Paul Farmer speaks at IDEO by Global X / CC-BY

This post is adapted from a speech I gave at Drexel University’s Beta Phi Mu initiation on December 6, 2011. The text of the original is available on Scribd, and a video of my speech, which includes a brief introduction by Helen Snowden is available on Vimeo.

Greek Picnic is a reunion and gathering of the alumni and current members of the nine historically African-American fraternities and sororities. It was first celebrated in Philadelphia in 1974, where it has been celebrated every year since. For most of its history it was a well attended event, but in the mid-1990s it got to be really big. I’ve read estimates that 100,000 people would register and another 100,000–200,000 would attend some events around the city during Greek Week each July.

The City of Philadelphia didn’t seem to know what to do with this sudden influx of college students and alumni. It seemed like they just wanted to drink and party all night, and most Philadelphians seemed to see the situation as a public safety issue that should be handed over to the police. Businesses would close for the week and gate their doors and windows, so each night bored students and alumni would cruise up and down Broad Street and South Street. Sometimes things got out of hand.

What do you do with a bunch of people who just want to drink and party all night?

Which leads to my first point: Perspective.

So you have this annual crush of African-American fraternity and sorority members and alumni who want to drink and party all night. You know who else likes to drink and party all night?

Mummers.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Mummers parade, think of it as Philadelphia’s version of the New Orleans Mardi Gras parade, only it’s held on New Year’s Day. Philadelphia hasn’t always handled its relationship with the Mummers as well as it should, but on the whole we do pretty well. I think most Philadelphians agree that New Year’s Day wouldn’t be the same without boisterous people in feathers strutting down Broad Street playing banjos.

You know another group that just likes to drink and party all night?

Delegates at political conventions.

Around the same time the City had no idea what to do with all these college students and alumni who visited us each July, we were getting ready to host the 2000 Republican National Convention, the one where George W. Bush was nominated for the first time. We were building hotels and fixing up the Convention Center. Just across the Delaware River, New Jersey was rebuilding Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Camden.

The Republican National Convention lasted four days, from July 31 until August 3, and then everyone went home. Which is what you would expect. You don’t get to be a delegate without putting down roots. It’s not like the delegates were going to spend three or four nights in Philadelphia, fall in love with the city, and decide to relocate.

You know who does that? College students. When I was a first-year undergraduate at Rutgers, one of my friends from summer camp came up to visit me for a few days. I introduced him to my friends, we went to my classes together, and he transferred to Rutgers from Virginia Tech and became my college roommate.

I realize that’s just one data point. Here’s another. One winter break, I went out to visit a friend in Albuquerque. He showed me around and I fell in love with the place and resolved to move there as soon as I could. Within a couple of years I had graduated from Rutgers, packed everything I owned in my new Saturn, and I had an apartment in Albuquerque and a job at Page One Bookstore.

That’s the kind of thing college students will do. And that’s exactly what Philadelphia needed in the mid-1990’s. Its population had been declining for decades. There were thousands of abandoned houses all over the city that would eventually get bulldozed. Students at Drexel and Penn and Temple and all of its other schools would leave the moment they graduated.

The City of Philadelphia should have realized those hundreds of thousands of college students and alumni coming to Greek Picnic every July could help to revitalize things. Government officials should have been working with employers and real estate agents and mortgage brokers and sports teams and musicians and dance clubs and theaters and restaurants and everyone else who could have made them feel like VIPs. Instead, Philadelphia treated them like criminals. And Greek Picnic got smaller again.

It could have been racism that clouded Philadelphia’s perspective. But that doesn’t explain Love Park.

Love Park, which is about a block from City Hall, has been internationally recognized for almost two decades as one of the world’s truly legendary skate parks. It was the main reason Philadelphia was chosen as the site for the 2001 and 2002 X Games. So what did Philadelphia do? It started enforcing a ban on skateboarding in Love Park.

A group called Friends of Love Park proposed a popular solution that would have kept certain paths clear for pedestrians and only allowed skating after 3:00 p.m. on weekdays. A company out of California called DC Shoes offered the City a $1 million donation if it backed the plan. The City turned it down.

Again, we have this dying city with a steadily declining economy and population. As with the sudden popularity of Greek Picnic in the mid-90’s, through no planning of its own, Philadelphia got a fantastic opportunity to become younger and hipper and economically stronger. And we blew it.

I don’t mean to pick on Philadelphia. We also have examples of stepping back, getting a better perspective, and making great decisions. The Free Library’s turned its “homeless problem” into one of its greatest successes by partnering with Project H.O.M.E. Now the library’s bathrooms and its cafe are among the nicest in the city and, just as significantly, formerly homeless workers have good jobs and new skills.

Another reason not to pick on the City of Philadelphia is that all of us occasionally need help with our perspective. Drexel, for instance, specifically its library school.

Can you name the most famous and historically significant graduate of the Drexel library program?

Barbara Rose Johns Powell.

It’s a little bit of a trick question, because she’s not famous for what she did after she graduated. She’s famous for what she did before. That’s a point I always try to make to library students and new librarians, and to anyone thinking about going to library school. What you do before you get your library degree matters, which is one of the reasons ALA only accredits Masters-level programs. You’re expected to have worked a bit before becoming a librarian, at the very least as an undergraduate, and ideally a bit after as well. For instance, I was a fundraiser and web developer before I went to library school. Those skills helped me get my current job and I still use them all the time.

So here’s what Barbara Rose Johns Powell did before she went to library school.

She helped end segregation in this country.

Seriously. Barbara Rose Johns attended a segregated high school in Farmville, Virginia. On April 23, 1951, she led her classmates in a strike to protest the school’s inadequate conditions. She had turned 17 only one month earlier and was a junior in high school, which didn’t stop her from convincing her classmates’ parents to support the strike. She also went to the NAACP and persuaded them to provide legal assistance. Three years later, in 1954, Farmville’s was one of the five cases the Supreme Court considered in Brown v. Board of Education when it ruled that segregation was unconstitutional.

After marrying Reverend William Powell, and after Drexel, Barbara Rose Johns Powell worked as a school librarian in the Philadelphia public school system (she was admitted to Drexel on September 27, 1976, and was awarded her Master of Science on June 2, 1979). For her, working as a school librarian wasn’t all that different from what she’d done as a high school student. For her it was all about education. She was born on March 6, 1934, and died on September 25, 1991, just 57 years old.

How cool would it have been to have her as your school librarian? Mrs. Powell, can you help me with my paper on racism? Can you help me get over my fear of public speaking?

I also like to imagine her getting called in for one of those interrogations last spring led by attorneys from the Los Angeles Unified School District. As the Los Angeles Times reported, “A court reporter takes down testimony. A judge grants or denies objections from attorneys. Armed police officers hover nearby. On the witness stand, one librarian at a time is summoned to explain why she—the vast majority are women—should be allowed to keep her job.” Can you imagine Barbara Rose Johns Powell on the witness stand?

Mrs. Powell, can you tell us what you contribute to student education? What have you done to improve educational outcomes?

I think those Los Angeles lawyers would have had a pretty difficult time pushing Mrs. Powell aside. Unfortunately, that’s sort of what Drexel has done. Those of us who want to change librarianship for the better, and see librarianship as our best chance to change the world for the better, have a role model in Barbara Rose Johns Powell. I’d like to see Drexel start celebrating its connection to her sensibility and her legacy. I’d like to see the American Library Association and the American Association of School Librarians do the same.

So that’s perspective in the abstract. Let’s bring it home. What does all this talk about perspective have to do with you?

We’re in a rough economy. It’s a tight job market. Libraries are in transition. Google and Amazon and ebooks, oh my. The sky is falling.

That’s one way to look at it. As you might imagine, at least for you, I don’t see any of these situations as bad things.

Public libraries are counter-cyclical. Higher education is counter-cyclical. In a down economy, people use public libraries more. They go back to school. Transitions are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to make a real and lasting difference. For instance, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that ALA’s Freedom to Read Statement was originally issued in 1953, during the time the case initiated by Barbara Rose Johns was working its way through the Federal Courts. Change was in the air, just like it is now.

Which leads me to my second point: No one can stop you from doing good work.

Getting a good job and doing good work are not the same thing. They’re correlated. But it’s not clear to me which is the cause and which is the effect.

Here’s how I describe my decision to become a librarian. If I could help end deaths associated with HIV, if I thought I had the ability to further the research or reduce the harm caused by the virus, that’s what I would be doing. But I’m squeamish, vegan, and not the least bit handy. So I do what I can to help people, and I try very hard to take my work just as seriously as someone whose work contributes more directly to public health. This is what I have to contribute.

Paul Farmer didn’t have to become a librarian because he’s amazingly good at keeping healthy people healthy and helping sick people become as healthy as possible. As with Barbara Rose Johns Powell, I’m not comparing myself to Paul Farmer. But both of them are role models for me, and I hope they’ll be role models for you as well.

When Paul Farmer was in medical school at Harvard, he started working in Haiti, then the poorest country in the world. His efforts were small at first, given that he was just one person doing what he could, plus he had to divide his time between Haiti and Boston, generally six months a year in each. When he was in Boston he would borrow medicine and resources, and recruit people to help him, and slowly he built the nonprofit he founded, Partners in Health, into one of the world’s most significant international health and social justice organizations. If you gave to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, there’s a good chance you donated to Partners in Health. It’s also a great place to donate if you’d like to help people in Lesotho, Malawi, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, the United States, the Dominican Republic, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Guatemala, or Burundi. I strongly encourage you to read a book that Tracy Kidder wrote about Paul Farmer called Mountains Beyond Mountains. It tells Farmer’s story really well, and it also makes you want to to good work. And it helps you realize there’s nothing stopping you from doing it.

So what do I mean by good work? Here are my three ideals for good work:

1. You feel so passionate about it that it doesn’t feel like work.
2. It does so much good for other people that you can’t help but feel good about yourself for having done it.
3. It gives you a chance to work with people you admire.

I’ve been really fortunate to work on a lot of different projects and with a lot of different groups that meet those criteria. I worked on an open source project when I was a library student at Drexel. I helped found In the Library with the Lead Pipe, and I wrote for Library Journal and ACRLog. In the last two years I’ve worked on a couple of ALA Presidential Task Forces, and even chaired one. I’ve served on a few boards for library organizations. I’m in a calendar called Men of the Stacks that’s raising money for the It Gets Better Project to help end bullying. And, of course, I’ve gotten to help a lot of people at the libraries where I’ve worked.

Some of those things have depended on other people either hiring or electing or choosing me, but a lot of them didn’t.  And I feel like I see new projects all the time that I’d work on if I had the time or that I wish I’d thought of or that I’m glad someone else is doing.

• The Library As Incubator Project, a new project that highlights the way artists and libraries can work together. It was started by three students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison program.

• The Hack Library School movement is fantastic, and has accomplished an amazing amount in just over a year.

• ALA Think Tank, an open group on Facebook, has a lot of energy and ideas, and its members #makeithappen.

• Library Boing Boing is coming, and it’s coming soon. Be part of it.

• And don’t forget about the Library & Information Science Stack Exchange. It could be huge.

• I would love to take part in anything related to the Digital Public Library of America. One option would be to get involved as an editor at Library News, a new community like Reddit or Hacker News that’s devoted to libraries.

• I’m also really excited about Gluejar, a company that’s working with authors to get them to release electronic versions of their books with Creative Commons licenses. Founder Eric Hellman has already hired recent library graduate and budding library superstar, Andromeda Yelton, and he appears to have some sort of working relationship with Library of Congress librarian/programmer Ed Summers as well.

• Code4lib, an anarcho-democratic community of programmers who work with libraries, is the most interesting thing happening in the library world, and I definitely recommend that you become a part of it in a way that suits you.

• The Open Shelves Classification project is still looking for someone to lead its attempt to compete with Dewey, LC, and BISAC.  They got a lot accomplished a couple of years ago, but they’ve been dormant for a little while. If you want to prove yourself as a cataloger, that’s a great way to get started.

• Among the newer open source library projects to watch are the eXtensible Catalog at the University of Rochester and the Kuali OLE project that has a bunch of sponsors and partners. And there are another dozen or so library related open source projects that are worth learning and helping to develop or document.

What’s most exciting is that I’m just scratching the surface. There are so many things that are right about libraries today, but there are innumerable things that could be improved. And there’s nothing stopping you from doing it. Whether you have a job lined up already or you have no idea where your next job is going to be, I hope you’ll devote yourself to finding problems you’re passionate about solving, people you’re passionate about helping, and a community of like-minded peers. You just have to look at things from a useful perspective and commit to spending your time doing work that doesn’t feel like work.

It took me a long time to find work that met all of those criteria. I tried a lot of things before I went to library school. As much as I’ve been trying to do it for the previous 3,000 words, I’m not sure I’m capable of expressing how grateful I am to have found librarianship, or how grateful I am to have colleagues and peers like you as readers and, more importantly, as collaborators. The librarians I’ve met in the last few years are the smartest, kindest, most helpful people I’ve ever worked with, and I can’t thank them enough for all the opportunities they’ve given me, for how much they’ve helped me to gain a sensible perspective on how best to approach problems, and how to go about doing good work. I wish the same for you for the remainder of your career and for the rest of your life.

Thanks to Sarah Houghton, Phyllis Bonfield, and Jeffrey Bonfield, and to my Lead Pipe colleagues, Ellie Collier, Erin Dorney, Hilary Davis, and Emily Ford for their help. Thanks also to Terri Breitenstine at the Office of the University Registrar at Drexel University for confirming Barbara Rose Johns Powell’s enrollment and graduation information.

Two Years Ago by Leah the Librarian / CC-BY-NC

For new library school gradates, or for more seasoned librarians ready for a change, entering the job market can be an intimidating, frustrating experience. We hear that there are no jobs available, and that the few libraries that do advertise new openings are inundated with applications.

Perhaps less publicly, we also hear administrators express concerns about a lack of good candidates for important positions, and we notice some jobs being advertised for months or being re-posted, sometimes more than once. We notice ALA’s estimate of over 122,000 libraries in the United States, as well as its estimate that academic, public, and school libraries employ over 150,000 librarians (ALA does not estimate the number of librarians who work for special libraries, vendors, or other employers). It may also be worth noting that, although U.S. unemployment as a whole remains relatively high, employment rates appear to be stratified by education level: in 2010, the average unemployment rate among people with Master’s degrees was 4%.

Because we do not yet have access to reliable, real-time data, we are left with imperfect, occasionally confusing information. No one knows the actual employment rate among librarians or how satisfied librarians are with their jobs. Nor do we know how satisfied administrators are with the librarians they employ or the applicant pools for positions they hope to fill.

By looking at the past and the near future, and by studying the process of conferring Master’s degrees on prospective librarians, we can begin to think about strategies for ensuring that we, both individually and as a profession, are taking an efficient approach to matching libraries’ needs with the supply of library workers.

Should library schools admit fewer students? Is the admissions process sufficiently selective? Are library school curricula and graduation requirements too similar or too distinct? Are they providing their students with the skills they need in order to get hired and do useful work? Should there be licensing exams for librarians? What data would we need to collect in order to come up with useful answers to these questions?

I hope this essay makes a contribution to that discussion. My original idea for it was to build on existing analyses of ALA-accredited library programs, adding my own observations based, in part, on my status as a somewhat recent library school graduate (Drexel University, September 2007), first-time adjunct professor (I taught a course at Drexel’s library school this past summer), and potential faculty member (I am a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University’s library school).

That will have to wait for the second part of this essay. Before discussing how library schools might better serve public interests and their students’ needs, we need to make sure we have reliable data about current library programs. The rest of part one is devoted to the story of that data.

The Librarian Job Market: Projections

According to the latest data (2008) from the Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were 159,900 librarians and in 2018 there will be 172,400, a projected growth rate of 7.8% (between 7% and 13% is considered average). The anticipated number of job openings due to growth and replacement needs is 54,500, with 12,500 openings attributable to new jobs being created and 42,000 due to attrition.¹

We have been hearing about the graying of the profession for a long time, a factor that will contribute significantly to roughly one quarter of all current librarians leaving the profession by 2018. Who will be hired to fill those positions? What qualifications will they be expected to possess?

Right now, 84% of librarian jobs require a Master’s degree, 13% require a Bachelor’s, and 2% an Associate’s, and new job postings appear to indicate an increasing expectation that applicants will have earned a graduate degree in a library-related field. According to Nazi Torabi’s review of research by Robert K. Reeves and Trudi Bellardo Hahn, most current employers are requiring an MLS or MLIS, though even a Master’s degree is not sufficient. In addition, writes Torabi, “experience, either through internships, co-op programs, or part-time or full-time employment, is essential for new graduates seeking employment.”

As mentioned above, the BLS expects employers to need 54,500 new librarians in the ten years spanning 2008 to 2018. We can represent that need as requiring 5,450 new Master’s-level graduates per year (54,500 divided by 10).

If library schools were to continue conferring 5,478 degrees per academic year, which is the average number of MLS and MLIS degrees they awarded from 1997-98 through 2006-07, there would be roughly as many new librarians as new jobs for librarians.² Based on the years the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) makes available for comparison, 5,478 Master’s-level library degrees per year would be near the midpoint given library schools’ relatively recent history:

• 1970-71: 7,001
• 1975-76: 8,037
• 1980-81: 4,859
• 1985-86: 3,564

One concern, at least for recent and future library school students, is that library schools have already begun conferring more Master’s-level degrees. The number of degrees conferred increased every year between 1999-2000 and 2007-08. In addition, in the two academic years following the ten years included in the average above (1997-98 through 2006-07), Master’s-level graduates from library schools numbered 7,162 (2007-08) and 7,091 (2008-09). That not only makes the job market especially competitive for recent graduates, it also means, if the number 54,500 was correct, that library schools should aim to graduate roughly 40,320 for the eight years remaining in the BLS ten-year projection, an average of 5,040 for the academic years 2009-10 through 2016-17.

There are several problems with the information presented so far in this essay. Before continuing, it seems worth discussing three primary issues.

1. Unlike medical schools, which faced pressure not to produce an oversupply of physicians, there appears to be no pressure on library schools to graduate only as many librarians as will be needed to fill vacancies

As with the job market as a whole, a limited level of unemployment among degreed librarians increases employers’ ability to hire selectively among the most qualified candidates while simultaneously decreasing salaries. When they produce more librarians than are needed, library schools make libraries happy by vetting, and providing initial training for, a more highly skilled, cheaper work force.

The key for library schools is to avoid granting so many degrees that the entry-level market for librarians becomes significantly more competitive than comparable job markets. If a disproportionate number of potential applicants perceive librarianship as offering worse prospects than comparable alternatives, then it becomes increasingly likely that the overall number of library school applicants will decrease and that library schools will have to compete with each other more aggressively for the most highly qualified applicants.

Although library school students are already graduating into a difficult job market, it seems at this point to be no worse than the job market facing law school graduates. While the salary potential for the most highly qualified new librarians is nowhere close to the salary potential for the most highly qualified new lawyers, the risk is nowhere near as great in terms of the amount of debt encumbered by the average student or the time commitment required to complete school. On a risk-adjusted basis, it is entirely possible that library school is a safer decision.

2. Economic projections are notoriously difficult

Projecting what will happen tomorrow is incredibly difficult, let alone what will happen next year or over the next decade. But selecting 2008 as the initial year for a projection may have been especially inauspicious given what happened that year: a decline in U.S. gross domestic product, along with the start of an unemployment spike and a stock market crash. Projections are worthwhile in that they help to provide some direction, and there is no reason to believe the Department of Labor projections were based on anything but the best available information. But, as librarians well know, sometimes the best available information will only get you so far.

3. Figuring out how many people graduate each year from an American Library Association-accredited program with a Master’s degree in a library-related field is surprisingly difficult

I thought this would be the easy part of this essay. With the help of a Presidential Task Force on Library Education, ALA’s Committee on Accreditation updated its Standards for Accreditation of Master’s Programs in Library and Information Studies in 2008 and released a statement of Core Competencies in Librarianship in 2009; it also released a revised second edition of its Accreditation Process, Policies, and Procedures in 2011. As is demonstrated in a Library Journal article by Norman Oder on the Presidential Task Force on Library Education and in the Committee on Accreditation’s own Standards Review blog, many within the information professions take the accreditation process seriously, and there can be significant debates surrounding accreditation policy.

ALA’s Office of Accreditation helps to vet applicants for the External Review Panelist pool, and also supports the accreditation process by maintaining a directory of currently accredited programs, as well as a list of all programs accredited since 1925. However, no one at ALA officially knows how many students graduate each year from the programs it accredits. When I asked for this information, I was directed to ALISE, the Association for Library and Information Science Education, which produces an annual Statistical Report.

The ALISE reports, which are compiled from questionnaires submitted annually by each accredited program, provide a great deal of data and analysis. However, I discovered a few problems when I tried to make use of ALISE data for this project:

1. It is proprietary and accessible only to ALISE members. Though the University of North Carolina provides public access to the Statistical Reports for 1997-2004, several of ALISE’s more recent reports are inaccessible to me, despite my connections to Rutgers and Drexel. Fair use seems sufficient for me to share the data I most care about—the number of graduates from each of the accredited library programs for each of the past ten years—but there is no reason to assume most readers would be able to verify any claims I make about the data.
2. It appears to be inaccurate. The individual number of graduates for each accredited program, when summed, does not equal the number given as the overall total for reports covering the 1999-2000 (off by 8), 2000-2001 (off by 13), 2001-2002 (off by 19), or 2002-2003 academic years (off by 9).
3. It is incomplete. The 2007 report, covering the 2005-2006 academic year, is unedited and unreleased, while the data for the 2008 report has not yet been compiled from that year’s questionnaires. The ALISE web page for its Statistical Reports lists both as being “for future release.”
4. It does not match the data the schools reported to the National Center for Education Statistics. Moreover, in some years it is higher and other years it is lower, so it does not seem to be differing in a predictable way (such as NCES including data from non-accredited programs).

• 1999-2000: 4,877 (ALISE “total”) or 4,885 (ALISE sum) vs. 4,577 (NCES)
• 2000-2001: 4,953 (ALISE “total”) or 4,940 (ALISE sum) vs. 4,727 (NCES)
• 2001-2002: 4,923 (ALISE “total”) or 4,904 (ALISE sum) vs. 5,113 (NCES)
• 2002-2003: 5,175 (ALISE “total”) or 5,184 (ALISE sum) vs. 5,295 (NCES)

IPEDS Data: Annual number of graduates from each ALA-accredited program, 2000-01 through 2009-10

For these reasons, it does not currently make sense to use ALISE data as the basis for answering questions about the relationship between library schools and the library job market. Fortunately, an alternative to the ALISE data is available through the NCES Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Data Center.³ IPEDS uses Classification of Instruction Programs (CIP) codes, which for the most part are extraordinarily useful in figuring out how many people graduated from each of the ALA-accredited library programs in each of the last several years. The last three CIP code revisions—1990, 2000, and 2010—have the same code number for Library Science, 25.

Among accredited programs, all report graduates for the Library Science classification except the University at Albany-SUNY, the University of Michigan, the University of Missouri, and the University of Puerto Rico. I have written to each of these schools and included their information in the following table.

Some Observations About the Data

My goal for this essay was not to engage in detailed statistical analysis. Rather, I wanted to verify that useful data is available for free from a readily accessible source, a necessary step before progressing to part two of this essay. However, before discussing part two, it seems useful to make a few observations about the data and ask a few questions that may eventually lead to useful information.

• If you rank the largest classes for each school by size, the top ten graduating classes between 2000-01 and 2009-10 are:
  1. 465 (San Jose State University, 2009-10)
  2. 456 (San Jose State University, 2006-07)
  3. 448 (San Jose State University, 2007-08)
  4. 437 (San Jose State University, 2008-09)
  5. 359 (University of North Texas, 2006-07)
  6. 356 (University of North Texas, 2009-10)
  7. 338 (San Jose State University, 2005-06)
  8. 315 (University of North Texas, 2008-09)
  9. (tie) 308 (San Jose State University, 2004-05)
  10. (tie) 308 (University of North Texas, 2007-08)

  All ten classes appear to be primarily attributable to two administrators. Ken Haycock was director of the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University from 2005 until 2010, and Herman L. Totten has been dean of the University of North Texas School of Library and Information Science since 2005.

  This raises two questions: Is it a good thing for the profession for administrators to be able to position their schools as outliers in the production of ALA-accredited Master’s degree recipients? And if it is not, are there remedies that would avoid creating even greater issues than the problem they would be intended to address?

• It may be interesting to see if the number of graduates from a program relates to its perceived quality, a measure readily available through U.S. News:
  

  U.S. News ranked 50 master’s degree programs in the United States that are accredited by the American Library Association. The rankings are based solely on the results of a fall 2008 survey sent to the dean of each program, the program director, and a senior faculty member in each program.

  The questionnaires asked individuals to rate the academic quality of programs at each institution as outstanding (5), strong (4), good (3), adequate (2), or marginal (1). Individuals who were unfamiliar with a particular school’s programs were asked to select “don’t know.” Scores for each school were totaled and divided by the number of respondents who rated that school.

• Does the recent increase in the number of library school graduates seem to correlate more closely with endogenous factors, such as the iSchool movement or the increasing emphasis on online education, or with exogenous factors, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics study or broad economic trends?

Looking ahead to part two

The significant variation in the number of students in accredited library programs, along with the rapid increase in the number of students who receive their library training without ever meeting one of their professors in person, harks back to library education at this point in the last century. Melvil Dewey’s personal influence began to wane after the first few years of the 20th century and Andrew Carnegie was already very actively funding libraries, leaving something of a void in library education just as demand was increasing. There were few training programs we would think of today as library schools, so many of the people hired to work as librarians received their education through correspondence-based programs.

In 1919, the Carnegie Corporation hired Charles C. Williamson to assess library education and make recommendations for how it might best support libraries and their users. In 1923, he published what is generally known as the Williamson Report, though its official title is Training For Library Service A Report Prepared For The Carnegie Corporation Of New York.⁴ Williamson’s findings and suggestions led to the Carnegie Corporation funding the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago, which conferred the first Ph.D. in Library Science, and played a pivotal role in establishing the standards for library education that arguably remain in place today.⁵  As noted above, ALA began accrediting library schools in 1925.

Working together, ALA and the Carnegie Corporation were increasing demand through advocacy for libraries—specifically, by funding new libraries—and also through advocacy for librarians by investing in their educational resources: new schools: dedicated, better trained faculty; modern textbooks; and updated, evidence-based curricula. Meanwhile, they were decreasing supply by adding de facto regulation in the form of library school accreditation, a limitation on supply that continues today. From the Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010-11 Edition entry for librarians:

A master’s degree in library science (MLS) is necessary for librarian positions in most public, academic, and special libraries. School librarians may not need an MLS but must meet State teaching license requirements…. States generally have certification requirements for librarians in public schools and local libraries, though there are wide variations among States. School librarians in 20 States need a master’s degree, either an MLS or a master’s in education with a specialization in library media. In addition, over half of all States require that school librarians hold teacher certifications, although not all require teaching experience. Some States may also require librarians to pass a comprehensive assessment. Most States also have developed certification standards for local public libraries, although in some States these guidelines are voluntary.

These are not the only conditions minimizing competition and protecting working librarians from termination. Librarians may also belong to a union, earn tenure (or quasi-tenure), or hold Civil Service commissioned positions. While occupational licensing among librarians is not as organized as it is in fields like medicine or law or the financial industry, it may be worth investigating if librarianship could benefit from more licensing or less, and, if any licensing at all is beneficial (either to the public, to librarians, or both), how it might best be organized.⁶

Finally, it seems worth investigating who is educating librarians and how the educators have themselves been taught. Library science is part humanities, part social science, and, at times in the past, and perhaps in the near future as well, part information science, and even computer science. Figuring out how these tensions might be balanced has everything to do not only with producing an appropriate supply of new librarians, but also ensuring these new librarians have the requisite skills to meet the demands of the marketplace.

Thanks to Nicole Cooke, and to my Lead Pipe colleagues, Emily Ford and Leigh Anne Vrabel, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. And thanks to Emily for helping me with the final draft as well.

1. To find this data on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, go to Selected Occupational Projections Data: Search by Occupation, enter Librarians as the keyword and choose “Job openings due to growth and replacement needs, 2008-2018” as the variable.
2. These figures are derived from data found in the National Center of Education Statistics Digest of Education Statistics for 2010 and for 2009, “Master’s degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by field of study: Selected years.” For 2010, the source data is found in Table 283, and for 2009, it is in Table 272.
3. From the IPEDS Data Center home page:
   • Select Compare Individual Institutions.
   • On the resulting page, select Publicly Released Data, then select Continue.
   • The field labeled Institution Name on the next page also accepts either individual UnitIDs for schools or a comma separated list of UnitIDs. Download this list of UnitIDs for all schools that had ALA-accredited programs between 2001 and 2010, enter its values into the Institution Name field, and chose Select. If you choose, review the list for accuracy against the earlier linked current directory and historical list of ALA-accredited programs, then choose either Check All or check the box next to individual institutions and select Continue.
   • You will be presented with a list labeled My Institutions. Select Continue.
   • On the resulting page, select the plus sign next to Completions to see a list of variables, and under it select the plus sign next to Awards/degrees conferred by program (2000 CIP classification), award level, race/ethnicity, and gender – includes new race/ethnicity and award level categories, and under it select the plus sign next to Gender – 2002-03 to 2008-09. For Step 1, select the check box next to any or all years between 2002-2003 and 2008-2009. For Step 2, select both First Major and Second Major and choose Save; select Library science (option 25) under CIP Code – 2000 Classification and choose Save; and choose Master’s degree under Award Level code and choose Save. For Step 3, choose Grand total. Then choose Continue near the top of the screen.
   • You will be presented with a list labeled My Variables. Select Continue.
   • Decide if you want Institution name only or if you also want the UnitID (I recommend the former), if you want short or long variable names (I recommend the former), if you want to view your report on screen or download it (I recommend the former first, followed by the latter), and if you want imputation and status flags. There is also an option to include a name for the table. Select Continue.
   • Adjust accordingly. Data earlier than 2002-2003 is available, but uses 1990 Classifications for its CIP code and is listed under a different variable. There is also early release data available for 2009-2010, but it requires a free login, which can be obtained by contacting IPEDS through its help desk.

4. See also:
   • Vann, S. K. (1971). The Williamson reports: A study. Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow Press.
   • Williamson, C. C. (1971). The Williamson reports of 1921 and 1923: Including Training for library work (1921) and Training for library service (1923). Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow Press.

5. Richardson, J. V. (1982). The spirit of inquiry: The Graduate Library School at Chicago, 1921-51. Chicago: American Library Association.
6. See:
   • Kleiner, Morris M. (2006). Licensing occupations: Ensuring quality or restricting competition? Kalamazoo, Mich: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
   • Kleiner, Morris M. and Krueger, Alan B. 2010 “The Prevalence and Effects of Occupational Licensing.” British Journal of Industrial Relations. 48(4), 676–687.
   • Kleiner, Morris M. 2011. “Occupational Licensing: Protecting the Public Interest or Protectionism?” Policy Paper No. 2011-009. Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
   • Winston, C., Crandall, R. W., & Maheshri, V. (2011). First thing we do, let’s deregulate all the lawyers. Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press.

Tango by The Noun Project / CC-BY

“Negotiation seems like dancing the Tango, two steps forward, two steps back and suddenly three surprising steps forward.”
— Margot Wallström

Smart, well-intentioned people often have good reasons for saying stupid things. Who hasn’t been swept up in an election, worried that there will be terrible consequences if we put the wrong person in the White House? In our passion to make sure we elect a president we don’t find repugnant, we occasionally say something stupid, either in favor of our chosen candidate or in opposition to the candidate we despise. In order to bolster a political or economic or moral position, we make accusations we cannot rationally defend, we misrepresent facts, we dissemble.

This doesn’t make us bad people. We’re doing what normal, smart, well-intentioned people often do when something we care about is at stake. Sometimes the stakes are global, other times they’re professional. For us, especially lately, it seems as if there have been an awful lot of issues related to libraries that have been both emotional and divisive. For me, over the past few months, in public interactions with library vendors, I feel as though I have been one of the many librarians on the receiving end of accusations, misrepresented facts, and dissembling. And I worry that I have contributed to our vendors feeling the same way.

My public tangoing with vendors has centered around two topics. In January, at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in San Diego, I was the sole public librarian at a private, Library Journal-hosted round table discussion on the future of integrated library systems. Much of this discussion, which was moderated by David Rapp, was published in Library Journal on April 1. In February, after OverDrive announced HarperCollins’ decision to have ebooks it licenses to libraries “self-destruct” after twenty-six uses, my friend Gabriel Farrell and I made a website that makes it easy to find out whether HarperCollins has reverted back to its original ebook agreement with libraries. It also lets people who are boycotting HarperCollins because of its self-destructing ebook policy know when the boycott is over.

The driving factor underlying our relationships with library vendors, including ILS vendors and HarperCollins, is intellectual freedom and the copyright limitations that enable it to function: fair use and first sale. Without the ability to offer information to our neighbors, students, or faculty members, a library’s value is irreparably compromised. If we negotiate away our constituents’ opportunities for intellectual freedom, if we do not control our own data, if we are not stewards of our constituents’ information, we are abdicating our responsibility.

I don’t know if I’m capable of thinking or writing about intellectual freedom without seeming didactic and sentimental. Which may make me a more passionate librarian, but if that passion goes unchecked it can inhibit my ability to think or negotiate rationally—and it’s no fun to negotiate with a zealot. For me, the key is to step back from any zealotry welling inside me and remember who it is we’re working with, what their incentives are, and what intermediate steps are likely to result in an ultimate outcome that provides the greatest overall benefit.

Vendors as People

When I started library school, I believed everyone wanted the same jobs I did. I figured the most talented librarians would cluster around the best libraries, which I assumed would be the large research libraries that either were themselves famous institutions, like New York Public Library or the Library of Congress, or were affiliated with rich, prestigious institutions, like Harvard or Princeton. If I couldn’t get a job at what I soon learned to think of as a top-ranked research (ARL) library, I wanted to work at a lower ranked ARL or an elite smaller university or college library. After that, I hoped I might find a job at a prestigious public library, or a major corporation or elite law firm’s library. Last on my list was working for a vendor. I assumed that was where the students who couldn’t get real library jobs ended up.

Once I learned what really happens, how the activities of librarianship are actually accomplished, I had to adjust my thinking, both about how library talent distributes itself and about the word “librarian.” First, the word “librarian.” Personally, I now use the word to describe anyone who works in a library, anyone who works specifically or primarily for the benefit of libraries, or anyone who has a degree in librarianship. Many of the best librarians I’ve met don’t (or don’t yet) have library degrees, don’t work solely for libraries, or aren’t employed by libraries directly.¹ Librarians are people whose work benefits library users, and I think of the best librarians as the people whose work provides these users with the greatest benefit.

A lot of the best librarians work for vendors, which stands to reason: often that’s where the most money is, both for compensation and for innovation. In addition, because most vendors are not limited geographically, these librarians are able to do work that benefits more users than any individual library.

Of course, even for librarians who work at what we traditionally think of as libraries, it’s foolish to assume the name of the employer tells you much about the librarian. It becomes obvious when talking to librarians that many of us are not particularly motivated by personal compensation or overall library budgets. But even when we are, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much: salaries are pretty compressed—the highs aren’t all that high and the lows aren’t all that low—and there seems to be an awful lot of variation even within that relatively narrow band. The best librarians seem to keep moving through employers until they find a place where they feel comfortable and useful. And when they stop feeling that way, or when another place seems likely to provide greater comfort or more interesting or exciting ways to benefit library users, they move on.

tl;dr: there’s no us and no them. In general, library-based librarians should assume the vendors they’re negotiating with are every bit as good at librarianship as they are, and very possibly a lot better. Also, assume that you’re both motivated by the same thing: figuring out the best way to serve library users.

Vendors as Companies

Vendors do a lot of good for library users, and in ways individual libraries usually cannot manage without assistance. They enable libraries to outsource many of their technology needs, pooling their resources to come up with better software than just about any library is capable of writing on its own. The same is true for abstracting and indexing serials, cataloging monographs, managing collections and acquisitions, and many other core library activities. These firms, operating in a market economy, allow librarians to use pricing and profit incentives to allocate resources in ways that balance the often divergent needs of the vast and heterogeneous population of library users. As librarians, we have access to a second economic model as well, and for some tasks the centrally managed planning provided by cooperatives seems to be the most efficient way to to allocate resources. We are fortunate to have both options.

Vendors also enable libraries to engage in activities that might be difficult to undertake without their existence. For instance, vendors play a major role in underwriting the expenses associated with hosting conferences and supporting professional associations, offsetting publishing costs for many library-related publications, making leading writers and thinkers available to interact personally with librarians, providing scholarships and travel grants, and sponsoring library awards. Without implying any quid pro quo or ulterior motives, if we simply follow the flow of funds, we see that libraries pay vendors for goods or services, and a portion of those payments end up benefiting librarians professionally. These are professional benefits, not personal benefits; while it is possible that some of these benefits may help some librarians earn more money or obtain greater job security, the overwhelming benefit seems to be to the profession as a whole, helping us to communicate more effectively, allocate our resources more efficiently, and better serve library users. The vendors benefit from this arrangement as well; by exposing potential customers to their products, they gain advantages within their markets.

The reason markets function, the reason vendors are useful to libraries, is that firms compete. Their goal is to maximize profit, both short term and long term. This requires a balance. They want to charge as much as they can get, but they also need to make sure they don’t charge so much that they bankrupt their customers or force them to go without the product. They want to keep their expenses as low as they can, but not so low that their product is perceived as less valuable. They want to assume control of their competitors or put them out of business, but they also don’t want to minimize the perceived value of their product or stifle innovation within their markets. Vendors understand that they operate in an ecosystem. They may not agree with you, or with each other, about the best way to steward that ecosystem—and a policy or situation that is good for firm A and bad for firm B now may be bad for firm A and good for firm B a year from now—but it is generally safe to assume that library vendors want what’s best for library users and libraries, both for moral and economic reasons.

tl;dr: in general, the firms that market to libraries succeed when libraries are perceived as more valuable and therefore more worth funding. The vendors know those funds will expand the market, creating a situation in which everyone benefits. They will compete with each other for a greater share of those funds, and sell as many of their products and services as they can for as much as libraries can pay, but they know that it’s bad for business if they charge unsustainable prices.

Vendors as Negotiating Partners

Here’s where we really torture the tango metaphor. What we need to keep in mind when libraries negotiate with vendors is that vendors are going to kick hard and fast, turn quickly, and libraries need to kick just as hard and fast, and turn just as quickly, or everything collapses.²

We should also keep in mind that it’s not clear to either of us, at least when we start the dance, exactly who it is that’s leading. Vendors have more money than libraries do, for the most part, and vendors generally have more potential customers than libraries have potential vendors. Vendors are also better negotiators than libraries because they do it more often. And, when necessary, vendors are more likely to have the funds to hire specialist lawyers or public relations firms to help them, whether they’re negotiating privately or in public.

Vendors also, like everyone else, can get so close to a position that it’s hard for them to step back and see how what they say or do might be perceived by their negotiating partners. Or they may say or do things just to see if anyone objects; maybe the objection they’ve been anticipating won’t materialize, meaning they’ve been limiting their own profits unnecessarily. Or maybe they’re just throwing wide the Overton window, taking advantage of anchoring to move the negotiations farther along in the direction that most benefits them.³

I believe this is how smart people with good intentions end up saying stupid things, how OCLC creates an “All Your Bases Are Belong to Us” records policy that draws near universal ire from its members or a library outsourcing company chief executive provides a quote for the New York Times in which he says, “You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement.” It isn’t difficult to imagine how smart people with good intentions would say or do these things. Frank Pezzanite, now Executive Chairman at Library Systems & Services (L.S.S.I.), founded the company in 1981 with his wife, Judy, who holds an MLS from the University of Maryland. They’ve been working in and with libraries for decades, and in that time it would be surprising if they didn’t encounter librarians who seemed to be biding their time until they could retire. Every profession has a few people who seem not to realize that workdays go faster and are more enjoyable when they’re filled with meaningful work. And perhaps Frank Pezzanite perceives even more of that attitude that most because his business first involved automation and later progressed to outsourced management, two areas that librarians may find threatening or worthy of resistance. There’s no reason to believe he sees himself as doing anything other than providing value to libraries and library users. But there’s also no reason to believe he’s right or that his quote helped anyone, including L.S.S.I.

tl;dr: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” (Robert J. Hanlon). “Never ascribe to stupidity that which is adequately explained by smart people with good intentions whose incentives are different from yours.” (Brett J. Bonfield)

Which brings us to the stupid statements I hope we can eliminate from libraries’ negotiations with vendors: “You just want everything for free,” and “It will cost you more when you factor in the total cost of ownership.”

You Just Want Everything For Free

This seems to come up a lot when I talk to vendors. It came up at the Library Journal round table discussion in connection with open source software. It’s come up in discussions about the HarperCollins decision to have ebooks self destruct. I’m told I just want everything for free.

The thing is, I don’t want everything for free. I mean, it’s true in the sense that I really would like to win the lottery, but it’s both stupid and false in the sense that I’ve never bought a lottery ticket. There’s nothing about my behavior to indicate that I want to win the lottery. And there’s nothing about my behavior that should lead anyone to conclude I want library vendors’ products and services for free.

What I am willing to do is stop paying. I’m willing to go without. And in so doing, I’m willing to take the money I’m spending on HarperCollins material and spend it instead on other publishers’ material. I’m not saving anything at all by not buying from HarperCollins. And I’m certainly not waiting around for any publishers to start giving away their work for free. I’m going to spend everything in my acquisitions budget every single year, and I’m going to do everything I can to increase that budget. What I’m not going to do is waste any of that budget on materials that don’t provide for intellectual freedom, that undermine fair use or the first sale doctrine. HarperCollins has more money to spend trying to figure out how its policies should work than I have, and it has more motivation to find an answer. HarperCollins has a lot more customers than I have vendors; even with the hundreds of libraries that are choosing not to buy HarperCollins materials, even with the tens of thousands of readers who have signed the Tell HarperCollins: Limited Checkouts on eBooks is Wrong for Libraries petition at change.org, HarperCollins still has thousands of potential library customers and billions of potential individual customers. HarperCollins employs people who can negotiate circles around me, and can bring in outside specialists lawyers or public relations firms just in case.

What libraries can do is choose not to dance.

In a Library Journal article by Michael Kelly about the HarperCollins change.org petition posted on May 5, Erin Crum, vice president for corporate communications was quoted as saying, “We invite librarians to continue to discuss their concerns with us, to actually use the model and to give us constructive feedback.” Assuming she is quoted correctly, and assuming she believes what she said, the point she’s missing is that libraries that are not buying from HarperCollins are using the model, just not in the way that HarperCollins would like. And we’re giving HarperCollins incredibly constructive, unambiguous feedback. We’re saying no, and we’re saying no very precisely, to a single, clearly identifiable factor. I wish everyone who chooses not to use the library where I work would give me such constructive feedback. About half the people who are eligible for a library card at Collingswood Public Library have an active, recently used card, but about half don’t. I wish there were a single thing I could do that would get them to sign up for library cards and start using them. If there were a change I could make, or a policy I could undo, and it would get them into the library—presumably back into the library, since most people have visited a library at least once in their lives—I’d like to know what that change is.

Sometimes when we choose not to dance we’re accused of wanting everything for free or of not using models. Other times we’re accused of being bad at arithmetic.

It Will Cost You More When You Factor in the Total Cost of Ownership

Like many people, I first encountered the concept of TCO, total cost of ownership, when I was evaluating the possibility of moving from proprietary, closed source software to open source alternatives. The idea behind TCO is to figure out which software option costs less after every factor has been accounted for, or at least guestimated. Karen Schneider is probably best known for expressing this as “free beer versus free kittens”, conveying the idea that some open source software is every bit as free (in terms of cost) as free closed source software (think Firefox or Chrome versus Internet Explorer or Safari), while other open source software could, potentially, cost more to operate and support than an expensive-to-purchase but fixed-cost-to-maintain closed source, propriety competitor.

The thing is, I have yet to meet a librarian who wasn’t aware that it generally costs a lot of money to operate and support open source library software like Evergreen or Koha or SOPAC. The libraries that initiated these projects and have underwritten their development were aware of these costs as were all the libraries that have hired developers, either on staff or as consultants, to support their operation. And the libraries that have contributed to the development of the Kuali/OLE are certainly aware that they’re undertaking a tremendously expensive open source project. Perhaps their decision is best summarized by the FAQ answer on the Evergreen website that discusses the reason the Georgia Public Library Service (GPLS) chose to write its own software for PINES rather than license software from an existing vendor: “GPLS decided that instead of pointing fingers at vendors or complaining about the limitations of legacy software, their developers would write the kind of system we want our users to experience.”

Ultimately, I think that’s what libraries care about. Not Total Cost. They care about Ownership. And that’s something most commercial software vendors won’t really sell you. If you want to own the code, you have to buy the company. If that’s your only alternative, generally it’s cheaper to write your own software.

So sometimes libraries just need control in order to ensure they provide library users with services that meet their immediate needs and also provide for their intellectual freedom. Other times libraries are willing to spend more now with the expectation they’ll realize cost savings long term. That seems to be the thinking behind many of the libraries who adopt open source software after some of the early development costs have been assumed by better funded libraries. It also seems to be the thinking behind Prince Edward Island University’s efforts to replace Web of Science with an open source alternative.

What Now?

Saying no is useful up to a point, though it’s hard to know what will happen with the HarperCollins boycott, in part because it seems to be unprecedented; I’m not aware of libraries’ having said no quite so publicly in the past, or of a situation in which so many libraries decided not to purchase products or services from a specific vendor. There are many possible outcomes, both immediate and long term. Libraries are testing their economic strength, as well as public sentiment. Whether we can support the pillars of intellectual freedom is an open question.

In addition to saying no, choosing a new partner can also be useful. We can even start from scratch by teaching a non-dancer how to dance, effectively creating a new dance partner where none existed before. The more efficient financial operations made possible by open source may make it the long term solution to many software needs, though it’s also possible that having only open source software to choose from would stifle innovation.

The equivalent for authors and publishers—the way libraries could have a more direct role in deciding which books are published and what restrictions accompany those books—is probably a variation on the Kickstarter or IndieGoGo paradigm; in its first two years of existence, Kickstarter has already generated nearly $3 million in pledges for books and other written works. Perhaps Gluejar, which focuses on publishing Creative Commons-licensed ebooks, will eventually fill that need, or perhaps it will be Unbound and its crowdfunded books by brand name authors. I see a lot of promise here, though I think it’s unlikely that we’ll get more and better books if this is the only way that books (or, perhaps more accurately, book-length works) are published.

We can also make our negotiations more public. Vendors know what all of their customers are paying for their products, but we often can’t or don’t share those prices with each other, nor do we share our experiences with the products themselves. In Sarah Houghton-Jan’s candid post about Freegal, she identifies three reasons for librarians’ silence:

1. As a profession, we’re generally nice people and don’t like to talk smack about anyone. This is generally a wonderful trait, but when we’re talking about allocating our scarce resources it can be extremely detrimental.
2. Librarians are afraid of repercussions at work, including being disciplined, yelled at, or just plain fired.
3. Librarians are afraid of the vendors, who they think might give them worse prices and support if they bad-mouth the product.

I think Sarah nails it. The one time I publicly documented my frustrating interactions with a vendor, I was told by the vendor that I should have understood that our negotiations were meant to be private. I’m also aware of one vendor whose reputation, both for preventing libraries from accessing their data and for aggressively intimidating librarians who complain about these policies, makes its product the one ILS that no library-based programmer I know wants to support. I brought this up at the Library Journal round table and mentioned the vendor by name, but it didn’t make it into final version of the story. I realize I may be contributing to the problem with my coyness, but all of my stories are second hand; the decision whether or not to share them is not and should not be mine. My guess is that they’ll come out sooner or later. And I think it won’t just be individuals sharing their vendor experiences and the details of their contracts, I think it will be entire libraries.

One of the most encouraging events I’ve seen recently is Cornell University Library’s announcement that it will no longer sign contracts with publishers that include confidentiality agreements. At least in the short term, Cornell is probably going to have to pay more for products and services if it follows through on its promise to deal openly with vendors, because vendors are either going to make Cornell pay for that privilege or they are going to refuse to deal with Cornell, meaning it will have a smaller group of vendors from which it can make purchases. And fewer suppliers means less competition, which generally means higher prices. What Cornell is doing will likely increase its total cost, perhaps for the next several years, but it will also increase its ownership of the bidding process, and not just its own, but every library’s. We’ll all have Cornell to use as a benchmark.

My hope is that other libraries will join Cornell. I believe it will happen. As librarians, we know how important it is for information to be available to those who need it.

Thanks to Kate Sheehan for reading an early draft of this article, and to my ItLwtLP colleagues, Hilary Davis and Eric Frierson, for helping me with its final version.

1. Using just people I’ve collaborated with on In the Library with the Lead Pipe as examples, some librarians who either don’t have library degrees, don’t work solely for libraries, or aren’t employed by libraries directly include Derik Badman, Casey Bisson, Clayton Copeland, Birkin James Diana, Ryan Eby, Clifford Lynch, Eli Neiburger, Carlos Ovalle, Jodi Schneider, Dan Scott, Ross Singer, Tim Spalding, Aaron Swartz. Cindy Welch, and Alex Wright. If we count cooperatives as “vendors” rather than “libraries,” that list also includes Sophie Brookover and Kate Sheehan.
2. Sorry. Everything I know about tango I learned from a pretty forgettable Sally Potter film and from an essay by pinboard creator, Maciej Ceglowski. I’m sure that anyone who knows anything at all about tango is aghast. My only defense: you should see the metaphors I rejected.
3. For more on vendor negotiations and pricing models, see “Fantasy Pricing—An Interview with Selden Lamoureux“

Derik Badman

Developer, Springshare

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Derik Badman. For a paying job I work as a web developer for Springshare, Inc (creator of LibGuides and LibAnswers). Most of my time is spent working on LibAnswers: adding features and occasionally fixing bugs. I also spend time working on a new product (as yet unannounced), and answering support questions from our customers.

In non-paying capacity, I make (drawrite) comics, often of an experimental nature, which get posted at my website, Madinkbeard.

What hardware are you using?

My main computer is a 22.5″ iMac with a 3.06 GHz processor and 8GB RAM, running OS 10.6.4. I use this most of the day, most every day for my programming, drawing, and other things like watching tv/movies. I also have an 12.5″ ASUS Eee PC laptop running Windows 7. I mainly use this for testing Windows issues (Internet Explorer) or for when I need to do some typing related work away from my desk.

My laptop use has cut down a lot since I got my Motorola Droid running Android, which I use far too much for email, texting, Twitter, RSS reading, managing my todo list, taking photos, and note taking.

I use a Wacom Intuos 3 tablet for making my comics, and I’ve got a Western Digital external hard drive for backups. For scanning (mostly) and printing (rarely), I’ve been really happy with the HP PSC 1510 All-in-One, which was cheap years ago and has held up really well.

And what software?

The software I really live in right now:

• Chrome for my regular internet browsing.
• Firefox for viewing and testing my development work (primarily because the Firebug Add-on is so useful for dealing with CSS and Javascript).
• TextMate for my actual coding.
• TweetDeck for Twitter and Facebook monitoring.
• Adium for instant messaging.
• Evernote (on my Mac and on my Droid) for notetaking and listmaking.
• Mac Mail for my work email.
• Adobe Creative Suite 5 (primarily Photoshop and InDesign) for making my comics and for various image-related work tasks (icons, logos, etc.)

If you count web applications:

• Remember the Milk for my todo list.
• Gmail for personal email.
• Google Reader for RSS feeds.
• Google Calendar for my schedule.
• Delicious for bookmarking.
• WordPress for blogging and posting my comics

A lot of these applications I use on all three of my devices, and often that multi-platform use is why I’ve chosen products.

What would be your dream setup?

Probably the only thing I could ask for is one of the Wacom Cintiqs, which is a very large tablet with a built-in screen. Otherwise, for now, I’m really happy with my setup, which admittedly is mostly all new in the past few months.

Paula Brehm-Heeger

Library Services Manager, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Paula Brehm-Heeger and I am the Central Region Library Services Manager for the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. I manage the direct public service departments at our large Main Library located in Downtown Cincinnati and also six of our 40 Branch locations. All six of the locations I oversee are located in urban areas. I’ve been working in libraries for more than two decades with a lot of that time dedicated to serving teenagers. I was the President of the American Library Service’s Young Adult Library Services Association in 2007-2008. My first book, Serving Urban Teens was published in 2008 by Libraries Unlimited.

What hardware are you using?

At work I use a standard desktop setup with a Pentium 4 processor.

At home I mainly use a Dell XPS laptop and sometimes sneak a few minutes on my husband’s laptop—also a Dell but an older model (Inspiron 6000). I use my husband’s laptop when I need to run numbers because he purchased a number pad to make calculating easier. I’m too lazy to actually buy one but always think it’s a great example of a simple hardware add-on that can make a huge difference in efficiency.

For my portable devices, I have a Blackberry Storm and my first generation 60GB iPod Classic. I’ll probably have to update the iPod soon but I really do like my Classic’s display so I haven’t been compelled to try anything new yet.

At home we recently updated our TV—finally abandoned our tube-TV in favor of a new Samsung flat screen! I also have three weather alert radios that I use in some capacity every day, including one that features a sensor to tell me the temperature on my front porch because I hate to be surprised about the weather.

And what software?

At work and on my home setup I use a Windows OS. I use Internet Explorer at work and Firefox at home.

I used standard Office products for writing my book—Microsoft 2003, and I worked with a freelance graphic designer to produce a few of the charts. The biggest challenge in writing the book was keeping things organized in my email and folders! I requested reproduction rights for a number of items and also did my own indexing.

The primary tools we have used in analyzing data are Microsoft Excel and SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). Greg Edwards (the Library Services Director at my Library) and I set up a logical data entry form in Excel which he then utilized for entering the data in SPSS. Our data analysis, like any good evaluation of data, depends heavily on constructing a logical way to compare the data. Excel and SPSS are just tools—figuring out what it is that you’re hoping to find out is the most important step. GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out)—even the best spreadsheet and data-mining software won’t help if you haven’t taken the time to logically think through what it is you’re comparing and how the data points relate to each other.

On my Blackberry my favorite apps are Google Maps, Weatherbug, Pandora, Facebook, and QuickPull. Pandora has replaced satellite radio for me in the car. I just plug the Blackberry into the auxiliary jack and select my station. QuickPull was an important find for me. A lot of times I concentrate on apps that make me happy and ignore things that keep my devices healthy and functional, so setting up a nightly schedule for rebooting was a big step. At my Library we now employ a Blackberry Enterprise server solution so I can review all my work-related email on my handheld, too. I wasn’t a big Facebook user until I started using the app on my Blackberry. Now it’s so simple and easy to check whenever/wherever that I check it a lot more, update my status, and send pictures regularly.

iTunes is software I use all the time. I’m addicted to downloading TV shows—especially those shows no one else I know is willing to watch with me. I watch them whenever I get a chance. This is especially great whenever I have to go anywhere on an airplane.

The other software that has changed my life is my Digital Video Recorder—does that count as software? I think it does. I love it and don’t know how I ever managed my TV life without it.

What would be your dream setup?

The Quantum computer described in The Traveler trilogy by John Twelve Hawks. How awesome would it be to have technology designed by beings from another realm? Though I’m guessing the tech support might be complicated. I also need to invest in my first ebook reader but haven’t committed to any on the market yet. The iPad seems impressive but is much more than an ebook reader, so maybe the Nook is the best option for my particular need. I’m planning to make a decision sometime before the Holiday season. Whatever I select, my ideal set up would allow for easy, simply downloading of ebooks and viewing them on a device that is lightweight with reader-friendly eink. I think even the highest-end ebook readers aren’t quite there on reproducing the eye-friendly feel of ink on paper. But it’s close.

Ellie Collier

Reference Librarian, Austin Community College

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a librarian at Austin Community College. My title is Reference Librarian/Assistant Professor (we have faculty status, I don’t teach any credit courses), but I also do instruction and collection development, am the subject liaison to a number of departments (psychology, radio-tv-film, and visual communications), and serve on library and college-wide committees. I’m also an editor and writer at In the Library with the Lead Pipe. I’ve recently started calling myself a technophile Luddite because while I geek out over tech in my personal life, much of my day is spent helping users who don’t own personal computers and are not comfortable with technology. I try really hard to be an advocate for those users when discussing new technologies and interfaces for the library.

Away from work I’m an active board and card gamer, and a less active video gamer, crafter, and cook.

What hardware are you using?

At work I mostly use what they give me. Right now that’s a Dell Optiplex 780 (2.93 GHz processor, 4 GB RAM, 150 GB Hard drive—of which 119 GB is free right now) and a fairly nice sized flat panel monitor. I have the standard mouse, keyboard, and speakers for peripherals, along with personal earbuds that I brought in to spare my office mate from whatever I’m listening to. We’re also given a thumb drive which I pretty much only use to transfer pictures to a laptop that has an SD card reader so I can put them on the SD card for our large display TV, or to take documents to a computer that has access to a color printer. Each campus has a digital camera, but I don’t use them that much. I did request and receive a Logitech webcam and a Blue Snowball microphone which I use for creating tutorials. I used to have a printer that I shared with my office mate, but it’s been out for repairs for months, so I share the main one with the whole office, and I use the student printers as well.

At home I have a 2005 Dell that was good for gaming when I bought it, but has been reinitialized and barely sees use anymore. A cat knocked the speakers onto the CPU and shorted it out. I managed to get most of the drivers reinstalled, but the sound card doesn’t work anymore and I’ve been too lazy to bother trying to fix it.

My main computer is my little netbook, an Asus Eee PC 1000HE. And more and more, my Motorola Droid. I have an external CD/DVD burner that I almost never use and an external hard drive (one of those cute Passport ones) that I thankfully used to backup my desktop before the cat attacked it. I also have one of those low end all-in-one scanner/printers.

I own a hand-me-down medium sized TV that I use to watch David Attenborough documentaries and play my GameCube (I’m currently loving Baten Kaitos). I have accidental cable because they couldn’t figure out how to shut it off when they set up my internet (through a smaller local company), but I don’t have that hooked up. I use a wireless router for my netbook and I have the cheapest possible internet, so between the dinkier computer and the slow internet I pretty much never watch any internet videos at my apartment. I save those up to watch at my partner’s place on his big screen TV that he has hooked up to his computer or watch them on my Droid.

And what software?

I am incredibly lucky to have full admin rights over my work computer. We’re running Windows 7. They’re actually pretty good about getting us software if we ask for it, but I’m more an instant gratification person, so I tend to just download something free at my moment of need. I use GIMP and sometimes just Paint for my photo manipulation. I have NVU for the rare times I need to do more with HTML than I want to mess with in Notepad. Foxit for editing PDFs. FireShot and Jing for screen captures. Snaplinks (now Multi Links) is my favorite Firefox add-on ever (you click and drag over a bunch of links on a page and it opens all of them in new tabs). Chrome and Firefox for browsing. Delicious for bookmarking items for the staff development committee. I use WordPress for my work blogs and we have an internal wiki run by eTouch SamePage. We also use LibGuides, LivePerson (for chat) and iii/Millennium. But honestly, most of my day-to-day tasks are accomplished in my browser (GDocs, showing students library resources, my email—which I run through Gmail) or in Excel.

The dying desktop has OpenOffice because I couldn’t be bothered to dig out my MS Office installation disc the last time I needed to open a document. The Eee PC has whichever version of Windows and Office it came with. I use Picasa for pictures, Pandora for music, iTunes for podcasts, Firefox for browsing, GChat for talking to my brother, Gmail for email, GBookmarks for bookmarking, GDocs for most of my word processing, GReader for blogs. Sensing a theme?

On my Droid I have Google Sky which is super awesome and I pull it out all the time even though it can be a little sad with all the light pollution in big cities, but it’s always good for figuring out whether that really bright thing is a star or a planet (tip: it’s usually a planet). I used to always carry a paper day planner, but I think I’ve begrudgingly made the switch to filling those roles with GCal and GTasks. I use GTasks for my grocery list, too. Oh, and GVoice for transcribing my voicemail. It’s hilariously terrible, but often close enough to get the idea.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m really pretty pleased with my current situation. I wouldn’t turn down a killer gaming computer, but I wouldn’t use it enough to justify owning it either. What I’d really love is a dedicated, built-in kitchen computer for cooking—with one of those plastic, gel covers over the keyboard so I can wash it off afterwards. Or maybe just a touch screen. And that’s probably totally attainable with current technology and will probably be within what I’m actually willing to pay for something like that within a few years.

Clayton Copeland

LIS Doctoral Candidate, University of South Carolina

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hi, Everyone! I’m Clayton Copeland, and I am currently a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina. Go Gamecocks! I’m a true “Carolina Girl,” and in more ways than one! In addition to being a student with the University and earning a Master’s degree in library and information science here, I was born and raised in the Palmetto State.

Libraries are the places of my earliest and happiest memories. The library was such a peaceful, tranquil place to me, a place where happy days were made happier and challenging days easier. No matter the burdens of my heart, somehow opening the library door, finding just the right book, and cuddling in a soft comfy chair made everything seem OK again. All of my worries seemed to be carried away by the gentle rustling of turning pages. My book journeys allowed me to discover both far and distant places and places within myself. Books gave me the gifts of learning and self acceptance. I loved the library so much that I became a “mini-me librarian” in second grade, when my school librarian made all my dreams came true and asked me to be her “assistant.” I’ve worked in libraries in one capacity or another since, and I have loved every minute of it. To me, there is no greater privilege than putting a book in a child’s hand or helping any library user find the information he or she is seeking.

Of late, my day-to-day work involves my dissertation study, Equity of Access to Information: A Comparative Exploration of Library Accessibility and Information Access from Differently-Able Patrons’ Perspectives. The study explores the lived experiences of library patrons whom society labels as “disabled,” and seeks to understand the extent to which our libraries are meeting their information needs and are providing them with equal access to information.

What hardware are you using?

A Dell Latitude D 620, with 2.16 GHz and 2 GB Ram. The computer travels well and is also flexible in its capabilities and functions. After long days of work, I connect to a 20 inch LCD monitor and standard size keyboard for better visibility and greater ease with typing. In a recent pursuit to find a small, lightweight computer for easier transport and travel to and from professional conferences, I purchased a Samsung netbook. I use a walker for ambulatory purposes, so space for carrying books and everything that must travel with me on the road and day-to-day is at a real premium. The small size and lower weight of the netbook offer a reliable and portable alternative to the more substantial laptop.

And what software?

Windows XP is the university-supported operating system at the moment. My professional day would not be complete without numerous interactions with the Microsoft Office Suite, which I use for writing and preparing course lectures for the courses I am teaching. I also rely heavily on Adobe Acrobat for creating PDF files as well as Dragon Naturally Speaking Version 10, a voice recognition program I use for recording notes, writing papers, and transcribing interviews with dissertation study participants. Of course, Google Calendar and Gmail are absolute musts when it comes to staying organized and in touch with colleagues, family, and friends.

What would be your dream setup?

Opportunities to interact with technologies personally as well as opportunities to learn from students, colleagues, and the people I am getting to know via my dissertation research increasingly make me aware of an ever-growing need for affordable, reliable, responsive, and Universally Accessible technologies. Technology has incredible potential. My greatest hope and “dream” is for technologies to help their users overcome barriers—whether physical, economic, social, or otherwise—that traditionally could prevent or inhibit access to information. Although so many facets of accessibility and technology have been (and are being) addressed, I am becoming more and more aware of our need to improve their accessibility; without it, the tools we intended to be facilitators of inclusion become another cause of exclusion.

Birkin James Diana

Programmer, Brown University Library

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Birkin James Diana. I’m a programmer for the Brown University Library. My work there focuses on enhancing our digital-repository, developing APIs and services based on lightweight SOA principles, enabling disparate systems to work together, and developing cool desktop and mobile-friendly services for users.

What hardware are you using?

I am one with an early 2010 13″ MacBookPro laptop. An Apple laptop has been my primary machine since the black and white 1991 PowerBook 170. They work for me. My previous laptop had a beautiful 15″ screen but I regularly missed the portability of a beloved 12″ PowerBook G4 I had around 2004. When this beautiful 13″ model became available, I took the leap, and have been thoroughly happy with it. Over the past few months I’ve experimented with an external display at work. A bluetooth Kensington Slimblade mouse drives the laptop. I also use an iPhone 3GS extensively, and have an iPad I bought largely as an experiment to monitor the UI creativity explosion I knew it would foster, and to understand first-hand what space it can occupy between a pod/phone and laptop. At home our numerous Macs are connected by and backed up to an Apple Time Capsule base-station.

And what software?

TextMate is my favored programming tool for Python and Django, my favored language and framework (the Django documentation oozes a refreshing depth of thoughtfulness). Initially trained in Java, around 2005 I came to love Eclipse and its plugins, and periodically fire it up and look at the latest version of Pydev (for Python development), but I always come back to TextMate. It’s not as full-featured as some other editors, but its clean interface and lightweight speedy feel are a pleasure.

I tend these days to have Chrome open to University email, calendar, and wiki tabs, Firefox open with the Web Developer Plugin and Firebug for examining webpages, and Safari for other browsing. I also always have open BBEdit, Apple Mail (which integrates fairly well with the University’s switch from Outlook to Gmail), Transmit for FTP, Apple’s Terminal, Versions for subversion work, and Clockwork, an old 2006 shareware app I use as a timer for focused work-bursts. Daily, I use the iPhone app ToDo which, with some angst, has replaced the wonderful LifeBalance as my preferred organizer. Lastly, in the context of API and complex web-communication analysis, Wireshark is an impressive, powerful tool I regularly dust off.

What would be your dream setup?

To a large extent I have it, in terms of hardware and software. That’s a nice thing about programming: it doesn’t require a huge tool investment, even for those drawn to high-quality well-designed tools. My move toward the dream setup has to do more with ‘practice’ and ‘environment’. Regarding practice, I periodically play with that balance between using known, comfortable tools and systems, and experimenting with possibly better ones (example: trying distributed version control). So an ideal setup would inherently be a bit fluid. Regarding environment, a dream setup would somehow allow for others to know when I need to be left alone to concentrate, and when I am / will be approachable for the good collaboration that our team values. No easy solution to that. But that’s why a single-screen portable laptop setup remains so appealing. I can just pick up and go find a quiet place to concentrate and work for a while if unable to do so in my normal workspace. (Of course, this does bring up the hardware desire for much, much faster wireless-speeds.) This is a great question; I see a group brainstorming meeting in my team’s future!

Emily Drabinski

Instruction Librarian, Long Island University, Brooklyn

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Emily Drabinski, an instruction librarian at Long Island University, Brooklyn (go Blackbirds!). I come from a failed first try at being a writer and editor, two things I do lots of as a librarian. I edit a book series for Rory Litwin’s Library Juice Press about gender and sexuality in librarianship, work on a journal called Radical Teacher, and saw my first edited book, Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods (with Maria T. Accardi and Alana Kumbier) come out last spring. I still daydream about running away to a tiny house on top of a mountain overlooking an ocean and writing the most beautiful book ever written ever in the whole wide world. Maybe if I get tenure.

What hardware are you using?

I walked to a friend’s house the other day with nothing but my pockets, and realized I was carrying almost $800 in gadgets. And I think of myself as a paper-and-pencil kind of person! I use a 13-inch white MacBook at home, an Dell OptiPlex desktop that takes up my entire desk top in the office, a Motorola Cliq phone that I wish had the latest Android update, a second-generation Kindle, and an 8GB fifth-generation iPod Nano. (Those last three are my New Yorker commute trifecta. They’re my car.) Love my gadgets, but I still buy two thirds of my books in print, use my Kindle primarily to pay for the newspaper again, and track my reading using an old card catalog drawer. I love living in the future, but the past is relentless. So far, there seems to be room in the present for both.

And what software?

I live in Google and Google lives in me, even though I know they’re tracking me and selling me and locking me in. Mail, Talk, Voice, Calendar, Reader, Docs (love Google forms!), Scholar, Groups, Books, I’m a fan of it all. Dropbox has been a godsend for manuscript-length files. I backup on a La Cie drive, but everything goes into Dropbox, too. And I love the social web, Twitter and Facebook, and WordPress for blogging, mostly about my lunch.

What would be your dream setup?

I’d love a featherweight laptop with a battery I could recharge in the sun, something I could take from home to work to play and back without even thinking about the weight. My mobile device works great for most things I do, but I still want a computer I can sit down and type on with a nice big screen. And I know this is unpopular, but if Google could insert a Firefox browser with all my tabs open just behind my eyeballs, I’d be fine with that too.

Ryan Eby

Sysadmin and Developer, Ann Arbor District Library

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a sysadmin and developer at Ann Arbor District Library. I take care of the network administration, system administration, and helping the development team when able with the website and other software development projects. My day-to-day responsibilities and projects vary considerably and it’s difficult to generalize with everything we do.

You can find some of the software we’ve released on the Ann Arbor District Library page at GitHub.

What hardware are you using?

I use pretty much all Apple hardware. I have a Mac Mini running OS X Server as the occasional desktop, though I tend to be mobile, and use a MacBook Pro 17″ 2.5 GHz intel Duo with 4 GB RAM for most of my work. An iPhone 3GS and iPad complete my mobile setup. With fixing things constantly as part of my job, I want something that just works for my personal setup and I’ve had good luck with this arrangements. OS X gives me enough Unix underpinnings to let me do everything I need.

For general hardware we tend to be an HP shop with numerous DL360‘s with mix of dual and quad core Xeons for various tasks and various ranges of HP switches.

The public computers are all HP thin clients, and staff thin clients are being migrated to the same hardware. You can read more about the hardware on Ann Arbor District Library developer blog; a post about our software is forthcoming.

Connection is fiber to all of our branches except one, which has a T1 due to location.

I have no real hardware at home as I do mostly work related things. The exception is airport expresses, which are scattered around the house for Airtunes.

And what software?

OSX Snow Leopard with some common apps installed:

• Things: task and project management, Dropbox synced
• 1Password: password management, Dropbox synced
• Dropbox: best thing out there
• Chrome for most browsing with Firefox installed for when I need Firebug
• Coda for coding, and TextMate for when I need more power
• Pixelmator for general image manipulation
• Git/GitHub for version control
• Ruby and Capistrano (parallel SSH commands) for various sysadmin tasks

The iPhone/iPad have SSH and RDP clients along with Instapaper, Stanza, Things, 1Password, Dropbox, and a couple of Dropbox-powered notes apps.

We’re mostly an open-source shop. Our public computers are thin clients that run a simple Debian installation. They connect to Windows terminal servers, giving patrons a Windows environment while retaining the back-end manageability of Linux. The thin clients were rather cheap, and we already had a Citrix-based server farm. Since we’re running it as a web-based application, we could drop the Citrix licensing, so costs are low. Running it as a Linux/Web-app combination has also allowed the public computers to become a rapid development platform where changes can be rolled out quickly, both to the OS and for other management needs. We plan to open source the software once our current round of testing is finished.

Most of the other servers run Gentoo with software installations based on the tasks we need to accomplish. Most of our development is done in Drupal, so servers tend to run Apache, MySQL, and PHP. We also have Nginx, CouchDB, Redis, and Ruby running for a few applications.

The Windows terminal servers are virtual.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m pretty happy with the current setup: having pretty much all Linux clients allows administration and debugging to be fairly straightforward. Dropping Windows would be nice, but is probably far in the future given the ongoing demand for Microsoft Office.

Ahniwa Ferrari

Library Development Project Manager, Washington State Library

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a nerd (and incidentally a librarian) who tries his best to find ways to push reference services forward, on a grand scale, for libraries in Washington State. I’m a project manager in Library Development at the Washington State Library, and I spend most of my time coordinating our statewide reference cooperative, Ask-WA. With over 65 library systems participating in this project, this means that I do a lot of scheduling and quality control work, provide a lot of reference and technology training, arrange continuing education opportunities for librarians throughout the state, and generally try and get the word out to the public that reference librarians are awesome.

I also coordinate our statewide database trials, assist with our statewide downloadable audiobooks project, review grant proposals for other projects, act as editor-in-chief for the official agency blog, and am the chief architect and curator of our Hard Times Resource Guide.

What hardware are you using?

I use what the State gives me, which works fine for my purposes.

It’s an HP desktop machine, runs Windows XP Pro, and packs a dual-core 3 GHz processor and 3.5 GB RAM. My favorite thing about it is the added NVIDIA Quadro NVS 290 video card, which supports my dual HP L1950 LCD monitors (in a side-by-side configuration). They could take away everything else, but I’d go nuts of I had to work on a single monitor again.

Peripheral to the desktop I have a Logitech Webcam Pro 9000 that I use for web- and video-conferencing, along with a Plantronics .Audio 400 DSP headset. I have an i-rocks IR-4610 USB 2.0 4-Ports hub that I purchased personally and brought from home (I have much more use for it at work), into which I regularly plug:

• My iPod Touch (2nd generation, 8GB), which I use to keep track of apps for libraries, and which was quite helpful in designing my own app, Ask-WA, which recently launched for both iPhone and Android platforms.
• My MotoZine ZN5 mobile phone, which I don’t actually like to use as a phone, but which I use quite frequently as a camera when I’m out visiting libraries.
• My SanDisk Sansa Fuze MP3 player (8GB), which I decided to purchase for myself after a great deal of research in light of our downloadable audiobooks project, and which I mainly use to listen to said downloadable audiobooks in my car during my commute.
• My SanDisk Cruzer Titanium flash drive (4GB), which wouldn’t be noteworthy except that a. it’s made out of titanium, which is automatically rad, and b. it’s a rugged beast that has lasted on my keychain for over three years now and has survived regular use.

When I’m on the road I have a netbook that I use for work, which is an HP Mini 2140 (the 1366×768 resolution version), and which sports an Intel Atom 1.60 GHz processor and 2 GB of RAM, and which also runs Windows XP Pro. I have the larger, 6-cell battery, which lets me (if I shut off Wi-Fi) run for about 7 hours at a conference without having to plug-in. It also has a built-in VGA webcam which I use occasionally to record presentations at conferences.

At home I run a three-year-old desktop that I assembled inside a quiet Antec P180B case with hand-picked components. It’s a little worse-for-wear for my having dropped it off the bed, but it still does what I need it to do.

And what software?

Ask-WA runs on OCLC’s QuestionPoint software, so I get to use that a lot, and after 2+ years, I’m happy to say that I almost have it figured out.

I’ve crowd-sourced some of the scheduling aspects of Ask-WA so that now libraries can manipulate their own schedules using Google Calendar, which saves me a lot of time. I like a lot of other Google applications as well, and regularly use Google Reader, Google Voice, and Gmail, for their respective functions.

I’m a Firefox user and devotee, and have a number of add-ons now that I couldn’t imagine living without. Among others, I regularly use Pixlr Grabber to swipe screenshots for presentation slides, and I use Shareaholic about a dozen times a day to push library-related news items (and other items of interest) to my Tumblr account, which in turn pushes out to my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

At work I use a lot of Microsoft Office products: Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, all 2007. Nothing too exciting there.

I use Camtasia Studio 6 for creating screencasts and training videos, which I switched to after using Jing for a time and finding it too limited.

I like free software, including 7-Zip for zipping and unzipping files, CutePDF so that I can print anything into a PDF file, TagScanner for mucking with MP3 filenames and tags (useful for audiobooks), and Pidgin for the occasional informal work-related chat.

I use Elluminate for web-conferencing and webinars, including my own monthly webinar series for reference librarians, Ref22. Elluminate does more than the software we use to have (Wimba), but I haven’t decided if I really approve of it or not, yet.

What would be your dream setup?

In terms of a desktop system, I actually think I could use two more monitors. I think that four monitors total in a 2×2 setup would be pretty awesome. Aside from screen real estate, so long as the computer is fairly responsive and I don’t spend too much time waiting, I’m pretty easy. That said, I’d still like to bump up to Windows 7, and I wish that Outlook worked better than it does.

What I would really love is a mobile-sized device that dual-boots as an iPhone and Android device (maybe even throw Windows 7 Mobile in there), with at least 64GB of space, with at least a forward-facing camera that takes good quality photos and video, with an integrated microphone and speaker, and that could connect via Wi-Fi and all mobile data networks. This magical device would also have a battery capable of eight hours of continuous use, and would allow folder-level file management on a PC connected through a simple USB cord.

I really want the magical mobile device that works as a camera (photo and video), MP3-player, cell phone, mobile gaming, and all-purpose work device, and I want it to be open and I don’t want to pay exorbitant monthly fees to be able to use it. And I’d really rather it wasn’t an Apple device. Is that too much to ask?

Alison Hicks

Romance Language Librarian, University of Colorado, Boulder

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m a modern language librarian who researches technology and foreign language librarianship. While language learning is more and more driven by technology, language librarians aren’t exactly known for their flashy tech expertise. My aim is to help spread technology skills and enthusiasm throughout language librarianship and departments in order to push the language/literature/information/technology frontier. To this end, I’m active in SALALM, the Seminar for the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (¡Vamos SALALM!) where I write a Web 2.0 column for the newsletter/blog, set up a mentor social network, and head SALALM’s first e-strategy committee.

My work with my departments and SALALM is mostly informed by the more general reference and instruction technology stuff, such as usability testing, widgets, QR codes, and mobile learning. I’ve kind of muscled my way in on it but I love exploring how new technologies can (or cannot) be adapted for research or teaching purposes.

I’m currently the Romance Language Librarian at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I serve as the bibliographer for French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Comparative Literature.

What hardware are you using?

This section is going to be embarrassingly short; pretty much my only gadget is my 13″ Mac Book, which replaced my beloved G4 Powerbook earlier this year. Yep, that’s right: no cell phone, no TV, no Wii, no nothing… What can I say?! My Scottish genes just can’t bring themselves to shell out that much for a smartphone, although I have to say that when I replaced my Mac earlier this year I did receive a free iPod Touch and I’m getting pretty addicted to the small screen. My uncle also once gave me a first generation Sony e-reader which I used fairly regularly, but not enough to replace it when it died. Though I do use my computer to excess, so I guess that makes up for the lack of other hardware.

And what software?

I moved to the US in 2005 to do my MSIS with the impression that Americans learned to code in the cradle. I soon realized I was wrong, but this didn’t stop me from taking all the technology courses I could find. And this probably helped me get my first job at LANIC, a Latin American website where we used Terminal. I still use Terminal today, largely for my husband’s retro webpage, but it’s more likely that I’ll be using TextEdit, Text Wrangler, and Fetch at home, and Dreamweaver at work.

Mostly I work in a pretty standard Firefox enabled cloud though. I used Bloglines for five years for RSS and since the sad news of its demise, I’m looking for a replacement. Yahoo Pipes for fancier RSS, Google Alerts for, well, web alerts, Jing for screencasting, WordPress for blogs, Flickr for photos, and Delicious for personal and subject guide bookmarks.

For collection development activities, I use a lot of targeted RSS fed through Yahoo Pipes. Instruction is when Jing and Sporcle (a quizzing software) come to the fore. I also helped implement Libraryh3lp for IM and text messaging reference, and Jing for IM videos. My latest reference project involves QR codes, and I use Microsoft’s Tag program for this.

Most of my collaboration with colleagues happens through Google Docs. I’m a new convert to Google Docs: I resisted the Google siren call for years because I was worried about privacy issues, but Zoho downtime finally made me change over and now I can’t go back. I use Ning for the social network that I built for SALALM, and Twitter for other professional development activities. I withstood Twitter for ages too, but I found that having to consolidate and condense my thoughts really helped my learning process.

Nothing very unusual on my Touch (Stanza for ebooks, MetrO for public transport, Pandora for music, The Guardian for news), except Convert Everything, a conversion app. It’s taken me five years to manage to translate feet and inches and I’m pretty sure that I’m never going to understand fluid ounces.

What would be your dream setup?

That we move beyond dismissing Web 2.0 as just a technology. Web 2.0 isn’t a thing, a tool or a trend; by its very uncontrolled, decentralized, and conversation-enabling nature it has engendered enormous sociological and pedagogical change. By continuing to look at Web 2.0 as just a trendy tool, we fail to understand its true potential and we fail to support the changing information paradigms. I love what I do but I think there’s a lot more room for truly enlightened discussion and reinvention in the research world.

My second greatest dream is that there is universal Wi-Fi. Enough of the spotty, slow connections, the extortionate costs, and that frustrated, useless feeling when you’re out and can’t look something up. Yay Finland for making broadband a legal right; I hope other countries are equally inspired.

Thirdly, and slightly less grandly, that every page that I want to follow has an RSS or a Twitter feed. If a page doesn’t have a feed then I’m pretty much never going back—it’s very frustrating. Subscribing to individual RSS feeds may be a little old school now, but while Techmeme and other aggregators filter a lot of the noise, Jaron Lanier has inspired me to try and avoid being “trapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts.” So RSS, and increasingly Twitter, is still my number one choice for a web desert island. All that news! That I want to read! Just waiting for me!

And lastly, I’d love a Guardian newspaper quick crossword app. I can’t do US crosswords (too many baseball players as clues), but a non cryptic quick crossword app would make my day.

Anna Johnson

Library Instruction Coordinator, Mt Hood Community College

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Anna Johnson and I coordinate the library instruction program at Mt Hood Community College. I schedule librarian-led research skills instruction in about 200 different classes every year, in a wide variety of subject areas (even Math!). I teach about half of these library instruction classes, and I also teach several one-credit courses, like “College Success” for new students and “Teaching at the Community College” for fellow (and future) educators. My job is completely different every day and I absolutely love it.

What hardware are you using?

At work I use a college-issued Dell setup with Windows 7 (64-bit) and a 17-inch monitor. I had a second monitor until a few weeks ago when I realized I care more about wooden desktop real estate than digital desktop real estate. Our library’s tech guy bet me a Dr Pepper that I’d ask for that other monitor back by December, but I’m happy to have it gone. So far.

Thanks to a decade-old wrist injury, I use a Natural Ergonomic Keyboard and a Natural Wireless Laser Mouse (both from Microsoft). I love this weirdo ergo equipment but it renders my computer pretty useless to anyone else who tries to use it, especially since all the letters on the left side of the keyboard’s split have somehow wiped off.

The other hardware on my work desk is an iHome, for the rare days when I’m in my office long enough to listen to my iPod, which is a 5th generation (video) model, 4 years old and still going strong. I have an ancient cell phone, so old it still flips closed, on purpose—if I had a smart phone I’d be an even bigger slave to email than I already am.

At home I have an Acer Aspire One netbook. I love it for three big reasons: it actually fits on airplane seat-back trays, it’s perfect for TV watching on Hulu and Netflix, and it doesn’t get in my way when I hook it up to a projector for presentations.

And what software?

If circa 1990s graphic designer me was reading this, she’d be so disappointed to know that I spend 90% of my computing time using Microsoft Office programs, but most of my work these days can’t happen without Word, Excel, and (especially) Outlook. I quite like the Xobni add-on for searching in Outlook, and it tells me fun facts like that I send way too many emails.

Nearly all of my work involves collaboration, so I give folks lots of ways to chat with me. Between Outlook, Gmail, Meebo, and Windows Live Messenger, I’m constantly getting four different pop-up notifications in my system tray.

This year I’ve been trying to better integrate library resources into the college’s online classes in Blackboard, so the Adobe CS5 suite is the newest addition to my software toolbox, especially Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Captivate. Alongside these I use lots of “helper” applications, like Audacity, and I’m a big fan of Levelator for cleaning up uneven audio files. I can’t live without Adobe Acrobat, and never post documents online without first converting them to PDFs.

iTunes is almost always running whenever I’m at the computer. At work I stream WERS, a great radio station out of Emerson College in Boston, and at home I dive into my 560 gigs of music on my Buffalo TeraStation external hard drive.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m still chained at the hip to my flash drive so I’m trying to decide if I should get on the cloud computing bandwagon or if I just want a powerful laptop that I can take between home and work. I have high hopes for a one-computer future for myself. I’ll be a happy early adopter guinea pig if and when my college starts supporting laptops instead for desktops for our faculty office computers.

Lynda Kellam

Data Services and Government Information Librarian, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Lynda, the Data Services and Government Information Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I do numbers and track down the government stuff. I also help train our reference interns who are LIS graduate students.

What hardware are you using?

At home I have a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with a 20-inch screen. I am also a bit of a gadget collector, so I have an Acer netbook, an 6 six-year old Dell Inspiron laptop (mostly for running Civilization III), a 64GB Wi-Fi iPad, a 30GB 5th generation iPod, a 1GB pink iPod shuffle, a 16GB 4th generation Touch, and an HTC Hero phone with the Android platform. I really need to sell some of these! The main things I use now are the iMac, iPad, Touch, and the phone.

My work computer is a 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Dell Latitude laptop hooked up to another big as an elephant screen. I also have some hand-me-down equipment to use for scanning and other projects. The laptop has been a great tool; I wouldn’t be able to do my job well without it because I need the mobility. On a given week I’m rarely in my office for long.

And what software?

Day and night I use mostly Firefox. It is the first program I start up when I get up in the morning and when I get to work, especially now that we have switched over to Google Apps for Education. I tried using Google Chrome on my iMac but it didn’t have my passwords so I lazily switched back. Firefox’s homepage goes to my work and personal gmail accounts, the library homepage, our library chat (Libraryh3lp), and my personal chat (Meebo). After logging into those I usually check the Echofon Firefox add-on Twitter feed.

During my typical workday I’m switching between Google Documents, for things I’m sharing, Microsoft Word, for big writing projects, and Evernote, for pretty much everything else. I’m currently finishing up a book project so I have spent most of my time in Microsoft Word this month. I regularly use SPSS, a statistical software, for data work. I have SAS training, but have few requests for it. And for some reason, I end up using Adobe Photoshop quite a bit. I know it better than any other editing program so I just default to it, I guess. We aren’t allowed administrative rights to our computers, which means I don’t get to experiment much with software on the Inspiron. I have to save the experimentation for the Acer or my iMac.

On my iMac I use primarily Evernote, Pages, Skitch, TweetDeck and Cultured Code’s Things. I would love to have Skitch at work because you can do photo editing in a fraction of the time it takes me in Photoshop. It is a super program! I am an Evernote junkie, too. Everything I need is in there and I can access it on my gaggle of gadgets. I’ve gone Pro because I use it for so many work projects. I’m a recent convert to Things. I’ve used Remember the Milk for a couple of years, but it can be so complex that I always get confused and abandon it. I now basically use RTM for my grocery list. Things, on the other hand, has a simple interface that is easy to use, and I have access to it on the iPad or iTouch.

What would be your dream setup?

I think for work I am finally reaching that point. We switched to Google Apps, LibGuides and Libraryh3lp this year, which means that I can answer student questions, update my library course guides and help out on chat from anywhere. As a reference and instruction librarian I shouldn’t be tied down to an office space; I should be able to roam and still have access to my work.

The only thing I would change is that I would love to have a Mac Pro for a second work computer for the Mac-specific software like Skitch and Things and because I prefer the OS. I bring my iPad to work regularly, which is a good substitute. I have remote office hours in a dormitory, and I’ve used it several times there. The library website and databases display pretty well. I do wish it ran Flash because then it would be the perfect little remote reference machine.

I’m pretty happy with my current home set-up. Out of all of the gadgets I’ve bought my iMac was one of the wisest. It does everything I need.

Bohyun Kim

Digital Access Librarian, Florida International University Medical Library

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Bohyun Kim (Twitter: @bohyunkim) and I design web sites, create databases, manage electronic resources, and plan and manage all aspects of technology (hardware, software, and services) at my library. I also write grant proposals and work as the project manager for technology-related grant projects. I am the Digital Access Librarian and one of the library’s four founding librarians of Florida International University (FIU) Medical Library in Miami, FL., which opened in the fall of 2009.

What hardware are you using?

At work, I have a Dell PC with Intel Core 2 Duo (2.4 GHz), 3.35 GB RAM, and a 20″ monitor and a Mac Mini with Intel Core 2 Duo (2 GHz), 2 GB RAM, and a 19″ monitor. I use a Gefen DVI switcher to connect the PC and the Mac Mini with one keyboard and other USB devices.

At home, I have a 19″ iMac with Intel Core Duo (2 GHz) with 2 GB RAM and a 17″ MacBook Pro with Intel Core 2 Duo (2.33 GHz) with 2 GB RAM. I also have a Samsung N120 netbook (Intel Atom 1.6 GHz and 1 GB RAM) and I own an iPhone 4, which I use every day, and an iPad that I use mostly for PDF reading. I use an Evoluent Vertical mouse at both work and home.

And what software?

I mostly work in Adobe Dreamweaver and Photoshop. The text editors I use for scripting are Notepad++ (Windows) and TextWrangler (Mac), both of which are free. My favorite SFTP programs are WinSCP (Windows) and Cyberduck (Mac). I have been quite tempted to purchase TextMate and Transmit for a while. So I may purchase those sooner or later. I rely on XAMPP and MAMP for testing server-side scripts on my local machine. Firebug and Colorzilla are the two Firefox extensions that I most frequently use. I also occasionally use Live HTTP Headers (Firefox extension) to troubleshoot access issues with e-resources. I heavily use Firefox for web design and development work, but for general web browsing I prefer Chrome for its speed. I heavily use iPhone simulator for mobile web app development. For creating instructional materials, I use Jing, FireShot (Firefox extension for Windows), Screenjelly, Camtasia, Audacity, and GarageBand for screen capture, screencasting, and video and audio editing. I use Dropbox on all my computers including my mobile devices.

The apps that I most frequently use aside from Mail, Calendar, and iPod are Dropbox, Good Reader, and iAnnotate on my iPad and Twitter, PS (Photoshop) Express, Podcaster, Facebook, Audiobooks, TWC (The Weather Channel), and Stanza, and Dropbox on my iPhone 4. I love playing with note apps although I am a terrible note taker. Among many note apps, I love Push+Pop for its extremely simple interface. I also have several games on my iPhone, and my recent favorite is SuperQuadra and Frict. I have been trying to revive my long-lost doodling ability after listening to the inspiring talk about Doodle Revolution by Sunni Brown at the Big Web Show and TED. But so far, I haven’t gotten much beyond purchasing the Brushes app and drawing a few palm trees and dogs!

What would be your dream setup?

As far as available hardware goes, I would like a MacBook Air with a 27″ Cinema Display and a Mac Mini on the side with the fastest processor and the largest RAM possible.

For things that do not exist yet, I want a foldable and rollable paper-thin touch-screen computer that can be charged wirelessly with the projection keyboard feature.

Emily Lloyd

Associate Librarian, Eden Prairie Library

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Emily Lloyd, an Associate Librarian with a large public library system, a mom to a teen and a tween, and the author of Shelf Check, a librar* comic and/or blog. Some of my interests right now include the idea of spontaneous library programming and librarians as Lifehackers for their communities, as well as the possibility of libraries offering library-published original or curated free ebooks to members. Why limit our ebook offerings to our Overdrive collections when e-publishing is so easy and free? We could partner with local historical societies for an e-volume of local lore, or publish a collection of our staff’s favorite public domain stories, or an anthology of poems or humorous essays by staff or teens from our teen advisory groups, etc.

What hardware are you using?

I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop. I’ve had it about two years, and it’s my first new, not hand-me-down laptop, a gift from my Mom. It’s fine, but could be faster.

Since mid-August, I’ve had a Wi-Fi-only Barnes & Noble Nook. I use it for library books, the occasional purchase (I was able to download Mockingjay at 11:00 p.m. when it was released at midnight EST! [I'm in Central]), and (most heavily) with Instapaper for reading longer articles and blog posts. Outside of the slow start-up time, I think it’s great, and really like the way it feels in my hands.

I don’t have a smart phone yet, but I bought a 3rd-gen iPod Touch last Spring so I wouldn’t feel completely out of the loop when it comes to trying out apps (backfire note: I still feel out of the loop, since many of the apps I’m most interested in require a camera that the Touch doesn’t have). I used the Touch as an ereader before I got the Nook, and continue to use it for free books from FeedBooks via Stanza.

And what software?

Google Docs. iTunes. Skype. There isn’t much I don’t do online or in-browser. Blogger, Google Reader, Delicious. Twitter. I make Shelf Check at Toondoo, a free strip-building site I’m very grateful for, supplementing their clip-art style graphics with things I slap together at Picnik (also free). I use Picnik a lot for library book display signage as well. For browsing, I use Chrome and make frequent use of Talon, Aviary’s brilliant screen capture extension, which lets you edit your capture in-browser.
At work, we recently upgraded to Office 2007, and added Audacity and GIMP to all public computers. I’m excited to spend more time with them.

What would be your dream setup?

Unfettered access to a great tech zoo. I don’t feel I need to own things so much as I feel that not being able to play and spend time with them is becoming a liability. I’m thinking of trying to start up a kind of tech gear co-op, either neighborhood or workplace-based, where you can take my Nook home for a week (I don’t think a weekend’s enough) and try checking out a library book, and I can take your MacBook and camera home and try out iMovie. Or even something as simple as a “Bring Your Gear to Work Day” or staff meeting, where we lay all our stuff out and teach each other the basics about it.

Clifford Lynch

Director of the Coalition for Networked Information

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Clifford Lynch. I’m the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information; I’m also an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. In terms of computing-supported work, this means that I deal with vast amounts of email, spend a lot of time looking at various kinds of things on the net, experimenting with various software and services, and editing or commenting on documents. I struggle to get original writing done, and to mange the research materials that underpin this. And I’m on the road almost all the time, so portability and reliability are very important.

What hardware are you using?

I’ve had Apple powerbooks for years and years; I’m currently on a 13 inch aluminum MacBook Pro that’s about a year old, with a solid state drive replacing the hard drive and the memory maxed out to 8 GB. These machines are finally at the point where you can put enough memory on them so they aren’t memory constrained (at least for what I do), which is really nice. I don’t use an external monitor; I have an assortment of external drives in various places as one level of backup. And handy access to a good duplexing laser printer (I’ve been using HPs for the last seven or eight years) is important.

I don’t use a lot of gadgets at present: for example, I have a boring quad-band unlocked cell phone that basically makes phone calls and roams internationally pretty gracefully. Though in due course I suspect I’ll end up on an iPhone or something like that.

And what software?

Of course the usual stuff: OS X, Safari and Firefox, Microsoft Office. I should say that the current trends towards very highly integrated software systems scares me to death and I try to avoid it (update your browser, and your mail and calendar suddenly break!). For email I’m still on classic, now four years unsupported, Eudora, and live in fear that it will suddenly stop working when Apple updates the operating system. The good news is there are some promising successors coming along, albeit slowly. I use Meeting Maker for calendaring, and an absolutely fabulous, indispensable program called CircusPonies Notebook for note taking, list making, and organizing.

There’s lots of other software I’m experimenting with on an ongoing basis, including various word processors and text editors, and systems like Mathematica, Netlogo, and TeX that I’d like to really master someday. And I still haven’t found a solution I’m fully happy with for bibliography management and organizing the masses of papers, reports and other documents that I have on my local drive that have been downloaded from the net.

What would be your dream setup?

In terms of hardware, I feel like I’m in pretty good shape, finally; I don’t feel like my laptop is severely underpowered for the basic work that I’m trying to get done. I do find some of the Apple product line trade-offs between capability and portability frustrating—the laptops with the bigger screens are consistently much more capable, and I keep wishing they’d couple the computational and storage capabilities less tightly to the screen size for those of us who prize a small footprint. I miss the non-glare screens that Apple used to use, and battery life can always be improved—particularly now that you can’t just pack an extra battery.

Network speed, ubiquity, and cost are real issues for me. I wish I could count on fast reliable wireless, backed up by fast backbone network connectivity (think about hotels, where the wireless is OK but everybody then bottlenecks onto a single T1 line out of the hotel)—everywhere and affordable. This is a particular nightmare when traveling abroad, but it’s bad even in the US. This is a major barrier to making more integral use of cloud services of various kinds (even basic things like backup; I do use this, but only as part of a broader strategy).

In terms of software, I think there’s still tons of room for progress towards a dream configuration. And let me close with a plug for content. Availability of journal articles in digital form is pretty good, and this is a huge boon when doing research. I can’t wait for the day when I can get the vast majority of the books that I have in hardcopy digitally so that I can put selected books on my hard drive, search them and annotate them when I’m working on writing something.

Sarah Murphy

School Librarian and Desk Set co-founder

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am Sarah Murphy, and I’m a school librarian at an Independent K-12 Boys’ School in Manhattan. In 2006, Maria Falgoust and I co-founded The Desk Set, a fund raising, party throwing organization of librarians and bibliophiles. I live in Brooklyn.

What hardware are you using?

At home, I use my laptop—a MacBook—and when I choose “About this Mac,” I discover that it’s a MacBook 4.1 with an Intel Core 2 Duo speeding along at 2.4 GHz.

I have an 8GB iPod Touch to carry around music and photos, and check the Web when I’m lucky enough to hit a Wi-Fi spot. For playing music, I’m considerably more fond of my circa 1955 Magnavox console turntable.

I adore my decade-old Canon CanoScan which lets me make flyers (or my own wedding invitations) using paper and other physical media (like Scrabble tiles!) and still distribute them like a proper 21st-century gal who wants to avoid extra waste and cost.

And to supplement all of this, I’ve got a ten-dollar phone that doesn’t even take pictures.

So, if I need to capture the moment, I might borrow my husband’s Canon Rebel XS or I’ll use my super rad Diana+ from Lomography (a gift from some of my Desk Set pals).

At work, I’m primarily hooked to a 21.5-inch 3.06 GHz iMac, and I often teach lessons using a SMART SB660i3 SMART Board ® 600i interactive whiteboard system and UF55 projector. I’m circulating 24 Dell 2100 Netbooks, 4 MacBooks, and 2 iPads.

And what software?

Most of what I do happens online, and my browser of choice is Firefox. At work, when I’m not teaching, I’m usually staring at either our online library catalog (Destiny Library Manager from Follett) or my email (.edu mail powered by Gmail). At both home and work I’ve more or less ditched MS Office in favor of Google Docs. And I can’t get through the day without my Google Calendar.

The Netbooks run Ubuntu, and I encourage the students to use Google Docs rather than Open Office. When they return the netbooks, I’d rather not have to worry about what files they leave behind: when all their work is in their email, it disappears when they log off.

The Desk Set has a blog powered by WordPress, and the blogs at school also happen to be from WordPress.

And I’m pretty wild about iMovie for library instructional videos starring fourth graders, or for video invitations for Desk Set events. When screenplays are required, I’m happy to use Celtx, mostly because it’s free, but also because screenplays for fourth graders don’t really require Final Draft.

What would be your dream setup?

I am fairly satisfied with what I’ve got, but I admit that I’m sort of loving the iPads at school and would love one of my own. But I wouldn’t use it for its (very nice) Kindle app or its (also OK) iBooks app, because my ideal setup for reading is still the book. Honestly, I’d love to ditch everything digital all together. My eyes have been more strained lately and I often feel like I spend most of my time writing and reading emails about what I’m going to do, and very rarely ever do anything. So my ideal ideal setup would be a house full of printed books, the aforementioned Magnavox, and a bottle of wine.

Kenley Neufeld

Library Director, Santa Barbara City College

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Kenley and I like to explore new ideas, play, listen to music, sit in meditation, and do my best to help others. If I can listen, to myself and to others, then I’m on the right track. If I can “be present” and bring “awareness” to all my actions then what I do is what I am doing. That said, I recently came across a Seth Godin discussion on what we should be doing in our organizations. I like what he wrote. My job should be seeing new opportunities, making decisions that work, and understanding the connection between my audience, brand, and ventures. I try to apply this in my work life where I serve as the Library Director of a large community college library in Santa Barbara. It’s a great place to arrive every day. It has a motivated, passionate, and supportive staff. What a difference that makes!

What hardware are you using?

Main device (appendage?) is my iPhone 4. Wow, what a device!

When using a full size computer, at home and in the office, I have a 15″ MacBook Pro (2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 4 GB) running Snow Leopard (and Windows 7 via Parallels 5 as needed) with an attached 24″ Apple Cinema display. Blue Snowball microphone and G Drive for backups.

My iPad comes in handy when going to meetings or the coffee shop.

And what software?

On the iPhone, I love using Gowalla, Foursquare, and Facebook. Safari and Calendar are the close follow-ups. Hipstamatic camera app for taking fun pictures. 1Password for tracking my virtual wallet and passwords.

The MBP keeps Chrome and Firefox open all the time. I use the Dev version of Chrome and am also testing Firefox 4. Some sites that I use don’t work well in Chrome (my preferred browser) and by having Firefox open and available I can easily switch over to the other browser. Also, I have two different Google accounts that I use and prefer to keep them open in different browsers.

TweetDeck appears when I can support the time. In the background is Adium, Skype, Dropbox, and Jing. 1Password for fast logging in to websites.

My iPad needs to have other functionality so I use iAnnotate PDF, Instapaper, GoodReader, IM+, and Tweetings. 1Password is a must, again.

Overall, I spend quite a bit of time with web apps. I’ve lived in Gmail for most of the last six years. All my calendars are in Google, but I have them connected with my iPhone and iPad using the Google/Exchange option. Pay for MOG for my music listening needs. WordPress is the bomb.

What would be your dream setup?

I’ve worked pretty hard at setting up systems that meet my needs. The laptop needs to stay small enough to travel, but large enough to work at the desktop. It’d be nice to have a second Cinema Display on the desktop.

Still waiting for the ideal audio storage and playback system in the cloud. Nothing quite has the mix right… cost, speed, ease of use, integration with existing tools, etc.

An Android to play with and explore

Carlos Ovalle

Computer Systems Developer, University of Texas, Austin

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Carlos Ovalle. I’m an IT person, doctoral student, and occasional lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin’s iSchool. I offer various types of tech support and run the IT Lab. I teach an undergraduate class called Information in Cyberspace. I study technology and law (especially copyright) and try to figure out how these things affect the practices of cultural institutions like libraries, archives, and museums, and maybe have suggestions for various groups about those subjects. I’m an American Library Association Copyright Scholar, and I try to help answer librarians’ questions about copyright at the website I helped build at librarycopyright.net. I’m on the board of EFF-Austin. I’m working on my qualifying paper and some other projects involving some local archives and museums. Also, I play games when I have time. Sadly, that isn’t too often recently, but my wife and I are on the library guild in WoW.

What hardware are you using?

My work desktop is an older system, but I really like it: a Dell Precision PWS380, Pentium D 3.20 Ghz, 4 GB of RAM, 500 GB hard drive using RAID 5 (basically, 3 hard drives striping, so that if one fails it can be replaced—that has saved me on multiple occasions). I also occasionally use a Dell Mini 10v or a MacBook Pro.

Home personal computers: Dell XPS 6301. Intel Core2 Quad, 3 Ghz, 8 GB Ram running 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate, NVidia GeForce GTX 285 video card, 750 GB hard drive. That’s supposed to be my gaming/high processing computer, but in all honesty it gets used the least of any of my systems. I mainly use this one when I want to hole up in a room and do a ton of academic work.

The computer I use the most often is my laptop, a Dell Vostro 1720 with an Intel Core2 Duo, 2.66 Ghz, 8 GB 64-bit Windows Vista, NVidia GeForce 9600M GS video card and 500 GB hard drive. I use it for absolutely everything.

The latter are the newest systems; they’re a bit of overkill for what I ordinarily do with them, but I expect them to last 4-6 years without much problem. The rest of the systems I mentioned are probably 5-6 years old, but still very usable.

My newest project is going to be getting Ubuntu running on a six-year-old Precision.

And what software?

Lots. I try to be at least familiar with everything we have in the lab. I regularly use Windows OSs because I support them, and I run XP, Vista, and 7 on my various systems. Although a coworker does most of the Mac stuff, I do try to keep familiar with OS X for the times I support it.

This second, I’m using SSH Secure Shell Client to connect to a Red Hat Server and using alpine to check my email. I’ve got about 40 or so Firefox tabs in five windows. I’ve got Skype and Pidgin running for IM, and Winamp Pro for music. I’ve got Excel and Word open for a research paper I’m collaborating on.

What would be your dream setup?

Dream—two main systems. For a desktop, up the RAM, processor, and graphics card on my XPS system, and since I’m dreaming, also have it be a lot quieter. Plus a giant monitor, naturally.

The biggest problem I regularly face is with my laptop cooling. I’ve had to purchase a cooling pad, and it still overheats regularly. So a fairly high-end laptop that doesn’t suffer from cooling problems is like a dream right now.

Dan Scott

Systems Librarian, Laurentian University

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hi, I’m Dan Scott, a decrepit 38-year-old systems librarian at Laurentian University. I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to help the Evergreen free software library system project on most fronts: features, bug fixes, community, and ease of use. I also maintain the File_MARC PHP library for reading and writing MARC records.

What hardware are you using?

Most of my time is spent on a Lenovo ThinkPad T400 with a dual-core 64-bit processor, 3 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB 7200 RPM hard drive (I buy a 3rd party hard drive and swap it in myself rather than paying the crazy premium that the manufacturer would demand). I never use an external monitor, and I disable the trackpad in the BIOS—I love the nipple—but I do plug in a stock external Lenovo mouse and keyboard when I’m at the office. I’ve used ThinkPads for ten years; I blame my previous career with IBM for getting me hooked.

Coffee|Code runs on a Linode virtual private server with 512 MB of RAM and 16 GB of storage.

My HTC Nexus One phone is my truly mobile computer; having email, a full Web browsing experience, and GPS navigation continuously available changes things. I own my phone outright, so I was able to switch to a local SIM when I spent two weeks in Amsterdam and got unlimited data for €2.50/day. In the last two weeks I relied on the phone’s ability to act as a Wi-Fi hotspot while working at a cottage without an Internet connection, and then again for a few more days when I returned home and found my DSL connection was dead. The 3G speed on the phone is as fast as my DSL connection—hard to believe that I used to use a 300 baud modem to connect to the world. I also use the phone to read books to my daughter at night; we just finished Alice in Wonderland and are moving on to Through The Looking Glass.

The Nexus One has also taken over most of my on-the-go media consumption needs, but when I’m traveling light or conserving batteries I’m very happy with my 8 GB Sansa Clip+ with an additional 8 GB microSD card. It has a tiny form factor, long battery life, and supports Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, which is how I’ve stored most of my music collection.

I ride a 2008 Norco Nitro (hardtail, hydraulic discs) and occasionally take advantage of the great trails in Sudbury, but usually it suffers the indignity of being used for commuting.

And what software?

I’m currently running Fedora 13 on the laptop. Linux has been my primary desktop for over a dozen years. I’ve been a Gnome user for the last few years; before that I was a KDE user (during the halcyon KDE 3 days), and before that I ran WindowMaker.

The software behind the Coffee|Code blog is Serendipity. I run “Screen” on every server so that random network problems don’t really interfere with my work.

I use mutt for email, and I use LibreOffice to create presentations or when people send me Microsoft Word or Excel documents.

I use KeePassX for password management on my laptop and synchronize the password database with my phone running KeePassDroid.

I run VirtualBox OSE (Open Source Edition) as distributed in the Fedora packages so that I can build and test virtual images of Evergreen on other distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu, and occasionally to test software on a Windows XP (ugh) virtual image.

I mostly program in Perl,JavaScript, and PHP using the Vim text editor and Subversion repositories. I write tutorials and documentation in AsciiDoc and store those in Bazaar repositories.

For Web browsing and Web development, I’m pretty much evenly split between Firefox + Firebug + NoScript and Chromium. Neither browser helps with the hell that is debugging Internet Explorer, though.

For communication, my primary tool is the XChat IRC client for staying in touch with #code4lib and #evergreen on Freenode. I also run Empathy so that people who aren’t library geeks can contact me via various instant messaging protocols. I fairly obsessively use the standard Web interface to communicate on the Identi.ca microblog service, and very rarely I check in on Twitter.

For a podcatcher, gPodder is the bomb.

What would be your dream setup?

I downsized from a 15″ laptop to a 14″ laptop, but was surprised that it was a 14″ widescreen—which ended up having approximately the same footprint as my old laptop. My first ThinkPad was a 13″ ultra-portable; I would happily go back to that form factor if I didn’t have to sacrifice the processor, RAM, hard drive capacity, or battery life. It looks like the ThinkPad x201 line is what I would be dreaming about currently. Throw in a decent port replicator and a dual-monitor setup; I’m sure I could get used to it.

I would ideally be using that setup to work on free software written in Python, stored in a distributed version control system, bolstered by a rich set of unit sets and solid documentation.

Cindi Trainor

Head of Library Technology, Eastern Kentucky University

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Cindi, and I’m a librarian. I’m also a mom, wife, student, photographer, crocheter, runner, reader, and writer. I work at Eastern Kentucky University currently, where I’m the head of the
library technology division. The word “Division” is a little heavy to describe my Fantastic Five, who keep all the technology in the libraries (from SFX to the public PCs and everything in between) a-humming along as best we can. Which is to say that we set it up, and when it breaks, we fix it. Like many librarians responsible for technology, I’m an accidental technologist. My current favorite distraction—aside from crocheting and running—is watching Dr. Who.

What hardware are you using?

My work computer is a 13″ MacBook, which I love and take everywhere with me. At home, I have a 24″ iMac. I shoot primarily with a Canon 5D and the f2.8 24-70 mm, f2.8 70-200 mm and f1.8 85mm lenses. I use the 24-70 mm lens for most shooting, but the best portraits come with the 85mm lens, which yields sharp images with vibrant color and butter-soft bokeh (the out-of-focus background that makes the subject POP!). Fantastic! I have experimented with off-camera lighting using the ultra-portable kit recommended by the Strobist blog including the Canon 580EX, Canon ST-E2 flash trigger, and Westcott collapsible umbrella—but mostly rely on natural light for shooting.

And what software?

• Connecting: TweetDeck, Chrome, Adium
• Writing: WordPress, Scrivener, Google Documents
• Shooting: Flickr, Photoshop, LightRoom, Picnik, iPhoto
• Chilling: Last.fm, Grooveshark, and Pandora
• Roaming: lamely enough, I still have a dumb phone. Someday, my distracted driving will be web-based and GPS-guided. I kid!

What would be your dream setup?

I would love to have a Canon 5D Mark II, but by the time I buy a new camera I bet there will be something even better available. My next camera-related purchase will probably be another L-glass lens. Now that I have a camera that can shoot acceptably in ISOs above 100 (the Rebel I had really couldn’t), I don’t have to rely so heavily on lenses with huge apertures. When I eventually get better training on studio lighting, I’d like to own a cloth backdrop and a few studio
lights.

If I ever decide to move on from librarianship, my absolute dream job would be to be the Presidential photographer, provided that by the time I get around to it, the President is still someone I like. More realistically, I’d probably be content shooting and writing for a publication of some kind.

Dee Venuto

Media Services Coordinator, Rancocas Valley Regional High School

Who are you, and what do you do?

For almost 20 years I’ve been a teacher librarian. For the past three years, I’ve served a wonderfully diverse and large population as the media center coordinator at Rancocas Valley Regional High School in Mount Holly, New Jersey. Most of my technology choices are based on creating relevant experiences for my students and networking with individuals interested in the library world.

Recently, a challenge led by the county chapter of Glenn Beck’s Project 9/12 group resulted in the banning of our school’s copy of Amy Sonnie’s Revolutionary Voices, an anthology of writings by LGBTQ individuals. This threw my career into a new direction: I now find myself an advocate for intellectual freedom and spending more time working on our nation’s growing digital/educational divide. Whether presenting at ALA or working as a member of the state library cooperative board of New Jersey, I hope to offer insight that helps all types of libraries collaborate for the benefit of our profession and patrons.

What hardware are you using?

I regularly use a HP 8510w notebook with Windows XP. Although quite heavy, it easily travels to and from work with me and offers me security when presenting in other locations. The lab in my library uses Vista and offers me another experience.

At home, I’m addicted to the wireless laptop, much to the chagrin of my family, but am integrating the iPad too. In addition, anticipating the purchase of Macs at our school I’ve started to play with a MacBook Pro.

And what software?

Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Google Docs, primitive website design using our school’s provider, Delicious, NoodleTools (checked out Zotero, but my students and I aren’t ready for that), SmartNotebook, Prezi, Windows Movie Maker, PowerPoint, professional listservs, Firefox, Safari, research databases, Yahoo IM, and iTunes. As always there are plans to learn new things really soon such as TweetDeck and iLife, with possibly Ning on the horizon.

What would be your dream setup?

Besides being shown a source that outlined exactly which technologies would best serve my students’ needs, I would love to have a second 30-station iMac lab in our library—complete with dual platform capabilities—so I could teach students how to create content using iLife or Movie Maker with information from their own devices (phones, MP3 players) or the library’s. I also dream of an educational system that allows this to happen by catching up to its 21st century learners and integrating a curriculum which gives them skills in the ethical use of technology. Personally, I entertain the idea of an iPhone or Droid, but really don’t think I should be plugged in anymore than I am.

Brett Bonfield

Library Director, Collingswood (NJ) Public Library

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m the director of the Collingswood (NJ) Public Library and a part-time PhD candidate at the Rutgers library school in New Brunswick, NJ. I’m also a co-founder and editor at In the Library with the Lead Pipe, treasurer for the New Jersey Library Association, and I work on a couple of presidential task forces for the American Library Association. Outside of work, I’m a wedding officiant, a barefoot runner, and a certified yoga teacher.

What hardware are you using?

My primary home computer is a new Apple iMac (21.5-inch, 3.2 GHz, 4 GB), which we bought in August to replace a Dell PowerEdge 600SC (Pentium 4 2.4GHz, 2GB, Sceptre X7 monitor) we’ve had since 2002. The iMac is my first Apple computer and so far I’m very impressed. I got it, in part, because I’m so taken with my 8 MB iPod Touch, which I use all the time.

My laptop is a first generation Pangolin Value from System76, an independent computer vendor out of Colorado that sells Ubuntu machines and provides very good customer support as well. We bought it in 2006 and it’s still going strong, though if I had the purchase to do over again I would have gotten a much lighter machine.

At work, I use a white label PC (Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz and 2 GB) sold to the Library by an independent, local computer vendor a year or so before I got here. Dealing with its finicky motherboard sold me forever on Kingston memory, as much for its customer service as for its products.

My camera is a Samsung SL270, though I’m a terrible photographer and, as I discovered when using its HD video mode, an even worse videographer. I also have a long-discontinued and practically invulnerable Nokia cell phone on a prepaid T-Mobile plan (the next best thing to my dream of not having a cell phone at all).

And what software?

I like and rely on Dropbox, Firefox, Google Docs, Gmail, Pinboard, LastPass, LibreOffice, Photoshop, VLC, and the three-headed notes team of SimpleNote (for Touch and synchronizing), Notational Velocity (Mac desktop client), and ResophNotes (Windows desktop and portable client).

On Windows, I’m a fan of 7-Zip, Foobar2000, Notepad++, PuTTY, WinSCP, and Microsoft Excel and Word (2003 and earlier), and Security Essentials.

On OS X, I’m a fan of Cyberduck, iTunes, and Skim, and I really like Safari, Stanza, iCombinator, and Hacker News Mobile on my Touch.

I’m trying to learn Vim yet again, this time by choosing MacVim over TextEdit as often as possible. If Vim finally takes, I’ll owe a big debt to Yehuda Katz.

I like Chrome (especially its developer tools) and Safari, but almost never use them now that I’m in school and rely on Zotero, which is only available for Firefox. Fortunately, almost everything I like about the other browsers is now available for Firefox as well (and sometimes exclusively), including Private Browsing Mode, Smart Keywords, Sync, AdBlock, BetterPrivacy, HTTPS-Everywhere, Instaright, Link Widgets, OptimizeGoogle, Readability, and Scrollbar Anywhere. I also use and appreciate Firebug, Flashblock, and NoScript, though I’d like to find a way to be less aware that I’m using them.

For Maintaining the Library’s Vista-based public workstations I depend on Ninite to keep the software up to date and SteadyState to maintain security and set session time outs. I’d like to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7, but Windows 7 doesn’t support SteadyState and I won’t upgrade without it.

The Collingswood Public Library’s website (including its catalog) run on the WordPress-based Scriblio, and WordPress is the platform for In the Library with the Lead Pipe as well. I use WordPress.com and FeedBurner to maintain the email list and send out the newsletter for my wife’s yoga studio, and Mad Mimi for the Collingswood Public Library’s list.

I host rss2email on my own server and send all my feeds to Gmail. I’m also playing around with TweetByMail, so I can interact with Twitter via Gmail. The fewer interfaces I have to deal with, the better.

What would be your dream setup?

Most interface/platform improvements don’t mean much to me. CPU speeds have long surpassed my cognitive limitations, and interfaces have been good enough for so long that it’s hard to remember a time when I wanted them to be more responsive. If anything, I tend to consciously slow down how fast I speak and type so that I don’t say or write something I haven’t thought all the way through. Meanwhile, I’m assimilating new information ever more slowly.

What would really impress me would be ways to seamlessly provide privacy and security in networked environments. For instance, I would really like to have access to a wireless mesh network, like the one being developed by the One Laptop Per Child project. I also dream of libraries wholeheartedly adopting Tor (or, perhaps, VPN or SSH tunneling), which would require two complementary initiatives: making Tor faster by installing relays on library servers, and spreading the word on what it does and how to use it—which may have the salutary effect of educating people about the relevance of libraries’ longstanding commitment to privacy.

Afterword

Five years ago, before I had started researching library schools I might want to attend, I didn’t know much about librarianship. I think I would have been surprised by the phrase “Library and Information Science.” What did one have to do with the other?

Like many technologists, I may have had some vague notion that librarians had something to contribute to discussions about information and metadata and standards and access, but my concept of what librarians did and what they knew probably had more to do with stereotypes and anecdote than on an understanding of reality. Which is a shame. Although in the last few years I think we’ve done a really good job of making clearer connections between libraries and technology, I don’t think anyone is surprised when librarians are omitted from discussions about and between prominent technologists, such as the one facilitated by the Setup. (Note: by “librarians” I mean anyone who works in, with, or for libraries. Hat tip to Eli Neiburger for saying what I’d been thinking, only less clearly, for some time before he said those words out loud.)

I love the Setup. It’s a great publication, it’s beautifully designed, the questions are perfect, and the interview roll includes many of the techies I most admire, along with many others who I hadn’t heard of by name before they appeared but whose answers were fun and instructive. Although I’m not surprised that no librarians have been included in the Setup, I thought it would be useful to see if librarians would be as interesting to interview as people who work in professions that are more generally perceived as IT. That’s for you to decide, but I think the answer is yes. I started this project with high expectations, and every one of the librarians I interviewed exceeded them.

Thanks to all participants for their answers and great photos, and thanks to Daniel Bogan for starting and running the Setup, for giving it a Creative Commons license, and for agreeing to serve as a reader for this piece. Thanks also to Chris Boetticher for his photo-editing wizardry, to my Lead Pipe colleague, Eric Frierson, for reading and commenting on this post in draft form, and to Derik Badman, Laurel Bliss, Ellie Collier, Hilary Davis, Allie Flannery, Emily Ford, AJ Johnson, Cindy Phillips, Jean Rainwater, and Marcellus Turner for suggesting people for me to interview. Finally, thanks to Derik Badman for last-minute troubleshooting—either WordPress or our host choked on this post and I had to go directly into MySQL to take it live, a task made much easier by my new friend, Sequel Pro.

The Yahoo! Search team by Yodel Anecdotal (explored on Sep 16, 2009) / CC-BY

As it turns out, librarians aren’t the only ones competing with Google. In fact, we’re not even the only ones offering an alternative to Google when it comes to helping people find information.

There’s Microsoft’s Bing, of course. And Yahoo! Search, at least until 2012, when Bing will begin providing Yahoo’s search results (though some testing has already started). Combined, Microsoft and Yahoo! provide about 30% of the search results in the United States, but only roughly 10% of the search results overall; Google, at 63% U.S. and 85% overall pretty much owns search.

Google’s dominance is one of the reasons many people get excited about alternative search engines. Choice is important, especially in something as important as access to Web-based information, and so is competition, which often leads to innovation. There’s often excitement leading up to the introduction of well funded and reputedly innovative search engines, such as Powerset (quickly acquired by Microsoft) and Cuil, both of which debuted in 2008, and Blekko, which is currently in closed private beta, but earned a positive review from Michael Arrington at the influential TechCrunch. Innovation in search is a good thing for many reasons, not least of which is the issue Paul Ford recently called, “the Barnes & Noble problem”:

Until I was about 26 almost everything I wanted to read was in Barnes & Noble. Eventually they had less and less of what I wanted. Now B&N’s a place I go before a movie, and I get my books anywhere else. I’m increasingly having B&N moments with full text search ala Google. It’s just not doing the job; you have to search, then search, then search again, often within the sites themselves. The web is just too big, and Google really only can handle a small part of it. It’s not anybody’s fault. It’s a hard, hard problem.

It’s possible that many ways exist to avoid the Barnes & Noble problem in Web search, but the two ways most companies seem to be trying at the moment are represented exceptionally well by Endeca and DuckDuckGo. Endeca, which provides search for Borders, Walmart, Home Depot, and many other large corporations and institutions (as well as North Carolina State University Libraries), will “guide users through asking and answering any question;” DuckDuckGo tries to out-google Google by adding features people want, removing annoyances, and finding out what’s working by engaging its users in a fun, ongoing conversation about their interests.

I recently had a chance to interview Endeca co-founder, Pete Bell, and DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg about their companies and their thoughts on search.

Both of your companies provide search for specialized collections. Do you believe that people want a single, universal interface that will work everywhere or do they want an interface that’s been built to suit the collection they’re using?

Gabriel: I think that vertical search engines can work if they are compelling enough, e.g. Kayak, which aggregates prices on airline tickets, hotel rooms, car rentals, and helps people find good deals on travel. However, there are only so many verticals where they can be compelling due to business model, i.e. high transaction value.

In general, I believe people want the “single, universal interface that will work everywhere.” At DuckDuckGo, I have a longer term goal to help people navigate towards vertical engines that may be better for them. I’m doing this currently in a completely self-selected basis via !bang syntax.

If you look at each vertical, there is usually a search engine out there that produces better results than Google for that vertical. But no one is going to go to each of these hundreds of sites in specific situations.

Pete: Good experiences are always designed around tasks—around specific users searching for specific content. And I’m using the word “search” to mean much more than the search box—I’m talking about all the navigation, visualizations, and content that helps people find what they need. Now, if you ask people what they want, they’ll say they just want a Google box. But if you test that against a task-built experience—say, image search at Jupiter Images—they’ll overwhelmingly pick the latter. Marti Hearst tested a great example of this as part of her Flamenco Search Interface Project on faceted search User Interfaces (UIs).

Is it important for search interfaces to match the way people think or will people adjust their thinking to suit search interfaces?

Pete: There’s a difference between zero-training and easy-to-use. Zero-training means it has to match the way people think, and for any popular public-facing website, it has to be fluid. On the other hand, there can be easy-to-use sites that take a few minutes to learn. They better become fluid after those few minutes though. For example, we’ve built some search applications for manufacturers that give their design engineers thousands of facets. They’re willing to spend a couple of minutes to orient themselves to get power-user features. First time I switched from a PC to a MAC, I was surprised that there was still a learning period, but it faded fast.

Gabriel: If you want fast, low-cost adoption, I believe the interface should be as fluid and simple as possible. However, sites like Amazon have proved that you can push through User Experience (UX) with enough money. By which I mean basically what Pete said, in that if you are allowed to train people for a few minutes then you can end up with a better UX overall. Amazon has done it essentially via brute force, i.e. push through by simply being around long enough that people end up spending those few minutes over time.

How do you weigh precision versus recall? Has your thinking changed along the way?

Gabriel: I’ve been pretty much about precision from the beginning, in part because I rely on external APIs for the long-tail; that is, for less popular searchers, I rely mostly on the raw search results I get from Bing API 2.0 and Yahoo! “Build your Own Search Service”. I think my value-add for those types of queries is in added precision. But more generally, there are just so many Web pages out there and people don’t look at many of them (they choose from just the top few results), so precision is most important for general search. For specialized search I think it can reverse depending on the vertical.

An example of a vertical in this context would be searching for bug reports. There are usually very few pages out there that have the exact output of your bug report, and if they exist, you want to find them. For things like that, we rely on Yahoo & Microsoft to have crawled those pages. For less specific queries we layer on top of those APIs some Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) stuff that, among other things, tries to extract the concepts/entities in the query and gives you pages more associated with them. For other queries where we know a vertical engine will give you better info, e.g. weather or complicated math, we will automatically query an API and display the better results—I think this is another form of recall.

Pete: You can cheat the precision vs. recall trade-off. At Endeca, we’ve become disciples of the Human Computer Information Retrieval school, and all that Gary Marchionini and Daniel Tunkelang have done to popularize the HCIR model.

When we started, it was orthodoxy that there was a trade-off between precision and recall. That assumes people make a query into a black box, get back a ranked list of results, and then either accept one of those top results or recompose their query. It’s the TREC evaluation model. But ranking is dubious—it conflates many dimensions of relevancy into a single score.

With HCIR, there is no strict trade-off between recall and relevancy. Instead, you engage the user in a multi-step “conversation” with the data, as in a faceted search. You start with a probe query that returns a set of results. And then the system characterizes the set—it tells you the attributes and facets associated with that set. That helps you refine to a subset, then lather, rinse, repeat. The trick is to treat search as a set retrieval problem instead of a ranked list retrieval problem.

For example, if your task were to find a photo of dogs with kids to illustrate a book jacket, and all you had was a classic search box, you’d probably maximize for recall with some searches like “dogs kids jpg” or “dogs children photos” and then eyeball the results. But with HCIR, the system has a chance to teach you about the results. Back to Jupiter Image search, we could search for “dogs,” and then discover facets about ages, concepts, and image technique, and use those to whittle down. You’re returning a set of results, and then learning about subsets. The effect is that you get unexpected results that you could never hope to discover with keywords.

What usability testing methods do you find most informative?

Pete: Agile testing is best. Make mistakes often and learn from them quickly. I’m with Jared Spool—you can learn a lot, inexpensively, by testing a small set of people and iterating.

Gabriel: I find natural feedback coming through the site to be most informative. Often this kind of feedback comes from users who have put in a lot of thought. I’ve also found Reddit comments from ads to be particularly informative, especially for first impressions. Finally, I’ve gotten use out of PickFu. I have plans to investigate usertesting.com and feedbackarmy.com as well, but haven’t done so yet.

Can you expand on “natural feedback”? And how you’ve used Reddit and PickFu?

Gabriel: By natural feedback I mean feedback that flows from real users using your site. On DuckDuckGo, there is a feedback button on every search result page (in the lower right corner). Most of our feedback comes through there and is in a “natural” context of searching for something particular.

I posted a PickFu review on my blog. Basically, it is good way to get quick opinions on two choices. People vote which one they like better, but more importantly they give you their take on why, which provides some insight into what people were thinking.

Reddit is more straight advertising, but with each ad there is also a comment thread. Reddit users are known to actually check out things and report back in comments, and they luckily do this for Reddit’s ads as well. But that’s not all, because you can actually engage with Reddit users as well, and have conversations about your product. All in all, it is a great feedback experience.

Guest question for Gabriel (courtesy of Andrew Nagy¹): “How are you positioning DuckDuckGo differently from Google in terms of user interface and user experience? What sort of new UI concepts are you evaluating that Google is not already doing?”

Gabriel: On a feature level, our about page attempts to answer this question directly: But at a higher level, I’m trying to make DuckDuckGo results pages more readable and understandable. A lot of the features are in this vein. For example, I put Zero-click Info on top, which is readable topic summaries (sometimes full paragraphs) from crowd-sourced sources like Wikipedia and Crunchbase. Other examples are labeled official sites, human-edited link titles and descriptions (also from crowd-sourced sources), disambiguation pages, and fewer useless sites in our results pages. Another angle is discovery. I provide related topics (as opposed to related searches) and category pages, which are groupings of topics of a similar theme.

How closely do you think profitability aligns with quality? In evaluating your competition, do you get the sense that it’s the better engineered search products or the better run businesses that are succeeding?

Pete: Just to set the context for Endeca, in our market, our customers want to customize a search experience for their specific users and content. There’s a healthy market for one-size-fits all sites generated by inexpensive appliances, but that’s not our market. NCSU, WalMart.com, and ESPN have different experiences from each other. We call these search applications.

There are a few ways to go about that. You could invest many, many, many millions on in-house developers, like Amazon and eBay did. But our customers choose the platform route—they’re buying Endeca’s “Legos,” and partnering with our services team to design their site.

Now, that’s a complex project. It brings together teams from two companies that haven’t worked together before. And it mixes a lot of specialties—user experience, application development, information architecture—that might not understand a lot about each other. My friend Joseph Busch does high-end taxonomy and document management projects, and he likes to joke that he’s 5% a library scientist, 95% a social worker.

People tend to focus on technology when they’re planning a new site. But with projects like these, business process, user experience, support, professional services, education, and so on all matter, too. So to answer your question, in the search applications market, technology is part of it, but execution matters just as much.

Gabriel: I think it is product for the most part, at least for general search and with a few caveats. Google’s share just kept climbing and climbing, and I think that is largely due to its product. Recently, Bing canceled their cashback program after tons of money because it presumably didn’t yield new customers. That’s more evidence of product dominance.

The first caveat is distribution deals. A lot of people use what is in front of them, and sometimes have no choice. It’s very hard (if not impossible) for a startup to capture those distribution deals since Microsoft and Google have so much money behind them.

The second caveat is, without distribution it is very hard to get people to switch search engines. All the recently well-funded search startups who failed are evidence of this fact. I think they didn’t wow people enough in the product, however. But the bar is pretty high.

The third caveat is brand. Google did a study comparing its results with its competitors’ and found a huge implicit trust from using the Google logo at the top. They earned that, but that is additionally hard to overcome for a startup (or even for Microsoft).

What are your thoughts on expert search features, such as specialized syntax or regular expressions?

Gabriel: I’ve been trying to “walk the line” in this arena, by offering specialized syntax that I think could get mainstream support from power users. I think regular expressions are a bit out there for the normal user although I did already incorporate them in some capacity already (though probably not what you meant): http://duckduckgo.com/?q=regexp+/(.*%3F)+(.*%3F)+(.*)/+duck+duck+go.

Something I think more walks that line is the !bang syntax I created where you input !amazon x in the search box and it searches for x in amazon. I think that’s easy to grasp and it is useful. Additionally, I think it can help market to specific groups of users, e.g. I also added hex color codes and unicode query responses.

Pete: You know the rule of thumb that 90-odd percent of users never change the defaults. Whatever the number is, it’s increasing. That said, it’s not fair to round down to zero and say that the few people that do use expert features don’t count. They tend to be some of the most valuable users. We’ve got extensive XQuery hooks into our engine that make it possible to build up some great queries.

What do you think of Wolfram Alpha?

Gabriel: As a collection of cool data that gets aggregated usefully in response to queries, I love it! As a standalone product, however, I worry that it will die for lack of a business model. I think a lot of what they’ve done would be great in a search engine, and I’ve tried to integrate it as much as possible into Duck Duck Go (see Duck Duck Goodies).

Pete: There’s a continuum of search tasks that range from fact finding on one end to discovery on the other. (Fact finding: Who wrote Ulysses? Discovery: Which Irish writer should I read on the beach this afternoon?) Wolfram Alpha is really cool for fact finding, and lousy for discovery. You can’t have discovery without human input—HCIR.

What do you think of WorldCat.org?

Gabriel: I had not heard of it until this moment, so this is a first impression. I’m not the target customer since I haven’t checked out something from a library since college :). But I imagine this could be really useful for people who do check stuff out from libraries, i.e. students, researchers, etc. The implementation seems a bit cluttered and I’m not sure how big that market is. I suppose the business model is clicking through to Amazon or whatever; it’s an empirical question on how much that actually converts.

Pete: I enjoy WorldCat. They’ve done an impressive job on their primary mission. That’s sincere—I’m not damning them with faint praise. But if you want me to focus on search and give constructive criticism, there’s a lot more they could do.

If you hold up some great sites as the bar, you’ll see ideas WorldCat should adopt on user experience, relevancy, text mining, and visualizations. Just to name a couple of sites, IEEE Explore and Food Network both have ideas that could improve WorldCat.

And if you expect OCLC to take a leadership role, they should push the bar on searching digital collections: full text, images, multi-media. We’ve been working with the JFK Presidential Archive on their next generation site to search their digital archives. That’s given me a real appreciation for how big the challenges are on searching digital collections. There’s a lot of work to do, and it would be good to see OCLC start experimenting.

If you’re interested in hearing more from Pete Bell, I recommend his always interesting contributions to Endeca’s excellent Search Facets blog as well as a very good interview with him conducted by Steve Arnold. For more on Gabriel Weinberg, I recommend his superb blog, book (still a work in progress, but we get to follow its development online), and the DuckDuckGo community for educators and librarians.

Thanks to Pete Bell and Gabriel Weinberg for participating in the interview, to Andrew Nagy for his question and his assistance with the article, and to my Lead Pipe colleague, Ellie Collier, for her comments.

1. Andrew Nagy, an open source evangelist and library technologist, joined Serials Solutions in late 2008 where he has been an evangelist for Discovery services and seminal in the development of [Summon] (http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon/). Prior to joining, he was the Technology Development Specialist for the Falvey Memorial Library at Villanova University where he was responsible for developing many innovations, including VuFind , an internationally adopted open-source Library Discovery solution.

Andrew Carnegie by cliff1066 / CC-BY

A few months back, someone emailed In the Library with the Lead Pipe asking if we could recommend an online course that could give her an overview of library responsibilities. She was about to start working at a K-12 school and, though she had no library experience, part of her job included running the library.

An aspect of librarians’ déformation professionnelle is the mistaken idea that people who don’t work in libraries realize there are library-specific degrees. Those of us who have earned our degrees want the world to value them the way we do, especially if we’re still paying off student loans. Wouldn’t you be just a little bit disappointed if all of your master’s degree coursework could be summarized in a single online course? And if it could, wouldn’t that make us sort of stupid for wasting all that time and money learning the art and science of librarianship?¹

Another part of our déformation professionnelle is that we make assumptions about other professions that are similar to the one our correspondent made about librarianship, especially professions that don’t typically involve degrees or licenses, such as fundraising. It isn’t that we don’t appreciate the importance of getting donations: since I started working as a librarian, the topic my colleagues in the profession have been most interested in having me teach them about is fundraising. I’ve spent much of my professional life in fundraising, so it’s a natural request. But what many people don’t seem to realize is that it’s just as difficult to summarize what fundraisers do as it is to summarize what librarians do.

This article is not intended to be a complete summary of fundraising. Instead, it’s meant to put you in the right frame of mind to help your organization raise more money. And it’s intended for everyone who works in libraries, not just the people whose job description usually includes fundraising. I hope we all agree that everyone who works in a library needs to work together if the library is going to function most effectively. For instance, everyone should be able to answer basic questions and communicate important policies. Fundraising is the same way: it’s not going to work nearly as well if only one person in the organization, or one department, is solely responsible for cultivating and stewarding donations.

There are multiple economies

Many people assume that nonprofits raise less money in bad economies. This isn’t necessarily the case; in fact, it’s possible that the opposite is true. G. Douglas Alexander, co-author of Essential Principles for Fundraising Success, wrote a 1991 article in which he pointed out that contributions increased during World War II, the 1974 recession, and the 1982 recession. In a 2008 study, “Fundraising in a Cold Climate,” Dennis O’Connor and Deirdre Hatch cited work by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University and the Association of Fundraising Professionals that found the same pattern: in most bad economies, nonprofits raised more money.

There seem to be many reasons this happens. In part, we seem to band together during hard times. People, and even countries, with very little discretionary money will send aid to victims of earthquakes, tsunamis, and terrorist attacks. We’ve all heard of poor communities coming together to support one another: it’s become a Hollywood cliché.

In addition, while many states and municipalities are eviscerating library budgets, the stock market, though volatile, has enjoyed a significant recovery in the last year or so. On March 6, 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average descended all the way to 6,627; on April 23, it reached 11,204. Along the way, many people made quite a bit of money. Certainly not everyone: plenty of people sold low, and plenty of others lacked the funds or insight to invest during the recovery. But the idea in fundraising isn’t to raise an equal amount of money from everyone: it’s to raise sufficient funding from people who are interested in supporting your work.

If people want to help you but don’t have money right now, make sure they still feel appreciated and informed and, if they’re interested, provide them with other meaningful ways to contribute. If people have money but aren’t interested, you’re not likely to change their minds. In general, it’s best to focus your fundraising efforts on people who have the ability and inclination to contribute.

We like winners

Many people with enough discretionary money to make sizable financial contributions have accumulated their savings by working hard, making decisions that turned out well, and avoiding risk. As Warren Buffett likes to say, “The first rule of investing is don’t lose money; the second rule is don’t forget Rule No. 1.”

This is one of the ideas that people who are unfamiliar with fundraising often fail to appreciate: your desperation makes donors less likely to contribute. In the US alone, there are thousands of great causes and nonprofits. It simply doesn’t make sense to donate money to a desperate organization when you have so many stable organizations to choose from that are also doing great work.

In addition, it’s awfully hard for a library to paint a bleak picture without coming off as disingenuous. If I didn’t believe libraries were important, I wouldn’t have gone to library school, but there’s no way the funding cuts we’re facing can compete with the World Bank’s estimate that “1.4 billion people in developing countries are living in extreme poverty, on less than $1.25 a day.”

How can we justify supporting libraries when hundreds of millions of people go hungry each day? When preventable diseases are decimating whole populations? I happen to think Andrew Carnegie was right: libraries are a great way to support economies while also furthering democracy. And I think Bill and Melinda Gates have analyzed the situation intelligently—an opinion shared by Warren Buffett, who donated the vast majority of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. For the most part, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spends its money on health and poverty, primarily in developing countries. But in the US it supports libraries and education, and it supports libraries in Europe and South America as well. This isn’t just a humanitarian decision, this is an economic decision.

We want you to ask us for money

One of the questions I’m asked most frequently by my neighbors in Collingswood: “Do you take donations?” They mostly mean books, but the principle applies to financial donations as well: unless you ask people to contribute, they don’t know that you need the money. It doesn’t have to be a hard sell. It can be as simple as, “Have you ever thought about making a contribution to the library?” or asking them if they’re aware that a friend of theirs has included the library in her will—assuming that you’ve asked the friend if she’s comfortable with your disclosing this information. In general, people are happy to agree to this request. If they care enough to contribute, they generally care enough to want other people to contribute as well, and they’re very aware that their example can encourage others to support the library; if you ask them, you’re likely to find out that it was someone else’s contribution that inspired their donation.

Also, and this often surprises those who are new to fundraising, sometimes people are insulted if you don’t ask them for money, especially if their friends are supporting the library. Even if they aren’t currently able to make a donation, they don’t want people to know it. What if you were walking through the exhibition hall at a library conference with two friends and Tim Spalding tried to interest both of your friends in LibraryThing for Libraries but completely ignored you? Regardless of how interested you were in the product, wouldn’t you wonder why he didn’t think it was even worth asking you about it?

Two quick anecdotes about asking people for money:

1. I started my fundraising career as a phone canvasser. Back in the early 90’s, I was one of those people who would interrupt your dinner and ask you to renew your support. At the close of the conversation, after we’d agreed on how much you would give, donors would often ask if I was so insistent with everyone I called. “Of course,” I’d say. Their inevitable response: “Good.” If they were giving the most they could, they wanted me to make sure that everyone else did the same.
2. Soon after I started my current job, I asked someone who has been connected to the library for years if there were any foundations or other potential donors who hadn’t yet supported the library, but who seemed like good prospects. Yes, he said, the secretary for a small area foundation has an office in town. The foundation had been around for many years, but no one from the library had ever solicited a gift. A few of us wrote letters of interest to the foundation, and, after initially turning us down—our inquiry coincided with the stock market’s 2009 low point—we were surprised a couple of months later by a $5,000 check. And so was a neighboring library, one that hadn’t even asked for a contribution. As it turned out, all we had to do was ask.

We really like to be thanked

The way I learned it, the fundraising relationship with donors cycles through three stages:

Cultivation → Solicitation → Stewardship → Cultivation → Solicitation → Stewardship, etc.

Cultivation is what you do before asking for money. Preparation is everything.

Solicitation is the ask itself. A colleague of mine would refer to proposals—one form of solicitation—as the icing on the cake, but cultivation was the cake itself. She also likened proposals to contracts: they simply made official what the two parties involved in the transaction had already agreed on.

Stewardship was the majority of what I did, full-time, for five years. Acknowledging gifts and maintaining correspondence with donors is important. It leads to cultivation, just as cultivation leads to solicitation, but it is distinct from either of them. Most donors contribute because they believe in the work you do, but many of them will not contribute again if they are not acknowledged appropriately. Once they have given, they feel connected to you in an emotional way. They feel hurt if you don’t appreciate the fact that they chose you over the thousands of other organizations they could have helped, and over the family members and friends they could have given gifts to instead. They want to feel like insiders not because they think they’ve bought their way in, but because they care so deeply about your work.

A good rule of thumb: if you don’t have the time and resources to steward a gift properly, don’t ask for it in the first place.

Our sense of privacy is different from your sense of our privacy

When I worked in stewardship at the University of Pennsylvania, there was another department called Research which consisted of about a dozen people whose sole task was to assess donors’ and prospects’ wealth so the people whose job it was to make individual solicitations knew how much to ask for: too much or too little and the potential donors could be insulted or, at the very least, end up making a gift that was much smaller than they were willing and able to give. No one is going to say, “You only want one million dollars to name that building after me? I was prepared to give you five million.” If you ask for one million, they’ll assume that’s all you need.

The Internet already existed at that point, but this was before Google, let alone Facebook: privacy was a lot easier to protect at the time. Even then, the researchers had about twenty bookshelves of material to consult, along with numerous databases. Our prospects knew they were being researched, but they didn’t mind then and people in similar situations don’t mind today: being marketed to is just part of what happens when a certain amount of money passes through your hands. In a smaller town, it doesn’t have to be all that much money. At a major university or hospital—organizations that do a lot of fundraising—it’s generally a bit more.

Not only professional fundraisers pay attention to these sorts of gifts, but other donors do as well, which is why one of the activities donors get involved in during the stewardship process is contributing information about their peers’ wealth. It’s one of the ways donors became insiders: Who just bought a new house or yacht? Who collects antique cars? Who is becoming an angel investor or venture capitalist? Who joined what board? Did you see the new donor listing in this year’s opera program? So-and-so moved up to the highest support level!

This isn’t to say that it’s acceptable to share any information without a donor’s permission. If anything, fundraisers are more aware of confidentiality than librarians. But if a donor wants her name connected to a gift or project, she usually wants people to see that connection everywhere.

We don’t think like you do

“Fitzgerald’s preoccupation with money and those who have it was a far more complicated business than is often understood. Whether he ever actually said that “the rich are different from the rest of us” is a subject of endless dispute, but if Hemingway did say in rejoinder, “Yes, they have more money,” then he missed the point. Fitzgerald understood that the rich live in a bubble the rest of us cannot enter….”
Jonathan Yardley

Librarians are frugal. I think part of it has to do with our salaries, which most of us don’t think qualifies us as rich. I think part of it also has to do with the fact that many of us can’t help but think about money in increments of how many books we could buy instead. Pay out of my own pocket to attend two ALA conferences a year? And spend over a hundred dollars in annual dues? Do you know how many books I could buy with that money?

Most of us can’t imagine what it would be like to buy a book and think nothing of its expense, let alone imagine buying as many as we want without having to go without something else we care about. It doesn’t cross our minds to get on a plane and fly to another city and pay for a hotel and fly back again without thinking about the money involved. It’s a fundamentally different relationship with money than I’ve ever experienced or ever expect to experience. But there are plenty of people who live this way, and they don’t make all that much more than I do. Once you have enough to meet your basic needs for housing and food and health care, once you can afford your clothing, and once you have enough in savings for retirement, everything else is play money. And there are plenty of people in that situation. They may not live in my town, but maybe they grew up near the library; if they’re well off now, there’s a pretty good chance they made use of the library when they were young and have positive feelings about it. Maybe they want to help other kids growing up like they did have similarly positive experiences.

What people with means don’t want is to have to justify their wealth, not any more than you want to have to justify yourself to someone living on less than $1.25 per day. But what plenty of them do want is something useful to do with their surplus money and, if they have it, their surplus time as well. During the cultivation process, when you’re communicating with donors, don’t try to justify their gifts in a way that would make sense to you. As much as you can, put yourself in their position. Figure out what motivates them. Perhaps, and this can work surprisingly well, by asking them. Think of it as a reference transaction: “If you were to support the library, what would be a best case scenario for you? What would you want to see happen?”

We don’t know what you know (and we don’t want to have to learn it)

Have you ever heard a teenager give a speech in public? They stare at the paper in their hands and read in a voice that’s somehow both choppy and sing-song, as if they learned to speak by listening to their GPS read them Dr. Seuss stories. The same thing happened in an acting class I took one summer. For no apparent reason, we all transformed ourselves into Joan Crawford. Acting!

When we write proposals or other correspondence with donors, we often seem to do the same thing, and probably for the same reason: fear. We want so badly to be judged fund-worthy that we write awkward sentences. And we want so badly to be succinct that we use abbreviations that are unfamiliar to our readers, over-explain simple concepts, and under-explain important ones, such as how the money, if granted, will be spent by your library. Sprinkle liberally with jargon and you’ve got yourself an unreadable mess.

A quote ascribed to Albert Einstein’s is a useful one to keep in mind: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Your job isn’t just to explain it simply, your job is to ensure your donors can explain it simply as well.

I’ve had colleagues who would go to great lengths to keep things as simple as possible. One proposal writer, a former journalist, went so far as to advocate using words of Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin origin because they tended to be shorter and more familiar. A more common practice among fundraisers: show everything to someone who is unfamiliar with the topic. If it doesn’t make sense to them, it probably won’t make sense to the donor.

Facts are boring

Clarity is useful, but it can be overdone. For instance, go to English Literature PowerPoints at World of Teaching. Pick a PowerPoint for a book you like, perhaps To Kill a Mockingbird. Imagine presenting this PowerPoint to people who haven’t yet read the book. Imagine how much coffee they would have to drink to stay awake during your presentation.

I think most really effective fundraisers and fundraising organizations have learned to tell stories rather than list facts. One person who’s helped organizations where I’ve worked make the transition into storytelling is Andy Goodman, who provides an overview of the process on his website. He calls it, “Storytelling as Best Practice.”

For some fundraisers, and some donors, there’s a quicker path to getting past the facts. Make everything personal. From Dale Carnegie’s summary of his influential book, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936):

Six ways to make people like you

If you can remember all six and make use of them, you’ll raise more money and be a better librarian. But if six rules are too many, you can summarize Carnegie’s message in a single word, as fundraiser Jeff Brooks suggested in what may be my all-time favorite blog post on any subject, “The easy way to write a fundraising letter”:

Dear [name]:

P.S. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You.

It’s about relationships

The standard way to segment donors is into three general categories:

1. Corporations and Foundations
2. Individuals
3. Planned Giving

In every case, contributions come from people. When possible, you want to get to know the people who decide whether to support your library.

There are steps to take in each case. In researching and cultivating corporate donations, ideally you get to know the people involved with making contributions, such as the owner of the company, the head of the division you’ll be working with (if that’s how the corporation is set up), and also the community relations person or team that coordinates grants and volunteers. Corporations generally want a return on their investment, such as associating the company’s name with organizations that fit its charitable mission or team-building activities like volunteer activities for their service days.

Foundations generally have fewer employees than corporations, but may have just as many people involved in approving donations, so it’s really useful to get to know everyone who has a say in whether your solicitation is funded. Foundations are usually guided closely by their mission, and they tend to be especially regimented in vetting the organizations they support. The grant process can be highly involved, and occasionally the reporting and other stewardship activities can be so much work you wonder if the grant was even worth it. Foundations are this demanding for a reason: more than any other class of donors, they want to make sure they’re supporting a stable organization, one that will use their funds appropriately but will not grow to depend on them. Foundations generally like to supply seed money or support for special projects, and they don’t want an organization or a project they’re funding to collapse once they shift their support to other organizations and projects. Getting to know people who work for the foundation, or who sit on its board, is a useful way to make those assurances. So is coming up with projects that are likely to become self-sustaining.

Individual donors fall into subcategories: annual giving and major donors. People who are annual givers donate relatively small amounts more or less each year. It’s generally not a lot of work to keep them happy, just so long as you don’t break any unwritten rules of the contract: make them feel important and special by learning their names and interests, and by acknowledging their gifts effusively and appropriately. Once people start giving annually, usually they keep giving about the same amount each year or maybe a little more. Developing a stable base of annual support is within the reach of most libraries. Most organizations solicit annual donations via letters, emails, brochures, newsletters, websites, or phone banks, which means the solicitation itself is often somewhat impersonal, or at least less personalized.

Major gifts—and each organization decides on its own what qualifies as a major gift—are the ones you solicit in person. Some people are capable of making major gifts annually, but the typical major gift is unique, such as a large, one-time sponsorship of a program or a room. Often, a lot of people are involved in cultivating this gift—remember, donors like to be insiders—but the solicitation itself should generally be made by whoever is at the top of the organizational hierarchy, perhaps accompanied by a peer or fellow donor.

Planned giving is the umbrella term for bequests, annuities, and trusts—all ways that people who don’t think of themselves as wealthy can make substantial contributions to organizations whose work they want to support. The one most of us know best is bequests, the practice of providing for an organization in your will.

It seems like every few months we read about another person who lived frugally and gave no appearance of substantial savings, who surprises everyone by leaving millions to their local library. These are heartwarming stories, and also nice reminders not to make assumptions about who is capable of making major gifts and who is not. But they’re also lost opportunities. I want every library to say thank you to its donors while they’re still alive. If you’re able to foster a culture of planned giving at your library, perhaps by establishing a “society” or annual dinner for people who have provided for the library, you can acknowledge generosity in person and also encourage others to make similar provisions.

Other ways to get people involved in planned giving, such as encouraging them to establish charitable gift annuities, usually require libraries to partner with community foundations. For instance, donors who set up annuities are making a gift that pays them interest while they’re alive and leaves whatever principle isn’t spent during their lifetimes to an organization they wish to support.

Finding a community foundation or other partner to guarantee an annuity usually isn’t terribly difficult, and many donors like annuities as investments because the rates are reasonably competitive, especially when coupled with the tax advantages, and they get the satisfaction of knowing they’ve made a potentially large gift to something they care about. The main things holding back most organizations is a lack of knowledge about planned giving, a fear of acknowledging donors’ mortality, and a lack of patience with a fundraising method that, though clearly worthwhile in the long run, may not deliver immediate gratification.

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing

Imagine you’re at the reference desk. A student approaches and says he needs ten authoritative sources for a paper he’s working on. You show him how to use the catalog and he finds two useful sources.

“Why bother?” he says. “I need ten sources.”

Undaunted, you show him how to use Academic Search Premier. He finds four good sources.

“That won’t work,” he says. “I need ten sources.”

So you take him to the bookshelves. You pull the more recent of the two books off the shelf. You show him how to read its bibliography and make interlibrary loan requests for the books and articles that aren’t immediately available.

“How long will that take?” he asks. You tell him it might take up to a week. He leaves, convinced that libraries and librarians are a waste of time.

I’ve had conversations with librarians about fundraising that felt sort of like this scenario. I would like to tell people that starting a fundraising program today will close their budget gap by December 2010 and provide their community with a new library by May 2012. It might work that way, but that would be atypical.

What’s more likely is your fundraising program will build slowly, and at first it may take a lot of time, and it may not be fun, and you might make a mistake or two. You will probably have someone decide not to fund something even though you’ve presented them with a compelling case: great cultivation and cogent solicitations tilt the odds in your favor, but in fundraising there are no guarantees. Though in the long term I think it’s worth it. And in the short term, I think fundraising is a lot more fun if you set reasonable expectations for yourself.

You are all individuals

We all probably have internal lists of the libraries we most admire. Some are in wealthy communities, where many people don’t really need the library but love and support it anyway. Some are in less affluent communities, where many people wouldn’t have access to information without the library, and grantors do their part to make sure superb library services are available. Some are in big cities. Others are in small towns. Some are independent libraries and some are part of a large system.

There are plenty of reasons fundraising might not work at your library, or why you may not want to be part of your library’s fundraising efforts. But there’s probably someone out there with a library a lot like yours, who could have the same reasons you do, but who instead is helping to raise funds and make the library more successful than it would be otherwise.

It may not seem worth it at first, but if you work at it steadily, if you refine your own story, you’ll develop your own set of donors and your own unique donor culture. We’re all different, but we’re not that different. If we celebrate those differences, if we give donors plenty of reasons to feel good about supporting us, they’ll respond.

Thanks to Ka-Msiyara Corbett, and to my Lead Pipe colleagues Derik Badman, Ellie Collier, and Emily Ford for their helpful comments on this article.

1. My response:

   That sounds like a very interesting job. Here at In the Library with the Lead Pipe, we’ve all become librarians the traditional way: we went to library school and got a Masters in Library Science. That’s certainly not the only way to do it, nor is it a requirement—it just means that any advice we offer is based on a best guess, not on our own experience.

   Here are some resources that might be useful to you:

   • Library Journal’s recent article, “How to Become a Librarian” and http://www.becomealibrarian.org/ — both are traditional/get-a-library-degree focused, but both contain good resources for anyone interested in doing library work.
   • SLA’s Solo Librarians Division. SLA has a pretty good international membership base, and it has created a home for people in the situation you’ll be entering: solo librarianship.
   • Ask the question you just asked us on Ask MetaFilter. The MetaFilter community excels at finding good answers to questions like yours. Plus, MetaFilter is moderated by an unaffiliated librarian who just happens to be one of the smartest people in the field.

Double Octuple Newspaper Web Perfecting Press, 1903

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is a little over a year old now. We published our first article on October 8, 2008, and we’ve now published thirty-five in all, along with five group posts. By most measures, we’re still a new publication, but we’ve also been pretty successful. About 2,250 people subscribe to our feed, we were one of the LISNews blogs to read in 2009, we’re indexed in LISTA, and many of our favorite writers and librarians have contributed articles or read drafts of our work, mentioned us on their blogs, left comments, or encouraged us in person.

In this article, I do my best to explain why we think we’ve been able to reach people. Although it’s hard to avoid talking about ourselves in an article that describes our experience writing, editing, and publishing In the Library with the Lead Pipe, our motivation is to encourage our readers to produce their own experiments, not to encourage them to adopt our model. When we created In the Library with the Lead Pipe, we had to figure out a lot of things for ourselves. Because we love reading good writing about libraries, we’re sharing what we know in the hope of bringing more good library writing into the world.

Assemble a Team

Treadwell's Wooden-Frame Bed and Power Press, 1822

Writing, at least writing that’s intended for publication, is an odd mix of the solitary and the social. You spend time alone, reading and thinking, working through your ideas and trying to present them in a way that resonates for other people. And then you share a draft of your work, ideally with someone you trust, and that person edits your text, refines it, makes suggestions, helps bring out the best in you. Our writing is only as good as our relationship with our readers, both the editors who help us turn our drafts into publications and the readers who spend time with our thoughts after they’ve been published, just as you’re doing now.

We publish most of our work at In the Library with the Lead Pipe over solo bylines, but all of our posts are group efforts. We usually bounce ideas off of each other before we get heavily involved in any research, and we rely on each other’s differing perspectives and skill sets as we refine our articles and prepare them for publication. We divide the tasks involved in keeping a blog/journal on schedule and have learned together what’s involved in this kind of undertaking. There are probably more small compromises involved for us than there are for people who publish solo, but none of us compromise on the things we care most about, such as open access and productive collaboration. We all feel comfortable disagreeing with the group and suggesting alternatives, and we all value unanimity when possible (or absolutely necessary), but are fine with simple majorities most of the time. We also enjoy co-authoring group posts, such as “What Not to Do When Applying for Library Jobs,” because they allow us to collaborate even more fully than we can in our solo posts, enabling us to include multiple perspectives in a single article.

The team behind In the Library with the Lead Pipe was assembled at the 2008 ALA Annual in Anaheim. Over lunch, Kim Leeder and I were talking about how much we would miss being first-year academic library bloggers at ACRLog. She was also eager to create an outlet for the enthusiastic, creative, and occasionally revolutionary voices she had been hearing as a participant in the 2008 ALA Emerging Leaders program. Kim suggested that we put together a group of librarians and start our own publication. Our goal was to find other people who seemed likely to bring out the best in each other, like the groups who publish ACRLog, Library Garden, and Pop Goes the Library.

Kim had worked with Emily Ford on an ALA Emerging Leaders project. I had worked with their fellow Emerging Leaders Derik Badman at Temple University and Ellie Collier on an ACRL panel. Being a North Carolina State University Libraries fanboy, I approached Andrew Pace for a recommendation from NCSU and he encouraged us to recruit Hilary Davis. It’s frightening to ask people to commit to a new project that may take up a lot of their time, especially when you don’t know them well, but know enough to know how busy they are. Fortunately, everyone agreed almost immediately even though we knew we were entering an area of the publication market that often seems saturated.

Find Your Niche

Modern Delivery Van for Grocers, Druggists, Etc.

As Walt Crawford has documented, at any given point there are approximately 500 active, fairly widely read library blogs. Additionally, there are dozens of non-blog library publications, such as Public Libraries or Library Resources & Technical Services. The world certainly didn’t need another new library publication last year any more than it needs one this year, but we figured we would be all right if we created the kind of publication that would hold our interest as readers. What librarian isn’t always on the look out for a good new read?

Our initial idea, our elevator speech, was simple: “We want to be the NPR or New Yorker of library blogs. We want to combine the intellectual rigor of an academic publication with the readability of The New Yorker or the storytelling of NPR.” This was a huge improvement over my initial attempt to get this idea across, which I’d written about in a piece for ACRLog with embarrassing results. The useful thing about mentioning NPR and The New Yorker is the mystique they carry. NPR is known for its personalities, its tendency to make you care about topics you don’t find intrinsically interesting, and its driveway moments—its ability to make you sit in your car and listen to the end of the story even after you’ve reached your destination. The New Yorker is known for its writers—even people who, like Garrison Keillor, have written for The New Yorker, write novels in which they fantasize about writing for The New Yorker—and also for its credibility: no one takes copyediting and fact-checking more seriously. If we can make In the Library with the Lead Pipe into a publication people look forward to reading and good writers want to write for, if we can be compelling and accurate, we’ll be happy with what we’ve created.

Our elevator speech itself, though compelling enough for our needs, wasn’t strictly accurate. Publications like Library Journal and American Libraries probably have more in common with NPR or The New Yorker than we ever will, but our intention is different from theirs. For one thing, like the stories on NPR and the articles in The New Yorker, we want our posts to be as compelling for people in other fields as they are for librarians. I regularly read articles or listen to podcasts by people discussing economics, philosophy, medicine, and software start-ups, in part because I’ve developed an interest in these topics, but mostly because I like how they think; I consistently get ideas from these writers and broadcasters that apply directly to my library work. What these publications have in common is, like Meredith Farkas’s Information Wants To Be Free and Wayne Bivens-Tatum’s Academic Librarian, they take on broad ideas that benefit from being explored at length. I can imagine economists, philosophers, medical practitioners, and start-up founders developing an interest in libraries, and those who do would probably enjoy learning about our field by reading Meredith’s and Wayne’s long form posts. For us, writing long form posts—limiting ourselves exclusively to articles and essays whose lengths vary between about 2,000 and 5,000 words—made sense because we thought it could broaden our appeal.

Long form work also lends itself to intellectual rigor. We were inspired by open access journals like Evidence Based Librarianship, First Monday, and especially The Code4Lib Journal, whose modified peer-review model we further modified. In our version of peer review, each piece is read before publication by at least one external reviewer and at least one Lead Piper. We encourage writers to choose reviewers with high standards, people who will reject substandard or unclear ideas or phrases. I think of our process as being more like a thesis review committee than like blind review, especially because we’ve never had a completed article rejected. From a scholarly publishing perspective, it feels a bit more like a compressed thesis/dissertation process.

Initially, we propose ideas to each other. Some ideas are rejected before they’re turned into articles, others are encouraged. After writing what we believe are polished drafts, we share our articles with outside reviewers. Sophie Brookover could have scuttled my review of her book; she didn’t, but she did make significant changes to portions of it, as did Meredith Farkas, my other outside reader for that piece. I got the same sort of editorial guidance from Tim Spalding and Aaron Swartz, who agreed to read my second piece. Either one of them could have objected strongly enough to elements of my article that the entire thing would have had to be rewritten or abandoned, and both made important suggestions the led to significant modifications. After incorporating ideas from our external reviewers, we show our revised drafts to each other. Again, in most cases this leads to significant changes to our articles before they’re published.

A key element in our philosophy is that articles which offer criticisms also offer constructive solutions. That first part is important to us—we place a high value on identifying problems in the status quo, we intentionally try to shake things up a bit, and we’re comfortable with a bit of irreverence and humor—but we won’t publish any critiques that aren’t accompanied by what we consider a useful solution. Thus, our name: In the Library with the Lead Pipe, which was inspired by the game, Clue, as was our tagline, “The murder victim? Your library assumptions. Suspects? It could have been any of us.”

The peer review process isn’t limited just to the Lead Pipe team: like ACRLog, which gave me an opportunity to post an article as a guest author before I was brought on board as a first-year blogger, we encourage people to submit their work for consideration, and also make it a point to recruit articles by people whose work we know and like. Having guest authors lets us cover areas we care about but don’t have the expertise to write about on our own, and it gives us a chance to work with a broader range of writers and include other perspectives. It also gives our guests a platform without requiring them to take on the editorial and other responsibilities required to keep In the Library with the Lead Pipe on course. Guest authors still need to recruit external and internal reviewers, they still need to learn their way around our publishing platform, and they are required to submit a short bio along with their article. The idea is that submitting an article shouldn’t be any harder or easier for our guests than it is for us.

In finding our niche and developing our processes, we did our best to find the things we liked and admired in other publications, and we adapted them to suit our skills and personalities. I don’t think the world needs another In the Library with the Lead Pipe, but I’d love to read a new publication whose writers go through a similar process of picking and choosing their favorite elements from the publications they enjoy reading.

Build a Sound Foundation

Accurate Measurements are Essential to Correct Time Keeping

I recently read an interesting explanation of the request that Van Halen included in its legendary backstage concert rider: “M & M’s (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES).” According to The Smoking Gun:

While the underlined rider entry has often been described as an example of rock excess, the outlandish demand of multimillionaires, the group has said the M&M provision was included to make sure that promoters had actually read its lengthy rider. If brown M&M’s were in the backstage candy bowl, Van Halen surmised that more important aspects of a performance—lighting, staging, security, ticketing–may have been botched by an inattentive promoter.

I think the same idea applies to publications. There’s no direct correspondence between good writing and either registering your own domain name or creating a unique layout, but at this point I almost always skip past writers who haven’t bothered to take control of their identity. Purchasing a domain, such as inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org is simple, and you can own one for less than $10 per year. It’s a good idea to register your domain with an ICANN-accredited registrar: I recommend Namecheap or Gandi.

Registering a domain is not the same as self-hosting your publishing software. All of the interesting hosted platforms allow you to associate your own domain with their servers. However, even though Google’s Blogger, WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Posterous are reliable, usable, and free, I still recommend that you sign up for a web host and run your own software. Again, it’s about making your site better for your users and, though there’s an initial learning curve, you’re able to get a lot more done with a lot less hassle.

Selecting a web host can seem daunting because there are thousands to choose from and most appear to be fairly indistinguishable from one another. My recommendation would be to go with an inexpensive plan from Blue Host, DreamHost, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, or A Small Orange, four of the hosts featured in Lifehacker’s January 2009 survey of the Most Popular Reliable and Affordable Web Hosts, or with LISHost. This is a somewhat larger commitment than registering a domain. There’s more involved, and the price will vary between approximately $25 and $120 per year, depending on your needs. I feel strongly that your time, and your readers’ time, is more than worth it.

One of the primary advantages of using a web host is that it gives you control over the software you run on your website. For us, the decision to use WordPress to publish In the Library with the Lead Pipe was an easy one. We were already familiar with it, it’s stable, it’s regularly updated and easy to upgrade, and it’s very good at reducing spam. It also has an extensive range of sophisticated plugins; though we actively weed any we aren’t using, we currently depend on twenty-nine plugins to help us present information, manage our data, and collect statistics. That last part, statistical measurement, is especially important: while Google’s Analytics and FeedBurner can be useful, it’s nice not to be reliant on third-party vendors for something so important. We’ve used Analytics from the beginning, but we’ve chosen not to use FeedBurner to measure our feed statistics. Instead, we use WordPress plugins Feed Statistics and StatPress Reloaded. Neither plugin has been updated in a while, but both still seem to be working fine.

WordPress also made it fairly simple for Derik to create a unique website design. By modifying an existing template and adding in his art, Derik gave us some of the best staging in online library publishing. When you visit a website for the first time and see original art, it immediately signals to you that the site’s creators care about your experience.

Six Librarians, drawing by Derik Badman

Go to Your Audience

Sectional View of a Telephone Building: A Typical American Central Office Building, Showing the Efficient Arrangement of the Various Departments

In addition to making sure our site’s appearance made our content more appealing, we wanted to make sure our site’s content license was appealing as well. We wanted a license that was permissive enough to make our content as usable as possible, but we didn’t want it to be so permissive that it would be hard for us to attract guest authors: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 seems to strike the right balance. As a measure of thanks for Creative Commons for creating this license, any royalties we make as part of our arrangement with EBSCO to appear in LISTA, though likely to be modest, will go directly to Creative Commons. Our license and modified peer review policy also qualify us as open access, which helped us get a nice boost in readership early on when Peter Suber’s SPARC Open Access Newsletter linked to us.

The other decision we made early on that’s helped us was the choice to apply for an ISSN. Unlike ISBNs, which cost about $125 for one and $275 for a block of ten, you can request an ISSN for free and you can start the application process before you publish your first issue. An ISSN is the major requirement for appearing in indexes, which was one of our goals. We aren’t going to change our policies in any major ways in order to get indexed—we’re happy with our version of peer review, and we don’t plan to divide our content into volumes and issues—but we still want people searching for articles in academic databases, such as those offered by H.W. Wilson or ProQuest, to find our articles in their search results.

I found it surprisingly difficult to figure out the relevant indexes’ collection policies or what we needed to do in order to submit our work for consideration. Here’s a short guide for others who might want to go this route. I recognize that it seems mundane, but a guide like this one would have saved me ten or twenty hours and a great deal of frustration:

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). We felt that we met DOAJ’s selection criteria, so we submitted our application online on December 9, 2008. The next day, we received a very nice rejection note from a reviewer in Sweden who had been a subscriber nearly from day one. As she explained, “For a journal to be included in DOAJ, the content of each issue, have to be at least 1/3 original research. Translated into blog publishing, I would say that means one issue = one month. So if you publish four posts in one month, at least two have to be original research… We are a bit traditional in the sense that we typically expect scholarly journals to have an abstract, a purpose of the paper clearly stated, references etc etc. Please do suggest the journal again if you feel that the content has shifted in this direction.”
• ERIC. We realized this was a stretch, but we felt we were close enough to meeting ERIC’s criteria that we emailed our information to ericpub@csc.com on December 9, 2008. We received a nice confirmation on December 15, 2008 from a Content Development Assistant, but haven’t heard anything since.
• Google Scholar. When we first submitted In the Library for Google Scholar’s consideration, the process involved sending an email to scholar-publisher@google.com, which we did, but we never received a response. The process has since been updated and a new request was submitted on November 22, 2009.
• Informed Librarian (subscription required). We submitted our request to be included in Informed Librarian on December 26, 2008, were notified of our acceptance on January 7, 2009, and received a note on June 4, 2009 that coverage had commenced.
• INSPEC (subscription required). We couldn’t find information on INSPEC’s website regarding submission contacts or collection policies, so we sent a message to its publishing contact on December 9, 2008. The message wasn’t confirmed and we have never been contacted by INSPEC.
• ISI (subscription required). Another stretch, but we thought people searching the Social Sciences Citation Index might find value in our work. After reading ISI’s guidelines (In six short paragraphs, we get the following friendly reminder four times: “A journal that is rejected for any reason (including timeliness) cannot be reevaluated for 2 years… Please do not resubmit a journal for evaluation if it has been rejected within the last 2 years. A reevaluation cannot be initiated until 2 years after the date of the rejection… If the journal is publishing on time and has not been rejected within the last 2 years, the evaluation will be initiated with the receipt of the first issue.”) and receiving the advice from a friend at Thomson to “make sure you use old fashioned snail mail in addition to submitting using the online form,” we decided to hold off for a bit.
• Library Literature (subscription required). We submitted our request to be included in Library Literature on December 9, 2008 and the next day we got a very nice request for more information from a contact with Library Literature’s publisher, H.W. Wilson. We responded immediately, and wrote back again on August 24, 2009 to let our contact know that our work would soon be appearing in one of its competitors’ databases, but we have not heard back from them since we received their initial response.
• LISA: Library and Information Science Abstracts (subscription required). We initially submitted our request for inclusion on December 9, 2008. At the time, a person’s name was listed and we emailed our request directly to her, but never received a response. ProQuest has since modified its process, so we resubmitted our request on November 22, 2009.
• LISTA (Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts) (free version available at libraryresearch.com). We wrote to EBSCO’s Director of Content Licensing on December 9, 2008, got a confirmation on December 10, 2008, and have nothing but good things to say about Paige Larkin, the EBSCO Publishing representative who has shepherded us through the process. She knows her stuff, she’s patient and responsive, and she’s done a wonderful job of addressing our concerns.
• Ulrich’s (subscription required). We emailed the Microsoft Word version of the submission form found on the Ulrich’s website to them on December 9, 2008 and were informed less than a week later that we had been added to their database.
• WorldCat (subscription version available). We asked a few catalogers at OCLC libraries to include us in their catalogs, but no one has ever stepped forward to receive credit for having cataloged us, and the citation itself doesn’t indicate which library chose to include us in its collection. Whoever you are, thank you for giving us a presence in WorldCat.

We also submitted our work to several other resources that aren’t specifically dedicated to scholarly research, including search engines Google, Yahoo!, MSN (now Bing), and Ask (all via the Google XML Sitemaps WordPress plugin, as well as Alexa and Technorati; DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory; library-centric search engines LibWorm and LISZen, and librarian-created indexes Librarians’ Internet Index, Internet Public Library, and LISWiki; and we requested an article at Wikipedia. There’s no reason not to submit your work to these resources. Depending on your goals, it may make sense to pursue them even more actively than we did.

Be Fearless

The First Missile: The Cave Man of prehistoric times unconsciously invented arms and ammunition

It’s time-consuming to submit forms, edit wikis, or send email messages to people you’ve never met or can’t identify. It’s a lot more challenging, at least if you fear rejection, to send a personal message to people you’ve met professionally asking them to read your publication, review a draft of an article before it’s published, or submit a guest article. Of all the tasks I’ve taken on as part of In the Library, that’s probably my least favorite, but we all do it and it’s worked: getting other people involved has made our writing better and helped us develop an audience.

It’s tempting to start naming names and giving thanks to the people who have helped us, but that would likely come off as showing a lack of humility and may also encourage even more unsolicited email than these folks deal with already. Still, it would be almost deceitful not to mention the two writers whose links to our work put us on the map.

I wrote to LISNews’s Blake Carver the day before we went live. His response, “Hurray, just what the world needed, a new blog ;-) I’ll take a look tomorrow.” He did, and he linked to us, and that resulted in the lion’s share of our incoming traffic the first couple of weeks (an effect not limited just to new blogs; the well established Pegasus Librarian recently experienced a similar spike in traffic after a link from LISNews). Three months later, Blake included us in his list of “10 Library Blogs to Read in 2009,” which resulted in our second highest traffic and subscription increase ever. So far, more people reach us from LISNews than from any other authored website.

Our biggest leap happened the first time Jessamyn West gave us a write up on her blog, librarian.net, on December 9, 2008. We got another big subscription increase when she linked to Ross Singer’s guest post back in August.

Detail from our Google Analytics traffic analysis

Detail from Google Analytics: Traffic spiked the first time Jessamyn West linked to us

Experiment

The Laboratory

We haven’t yet found a substitute for spending twenty-five or more hours writing and editing what some of us still think of as a blog post, but we recognize that’s only half the assignment: we need to keep looking for more ways to ensure that posts reach people. We’ve had some success with Twitter and Facebook, and considerably less success with Lead Pipe News, our attempt to create a Proggit/Hacker News/Stack Overflow for the library community.

We’ve also experimented with deadlines. We thought it made sense to publish weekly, but found that our writing was suffering, we were struggling to manage our time, and many of our readers couldn’t keep up with our output—our articles regularly exceed 5,000 words, plus our average post generates fourteen comments. So we scaled back to every other week and things seem to be better for all concerned.

This is one of the ways we differ from most blogs: as a rule, bloggers don’t seem to publish at specific intervals, while traditional print publications (or publications produced by publishers who are grounded in print-based models), generally distribute their work on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly schedule. I’m not sure that either model is better, but publishing every other Wednesday works well for us. Publishing online allows us to edit up to the last minute when we need to, either because our personal schedule necessitates it or information we’re discussing in the article is changing, and our regular publication schedule enables us to plan our own articles and line up guest authors several months in advance.

In addition to deadlines, we’ve experimented with our internal communication. At first, we started with a wiki, a private Google Group, and a series of chats on Meebo: the Google Group has been our mainstay, while the chats and wiki, though initially useful, proved less important once we got up and running. What we haven’t needed to do is meet face-to-face or via phone. Scheduling meetings is hard because, for the most part, we don’t live anywhere near each other or even share a time zone: Emily’s in Oregon, Kim’s in Idaho, Ellie’s in Texas, Hilary’s in North Carolina, Derik’s in Pennsylvania, and I’m in New Jersey. We’ve also grown to rely on Google Docs, both as an archive and as a way to collaborate asynchronously.

Virtual participation is a huge and somewhat divisive topic in the field, and I often find myself wanting to argue both sides. It can be helpful to get together in person—In the Library started, in part, because many of us attended the same meeting—but, in our experience, almost all of our work gets done virtually. Granted, we’re a small and non-hierarchical group with a fairly simple focus, we’re making our own rules, and we’re beholden only to our readers, reviewers, and each other. But it isn’t because of technophilia or any other ideology that we’ve arrived at our working style. We’re simply trying to do something people value, devoting as much of ourselves to this work as we can without throwing the rest of our lives out of balance. I don’t know exactly what conclusions others will draw from this, but my hope is that I’ll be able to bring what I’ve learned from In the Library to the other committees on which I serve. It‘s rewarding to work so happily and productively on something as successful as In the Library. I’d like to share that experience with others.

All images except for Derik Badman’s drawing of the In the Library with the Lead Pipe team and the screen captures of our statistics are from The Standard reference work: for the home, school and library, Volume 8, edited by Harold Melvin Stanford and published in 1921 by the Standard Education Society. An original of this work, part of the collection at Columbia University, was digitized on June 9, 2009. I downloaded these images from Google Scholar.

Thanks to Derik Badman, Blake Carver, Ellie Collier, Hilary Davis, and Jodi Schneider for commenting on a working draft of this arti­cle, and to Hilary Davis, Emily Ford, and Kim Leeder for help­ing me with its final version.

Integration by certified su / CC-BY

It’s interesting how many people don’t really understand the concept of open source. People often describe freeware as open source, or they’ll describe free web-based applications as open source, or applications with APIs that allow for mashups. There are articles all the time, on some of the most popular websites, that recommend free software but don’t distinguish programs the authors gives away for free from software that is actually open source.

For a program to be open source, it has to meet two basic qualifications

1. The author has to provide full access to its source code
2. The software has to be accompanied by a license that protects the contributions and rights of the community.

Perhaps what people associate most closely with open source—free software—is its price tag. However, it is often pointed out that open source software is usually free like a puppy or a kitten: there may be no cost associated with acquiring it, but there’s more involved than just the initial cost. As with software you pay for, it takes time and money to integrate new software into an existing computing environment. The difference between open source projects and software purchased from commercial vendors is that vendors profit from the time users spend on integration and workarounds (the stories they share on mailing lists and at user conferences add value to the commercial product) while fixes contributed to an open source project are owned by anyone who wants to make use of the software and are protected by its open source license. That’s why open source means more than just the zero on its price tag: the most essential element of open source is that the data is yours. Not just the data you entrust to the software, but the software itself. You are not reliant on the programmer who created it or the company that controls its license: you can alter it yourself or hire someone else to alter it for you.

Of course, the initial price matters. When libraries buy proprietary software, they aren’t just paying programmers to write code, system administrators to make sure computing infrastructure is working properly, and managers to provide the programmers and system administrators with meetings and timelines. They’re also paying for the company’s overhead expenses (such as the salaries of the salespeople who sell them the software) as well as the company’s profit margin.

What if libraries hired every single programmer, systems administrator, and systems manager away from library software vendors—let’s say at exactly the same salaries they’re making now—and also purchased all their code and relicensed it as open source? The pool of employees making library software wouldn’t be any bigger, but the overall expenses for creating library software (less the one-time cost of purchasing the code) would be the same. Except it wouldn’t, because libraries would no longer be paying for sales and other expenses or footing the bill for vendors’ profit margins.

I’m not suggesting this is going to happen. Libraries aren’t organized enough to scoop up every techie at every library technology company, and even if they were, the companies aren’t going to sell their intellectual property.

No, I’m not suggesting it’s going to happen; I’m suggesting that it is happening. I’m suggesting that, within a few years, libraries’ software expenditure distributions will have changed. Rather than paying outside companies to employ library programmers, software developers will work directly for libraries. The code will be different, it will be better, and it will be open source. And, if library software is like other software, there’s a good chance that a lot of the code will be contributed by volunteers—people who aren’t even employed by libraries, but are interested in the problems and possibilities presented by creating software for library users and employees.

This is what happened with web server software, the programs that deliver code to web browsers (such as Firefox): open source software, especially the software released by the Apache Foundation, dominates the web server market. It also appears to be happening with web browsers themselves (Firefox again, though Google’s open source Chrome is off to a good start) and with the operating systems, primarily Linux, that run the computers on which web server software runs.

Once open source software is good enough, and has a good enough support system, there aren’t any particularly compelling reasons to use propriety software. Eventually, people come around to that realization, whether they care about the underlying code or not. The issues are that “good enough” is in the eye of the beholder and “eventually” can take an awfully long time.

A Quick Survey: Naming Names

When I took on the task of creating a new website for the Collingswood Public Library, I looked at the software options that were available to me. I was familiar with some of them from my jobs at other libraries, and it’s not hard to figure out what software libraries are running or to investigate what they’re doing with it: it’s mostly just a question of visiting their website. In my opinion, the leading open source options seemed good enough—perhaps no better than the proprietary software that dominates the market, but also no worse and, more importantly, the open source software seemed to be improving more quickly.

In my opinion, there are seven open source software projects worth considering

• Blacklight (demo)
• Evergreen (demo)
• Kochief (demo)
• Koha (demo)
• Scriblio (demo)
• SOPAC (demo)
• VuFind (demo)

There’s some apples-and-oranges going on here, in that some of these packages are just components of a website and require other software in order to do everything a library website needs to do (such as inventory management). Other packages cover the entire process.

Evergreen and Koha cover the entire process. Some people call them Integrated Library Systems, though I wish they wouldn’t.

Blacklight, Kochief, and VuFind provide usability improvements for people stuck with existing library websites. Some people call them Discovery Layer Interfaces and a few people would probably still refer to them as Online Publicly Accessible Catalogs. If you know any of these people personally, please ask them to cut it out.

SOPAC is still known to some as a Content Management System, and Scriblio is still occasionally referred to as a Blogging Engine, though they’re also sometimes lumped in with Blacklight, Kochief, and VuFind because, like these three, most libraries would probably choose to use them in conjunction with a system that assists with tasks like cataloging and circulation.

For us, and for most libraries that use library-specific software to handle their inventory, these were all viable options. The library where I work uses Innovative Interfaces’ Millennium, so these packages already work with it, could be adapted to work with it, or could replace it entirely.

Built from Scratch, on a Framework, or on an Application

One of the many advantages of open source software is that it’s often accretive: once one group of developers figures something out, they tend to share it. Other developers are then free to build software on top of it, and these developers generally share their improvements. Netscape opened the code from its browser and developers turned it into Mozilla. Other developers turned Mozilla into Firefox, which has been used as, among other things, the basis for a music player (Songbird) and scriptwriting software (Celtx). This kind of thing happens all the time.

For some uses, it’s nice to work with software that’s built from scratch. Other times, it’s nice to work with software that’s built on top of a framework—code designed specifically so that other code can be built on top of it. And sometimes it makes sense to work with software that takes software applications and adapts them to specific needs.

Both Evergreen and Koha were built from scratch, which makes sense: when they were started, there really weren’t any frameworks for them to use. VuFind is built on the Apache Foundation’s Solr project (which helps it optimize search), but its interface was built from scratch. Again, when VuFind was started, there weren’t any frameworks that made sense for it to use. If it were started today, it probably would use a framework, though that’s just speculation.

VuFind is partnering with Blacklight in standardizing Solr for library search. Blacklight also makes use of a framework, perhaps the best known among web developers: Ruby on Rails. Like VuFind and Blacklight, Kochief uses of Solr, but its interface is built using Django, a competitor to the Rails framework.

There are two projects that make use of existing applications: SOPAC is built on Drupal and Scriblio is built on WordPress. Both Drupal and WordPress are well known and widely used. To pick just library examples, ALAConnect and LISNews use Drupal; Jessamyn West, Jenny Levine, Karen Schneider, and Meredith Farkas use WordPress (and so do many—perhaps most—other successful library bloggers who run their own software).

In general, like most users I’m fairly agnostic when comparing software that’s built from scratch to software that’s built on a framework or an application, but this information was useful to me in this instance because I really know and like WordPress, the software behind several projects I’ve developed or helped to develop, including In the Library with the Lead Pipe. As with Drupal, Ruby on Rails, and Django, WordPress has a large and sophisticated user community. By choosing these applications and frameworks, the developers for Blacklight, Kochief, SOPAC, and Scriblio are making it easier for technically inclined people to understand what they’re doing and also making use of a large group of programmers and users who are helping them to develop their library website software, even though they probably have no idea they’re doing it. By improving the underlying software, they’re improving all the programs built on top of the framework or application.

Language

Although I may be the world’s worst programmer, I still consider the programming language used in building the software for one of my websites. Preferences tend to be idiosyncratic, and mine are no exception, but I try to be as objective as I can. For instance, I limit my choices to the languages that are popular (according to surveys like the TIOBE Top 20 or Programming Language Popularity) and that are typically used to build websites: Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby (all of which are open source). Languages (and frameworks) tend to be popular, and to add more developers, because they’re fun to use in developing software. Also, when a language is popular and fun to use, there tends to be larger group of programmers who will help you, or who you can hire, if you run into trouble.

Combining my language preferences with the previous consideration (built from scratch, on a framework, or on top of an application), here’s my ordered list

1. PHP/WordPress
2. PHP/Drupal
3. Python/Django
4. Ruby/Rails
5. Python (from scratch)
6. Ruby (from scratch)
7. PHP (from scratch)
8. Perl (from scratch)
9. Java (from scratch)

This doesn’t disqualify any of the contenders. Here’s how they fit into my list

• PHP/WordPress: Scriblio
• PHP/Drupal: SOPAC (and also some of the eXtensible Catalog project, though this project is not yet available for use or testing)
• Python/Django: Kochief
• Ruby/Rails: Blacklight
• Python (from scratch): N/A
• Ruby (from scratch): N/A
• PHP (from scratch): VuFind
• Perl (from scratch): Evergreen (though it’s being extended in other languages) and Koha
• Java (from scratch): N/A, though the eXtensible Catalog already makes use of Java, and OLE, which is still in the planning stages, may make use of Java as well, though I’m mostly just speculating on this point. My disinterest in Java, which I’ll admit is mostly just second hand, also helps to explain why I like Moodle (PHP) for educational websites better than its open source competitor, Sakai, which is built on Java.

Documentation

One of the advantages that commercial, proprietary software often enjoys over its open source competitors is documentation. This makes sense from a commercial perspective: write the documentation, point customers to it, and you can save on customer service. The catch is that documentation for commercial software is often hidden from search engines, so finding an answer to a question about commercial software often means navigating the vendor’s documentation or sending a message to its mailing list. At a previous employer, we were contractually obligated to constrain employee access to Innovative Interfaces’ documentation. While Innovative’s information was well written, the search engine that was built into it was awful, so finding answers was often frustrating. The plan, when I left, was to buy a specialized server we could use to run our searches through an access-restricted Google search.

Open source developers often seem more interested in improving the software than in writing documentation. It’s also a separate skill from writing code; people who are good at programming, and enjoy it, are not always the same people who are good at, and enjoy, writing documentation. As projects grow, people interested in writing documentation tend to get involved—and they make their discussions public. Users and developers post their thoughts about issues they encounter and they link directly to the documentation, which means search engines become one of the best resources in understanding a feature or solving a problem with open source software.

The programming languages I’ve cited all have excellent documentation, as do the frameworks and the applications. Among the full-service website software, Koha, the older of the two, has fuller and more user-friendly documentation, at least in my opinion; Evergreen’s is good and improving, but doesn’t yet appear to be as polished or accessible as Koha’s.

Among the other projects, VuFind and Blacklight probably have the best documentation—certainly enough to get you started, and SOPAC, though the newest of the bunch, has done a very good job with the basics, though as of this writing it is open about the absence of documentation for its more advanced features.

I’m probably hardest on Scriblio because it’s the project I know best, but Scriblio’s documentation lags behind its peers and even relatively basic questions often need to be answered on the mailing list. To Scriblio’s credit, these questions do get answered, but its lack of documentation is probably Scriblio’s most notable shortfall (for instance, as of this writing its internal record format, Marcish, is not yet documented on its website). Among the list of major open source library website software projects, Scriblio is ahead of only Kochief, which is in the earliest stages of the documentation process.

Stability: Leadership, Community, Funding

When commercial software vendors go out of business, they often take their software with them (unless they sell it to another company or, like Netscape, decide to release it as open source). That’s not a danger with open source software: as long as someone has a copy of the code, it remains available. I’m not aware of any significant open source projects that have simply disappeared. However, plenty of open source projects seem to die off when their developers stop making time for them. While it’s possible to revive stagnant projects or take them in another direction (WordPress, for instance, was a reinvigoration of b2/cafelog), it’s still advisable to look for projects that have a strong, stable community—especially for something as important as the software that powers your website.

As with documentation, stability is not really an issue for any of the languages, frameworks, or applications I’ve mentioned. However, it seems like it may be more of an issue for the library-specific projects.

Koha and Evergreen are closely associated with private companies that offer consulting for these projects. Josh Ferraro, one of Koha’s early adopters in the United States and the release manager for Koha 3.0, created LibLime in 2005 in order to focus on providing support for Koha users in North America (Koha was released in 2000 and has a longstanding, active community in New Zealand and Europe; reading its well documented history and learning about its unsung heroes are good ways way to learn how open source projects evolve). While Koha is as strong as its developer community—currently at about 90 developers, which is quite good—it seems likely that LibLime’s success and Koha’s will be intertwined for some time.

Unfortunately, there may be reasons to be concerned about LibLime. Most of what I’ve heard is just rumor, though in the last few days the LibLime website’s management team page ceased to display photographs and blurbs about two of its members, Debra Denault (Senior Vice President, Operations) and Galen Charlton (Vice President, Research and Development, and the manager for the newest Koha release, version 3.2). LibLime also pulled its promised funding from the code4lib conference earlier this year rather suddenly and unexpectedly, or so it seemed to me. There could have been a non-financial reason for this decision, or it could have been a conservative move (the conference took place right after the sudden 2008-2009 downturn).

Just to be clear: I’m doing my best not to pass on gossip as fact, especially about a company whose employees I’ve met, respect, and like very much—and who funded a presenter, Aaron Swartz, when I found out last minute that ALA wouldn’t waive Aaron’s registration fee for the Midwinter in Philadelphia (even though he was addressing our discussion group for free and paying for his own travel expenses). And I’m not suggesting that either LibLime or Koha is in trouble. LibLime is an important contributor to Koha, but even among “pay for support” organizations, Koha is bigger than LibLime. Still, just as it’s worth understanding what’s going on with automobile manufacturers before you buy a new car, it’s worth getting to know a bit about the groups who are working on your website software, whether they’re private companies or open source communities.

Evergreen, which was initially released by a consortium of Georgia libraries as the PINES catalog, saw several of its initial developers go on to found Equinox Software, a company that consults on Evergreen installations. Equinox has hired extraordinarily talented people, they’re hiring (which is always a good sign), and they have talented volunteers contributing code back to the project. To bring this back to the model I sketched out in the introduction, most of these “volunteers” are employed by libraries, not by Equinox/Evergreen.

The rest of the projects have what could be considered a single point of failure: if their lead developer or sponsoring department were to abandon the project, they would likely lose a great deal of momentum. I believe, in each case, they would eventually regain that momentum or I would not have included them in this survey, but it seems clear to me that the other five projects are potentially less stable than Evergreen or Koha.

Based on its code updates, VuFind appears to be adjusting well to its transition from being someone’s primary responsibility to being a community-based project. Andrew Nagy founded VuFind while working for the library at Villanova University (VuFind is a pun on VU). He has since moved on to Serials Solutions, where he is one of the leaders of its Summon product. VuFind has received a Mellon Award and professional support is available through Lyrasis, both of which are encouraging. However, it would be nice to see a new release (VuFind’s latest release is its first release candidate for version 1.0, which came out on October 15, 2008) and, Lyrasis, though large and diversified, is undergoing its own changes, so VuFind could find itself with no organization other than its original developers offering commercial support.

Blacklight and Kochief are similar to VuFind, or at least to where it was when it was mostly a Villanova project: Blacklight is being supported primarily by the University of Virginia library and Kochief primarily by the Drexel University library. Both look great and are under active development, but neither has a large base of installed users. This is significantly mitigated by their use of popular languages and frameworks, but lack of support by Virginia or Drexel (at this point mostly Drexel’s Library Systems Developer, Gabriel Farrell) would be major blows to these projects.

As far as institutional support, Scriblio and SOPAC are a study in contrasts. Scriblio isn’t technically based at a library: Casey Bisson, its lead developer, works as an Information Architect at Plymouth State University, but he works centrally, not just for the library. He has, however, secured funding for Scriblio from the Mellon Foundation and also joint funding from the NEH/IMLS. Meanwhile, SOPAC’s development has been funded by two of the finest and best funded public libraries in the country, Ann Arbor and Darien, lead developer John Blyberg’s former and current employers. Neither Scriblio nor SOPAC yet have large developer communities or installed user bases, and both remain highly reliant on their lead developers.

Self-Hosted or Outsourced

One of the advantages of open source website software is the empowering feeling of downloading the software and running it on servers you control. However, it’s also useful to have the option of paying someone knowledgeable to run the software on their servers: as mentioned above, system administration is a career and an expense unto itself. Some software offers the best of both worlds: go to WordPress.org and you can download WordPress and install it on your own servers; go to WordPress.com and you can sign up for a free website that’s powered by WordPress software, but works much like Blogger or any other hosted software. In exchange, you give up a certain amount of control, but for many people it’s a welcome tradeoff.

LibLime and Equinox specialize in their projects and offer hosting for them at what I consider reasonable prices. Scriblio has a free hosting option that it is slowly rolling out to smaller libraries—an equivalent service to the WordPress.org/WordPress.com website option. For us, that was a big attraction. We give up some control, but taking server administration tasks and expenses out of the equation is a huge net win.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no dedicated VuFind, Blacklight, Kochief, or SOPAC hosts, though there are companies that specialize in PHP, Rails, Django, and Drupal. For instance, Palos Verdes Library District, which just released its SOPAC-based website, hired CraftySpace to guide its implementation. Help is available for running and hosting any of these projects, but for now managed hosting is most closely tied to Koha, Evergreen, and Scriblio.

Choosing Scriblio

For me, the initial decision to use Scriblio and the ongoing decision to stick with it are both difficult and obvious. I really like using WordPress and know it well—I created a very basic Scriblio site even before I had my first interview for my current job, and setting it up took just a few hours—and I really like Casey Bisson as a person and as a web developer: our visions for libraries are awfully similar. For instance, Scriblio creates unified websites: for Scriblio libraries, the catalog and the rest of the website look alike and run on exactly the same software. What closed the deal for us was Scriblio’s ability to pull in funding and its decision to turn some of that funding into free hosting for CollingswoodLib.org (and similar libraries).

Scriblio isn’t perfect, but I’m very comfortable with Scriblio and excited about where it’s heading. While I’ll be happier when there’s a larger developer community, more internal interest in standards, and better documentation, I have the ability to help make these changes. In particular, as one of Scriblio’s early adopters, I bear more than a little responsibility for not having done more to improve its documentation; remedying this situation is high on my to do list. However, perhaps the main problem I have with Scriblio is that my satisfaction with it diminishes my interest in getting more direct experience with the other software I could be using for our website.

If I were a more talented programmer, I’d probably choose Kochief because I’m most interested in learning Python and Django. I’ve also commented on my admiration for Gabriel Farrell elsewhere on this website. Blacklight would probably be my next choice if I knew what I was doing: plenty of programmers I admire are fans of Ruby and Rails. If I were more interested in PHP, or was interested in hiring a developer, I’d strongly consider VuFind. Its user interface is attractive and polished, and a lot of good thinking and good work has gone into this project.

If I had more money to spend on implementation and training, I’d hire LibLime to host Koha and migrate our data, or Equinox to migrate us over and host us on Evergreen. My hope, which I try to make real via advocacy, is that a larger entity than Collingswood—Camden County, VALE, the New Jersey State Library—will make this decision and include us as partners. From what I’ve seen, I strongly prefer Koha and Evergreen websites to what Millennium offers. As for choosing between the two, I’m not yet able to do it and don’t see any reason to decide just yet, though I have learned enough to decide that I don’t yet want us to abandon Millennium on our own. When the time comes to migrate our data, both projects will have changed, plus we’ll be making the move alongside partners. Fortunately, Koha and Evergreen are both great and getting better. I’ll decide later which one I most hope to use.

If I were to leave Scriblio tomorrow, the project I’d likely leave it for would be SOPAC. While I prefer WordPress to Drupal, it’s mostly because I’ve been working on smaller projects: Drupal was initially developed with more complex websites in mind, while WordPress was initially developed to handle simpler sites. They’ve been converging for years, as WordPress has gotten better at bigger sites and Drupal has gotten better at smaller sites, but there’s still a perception—one I admit to not having tested in a few years—that Drupal is better at handling larger websites. I also like the fact that SOPAC, like Scriblio, creates more unified websites (why is it that most libraries still subject their users to a website that includes the catalog only as an adjunct?) and that SOPAC has Darien Library as its primary funding source and John Blyberg as its lead developer. Plus, it’s attractive, flexible, and fairly easy to implement: all in all, a deserving winner of LITA’s 2009 Brett Butler Award.

For now, I’m happy with Scriblio. It meets our basic needs and is steadily improving. Perhaps the best endorsement I can offer for Scriblio, at least for smaller, public libraries like Collingswood, is my endorsement of its competitors. We use Scriblio in spite of its competition, not because of it.

Thanks to Casey Bisson, Nicole Engard, and Gabriel Farrell for reading an early draft of this article, and to my ItLwtLP colleague, Derik Badman, for helping me with its final version.

Teapots In a Tempest by GaijinSeb / CC-BY-NC-ND

Only a few information technology organizations predict the future by inventing it.¹ One of the canonical examples is Xerox PARC, which in the early 1970′s produced the first mouse, pioneered Graphical User Interfaces, invented Ethernet, and developed the first laser printer, along with dozens of other innovations. Among contemporary organizations, the inheritor of this lineage appears to be Google.

The Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago during its early years is probably the most widely accepted Xerox PARC analog within librarianship. If libraries have a Google equivalent, a contemporary organization that is both synthesizing the best work in the field and shaping its future, it’s North Carolina State University Libraries. Under Susan Nutter’s directorship, NCSU Libraries became the first university library to win the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Excellence in Academic Libraries Award and received the American Library Association’s Library of the Future award; Susan Nutter was Library Journal‘s Librarian of the Year in 2005; and it places someone in LJ‘s Movers & Shakers list pretty much every year. Observe NCSU Libraries from afar and you can’t help but be impressed. Study it up close, as I did two years ago this week, and you get a sense of what it must have been like to work at Xerox PARC or, I expect, what it’s like to work at Google.

Two years ago, I was a library school student enrolled in Steven Bell’s Academic Librarianship course at Drexel University. The major assignment for the class was to conduct a field report on a library, and Susan Nutter allowed me to spend a day interviewing her management team, mostly individually or in small groups. One of the major themes I noticed was how fortunate they felt to work with each other. They believed they were working more hours than their colleagues at peer institutions, but they also believed they were having more fun (in my experience, both beliefs seem to be accurate). As complimentary as they were toward all of their colleagues, when they began listing the colleagues who they most admired, who drove them the hardest, who made them feel like what they were doing was important–and just about every member of the management team cited just about everyone else by name–inevitably they started that list with Kristin Antelman.

The sense I got of Kristin, in part from our conversation, but mostly from hearing her colleagues talk about her, was captured by Steve Yegge, a programmer at Google, in a post entitled Done, and Get Things Smart:

“At first it’s entirely non-obvious who’s responsible for Google’s culture of engineering discipline: the design docs, audited code reviews, early design reviews, readability reviews, resisting introduction of new languages, unit testing and code coverage, profiling and performance testing, etc. You know. The whole gamut of processes and tools that quality engineering organizations use to ensure that code is open, readable, documented, and generally non-shoddy work.

But if you keep an eye on the emails that go out to Google’s engineering staff, over time a pattern emerges: there’s one superheroic dude who’s keeping us all in line.”²

The trait Kristin shares with Yegge’s coworker at Google is that she excels at understanding how decisions made today—or left unmade today—can impact the future. And she insists on looking at reality as it is and seems likely to be, not as people might wish for it to be. As NCSU’s Associate Director for the Digital Library, one of her major initiatives over the past few years was to lead the group that first introduced faceted browsing to library catalogs, using the Endeca software that was previously used only on commercial websites like Home Depot’s. After rolling out the catalog at NCSU Libraries, she and her colleagues worked with their peers in the Triangle Research Library Network to create an Endeca-powered union catalog (in addition to NCSU, the network comprises the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, and North Carolina Central University). In an article for the April 2009 issue of College & Research Libraries News she co-authored with TRLN’s Mona Couts, they emphasize the ambiguity inherent in the project:

“TRLN librarians were in agreement that our catalogs were bad, and that what NCSU had in its Endeca catalog was, if not the answer, at least an improvement. The harder challenge is that the very concept of the catalog is in transition. Implementing a “next-generation” catalog doesn’t answer the question, what should a library catalog be anymore?”

When I learned that a group of Assistant/Associate University Librarians and Assistant/Associate Directors (AUL/AD) in academic libraries, known as the Taiga Forum, issued a series of provocative statements on the future of libraries, it was no surprise to me that Kristin Antelman was on the steering committee that helped create the document. And when I read the statements themselves, I was sure I detected some of her ideas.

Over the past few weeks, I had the good fortune to interview Kristin about Taiga, the statements, and the future of libraries. Although during the course of our conversation we chose not to dissect the Taiga Forum members’ creation or discussion of each statement individually,³ we encourage you to use the comments section that follows this article to share your thoughts on the statements themselves as well as the other ideas Kristin shared.

Why did you agree to join the Taiga Steering Committee and to moderate a session? What was it about Taiga that appealed to you?

I got involved with organizing Taiga 4 because I had attended the first three Taigas and found them to be great meetings. They were unlike any professional meetings I had been to; we spent a whole day talking honestly about big and difficult challenges facing academic libraries. At the end of Taiga 3, I felt I wanted to have some input in how the next one was done.

The Taiga meetings were conceived as a venue for people at the Associate University Librarian/Associate Director level in academic libraries to get together and discuss common challenges. We tend to have few peers in our home institutions and, sometimes, in smaller institutions, none at all. The premise of Taiga was that, while directors had venues to talk amongst themselves, there was no such venue for administrators below the level of director to talk frankly about issues across functional lines and with colleagues from other institutions.

The first year saw the development of ten provocative statements. Those statements ended up serving as the basis for lively conversations not only at the first Taiga meeting itself, but in academic libraries across the country for years afterward. I think they struck a chord because they dared to express fears and forebodings about our collective future that many of us were feeling but that we may not have had the courage (at that time anyway) to speak freely about. Taigas 2 and 3, very successfully in my opinion, employed the “open space” approach to participant-defined meetings. You could even say we were ahead of the curve on the “unconference.”

The aspect of Taiga 4 that has received the most attention was its revised “Provocative Statements” document. What was its purpose?

For Taiga 4, which was held this past January before ALA in Denver, the steering group had the idea to revisit which (if any) of the original provocative statements were still valid, and then to add to them. The new statements would be focused around the theme of this year’s meeting, “Organizational Change: Professional Identity and Personal Commitment.” We asked the Taiga community for feedback and took those responses into account when we wrote the new statements. As it happened, we did not carry forward any of the original statements, but incorporated a lot of the same themes in the new ones. The statements were written by a subgroup of the steering committee over several phone calls and wiki work. They were then commented on and edited by the full steering committee, and were distributed to the people who signed up to attend the meeting.

We then asked for volunteers to do “lightning talks” on the statements at the Taiga 4 meeting. Those talks were each followed by 10 or so minutes of discussion, which planted many seeds for conversation for the rest of the day. At the end of the meeting, we reviewed how we felt about the statements. That recap resulted in minor changes, including deleting statement #3 (about the dominance of Google) as not very provocative.

One of the misconceptions about the statements has been that the Taiga meeting participants believe that these things will happen, or, more interestingly, should happen. Actually, their purpose is largely rhetorical. We hoped the statements would inspire conversation—and resistance!—at our meeting. We very intentionally meant to say that we feel that research libraries are facing serious challenges to core areas of what we do and that we want to talk about these challenges without presuming any answers. I would also add (and here I’m speaking for myself and not the group) that I think the statements also explicitly confront superficial optimism about how academic libraries—and librarians—will transition into new roles.

The subtext of many of the statements is the as-yet-unknown impact of a potentially prolonged period of tough budget times, which was just becoming evident when these were written. How libraries build collections and are staffed now is a product of many decades of pretty robust growth. It remains to be seen what path libraries will take when budgets are shrinking, but ideas like realizing we cannot support a hybrid print/electronic model indefinitely, or cannot continue to work around underperforming employees, are a couple responses to these pressures that we explored.

Are the reactions you’ve seen—the ones that respond to the content rather than the context—in any way satisfying, even if their writers appear to be dismissive of the ideas expressed within the statements? Do these librarians’ strong reactions mean the statements are doing what they’re supposed to do?

Any reaction means the statements have had an impact. Response to the statements’ content and their context have been quite intertwined, however. Having made the decision to send the statements out into the world, we made a mistake in distributing them in a static way, with a lack of transparency about their context (who did this? what was the purpose?). We were rightly criticized for that.⁴

Apparently, the Darien Statements might be a response to Taiga, although they don’t claim that.⁵ Aside from being both being list-like and appearing around the same time, I don’t see too many commonalities. Except, that is, in the section called “as librarians, we must…”, where the Darien Statements have quite a bit in common with the spirit of Taiga, including their own expression of some of the points made in the provocative statements.

One aspect of the responses that does concern me is that there seems to be a pervasive, and enthusiastically embraced, gap of trust with administrators. While maybe that’s just something that always has been and always will be, it concerns me because these divisions weaken us. Those of us who are currently AULs or ADs are not MBA-types dropped into libraries; we have spent most of our careers working in various non-administrative librarian jobs. In fact, my impression is that a significant number of AUL/ADs attend Taiga soon after arriving in their positions.

Another criticism I’ve seen is that we’re too negative, that we don’t propose answers. It’s worth noting that, while most of the statements themselves don’t propose answers, the discussion at the meeting did very much address answers. How libraries address the challenges facing us often gets back to organizational culture. Acknowledging the need, and then adjusting what we do and who does it, sometimes in significant ways, is not an easy task for any of us, whether you are a front-line library worker, a manager, or an administrator. A couple colleagues and I have been working on a project to find out more about what future library leaders are thinking. This dovetailed with the Taiga 4 theme, so we prepared a little video of interviews with some of these librarians that we showed at the beginning of the meeting.

Will there be a Taiga 5?

Since Taiga is not a formal organization, we see where it takes us year to year. Thanks to the continued generosity of our sponsors, Innovative Interfaces and R2 Consulting, a Taiga 5 meeting will be possible, but what form it will take remains to be seen.

Time for some non-Taiga questions. What do you think library schools should be emphasizing? Requiring? Or, put another way, what are the abilities you consider most important in potential NCSU Fellows?

Library school programs are becoming increasingly differentiated it seems to me; and they have to in order to survive. Distance education will make it possible for prospective students to find the program that best meets their needs. These are both positive developments. I think that internships are even more critical than ever. Every recent MLS we hire tells us that they learned more in those experiences than they did from their educational program. Separating the Masters coursework from learning librar