In the Library with the Lead Pipe » Brett Bonfield http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org The murder victim? Your library assumptions. Suspects? It could have been any of us. Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:18:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 Aaron Swartz http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2013/aaron-swartz/ http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2013/aaron-swartz/#comments Wed, 20 Feb 2013 11:00:00 +0000 Brett Bonfield http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=4662 Aaron Swartz, holding a knife pointed at the camera, in Florence / CC-BY

A photo of Aaron Swartz by Quinn Norton entitled, “Florence” / CC-BY

In Brief:This article discusses Aaron Swartz’s life and legacy, especially his contributions to libraries. Via video, narrative, and archived email discussions, it conveys a sense of Swartz’s values and conversational style. It concludes with a detailed timeline of his life.

This is a living article about someone who died. This version is complete, but it’s not finished because I’m not yet ready for it to be finished.

I want to write about Aaron Swartz now because of what libraries meant to him and because of what he means to people who care about libraries. As much as has been written about Aaron since his death, I don’t think that story has been fully told.

I think it may be best to start with a video. There are no images of Aaron in this video, just his voice. We had a camera pointed at him as he delivered this presentation on Saturday, January 12, 2008, at the American Library Association Midwinter meeting in Philadelphia, but this is the version he liked best.

The talk is called “Picking Winners,” a topic my colleagues and I from ACRL’s University Libraries Section “Current Topics” committee requested, and he used it as a chance to talk about technologies and other projects he cared about, including Open Library. This video was never posted anywhere because neither of us could get the slides and the audio to line up. I’ve gotten the video to the point where it’s mostly watchable, but it’s still kind of a mess in terms of synchronization. If you’re a Keynote expert and want to give it a shot, I’d be happy to share the .key file with you.

A few weeks later, on Wednesday, February 27, 2008, he gave a different talk about Open Library at the code4lib 2008 conference hosted by Oregon State University.

I’ve been writing about Aaron and his connection to libraries since I was in library school. On July 17, 2007, for LISNews, I wrote a post called  “Aaron Swartz Announces the Open Library.” Here’s how it began:

What are you supposed to feel about Aaron Swartz? He co-authored RSS, served on the W3C’s RDF Core Working Group, helped the wonderful John Gruber design the amazing Markdown, and developed and gave away software like rss2email that many of us use every day… and then he graduated high school. He went to Stanford, naturally, at which point his already fascinating blog, Raw Thought, began alternating even more maddeningly between precocious, annoying, honest to the point of painfulness, and legitimately brilliant.

Aaron’s comment on the post: “Thank you for the kind words. And I’m sorry for the annoying blog posts.”

The fact that I’ve been writing about Aaron for years1 is not intended to give me credibility. As has become obvious since his death, a lot of people admire Aaron and a lot of us believe he had the capacity for greatness. I was consistently surprised and delighted by his thought processes and how he chose to spend his time. His curiosity, idealism, charisma, and productiveness gave me hope.

Maybe that explains the overwhelming sense of sadness I feel several times each day, and expect to for a long time. I also feel a lot of anger at the decisions made by MIT and the prosecutors who were responsible for his case, and expect to live with that anger for a long time as well.

It hurts to read that some people feel the memorials to Aaron are canonizing him or treating him as a martyr. I feel like those characterizations question the sincerity of those who knew him or admired him or agreed with him or simply believe he was mistreated. It represents a callousness that I hope people can allow themselves to leave aside. It would be awful for me to tell anyone else how to feel about Aaron’s death. I think those of us who are mourning are owed that same level of respect.

I met Aaron in person for the first time on January 12, 2008, when he presented at ALA. And I saw him in person for the last time the next night. The two of us got together at the Convention Center and talked for a couple of hours, then I drove him to West Philadelphia, where he was staying with friends. A couple of days later, he emailed to make sure he had the correct reference for a book I had recommended about nonprofit management and a week or so later we resumed our conversation via email.

I’ve uploaded our email correspondence (direct link to the PDF) to the Internet Archive’s Aaron Swartz Collection. At the time, Aaron was beginning to assist with the formation of Change Congress (now called Rootstrikers), an organization that sought to end corruption in the U.S. congress by reducing the influence of lobbyists and PACs, ending earmarks, supporting public finance for political campaigns, and promoting transparency. I was in favor of making it easier to prosecute corrupt officials by creating technology that ensured anonymity for whistleblowers and helped bring attention to the most credible and useful tips.

There are a few things our email exchange illustrates:

  • The nature of our in-person conversation that preceded this exchange. We were looking for practical ways that we, or a few people like us, could change the world for the better. Which is not what I had planned to talk to him about. I wanted to know more about the diet he’d recently used to lose weight. I wanted the inside story of his time at Reddit. I wanted to know what it felt like to leave Stanford after a year. I wanted to know what Paul Graham was like once you get to know him. But I didn’t drive the conversation, Aaron did. And he did it by asking questions. This style comes through in the emails he sent as well.
  • It should be obvious how hard I’m working to keep up with him, to come up with ideas that he has not already thought of and dismissed. I can usually at least hold my own in these kinds of conversations. But I was badly outclassed, in person and via email, by someone roughly half my age. For instance, my case is centered around the idea that corruption would end if it were easier to report and more frequently prosecuted. Aaron’s response:

    “I tend to disagree with the if-only-they-knew-the-truth school of thought. Watergate happened not because the story came out — COINTELPRO started in 1956; stories like this came out all the time in the independent press — it was because Nixon went after someone powerful (the DNC) who could fight back. Had it been Nixon burglarizing the Socialist Worker’s Party offices again, the Post never would given the story such attention and Woodward and Bernstein would have been stayed on the cub beat. So airing the stories is good, but it’s nowhere near enough. We need an alternate system for making them interesting and getting them to people. And that’s much harder.”

  • He took me and my ideas seriously. Because Aaron seems to have known everyone who was anyone, it can be easy to think of him as someone who had no time for you if you were less accomplished than Tim Berners-Lee or Paul Graham or Lawrence Lessig or danah boyd. That wasn’t the case. When we met, I was a recent library school graduate working part-time at a couple of libraries, a guy in his late thirties struggling to find my way in a new profession. It didn’t matter. He wanted to figure out what he could learn from talking to me or exchanging messages. And also what he could help inspire me to do. For instance, he suggests that I help make the nascent Wikileaks website easier to use.
  • There is foreshadowing in this exchange. His connection to Wikileaks is rumored to be one of the reasons the prosecutors were so keen on a conviction in the JSTOR incident. And I display a great deal of naivete about prosecutors as well, which Aaron doesn’t really call me on.

That conversation ended, but we continued to correspond. He served as a reviewer for one of my first Lead Pipe articles before it went live. When the Lead Pipe editorial board was first discussing the possibility of a Lead Pipe 501(c)(3), I asked Aaron for advice, and he put me in touch with his friend SJ Klein. I sent Aaron the MARC records for the Collingswood Public Library, which he described as being received by his colleagues at the Open Library with “much rejoicing” during their annual meeting. When my friend Gabriel Farrell and I created a website to promote the HarperCollins self-destructing ebook boycott, Aaron made some suggestions on how we could improve it. Aaron was an ally, one of the first people I would go to for advice on some of the projects I cared about most deeply.

Though we met that one time in person, Aaron was really just an Internet-friend. We were friends on Facebook, contacts on LinkedIn, and shared a few songs with each other on Spotify. The last thing he listened to on Spotify, the day before he died, was a Flying Nun-era Sally Field singing a song called, “Optimize”:

That song breaks my heart. I can’t help but attach a narrative to it. I picture him feeling down. I picture someone trying to do something to pick him up. That’s what this sort of song is best at. Find a goofy song, send it to Aaron, brighten his day. It always worked until it didn’t.

When the only explanation anyone seemed to have for Aaron’s death was that he was clinically depressed, I tried to accept that idea. It fit with the David Foster Wallace narrative. At the time of his death, Aaron was writing a summary of Wallace’s masterpiece, Infinite Jest. He’d blogged about it in two separate posts, “What Happens at the End of Infinite Jest?“ and “On Finishing Infinite Jest.” Wallace was clinically depressed. Aaron, like Wallace, chose to hang himself.

Many of the things I’ve read about him since his death cite his short story about suicide as evidence of his clinical depression, his disinterest and lack of participation in Reddit’s success as evidence of his selfishness and melodramatic tendencies, and his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto as evidence of his intention to distribute the JSTOR database online.

When it seemed like it was the only narrative available, I tried to make it fit with my limited understanding of Aaron as a person, with what I knew about his behavior leading up to his death. This narrative might be the most accurate one we will ever have, but I hope not.

We all contain multitudes. That’s obvious, perhaps trite, but it’s also something we tend to forget when we follow our natural tendency to explain why others behave the way they do. Which is why the portrait of Aaron that Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman is creating on Tumblr feels more believable, on an emotional level, than anything else I’ve read about him since he died. For instance, she doesn’t think he was clinically depressed. I wonder if she’s right, and what else she will be right about in the days ahead.

We know there are going to be books about Aaron Swartz. The story of his death has been too big, and his life has been too well documented, for there not to be multiple biographies. I wouldn’t be surprised it there were a few already being seriously negotiated.

I hope one of these biographies gives him the No One Here Gets Out Alive treatment, something like what Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman did for Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors, in their 1980 biography. It might be nice to see Aaron’s life turned into a series of melodramatic anecdotes that appeal to adolescents and inspire a decade or two of dorm room posters (assuming there are still dorms and posters in the years 2023 through 2038). I want to live in a world in which disaffected teens are at least as interested in coding and activism as they are in loud music and flattering pants.2

Even more than that, I hope one of these biographies gives Aaron his own Robert Caro, a biographer whom Aaron held in great esteem; he called The Power Broker, Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, “one of the very best books ever published,” and he admired Caro’s four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson as well. Aaron’s life was far shorter than that of Robert Moses or Lyndon Johnson, but he was present as history was being made, and he collaborated with many of the people who I believe will define our present age. I think his life is worthy of the Caro treatment.

The question I have is whether the world Aaron helped to create will be a world without Caros or, for that matter, without his other favorite authors, including David Foster Wallace and Noam Chomsky. These writers and their works have been heavily subsidized by the education and publishing industries. Much of Aaron’s work threatened the publishing industry and, given that he dropped out of both high school and college, he also embodied a threat to traditional education. While he loved books, I have yet to see how he reconciled that love with his desire to make information open and accessible. I’m sure Creative Commons was part of that vision. I wish I could ask him if there was more to it.

Assuming traditional education and publishing continue to struggle, assuming a void develops where they have prospered for the last century or so, we have no way to know if anything will replace them. That may be good, on balance, just as an increasing number of teen activists seems likely, on balance, to be more beneficial than harmful. Yet its seems that some of the things we love about education and publishing may soon become anachronisms, if they are not already.

So it’s possible that the best we will ever get is a web-based article. Fortunately, we already have a very, very good one: on February 7, 2013, Slate published “The Idealist: Aaron Swartz wanted to save the world. Why couldn’t he save himself?” by Justin Peters. At least for now, I think this is the closest we have to a definitive telling of Aaron’s story.

Since Aaron died, I’ve been trying to figure out how to honor him in a library-centric way. Many of the other ways that people have chosen to honor him overlap with libraries. For instance, at his memorial in New York City on January 19, 2013, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman said that a way to honor Aaron is that “All academic research from all-time should be made public and free and open and available to anybody in the world.” I want to see that happen, and I intend to help with that process, but I also want something more immediately achievable. And what I’m good at, as a librarian, is organizing information.

Justin Peters did a good job, for Slate, of creating a basic timeline of Aaron’s life. My plan is to expand on that project, to create a much more detailed timeline.

This project is not intended as an end unto itself. I see it as a resource for subsequent researchers, as a way to make Aaron’s “Robert Caro biography” just a little bit easier to write.  Like any library, it will always be complete, but also unfinished. As I learn more about Aaron’s activities or come up with more illustrative or stable links, I’ll add them to the timeline below.

At present, the timeline is just well formatted HTML. Once I have a better sense of what else should be added, I hope to publish it in a format that’s more conducive to being remixed, and perhaps host it in a way that makes it easier for others to contribute, perhaps as a Git repository or as a wiki. For now, I want this to be like John Mark Ockerbloom’s Online Books Page, my own to edit, but something I hope everyone finds useful.

Aaron will never respond to another of my emails. But he may still have answers to questions I never got to ask him directly. For me, this timeline has a second purpose. As I read more texts he wrote, learn about additional conferences in which he participated, and discover additional projects he found compelling, it’s my way of having the conversation end later, when I’m more ready for that to happen. I’m not yet ready.

Thanks to Laura Quilter, and to Lead Pipe colleague Erin Dorney, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Aaron Swartz: A Timeline

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

  1. The LISNews post was picked up, with permission and supporting documentation, by ACCESS, Asia’s Newspaper on Electronic Information Products & Services, which republished it in September 2007. Here are a few other times I’ve referenced Aaron in library-related publications:

  2. As one of my readers noted, this reads like a reference to Cory Doctorow’s novel, Little Brother, and its sequel, Homeland, which was released on February 5, 2013 and for which Aaron wrote the afterword and made suggestions while it was in progress. The only reason it isn’t a reference is because I still need to read both books, something I plan to do soon.
]]> http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2013/aaron-swartz/feed/ 6 Libraries: The Next Hundred Years http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/libraries-the-next-hundred-years/ http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/libraries-the-next-hundred-years/#comments Wed, 14 Nov 2012 22:46:21 +0000 Brett Bonfield http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=4541 Space Colony Art from the 1970s: Toroidal Colonies, Interior View (via NASA)

Space Colony Art from the 1970s: Toroidal Colonies, Interior View (via NASA)

Usually when we discuss the future of libraries, we’re talking about a year or two in the future, maybe up to ten. We look at forward-thinking libraries like NC State, or Darien Public Library in Connecticut, or maybe the initiative Nate Hill is helping to lead in Chattanooga. But for this article, I’m interested in a much, much longer span of time: the next hundred years.

One hundred years is not all that long of a span: one lifetime, or maybe two or three. When we try to think forward into the future, one hundred years can seem incomprehensible, a temporal illusion that makes it seem almost infinitely remote. But when we look backward, it can amaze us how quickly the time has passed. For that reason, I want to briefly cover the last hundred years in order to explore how much librarians in 1912 knew about us, and how they shaped where we are today.

That exploration starts with Dr. Sarah K. Vann. She died just a few months ago, at age 96, and I’m still shaken by her loss. I became a fan of her work soon after I began studying library history. As Dr. Vann wrote in her dissertation, which she completed at the Graduate Library School at Chicago in 1958, the first modern era of library science education started with Melvil Dewey and lasted until the publication, in 1923, of a report that Charles Williamson prepared for the Carnegie Corporation.

Dr. Vann is a direct link to Charles Williamson. One of her books was a study of the Williamson Reports, which ushered in the second modern era of library science, an era I believe we’re still in today. The Williamson Reports, which were underwritten by the Carnegie Corporation, helped lead to the accreditation process for library schools, and it also led directly to the creation and proliferation of modern library education, most notably at the University of Chicago (whose library school was underwritten by the Carnegie Corporation). The Graduate Library School at Chicago awarded the first Ph.D. in library science in 1930 and “(f)or the next twenty years up through 1950 Chicago was the sole awarder of the doctorate—at least one and as many as six per year during this period for a total of sixty-five degrees” (Bobinski, 1986, p. 699; see also, Richardson, 1982).

While Dr. Vann was working on her dissertation, she met Charles Williamson, and he wrote her two letters. In those letters, we learn that one hundred years ago, in 1912, Williamson had just been hired by the New York Public Library, which was working on a new grant from the Carnegie Corporation to set up its own library school. He helped provide assignments for the students and sometimes served as a lecturer. As he wrote to Dr. Vann, “I am afraid I always had a rather dim view of the nature and quality of the instruction in that school, including especially my own little part in it. Later I found that the School at the New York Public Library had the reputation of being one of the best in the country” (Vann, 1971, pp. 191-192).

It’s clear from this passage that Williamson, in 1912, was beginning to form a vision for library education. That vision turned into the education library schools are still providing today. In 1918, Carnegie hired him to help with its Americanization Study. In 1919, it hired him to study library education. In 1921, he turned in that report. In 1923, a revised version of that report was published. A few years later, based in large part on Williamson’s work, the Carnegie Corporation funded the Graduate Library School at Chicago.

Dr. Vann’s scholarship links us to Williamson’s studies. Many of Dr. Vann’s students are working in libraries today, and are also educating library students. So that’s roughly one hundred years in one or two or three lifetimes.

But just because we can traverse one hundred years so quickly, is it practical to think about? I think so. In fact, I think it’s not only practical but necessary.

Why We Should Look 100 Years into the Future (part 1): “The Hundred-Year Library”

The first reason I think it’s necessary is based on an argument made by Paul Graham, a programmer, essayist, and probably the most influential venture capitalist in the world. One of his best essays is called, “The Hundred-Year Language.” The idea is that we’ll still have computer programming languages in a hundred years, and programs written in these languages will provide the necessary code for all the cool futuristic stuff we don’t yet have, like cities in outer space and flying cars. So Graham asks, Can we imagine today how the programming language that’s used for flying cars might look? And if we could, would we want to start using it right now?

Graham answers both questions affirmatively. We can imagine the hundred-year language and we want to start using it as soon as possible. So Graham sets out to design that language and put it to immediate use. The downside is the language might run slowly on today’s processors; the upside is, by not worrying about today’s limitations, it can be more elegant than contemporary languages, and it might also help inspire people to work even harder to develop faster processors. It might even bring about the existence of flying cars more quickly.

It’s easy to adapt Graham’s questions to libraries: Can we imagine the hundred-year library today? And if we can, would the people who currently rely on your library want to start using it? Would you want to work there? What’s keeping us from building it today?

Remember, if you read the Williamson Reports for the Carnegie Corporation, you’ll see that almost one hundred years ago Charles Williamson was able to draft the curriculum that’s still in use in library schools today. Actually, in many ways the recommendations he drafted would be an improvement on the library training provided to most librarians working in libraries today. For instance, he calls for greater standardization within curricula, for certifying library workers (his umbrella term for anyone who works in a library), and for better use of distance education, especially for professional development (what he refers to as “Training in Service”).

So just as Williamson could imagine and design the library training we’re receiving today, I think we can imagine the hundred-year library and begin designing that library now. I think the people who rely on your library today would be thrilled if it suddenly transformed into the library of 2112. And I think you would love to work there. Which is a good thing. Because in 2112 you will still be alive and you will still be working. Maybe at the library where you work today.

Why We Should Look 100 Years into the Future (part 2): Aubrey de Gray and Warren Buffett

You can view the idea that you will still be working in 2112 as preposterous. Or as a theoretical exercise. But at least one influential scientist, Aubrey de Gray, might see it as something of an understatement. de Gray is a biomedical gerontologist and the Chief Science Officer for the SENS Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) dedicated to combating the aging process. His bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. are from the University of Cambridge and he has been interviewed on “60 Minutes” and in the New York Times, and he has presented “A Roadmap to End Aging” at TED. He believes the science already exists to delay or even reverse much of what we view as the aging process. The idea is to stay alive long enough for science to eradicate each of the conditions that kill us.

Admittedly, this seems far-fetched, the idea of living another hundred or five hundred or thousand years. But consider that we’ve already eradicated many of the diseases that killed our ancestors. And there’s no lack of motivation to eliminate heart disease, cancer, respiratory diseases, stroke, and the other leading causes of death. In the last few decades, we’ve made tremendous progress in diagnosing and treating all of them.

Why does the possibility that we will be alive in one hundred years matter? It follows the same reasoning as Warren Buffett’s well known advice about investing: “An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it. With every investment decision his card is punched, and he has one fewer available for the rest of his life.” (Warren Buffett, quoted in Mark Hulbert, “Be a Tiger, Not a Hen,” Forbes, May 25, 1992, p. 298) In other words, if you are personally invested in the long-term consequences of your actions, you make more rational decisions. It gets you away from the immediate gratification mindset and encourages you to think about first principles.

Which gets us to the central question of this essay: What will the library of 2112 look like? Which of our first principles will still apply? I think the core tasks and principles that have helped to define libraries since their founding will remain relevant for at least another hundred years. Libraries will continue to be about their users and their workers, about inquiry and intellectual freedom, about preserving the cultural record, about equalizing opportunity, and about cooperation.

So the first point I want to make is that libraries will still be about people. In fact, they’re going to be a lot more about people than they are today.

Libraries = You

Another way of saying that is, the hundred-year library is about “you,” Time magazine’s 2006 person of the year. Yes, you.

I first shared the thoughts in this article as a keynote at the Fall 2012 Tenn-Share Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. I could have done it via Skype or in a Google Hangout. I could have presented it as a webinar. I could have recorded my presentation and the attendees could have watched it together and discussed it, just like a lot of libraries do with recordings of TED talks. They could have waited until I published this article and discussed it online. The point is, there were essentially no technical barriers to their having the same discussion in collective isolation, or at least without the attendees and I being physically present in the same room at the same time.

Except that it wouldn’t have been the same discussion. We are social animals. We need each other, and not just emotionally. On a cognitive level, we get more information, and better information, from being in each other’s presence. In-person, human interaction is still the highest bandwidth way for us to communicate. And that’s not going to change in the next hundred years. That’s not how biology works.

So if this rather obvious point is correct, what are its practical implications? It means the hundred-year library, the library of 2112, is going to focus far more time, effort, and money on human interactions. Right now, the idea of signing up to check out a person is kind of a novelty. But I think libraries that have instituted these programs have the right idea. Libraries should serve as the focal point for meeting new people.

When we meet new people, we learn something. And if those interactions can have an empathetic, well planned out structure behind them, libraries could do an even better job of providing people with information about their community, their world, and any topics they’re interested in studying. I’m not just talking about public libraries: I think every library can better fulfill its mission by fostering more direct, in-person interaction.

The idea of high quality, high bandwidth, human interaction also argues that we might consider investing far, far more into what we currently think of as library programming. It would mean adapting our spaces to accommodate these changes. It would mean additional training for staff. It would mean learning more about what our neighbors and students and faculty want to know. The seeds are there, and a lot of libraries are already doing amazing work in this area. But what if we’re only just at the earliest stages of a movement?

To continue this idea, there’s no reason libraries can’t become the first thing people think about when they’re looking within their community or on their campus for activities that involve storytelling, visual art, and music. As with library conferences, the ability to digitize stories, visual art, and music hasn’t diminished our desire to experiences these things in person. When I look at representations of art, I want to see the original. When I hear mp3s of a band I like, I want to attend a live performance.

These impulses seem unlikely to change. If anything, we want more art, more scholarship, more experiences we can sample digitally and experience in person. The environment that fosters more art and scholarship is an environment that values and protects intellectual freedom, both for its producers and its consumers. Libraries will remain an important element within that environment.

Libraries = Intellectual Freedom

Libraries are already one of the leaders in intellectual freedom. We work hard to ensure privacy and freedom from censorship. But we’re not there yet. Exhibit A: our willingness to sacrifice our cardholders’ privacy in order to get the latest ebook bestsellers onto Kindles.

Here’s what I see for the hundred-year library. There’s an open source software project called Tor that allows people to surf the web anonymously, providing the highest level of intellectual freedom we can make readily available given the internet’s current structure. There are servers with Tor installed on them all over the world. To make use of them, you install client software onto your computer. Unfortunately, there aren’t all that many Tor servers, they only have so much bandwidth, and anonymizing web surfing isn’t as fast as serving web pages the regular way.

But there are an awful lot of libraries in this country and all over the world. They tend to be pretty well distributed geographically, and they tend to have a pretty fair amount of bandwidth. There’s no reason we couldn’t use that bandwidth for Tor, or whatever solution succeeds it. And there’s no reason we couldn’t install Tor software on our computers and teach library users to install the software on their computers. And because there’s no reason we can’t, and lots of good reasons we should, I figure there’s a pretty good chance it will happen.

So we can provide anonymous web access to anyone who wants it. Can we also provide internet access to everyone? One of the underappreciated aspects of the One Laptop Per Child initiative was the idea that each laptop could be a node on a wireless mesh network, enabling internet access to daisychain wirelessly from laptop to laptop. Mesh technology has come a long way since One Laptop Per Child was first proposed. Again, libraries tend to be pretty geographically dispersed. Think about what we could do with our own network, which we could connect to the rest of the internet, but only if we wanted. It wouldn’t be that hard to do, and it’s getting easier all the time.

Finally, I see libraries helping people to publish anonymously. Right now, it’s difficult to publish anonymously and it seems to be increasingly difficult to share our thoughts while also protecting our identity. Anonymity can be a touchy, scary topic. I think the positives on this one outweigh the negatives.

Libraries = Our Culture, Preserved

As long as we’re talking about helping people to publish, we should also talk about our traditional role of helping to organize the cultural record. I think it’s pretty obvious that each year there are more books, articles, and posts published than at any time in human history. And also more images, audio, and video. Libraries need to take a far more active role in helping to organize and preserve this material. In addition, we have a tremendous amount of material that’s yet to be digitized, and a tremendous amount that needs to be preserved.

I give Google credit for its ambition. We have a much better sense now about what’s involved in mass digitization efforts, and we have much better hardware and software, in part, as a result of the Google books project. We also need to acknowledge that Google plucked the low-hanging fruit. Books are typeset. They’re generally well cataloged. A huge percentage of the material that remains to be digitized and still needs to be preserved is lacking either or both. I’m talking about diaries and blueprints and hand-written medical records.

Think about the area where you live. There’s probably an area nearby with really pretty, really old houses? About how old are those houses?

When we look across the Atlantic, I think we can get a pretty good indication that those houses are still likely to be used as homes one hundred years from now. Maybe even five hundred years from now when you start to seriously consider retiring. The people who live in those houses five hundred years from now are going to be interested in learning about the people who lived in their homes before they did, the origin of their homes, and all the changes they’ve experienced along the way.

We have a lot of that kind of material in the library where I work, and probably in the libraries where you work as well. It’s really difficult to digitize, to make accessible, and to archive. I expect we’ll figure it out in the next hundred years.

Libraries = ≈

Just as it does today, the hundred-year library will continue to mitigate the effects of inequality. When I talk about the business that libraries are in, sometimes I say that we’re information coops. When I’m feeling a bit more frisky, I’ll say that we’re coops for low-cost, infrequently needed, durable goods. But when I’m feeling my best, I say we’re in the business of opportunity redistribution.

Fortunately for libraries, opportunity redistribution is in society’s collective best interest. We may want our kids to get in to the best school, but we want all the other kids to get in on their own merit.

So how do libraries redistribute opportunities? Helping to support education is obvious, and it’s going to continue to be important, but it’s not enough. Think about the things we’re fortunate enough to take for granted, but are comparatively inaccessible for huge swaths of our campuses and communities. I’m talking about museum passes, tickets to cultural events outside the library like movies, concerts, fitness classes, and music lessons. These things can be shared. So can tools, seeds, grafts for trees. Automobiles, even once they start driving themselves. Even once they start flying.

I’m interested in evidence of the most pressing needs, the ones where libraries can make the most difference. My guess is that it’s closely tied to students, especially younger students.

As with universities as a whole, and like doctors and hospitals, my guess is that libraries can create their own successful alumni and philanthropists, their own grateful patrons. Educating someone, saving their life, that’s it’s own reward. I don’t think colleges and universities or physicians do their work in order to collect donations later on. And I’m not suggesting libraries should, either. But I think if we help the people with the greatest need, if we change their lives, they’re going to succeed and they’re going to want to share that success with others by supporting the agencies that supported them.

Libraries = Cooperation

Most of the ideas I’ve discussed for the hundred-year library require interlibrary coordination, and I think every one that doesn’t require cooperation would benefit from it. Fortunately, cooperation is an area in which we excel. I’m pretty sure we could already use consortia for our consortia, and a hundred years from now, we’ll need consortia for our consortia of consortia.

And I’m all for it. As others have pointed out, if we got rid of ALA and started all over from scratch, what we’d create would look a whole lot like ALA. The same goes for OCLC. I figure what we really need, in addition to ALA and OCLC, is one or two or three more really big tent library organizations. Maybe that will be the Digital Public Library of America.

I don’t know what organizations will emerge, but I do know that if we’re going to set up mesh networks and provide anonymous access to everyone and digitize all the things that need digitizing and take a really thoughtful, evidence-based approach to diversifying and redistributing opportunity, we’re going to have to work together to do it.

Strategies

One strategy for helping us improve our ability to redistribute opportunity, and to operate more effectively in general, is to become more familiar with our history. Dr. Vann didn’t spend the 1950s studying the work of library education pioneers from Dewey through Williamson because their ideas seemed quaint or archaic. She studied them because she believed their ideas and experiences could help improve library education in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.

We also need to think about the truly long-term, which means believing that decisions we make now will affect us and those around us for a long, long time. For me, it’s easier to take that leap if I can persuade myself that I’m going to be here to experience all of the outcomes of the decisions I make. And by “experience” I mean not just that I’ll be using libraries a hundred years from now, but I’ll have to accept credit or blame for my actions and inactions. Aubrey de Grey may not be right about our life expectancy, but I see only upside in acting as though he is.

Which is one way of explaining Paul Graham’s work on his hundred-year language, which he named Arc. The project is ambitious, perhaps even megalomaniacal. Which may be why it works equally well to interpret it as a project based in altruism or as a project bred from selfishness. Whether his goal is to start a project that he’ll never himself get to finish or use in its realized form, or his goal is to use the best programming language on the planet even if he has to write it himself, his goal is to create something so spectacularly good that it will benefit everyone.  As is clear from his essays and other writing related to Arc, he’s willing to fail, publicly, in its pursuit.

I hope libraries are ready to do the same. I hope we’re ready to work individually and together to identify the hundred-year library for ourselves. And I hope we’re ready to work publicly and without fear of failure to bring it about in a span far shorter than a hundred years.

References and Further Readings

Bobinski, G. S. (1986). Doctoral Programs in Library and Information Science in the United States and Canada. Library Trends, 34(4), 697-714.

Graham, P. Arc. Accessed November 14, 2012.

Richardson, J. V. (1982). The spirit of inquiry: The Graduate Library School at Chicago, 1921-51. Chicago: American Library Association.

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.

This article is adapted from a keynote I delivered for Tenn-Share at the Nashville Public Library on September 28, 2012. It was also influenced by a chapter I wrote for Library 2025 (ALA Editions, 2013), edited by Kim Leeder and Eric Frierson. Thanks to Robert Benson and Kim Leeder for their help in turning a speech into an article.

]]> http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/libraries-the-next-hundred-years/feed/ 3 The Ebook Cargo Cult http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/the-ebook-cargo-cult/ http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/the-ebook-cargo-cult/#comments Wed, 11 Jul 2012 10:00:29 +0000 Brett Bonfield http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=4117 John Frum 'cargo cult' and their ceremonial flag raising by Charmaine Tham / CC-BY

John Frum ‘cargo cult’ and their ceremonial flag raising by Charmaine Tham / CC-BY

Libraries created the present crisis in scholarly publishing, and we are creating a similar crisis now with our approach to ebooks.

We created the crisis in scholarly publishing by ceding control of an intrinsic library function, abstracting and indexing, a decision with inevitable consequences. Consequences like the present need to boycott Elsevier for its predatory practices. Consequences like libraries spending as much money as we can muster on only just minimally justifiable user experiences: bundled interfaces that are confusing individually and often unusable collectively, which is why many libraries spend even more on federating services like Summon in order to offer search to our users in a way that makes sense to them.

Hiring abstracting and indexing firms at the beginning of the 20th century was an understandable decision. When abstracting and indexing services were first established, libraries’ reach exceeded their grasp. Late-19th and early-20th century libraries knew they wanted to collect everything they could, and to make those collections accessible to as many people as possible, but there was not enough funding or infrastructure for them to do it collaboratively: there were fewer libraries and librarians, less specialization, and library training was still in its infancy. In addition, libraries had not yet reached the kinds of cooperative agreements that would have made it possible to divide the abstracting, indexing, and archiving of serials into manageable tasks and then share the results. What we had was an inefficient system, one in which a lot of libraries were putting redundant effort into the same core works, and few or no libraries were able to adequately cover that era’s smaller or more niche publications.

When there are inefficiencies in a system, entrepreneurship and private enterprise are generally the best ways to create efficiencies. Informed librarians, acting individually but uniformly, made a calculated risk, choosing to select and store serials themselves, and hire abstracting and indexing companies to catalog this material. Within our hierarchy of values, we placed immediacy above ownership, and convenience above preservation. And so, when it comes to serials, the library’s inherent character is compromised: the core values we apply in our other activities, most notably our work with books, are not applied to serials.

To date, the decision to hire firms to provide abstracts and indexes for our serials is the largest mistake libraries have ever made, leading inexorably toward the indexing and eventually the archiving of newspapers, magazines, and journals being controlled by a small group of commercial enterprises. Creating the same sort of problem for ourselves with ebooks cannot be justified. While there were a few wealthy, sophisticated libraries at the time, collectively we did not have the funds, expertise, or consortial structures in place to handle cooperative abstracting and indexing 125 years ago. Now, with ebooks, we have the resources we need to avoid repeating our greatest error. The question is whether we have the will to maintain our values rather than simply preserve our role, or at least what we have come to think of as our role.

Cargo Cult (Library) Science

In a now famous speech, his 1974 commencement address for the California Institute of Technology, physicist Richard Feynman popularized the idea of “cargo cult science”:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

This is how I characterize the cargo cult thinking I keep hearing around ebooks: “We’re librarians. It’s our job to pay for access to books and then share them with our community.” These are our apparent forms and precepts. For instance, at the 2012 Public Library Association conference in Philadelphia this past spring, I attended a discussion on ebooks that was so popular we ran out of chairs and had to turn people away to keep from violating the Convention Center’s fire codes. During a small group discussion that took place during the session, one of the presenters told me that by boycotting HarperCollins, and by making plans to leave Overdrive, the only vendor that supports Amazon Kindles, I am making the library irrelevant for my neighbors—that I was in danger of losing a whole generation of users. When we reconvened as a full group, another participant, to general agreement within the room, said that she was looking forward to being able to offer access to ebooks the way we offer access to journal articles. The presenters even suggested that HarperCollins may be “one of the good guys” because they are among the few big publishers currently willing to sell their ebooks to libraries (despite the fact that they self-destruct after 26 uses). I have begun hearing this phrase in connection with HarperCollins more and more since that session, including a recent interview with a 2012 Library Journal Mover & Shaker on the Circulating Ideas podcast.

When we think this way, we are still “waiting for the airplanes to land,” going through the same motions as though nothing has changed while undermining the intent of those activities and compromising the core values of our profession. What we have done throughout the modern history of libraries is rely on and uphold fair use and first sale. We have fostered and protected intellectual freedom. We have helped to preserve our culture. If there is a science unique to library science, these are its tenets and its bulwarks.

When we throw away privacy and ownership in order to distribute ebooks onto Kindles via Overdrive, when we abandon first sale and fair use in order to purchase ebooks from HarperCollins, when we tacitly endorse our partners’ use of digital rights management (DRM), we are abandoning the principles that have made libraries valuable to our communities. When we sign contracts that ignore our first principles, we are abandoning our moral and financial obligations to the people whose library collections and intellectual opportunities we are supposed to be stewarding. We are “paying for stuff” and we are “sharing it with our community,” but unlike before, we are not actually buying anything.

When we stop buying authorized copies, when the people who have hired us no longer own the material we are purchasing with their money, we are ceding control. And when we cede control, someone else seizes it away from our neighbors, colleagues, and students—the people who entrust us not to let that happen. This not only drives up costs for libraries, but puts access to knowledge in a tenuous position: by relying solely on commercial enterprises, such as Amazon or Netflix or Spotify, to preserve works and make metadata about those works accessible on an ongoing basis, we increase the likelihood that materials could become more difficult to locate and analyze, and create the possibility of that information becoming permanently inaccessible. If these works or their attendant metadata are not seen as sufficiently profitable, or if the company that controls that information is unable or unwilling to share it, this material is likely to vanish.

Individuals who choose Amazon or Netflix or Spotify for their personal use are taking an understandable risk, since the cost-benefit ratio may well work in their favor, even if their access is ephemeral or otherwise limited. But if libraries, collectively, elect to ignore society’s long term needs for preservation, and immediate need for intellectual freedom, we are making a decision whose consequences seem likely to work against everyone’s interests. Information tends to spread: if even one entity is preserving and sharing it, it tends to make itself widely available. This lowers the barrier to entry for businesses (e.g. Amazon and LibraryThing, as discussed in “A Useful Amplification of Records That Are Unavoidably Needed Anyway“) and lessens the need for individuals to maintain their own archives, as well as bolstering libraries’ case that our core values remain relevant in an increasingly digital world.

Implementing a sensible, long-term plan for acquiring ebooks may be the most pressing issue in American libraries today. According to the often quoted January 23, 2012 report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, “The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January.” And serving smartphone users is just as important, or soon will be, given that the reading and listening experience on a phone is likely to continue to improve until the difference between reading on a phone and reading on an ereader is akin to the difference between reading a mass market paperback and a hardback. If we as librarians wish to provide the greatest possible access and highest level of service to people who own these devices while also upholding the core values that best serve readers, we need to develop ebook practices and software that complement one another. To do that, we need to ensure that the negotiations with our vendors maintain the balance of control that has traditionally served everyone’s best interests, helping publishers and other vendors maintain their profitability and promulgate reading, supporting libraries’ mission (e.g., intellectual freedom and preservation), and giving readers the greatest possible variety of choices in what to read and how to access it, while also protecting their privacy and confidentiality.

Learning from the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing

The present crisis in scholarly publishing is the inevitable consequence of the decision to privatize serials cataloging and archiving. Together, libraries and vendors created an oligopoly, a hydra with multiple heads and an unappeasable craving for library budgets. Resources that not only have to be bought, but have to be bought from a single source (or just a few sources acting more or less in concert with one another), are generally going to be produce steady, predictable profits for the companies that own these resources. Warren Buffett refers to this as a moat that protects companies from their competitors, and he seeks out companies that have this kind of moat, such as recent purchases Burlington Northern railroad, which has few or no competitors along many of its rail lines, and newspapers that are the only paper in the towns and cities they serve. Examples within libraries include the most prestigious journals in a field of research and the latest bestsellers.

Oligopoly pricing, especially unregulated oligopoly pricing, leads to unbalanced negotiations, which in turn leads to significant, ongoing profits. And those profits are often best spent expanding the oligopoly into complementary markets. This is why the abstracting and indexing companies bought up journal distribution, and eventually the journals themselves. Think of Google branching into hosting content (by purchasing Youtube, Blogger, and the Usenet archive through its Deja News acquisition, as well as partnering with libraries to scan books) and providing internet access (through the Fiber Project in Kansas City, as well as its open spectrum purchase). Amazon regularly purchases complementary businesses as well. When you have a monopoly, or you are part of an oligopoly, you have a lot more control over what you charge than you do when you compete with other enterprises in a more free-flowing marketplace.

This is the reason that the Random House executive who authorized higher ebook prices for libraries should probably be fired. Not for tripling ebook prices, but for not doing it sooner. Or for not quintupling them instead. It seems safe to assume that libraries have continued to purchase enough Random House titles to increase the publisher’s profits, because Random House has not reverted back to its previous prices. Which means that Random House was giving away money to which it had an obvious claim, and is likely doing so even now. In addition, despite what would seem to be a great opportunity for libraries to demand more in return for higher ebook prices, I am not aware of any libraries having negotiated features like greater privacy or accessibility on behalf of our users, or any other features that represent libraries’ core values.

Do We Have Any Good Options?

The only ebook options that uphold libraries’ core values either provide libraries with ownership rights for the authorized copies we purchase and circulate or are free of DRM software, ideally both.

Libraries need to retain ownership of authorized copies in order to perform key library operations, including acquisition, organization, dissemination, and preservation.1 In the United States, the legal basis for libraries has been the combined effect of two copyright exemptions, fair use and first sale (which was recognized as a doctrine in 1908 and became law in 1976). Fair use allows library users to make use of library materials for research and education, and allows libraries to archive these materials. First sale gives libraries the privileges of ownership, including the right to lend materials to library members, and even the right to sell materials from their collections should we choose. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) compromises libraries’ ability to serve our communities, in part by weakening first sale, but the law went into effect in 2000 and libraries have managed to continue to serve the public in spite of its limitations.2 From the perspective of intellectual freedom, DMCA was a terrible law and the American Library Association has worked hard to fight against it. But it took HarperCollins, and complicit libraries, to demonstrate our apparent willingness to move to a post-first sale world in which libraries license the books we circulate rather than own them.

As ALA reports on its website under the heading, Digital Rights Management (DRM) & Libraries, “The purpose of DRM technology is to control access to, track and limit uses of digital works.” This hinders our ability to disseminate materials, hurting usability, and also increases the likelihood of obsolescence, hindering our ability to preserve materials in a way that guarantees our ability to access them in the future. More chillingly, DRM undermines intellectual freedom, as described in “The Right to Read” (1997) and “The Digital Imprimatur” (2003).

Though DRM is an inherently flawed technology, there is a possibility that it could be replaced by creating better software. At the 2012 ALA Annual in Anaheim, Peter Brantley referred to the possibility of replacing our existing DRM technologies with “tenable protection measures,” and the International Digital Publishing Forum has released an “initial statement of requirements for a potential ‘lightweight content protection’ technology.” I think we are more likely to replace DRM by developing business models and agreements that enable libraries to acquire ebooks while also helping to ensure that authors, editors, and others involved in publishing get paid for their work.

Rather than focus on the materials that are not presently available with ownership privileges or without DRM, it is more useful to focus on the many options that are. There are currently eleven viable ways for libraries to offer ebooks to our communities while still maintaining our professional commitment to our core values.3

As summarized in the table that accompanies this article, the available options are:

  • Open Library
  • Open Source/DRM Hybrid Model
  • Unlimited Content License Model
  • Portability Model
  • Publisher Hosting Model
  • Unglue.it
  • Library License
  • Sneakernet Model
  • DIY Model
  • Steampunk Model
  • State Redistribution Model
Partial screen capture of a table of viable ebook options

This is a partial screen capture from a table of viable ebook options that accompanies this article. The table summarizes every currently available ebook option that either provides libraries with ownership privileges or is free of digital rights management (DRM) software.

By analyzing every existing model that either involves ownership or is DRM-free, libraries and people who are interested in libraries can develop a consensus around realistic and efficient models, and can create and adapt software, licensing, and other practices to support the models that are described below. Some of these models are intended to be self-contained solutions to the ebook situation, most notably the State Redistribution Model. Other models can be combined with one another, as noted in their descriptions.

Open Library

Open Library, which has been endorsed by all fifty state librarians in the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA), partners with libraries to create a nationwide, shared ebook collection. Participating libraries contribute at least one print-based book to the shared collection, which Open Library digitizes and then locks away in long-term storage, so the print-based copy of the book cannot circulate. Instead, Open Library circulates the digital copy of the item.

In return for contributing a book to the Open Library collection, participating libraries’ cardholders are given access to all of the ebooks in that collection (Open Library retains ownership of the authorized copies of ebooks on behalf of the participating libraries.). Access is much like it is in many consortia, in which a single item circulates to one person at a time within the consortium. One-borrower-at-a-time is enforced by a DRM-enabled server that uses the same underlying technology as Overdrive, 3M, Ingram, and Baker & Taylor—Adobe Content Server. Open Library has also experimented with purchasing new, original content, though with limited success, and this material is currently a tiny portion of the overall collection.

In addition, Open Library mimics a feature that is familiar to Nook owners who have taken their Nooks to a Barnes & Noble store and taken advantage of the bookstore’s “Read in Store” service, which provides free, unfettered access to the Nook catalog of ebooks and digital magazines for up to one hour per day. Like Barnes & Noble, Open Library partner libraries offer greater access to people who are using Open Library from within the physical structure of a member library, though they do not limit access to one hour per day.

Open Source/DRM Hybrid Model

Perhaps the most promising and fastest growing model is the Open Source/DRM Hybrid Model pioneered at Douglas County Libraries in Colorado. The model is for libraries to deal directly with copyright holders, have them sign a simple Common Understanding license, and host the ebooks either on an open source server if the rightsholder is willing to allow for more liberal circulation of their ebooks or, if the rightsholder wants more restrictions, Douglas County also hosts ebooks on its own Adobe Content Server.

The Open Source/DRM Hybrid Model’s most visible advocate is the library’s director, Jamie LaRue, who writes about it frequently, including in the recent “All Hat, No Cattle: A Call for Libraries to Transform Before It’s Too Late.” One sign that this model is viable: in addition to being copied by other libraries, the system is also being adapted by a commercial entity, Bibliotheca, which three weeks ago announced that it had hired Douglas County Libraries’ IT Director, Monique Sendze.

Unlimited Content License Model

In the Unlimited Content License Model, which was created by Ann Arbor District Library, publishers agree to allow the library to distribute unlimited, unencrypted copies to their cardholders, and libraries agree to pay the publishers a flat annual fee. If the library chooses not to renew its payment, it must remove the files from its servers when the term is up. Additionally, the publisher makes explicit its “reps and warranties” that the content is theirs to license, and indemnifies the library against infringement claims if they made a mistake. Finally, the publisher agrees that the library’s users can make copies and derivative works for their personal use. The most notable example of this model is Ann Arbor’s agreement with Magnatune to license the music label’s audio file collection, though there is no reason this model could not work for ebooks as well.

Portability Model

This model is perhaps best associated with the State Librarian in Kansas, Jo Budler. When Kansas signed its first contract with Overdrive, it negotiated the right to transfer the titles it bought through Overdrive to another vendor should it so choose, a right that Overdrive sought to eliminate after the first contract expired. Budler refused to sign away that right and Overdrive refused to include a portability option in the second contract: all titles purchased through Overdrive would not be allowed to leave the Overdrive platform, including titles that had been purchased during the first contract.

Budler had to find a vendor that would not insist on locking her into its platform, and she and her colleagues also had to write to each of the publishers whose books they had purchased through Overdrive to affirm that the publishers would not seek to block Kansas from transferring its authorized copies to another host. All but two or three publishers agreed to the transfer, and Kansas eventually signed a contract with 3M. It is my understanding that King County, which is working with Baker & Taylor’s Axis360, has similar rights to portability for the authorized copies it purchases.

Publisher Hosting Model

This model is most prevalent in contracts between academic libraries and scholarly publishers, though this is more a matter of convention, and of large libraries’ buying power, than a reflection of anything intrinsic to the ebooks being sold. For instance, Cornell University Library, which will not enter into vendor contracts that require nondisclosure of pricing information or other information that does not constitute a trade secret, focuses its attention on contracts that call for either perpetual or archival access (the language for these contracts is based on the NorthEast Research Libraries Licensing Guidelines and Model License). Perpetual Access is when a library’s cardholders have access to the ebooks a library has purchased even if the library does not have a subscription to the vendor’s ebook platform. Archival Access, which is similar to the Portability Model, is when a library retains the right to transfer an authorized copy to its own servers or to another vendor.

Unglue.it

Unglue.it uses a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding model, but focuses solely on working with rightsholders to set prices for “ungluing” their books: that is, releasing ebook versions of their work under a Creative Commons license. The rightsholders set a price, and Unglue.it helps them get it. Ownership of authorized copies of ebooks in the Unglue.it model is universal, so libraries do not have any special rights or privileges, but there is also no reason for libraries not to add successfully relicensed ebooks to our collections, and we are free to contribute whatever we can afford toward the campaigns to make currently inaccessible works universally available. Unglue.it has also built a large catalog of books that are candidates to be relicensed; for libraries that are interested in gaining unrestricted access to out-of-print material, or who have a strong interest in having a particular title relicensed under Creative Commons, the Unglue.it community is a useful place to let that be known and to find others who share that interest.

Library License

Library License, proposed by Jeff Goldenson of The Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory, is similar to Creative Commons, but it is directed solely at authors who want their work to have a special, companion license that allows libraries to own and circulate their work. The initial draft calls for three possibilities:

  • An embargo. For instance, libraries could have the work for free, but only after it has been commercially available for, say, five years;
  • An institutional “carve-out” in which, for example, Harvard Library can have this work for free the moment is it published, and circulate the work to everyone who has a Harvard Library card, but everyone else has to acquire it through standard, commercial means;
  • A performance-based clause, sort of like Kickstarter or Unglue.it: once the publication makes a certain amount of money in sales, libraries will be able to add it to their collections for free.

Unfortunately, any progress that has been happening since this proposal was introduced has been pretty quiet, though Harvard was involved in the creation of Creative Commons, so it was proposed by someone at the right institution. As Goldenson writes, “This is a young project, working itself out as we speak. If you are interested in exploring it further, visit librarylicense.org and reach out.”

Sneakernet Model

A seeming step back, but perhaps the most practical way to wait out the technological, financial, and legal changes taking place within the ebook market. Using the Sneakernet Model, libraries would buy ebooks just like any other purchaser and place our authorized copy on a read-only flash drive. We could then circulate the drive like any other physical object we circulate, such as books, DVDs, and CDs, using our existing software (we could even use bar codes). Making use of a flash drive with an ereader or phone would require that borrowers purchase an extra adapter or dongle, but the added price is less than the cost of two or three ebooks, and the inconvenience would be fairly minimal, if clearly less than ideal. When a new server technology emerges (or an existing model, such a the Open Source/DRM Hybrid Model, becomes simple and inexpensive enough for even the smallest libraries to implement), we could transfer our ebook files to a server and erase them from our read-only flash drives.

DIY Model

DIY, which stands for “Do It Yourself” is an homage to the members of the indie/punk music scene of the 80’s and 90’s, who believed bands could and should avoid major record labels, and even published guides/zines describing how to put out your own records. Specifically, the DIY Model uses Open Library’s model as a precedent and gives individual libraries control of their own authorized copies. Open Library’s interpretation of copyright is that libraries, when they purchase an item, also purchase the right to circulate one copy of that item at a time, even if the library elects to transform that item into another format.

So far, most of the items in the Open Library collection are either public domain or are unlikely to be challenged by a presumptive copyright holder. However, it is not clear that the model would only work in these instances. What if a library were to digitize a copy of a print-based book by a publisher that does not sell to libraries, then lock away the print version and circulate only the ebook it had created? Or what if the library did the same thing with a still-in-copyright item that is not available digitally? The library would own the item, it would only be circulating one copy at a time, and it could be argued that the library is circulating the item in the only way it can, and that it is causing no harm, or de minimis harm, to the copyright holder. Options for circulating DIY ebooks include the Open Source/DRM Hybrid Model and the Sneakernet Model.

Steampunk Model

Like the Sneakernet Model, the Steampunk Model is another technological step back (in this case from digital back to print), but potentially worthwhile because there are many solely digital works that some libraries might want to circulate in print. One example: Download the Universe reviews science ebooks, most of which are not available in print. Given the limitation of print, authors may agree to “gluing” their books for a modest fee, or to the print-only equivalent of a Common Understanding license or a Library License. Don’t you want your grandfather to be able to read your book? Or the person on the other side of town who doesn’t have internet access at home? And wouldn’t it be cool to see your local library add a print copy of your book to its circulating collection? Libraries know what to do with print-based books, and our members know to look for them when they visit us. The key is to work directly with rightsholders who like libraries or who see us as a useful market for increasing their sales and promoting their work, especially if they would not otherwise consider printing their books at all.

The State Redistribution Model

This is the least viable plan, in that it involves significant changes to current laws. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation proposed the idea, originally in a letter to the Brazilian Government. Under Stallman’s proposal, the author or publisher would retain ownership of the authorized copies copyright, but sharing them noncommercially copying and redistributing authorized copies would be legal and authors would be reimbursed based on the popularity of their work. Popularity would be measured not by counting downloads or monitoring use of the work in other ways, but by responses to voluntary surveys in which readers would report what they have read. Rightsholders Authors and artists would be paid from a pool of funds set aside by the government to pay authors for their work. (Note: thanks to Richard Stallman for correcting a couple of errors in my original summary of his proposal. In addition, though sharing would be legal in the State Redistribution Model, people would remain free to purchase the books directly. In that case, the purchaser would own the authorized copy. As Stallman wrote, “I think that if you buy a book, you should own what you bought.”)

What Happens Next?

I wrote about ebooks in a previous Lead Pipe article, “Tangoing All the Way: Is Everything Negotiable?” What was different when that article was posted, just over a year ago, is how many fewer options I could identify. At the time, instead of buying HarperCollins books through Overdrive, I was in favor of buying books through Overdrive from other publishers. Now that Overdrive has revealed its insistence on vendor lock-in and its willingness to allow Amazon to violate library members’ privacy, I am in favor of writing off our Overdrive purchases as a sunk cost and of moving on to other options. Constructive engagement has its place, as evidenced by the ReadersFirst movement (though I prefer the North Carolina State University Libraries “Value Statement for the Scholarly Ebook Marketplace,” which is currently hosted on the Triangle Research Libraries: Beyond Print website). But often the most sensible response to a bad option is to ignore it, cut it out of our budgets as quickly as possible, and focus instead on those options that offer greater promise.

While the eleven viable ebook options described above are promising, they are not yet ideal. They will take work. The open question is our willingness to appreciate the important features these options make available rather than the features we wish they had. Are we willing to do what is best for the people we serve in the long term, while perhaps disappointing them in the short term?

Unfortunately, we do not have much choice: even if you work at one of the two New York libraries that have access to Penguin’s ebooks, you still can only offer popular materials from three of the “big six” publishers; for the rest of us in public libraries, we can only offer ebooks from two, and even those include the significant issues I have discussed above regarding HarperCollins and Random House. For academic librarians, I can only imagine the pain involved in watching a student trying to figure out how to make use of some of the ebooks in the university collection before they give up in frustration. I am currently a student myself, and I know that frustration well.

When we remind ourselves about our core values, the answer is obvious, at least the answer about what not to do. If we keep pretending that all of our vendor relationships are serving our cardholders’ best interests, the airplanes will never land. When we cede power, we know where that leads.

We have also seen what happens when libraries meet adversity with innovation. The State Library of Kansas helped establish the Portability Model. Ann Arbor District Library created the Unlimited Content License Model. Douglas County Libraries created the Open Source/DRM Hybrid Model. Previously, the Georgia Public Library Service created Evergreen and North Carolina State University introduced faceting to library catalogs with its Endeca project (which Villanova University helped to perpetuate with its open source VuFind project).

Single agencies, and even statewide consortia, can be nimble, creative, and powerful, though it seems clear that even broader collaboration will be necessary in order to bring our handling of ebooks into line with our core values. Right now, it looks as though the Open Source/DRM Hybrid Model, like Evergreen and open source faceted catalog interfaces before it, is following the growth pattern established by some of libraries’ most successful cooperative projects, such as the MARC bibliographic standard, interlibrary loan technologies and agreements, the WorldCat union catalog, the Z39.50 protocol, and the Library Bill of Rights. But even if none of the presently viable ebook models ultimately enjoy widespread adoption, it is heartening to see how much progress we have made in just one year. Not all that long ago, we had no options that honored libraries’ core values. Now we have several. The next step is to work together, to vet and develop the current options, and to help create new ones if necessary.

Recommended Reading

Thanks to Michael Bills, Jo Budler, Tim Coates, Shea Crow, Marin Foster, Jeff Goldenson, Amber Kiepe, Jesse Koennecke, Jamie LaRue, Robert Miller, Mary Minow, Eli Neiburger, Michael Porter, John Saylor, Karen Schneider, Monique Sendze, Ari Shanok, Kate Sheehan, Richard Stallman, Katy White, and Andromeda Yelton for their help with my research. I have done my best to include information as it was presented to me, though any opinions or mistakes included in this article are solely my own. In addition, thanks to Emily Clasper, John Jackson, and my Lead Pipe colleague, Kim Leeder, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

  1. As Jesse Shera wrote in The Foundations of Education for Librarianship:

    “The processes of selecting, acquiring, and making available for use the contents of graphic records comprise the operational aspects of librarianship. Librarianship is a trinity of acquisition, organization, and dissemination, in which acquisition relates to the selection and accumulation of materials, organization to their preparation for efficient use, and dissemination to the processes of making the contents of graphic records available to the user” (Shera, 1972, p. 193).

    Libraries have since greatly expanded their work into non-graphic records (such as audio, video, and games), but acquisition, organization, and dissemination remain a good characterization of what we do. Along with Shera’s list, it seems sensible to include preservation, privacy, and, increasingly, production:

    Acquisition
    Libraries play an important role in helping to identify the books that people can trust, or are especially likely to enjoy in their leisure time.
    Organization
    Metadata created and preserved by libraries is a public resource, as are the standards libraries develop to organize this metadata.
    Dissemination
    Making materials available remains relevant, even when these materials are digital: just because people can afford ereaders does not mean they can afford ebooks. In many libraries, including the one where I work, video games and DVDs have the highest per-copy circulation even though the equipment required to make use of video games and DVDs is far more expensive than an ereader.
    Preservation
    HathiTrust is an important component of the digitization efforts that have taken place to date, as is the Internet Archive, but these efforts apply primarily to preservation and access for works that were initially released in print. Libraries need to make different arrangements for work that exists only in electronic form. As David M. Levy wrote (about the early history of the Web) in “Digital Libraries and the Problem of Purpose” (2000), “…we have been rushing to put materials online with no thought to (and no idea of how to) preserve them. One consequence is that, almost certainly, there will be a hole in history….” Given that libraries’ relationship with serials, especially electronic journals, can be seen as a lesson in how not to work with commercial interests, it is worth noting the recent report by the university libraries at Columbia and Cornell which finds that only “15-20% of the e-journal titles in the libraries’ collections are currently preserved” by libraries’ two leading digital preservation initiatives, LOCKSS and Portico. One way for libraries to avoid these kinds of difficulties is to find ways now, while ebooks are still relatively new, to begin preserving copies of ebooks in ways that will ensure their continued availability.
    Privacy
    This also includes confidentiality and intellectual freedom. From the ALA Core Values of Librarianship, “Protecting user privacy and confidentiality is necessary for intellectual freedom and fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship…. We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources.”
    Production
    Libraries can help authors publish, and not just in the traditional sense of library-as-place, e.g., Marx in the Reading Room of the British Museum, surrounded by documents and given a quiet place to work (for a more contemporary example, listen for the Chicago Public Library’s role in “What Gave You That Idea?,” a recent episode of the 99% Invisible podcast). Though it remains an important library function, library-as-place is less central to users’ interactions with ebooks, which are generally downloaded and read outside of libraries. However, with relatively modest cooperative investments in technology and training, the connection between libraries and the publication of ebooks could be far more practical: helping authors turn their manuscripts into ebooks, and helping them find their audience (see Nate Hill’s “A two part plan to make your library a local publisher”).

  2. In part because every three years the Library of Congress can determine exemptions for certain activities.
  3. The following companies and models are not considered viable ebook options either because they do not provide for the sale of authorized copies to libraries and because the ebooks they license to libraries are DRM-encoded, or because there is not yet enough known about them to describe their business model or how libraries would make use of their services:

    • Bilbary, an ebook store that went live in March 2012 and plans to eventually feature titles from almost every major publisher, has been working with Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) to find a way to support libraries. The most likely arrangement would allow for libraries to benefit from an affiliate program for sales referrals, one that could eventually include co-branding. Another possibility would be for Bilbary to facilitate short-term rentals, sort of like a cloud-based, ebook version of McNaughton Subscription Service, though libraries would be charged per transaction rather than paying a monthly access charge. All titles would include DRM and no authorized copies would be owned directly by the library; instead, libraries would subsidize or underwrite cardholders’ rental costs.
    • Freading (by the company that offers Freegal) provides pay-per-download, DRM-encoded ebooks.
    • Ingram’s MyiLibrary allows publisher to decide how they want to handle DRM, and at least one MyiLibrary customer, Rosen Publishing, says that its ebooks are sold without DRM. It is not clear if purchases are transferable to another vendor or server.
    • Library Renewal, a project led by Michael Porter, is currently planning a groundbreaking system that would eliminate inefficiencies and unnecessary expenses in the ebook market, and offer transparent pricing for publishers, rightsholders, and libraries.
    • OverDrive does not provide DRM-free downloads and changed the provision in its contracts that supported library ownership of the copies that libraries purchase through OverDrive.
    • Safari has a consumer product that allows for DRM-free downloads, but access to the titles in Safari’s library product is online-only. Safari was started by O’Reilly Media, whose founder, Tim O’Reilly, proudly states that his company’s books are sold without DRM. Except, it seems, to libraries.

]]> http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/the-ebook-cargo-cult/feed/ 24 An Interview with Paul Ford and Gina Trapani http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/an-interview-with-paul-ford-and-gina-trapani/ http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/an-interview-with-paul-ford-and-gina-trapani/#comments Wed, 13 Jun 2012 10:00:47 +0000 Brett Bonfield http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=4056 Paul Ford and Gina Trapani

Paul Ford and Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani and Paul Ford are programmers, interface designers, authors, editors, and broadcasters. They are consistently involved in the kinds of projects that we as librarians undertake when we’re at our best: finding imaginative, meaningful ways to make as much information as possible widely available, easily accessible, and interesting.

Gina Trapani was the founding editor of Lifehacker and has published Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day (Wiley, 2006), Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better (Wiley, 2008), The Complete Guide to Google Wave (3ones, 2010), and Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better (Wiley, 2011) (the latter two with co-author Adam Pash). She is currently the founding and lead developer for ThinkUp, “a free, open source web application” that you can use to track “all your activity on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+,” the author and publisher of Todo.txt apps (available for iOS and Android, as well as other platforms), the creator of Narrow the Gapp, “a data-driven web site about the gender pay gap” that is made with “open data, Isosceles, Bootstrap, insomnia, outrage, and hope,” and a co-host of This Week in Google on the TWiT.tv network. Fast Company named her one of the “Most Influential Women in Technology” in 2009 and 2010, and Wired gave her its Rave Award for blogging in 2006. She lives in San Diego. These are just some highlights: read her complete profile, her list of activities (going back to 2005; why don’t we all publish this kind of list about ourselves?), her GitHub profile, her Wikipedia entry, and her blog, Smarterware, for more information.

Paul Ford worked for five years as an editor at Harper’s Magazine, where he wrote and edited for the web as well as for print, and also designed and built its website, a project that included bringing Harper’s 160-year, 80,000-article, 250,000-page archive to the web (the website remains profitable). He has also written for his own blog, Ftrain, since 1997, The Morning News since 2001, provided commentary for NPR’s All Things Considered from 2003–2006, and published a novel, Gary Benchley, Rock Star, with Penguin/Plume in 2005. His Ftrain post, “Processing Processing,” was included in The Best Software Writing I (edited by Joel Spolsky) and he once previewed an upcoming South by Southwest by posting six-word song reviews of MP3s submitted by each of the 1,302 bands that were scheduled to play (which earned him inclusion in Best Music Writing 2009, edited by Greil Marcus and Daphne Carr)  He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Maureen, and their two children, and takes on consulting projects, such as helping to relaunch Gourmet Magazine for the iPad. Again, these are just some highlights: read his LinkedIn profile to for the rest of the story or, if you want a real treat, read the newly published “10 Timeframes,” his “closing keynote at the 2012 MFA Interaction Design Festival, a full-day event held on Saturday, May 12, 2012, to celebrate the work of the 2012 graduating class of the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City,” where he teaches. Throughout the speech, I was reminded of Raganathan’s fourth law, “Save the time of the reader.”

When you review your career, what themes do you see?
Paul: I have always wanted to integrate my love for writing with my love of technology, but for the duration of my career—which has been fun for me but rather spotty in terms of it being “a career”—the right way to combine the two has often been a puzzle. I often felt that the people who want me to write found my nerdishness a novelty at best, suspicious at worst, and I spent a lot of time, you know, being called out of meetings so that I could fix a boss’s daughter’s iPod. The people who hired me to build websites found the writing suspect and were concerned that I’d write about them, which of course I never did, as I have sense. It’s very important in a workplace to settle people into roles so that you know they won’t go over to some other division and ask questions and piss everyone off.

Now, however, all of this seems to be less of a big deal, and the people who hire me to be a nerd for them are less anxious about the writing, probably because when they read me they realize I’m a big nerd—whereas the people who hire me to write are glad that I can read standards documents, code, etc., as that makes me less likely to make big mistakes and gives me occasional insights.

Gina: I’ve had two major obsessions in my career so far: personal publishing and archiving, and technology’s role in personal productivity.

I have a terrible memory. I can’t remember what I ate for dinner last night, much less things like what countries I’ve visited or important people I’ve met. My father passed away when I was 20 years old. The fear of losing memories of the little time I had with him (and everyone who means something to me) drives a compulsion to journal, blog, tweet, post status updates, check in, and upload photos. The web makes it so easy to publish and share the most mundane moments. [Insert hackneyed joke about tweeting what you ate for lunch here.] But that’s the stuff that can potentially mean so much down the road, in retrospect. So, I’ve spent a lot of my career working on personal publishing and archiving tools as a way to augment my own memory, as well as leave something behind that will help my kids understand me better someday.

I’m also a procrastinator who suffers from a severe case of distractibility. I got interested in tech-driven personal productivity because hey, if you can code an algorithm that makes a computer complete tasks more efficiently, why can’t you “program” a human to do the same? I think the desire to systematize everything, to shave seconds off of every email reply, to figure out how to add items to your todo list in the fewest keystrokes possible—that all comes from some exaggerated sense of mortality. The more seconds and minutes that get away from me while I’m whiling away time on Facebook, the less chance I’ll have to do something meaningful.

You’ve both spent a lot of time on projects that encouraged you to think like an archivist or librarian (such as Gina’s ThinkUp and other work with personal archives, as well as Narrow the Gapp, and Paul’s SXSW MP3 catalog and the Harper’s website, especially digitizing its archive). What aspects of working with archives were different from what you expected?
Gina: I’ve had it easy, not having to convince big organizations to digitize their past work. I’ve worked almost exclusively with data that’s available via APIs or published documents. When I started ThinkUp, I was in love with the idea of simply giving users control and ownership of their social data archive. But a database alone isn’t compelling enough. The question is: how does this app present or remix this data in a way that turns it into an insight? The possibilities are endless, but finding the really useful ones is the challenge.

Paul: For me the key to working with large corpora of any kind is to think in multiples. If it takes you this long to scan one page, or review one MP3, how long will it take to do thousands or tens of thousands? What is the unit of work? How many hours are in a day? What can I parallelize? What are the limits I’ll hit in terms of storage, or human effort, or budget? And then you work backwards from there. The other thing I’ve learned, working with many organizations, is that assets are not easily unlocked—it’s one thing to say “can we put this online?” And another to deal with the legal, territorial, and cultural anxieties that define a big organization. That’s why so many archives never see the light of day.

Like editing and criticism, preserving texts and making them accessible can change how you think about the texts that you create. How have your archiving activities influenced your writing?
Paul: Prose and archives are different kinds of documents with different interfaces. Reading at its best is a linear experience—you are carried along by the story. The territory is controlled by the author. Archives are for exploring, for piecing together understanding of history by trawling ephemera and uncovering odd corners of the past that challenge your assumptions of how people behaved. So when I write I’m thinking about how to create a single common experience between the reader and myself. And when I work on archives I’m thinking about the facets that can be used to search and explore.

Gina: Yes, Paul’s exactly right—an archivist builds facets of exploration and a writer creates a single common experience.

When I’m writing online in any form, whether it’s an essay or a Facebook status update, I get hung up on the grand contradiction of the web. On one hand, it’s easy (and encouraged!) to publish the most thoughtless off-the-cuff observations that matter in the moment, to “share” with your “friends.” On the other, the technology means those ideas potentially have the shelf-life of generations. It’s not just the Google cache, either. When I think that the Library of Congress archived my tweet about being stuck in traffic last week, it gives me chills. It makes me aspire to publish things that are fit for a long shelf life.

I think longtime web writers are archivists at heart, and treat social networks as distribution channels versus publishing tools. The old-school blogger or essayist regards the work like “books on a shelf”—writing published at a permalink at a domain name they maintain and refer back to later. Today, the popular way to publish is to just add your ideas to the stream of ephemera that flows by on one service or another. If you’re lucky, it’ll get a thumbs-up or a star or a plus one or a comment. But eventually, it winds up in cold storage in some social networking company’s data center.

Gina touched on this in her answer, but I’d like to know more. What are your thoughts on writing for social networks vs. writing shorter pieces for the web vs. writing longer pieces for the web vs. writing for print-based periodicals vs. writing for ebooks or print-based books?
Gina: The nature of print scares the daylights out of me. Once the ink hits that page, it’s all so final. Before I published a book or a print magazine article, I thought I wasn’t a “real” writer because I only worked on the web. Several books and magazine articles later the web is still by far my medium of choice—whether it’s a long piece for an online publication, a short piece for my blog, a tweet or even an ebook.

Paul: I no longer really see the difference. In print you get paid more and often factchecked. But I’m the same kind of writer for each.

It seems that an ever increasing percentage of professional writers and publishers are making their books and articles available for free or, in the case of publishing or distributing through Amazon, feel compelled to sell it for less than they think it’s worth. There are notable holdouts: Harper’s publisher John R. MacCarthur counsels writers not to write for free, and Warren Buffett recently placed a big bet on the ongoing profitability of local newspapers. What are your thoughts on the future of writing as a profession, both for yourself and in general?
Gina: The mediums may change, but there will always be a need for good writers in this world. How difficult or easy will it be to get paid for that skill? It’s complicated. In my limited experience, giving away my writing “for free” led to my first pro gig, which led to a book deal, which yielded magazine assignments, a web show, etc. I guess on some level I believe that giving your work away is how you get paid, eventually.

Paul: Gina’s right—giving it away brings opportunities. In general it’s very hard to get people to offer you money for writing, and even harder to get them to send the check. Like most careers in the arts, it’s something you do first for the love of it.

My In the Lead Pipe with the Lead Pipe colleague, Micah Vandegrift, suggested I ask you about the relationship between your technical work and your writing. How do your coding, interface design, and writing complement one another? Do they ever interfere with each other?
Gina: At the keyboard level, writing code and writing prose are vastly different activities. I have to consciously shift gears from one to do the other. Code is a functional thing. It either works or it doesn’t, and there are tests which tell you if your code passes or fails. You spend a lot of time debugging problems. You have a lot more leeway writing prose. Whether or not it works is a more subjective assessment.

Zooming out, the skills do complement each other. I like to think my writing experience has helped me produce code that’s easier to read and understand, that’s coherently commented, and that’s well-documented. Since I primarily work on open-source software, releasing it is an act of publishing, so readability and maintainability is a top priority. On the other side, I hope my background as a coder helps me make more logical, well-reasoned points when I’m editing a piece.

Paul: They combine in many ways. For example, when I review books I scan them in and search through them, and can extract the text and manipulate it to count words. Programming can be a tool for seeing patterns, which is complementary to the requirements of book reviewing. Also, very often, when I am trying to get writing projects done, I will write tools for content management, instead of actually creating content, as a most pleasurable means of procrastination.

Kudos to Karen Schneider for suggesting I ask you about women in tech. What are the key interim steps that will get us where we should be? By the time Paul’s nine-month-old twins learn to program computers, will anyone think twice if his daughter is better at it than his son? What about by the time they enter the workforce?
Gina: I wish I knew the answers to these questions. Two major things we must do: get ‘em young, and make STEM-related educational institutions and workplaces as welcoming as possible to women and girls.

Paul: This is a very serious issue that I have not investigated in depth, so I’m not going to offer an opinion. Except to say this: I’ve worked with a number of great female programmers, information architects, project managers, and senior executives who were entirely equivalent in skill to their male counterparts.

What criteria do you use in determining which activities you’re interested in pursuing?
Paul: I don’t really make decisions. Instead, I pick my friends carefully. Then I go where people ask me to go; when no one needs me to go anywhere or do anything I work on longer essays that I’ll publish some day.

Gina: I say “no” to everything by default. Most of the time, I’m at peace with that. When it makes me uncomfortable or regretful, I reconsider. It’s hard to say exactly what the criteria is for the stuff I decide to pursue. It’s just a gut feeling. If I feel a spark of excitement about something, I’m in.

That said, I do enjoy paying my bills on time and in full.

Thanks to Paul Ford and Gina Trapani for their thoughtful responses and their generosity, and to Karen Schneider and Micah Vandegrift for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

]]> http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/an-interview-with-paul-ford-and-gina-trapani/feed/ 3 Perspective and Doing Good Work http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/perspective-and-doing-good-work/ http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/perspective-and-doing-good-work/#comments Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:00:05 +0000 Brett Bonfield http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=3449 Paul Farmer speaks at IDEO by Global X / CC-BY

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.
  • 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.

]]> http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2012/perspective-and-doing-good-work/feed/ 6 Is the United States Training Too Many Librarians or Too Few? (Part 1) http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/is-the-united-states-training-too-many-librarians-or-too-few-part-1/ http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/is-the-united-states-training-too-many-librarians-or-too-few-part-1/#comments Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:00:40 +0000 Brett Bonfield http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=3228 Two Years Ago by Leah the Librarian / CC-BY-NC

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 the 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:

  5. Richardson, J. V. (1982). The spirit of inquiry: The Graduate Library School at Chicago, 1921-51. Chicago: American Library Association.
  6. See:

]]> http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/is-the-united-states-training-too-many-librarians-or-too-few-part-1/feed/ 43 Tangoing All the Way: Is Everything Negotiable? http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/tangoing-all-the-way-is-everything-negotiable/ http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/tangoing-all-the-way-is-everything-negotiable/#comments Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:00:01 +0000 Brett Bonfield http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=2916 Tango by The Noun Project / CC-BY

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“
]]> http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2011/tangoing-all-the-way-is-everything-negotiable/feed/ 19 The Desk Setup http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/the-desk-setup/ http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/the-desk-setup/#comments Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:56:10 +0000 Brett Bonfield http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=2458

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:

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:

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?

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.

]]> http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/the-desk-setup/feed/ 6 Marketing Search: An Interview with Pete Bell of Endeca and Gabriel Weinberg of DuckDuckGo http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/ http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/#comments Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:00:22 +0000 Brett Bonfield http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=2261 The Yahoo! Search team (explored on Sep 16, 2009) by Yodel Anecdotal

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.
]]> http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/marketing-search-an-interview-with-pete-bell-of-endeca-and-gabriel-weinberg-of-duckduckgo/feed/ 7 What your donors (and would-be donors) wish you knew http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/what-your-donors-and-would-be-donors-wish-you-knew/ http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/what-your-donors-and-would-be-donors-wish-you-knew/#comments Wed, 12 May 2010 11:00:09 +0000 Brett Bonfield http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/?p=2128 Andrew Carnegie by cliff1066 / CC-BY

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

  1. Become genuinely interested in other people.
  2. Smile.
  3. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
  4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
  5. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
  6. Make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.

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]:

You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. Yes, you. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You.

Sincerely,
[Signature]
[Name][Title]

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.

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