend that they are still out there. And sometimes I have a hard time knowing how to deal with them.

I had a strange phone conversation with a librarian recently. I usually don’t blog about stuff that goes on at work, but this was too good to not share. Here it is in a nutshell (paraphrased):

Me: …I have a handout with step-by-step instructions for doing what you want. Let me just email it to you. Do I have your address?

Them: No, I really don’t do email.

Me: (Stopping, confused.) You don’t use email?

Them: No, I don’t want to get sucked in. Can you just put the handout in the mail bag for me?

Me: (Totally thrown for a loop) Oh… Well… Um… I don’t know…. You don’t want to get sucked in??

Them: Yes, everyone seems to get so obsessed by their email, and I want to keep things simple for myself. You know, so it doesn’t get overwhelming.

Me: I guess so… but you don’t use email at all?? How do you communicate?

Them: (laughing) You know, the old fashioned way. I call. Or use the mail. Email is such a bother. So can you just mail the handout over to me? Or fax it?

Me: (with new resolve) No, I don’t think so. I can email it because I have the file right here, though. Can I send it to a library email account or something?

Them: I suppose so, but I don’t know how to get into that. I guess I could get someone else to get it for me…

Me: Well, if you find someone, maybe have them call me? I don’t want to send it if I don’t know that you will get it.

Them: Why not just put it in the bag??

Me: Because we email things here. I really think you should think about setting up an email account.

Them: I don’t want to, though. I don’t even know how to.

Me: Don’t you have to help patrons with that?

Them: No, I pass those questions off to someone else. I don’t really want to know anything about computers.

Me: (stubborn) I guess you’re out of luck, then. Why don’t you have someone with an email account call me. Or pick up the handout at the next meeting.

Maybe this wasn’t the best way for me to have handled things, but I was rather taken aback, and sometimes when that happens, you don’t really think, you just react. And the part that really got to me was the whole attitude of “someone else will do it.” I was pretty irritated by that. But in retrospect, I feel like this wasn’t necessarily the best reaction. What do you think?

Was I wrong to not just send the handout via mail? It would have cut this conversation down to size, and the person on the phone would have had her information the next day. Was I just being stubborn? Was this bad customer service on my part? Should I have just let it go?

BTW: I later worked out the training issue with one of her colleagues who was more than happy to use email as part of the resolution.

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