Andrew Carnegie by cliff1066 / CC-BY

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

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

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

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

There are multiple economies

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

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

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

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

We like winners

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

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

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

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

We want you to ask us for money

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

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

Two quick anecdotes about asking people for money:

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

We really like to be thanked

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We don’t think like you do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facts are boring

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

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

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

Six ways to make people like you

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

Dear [name]:

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

It’s about relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are all individuals

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

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

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

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

1. My response:

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

   Here are some resources that might be useful to you:

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

Double Octuple Newspaper Web Perfecting Press, 1903

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

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

Assemble a Team

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

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

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

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

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

Find Your Niche

Modern Delivery Van for Grocers, Druggists, Etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build a Sound Foundation

Accurate Measurements are Essential to Correct Time Keeping

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six Librarians, drawing by Derik Badman

Go to Your Audience

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be Fearless

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

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

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

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

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

Detail from our Google Analytics traffic analysis

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

Experiment

The Laboratory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Integration by certified su / CC-BY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Quick Survey: Naming Names

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language

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

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

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

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

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

Documentation

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

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

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

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

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

Stability: Leadership, Community, Funding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Hosted or Outsourced

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

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

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

Choosing Scriblio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will there be a Taiga 5?

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

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

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

In terms of skills, I like to see librarians who have the ability to think through problems in a systematic way, who can learn independently, who are fearless and enthusiastic about technology. It’s critical that they be able to communicate effectively, including in writing, and that they show leadership qualities. They should be focused on the big picture and be pointed toward the future, thinking about what libraries are for, not what we do, because what we do is changing very quickly. I’m very encouraged by the graduates I’ve seen in recent years. The applicants to our Fellows program just seem to get stronger every year.

What are the most useful things ALA can do for us as a profession?

I think ALA is most effective when it works as an advocate for public libraries, promoting the contribution that public libraries make to communities across the country. Our public libraries are a tremendous achievement of this society, really unique in the world, and yet one that we cannot take for granted will always be there, especially as local governments are hard hit economically.

ALA and its divisions also serve as a valuable professional development opportunity, where people can find leadership and other opportunities even if their jobs do not offer them the chance to develop in that way.

Are there any other professional associations or consortia that are more important to you than ALA?

Actually, ALA is pretty important to me. LITA is my primary home in ALA, and I try to stay involved with LITA committees, etc.

Closer to home, the Triangle Research Libraries Network is an important professional connection. TRLN is very active both in developing shared services and sponsoring information sharing and professional development events for staff at the TRLN libraries.

The Digital Library Federation (recently folded into CLIR) and the Coalition for Networked Information have been important associations for me as well. Both organizations hold semi-annual meetings where members can share ongoing work.

What data do you wish you had available to you in figuring out how well the library is meeting its constituency’s needs?

Data about fast-changing areas, such as discovery, would be useful to have. I’m concerned that we understand only in a sketchy way how our different users are finding the information they need, and where and when that leads them to library collections or to library-provided tools.

Two or three years from now, what will be the minimum requirements for a really good library website/catalog? What will its users expect it to be able to do?

I anticipate users will expect to have to interact with the library website or catalog much less, or hardly ever at all—which, I note, is hardly a provocative statement! The library website will continue to lead our users to information about our spaces and services, but our goal should be to make its footprint as minimal as possible in our users’ lives. The resources they can get to by virtue of their institutional affiliation should be seamlessly linkable from course sites and search engines. For this to happen, linking technologies, like OpenURL, will have to work even better than they do now. But we also will have to make this vision a priority—from negotiations with information providers to how we make local investments of our staff time and development resources.

Do you foresee anything changing the dynamic between libraries and information providers?

One frustration for me is that we have not had much success in buying/licensing just data; providers will only offer data in the context of their products, their interfaces. Had libraries been able to buy metadata for scholarly articles, for instance, we could have conceivably developed reasonable metasearch solutions. But that time is passed, now, with Google Scholar. Good data to support reference linking services is still hard to get, and it hurts our services. Quality metadata to drive OpenURL-based services for ebooks is also an area where the information ecosystem has a ways to go. Ebooks themselves have all kinds of platform restrictions that create challenges for libraries. But whether libraries have now, or will ever have, the leverage to get access to more open content is debatable. As the market consolidates around Google and a handful of major publishers, we will likely increasingly be at their mercy, in terms of APIs into their content and services. Even if that’s the case, though, there’s much that can be done with those tools; I think libraries by and large underutilize those opportunities to develop integrated services that are already made available to us.

What could we be doing to better utilize the available tools?

Just looking at the catalog, there’s no reason that any library should be running a last-generation ILS OPAC interface. There are open source and relatively low-cost commercial options that can give your library a current, faceted interface with good relevancy in keyword searching. There are also a range of APIs from Google, OCLC, LibraryThing, etc. that should be employed to make searching the catalog a richer experience, better integrated with the larger information environment.

Is there anything we could do to that would keep us from being at the mercy of Google and the major publishers?

I’m much more concerned about being at the mercy of publishers than Google. Google has advanced access to information worldwide far more than libraries ever could dream of doing; where they encroach on our area they are changing the paradigm for the better (for example, full text-based rather than metadata-based discovery of books).

Scholarly publishers, operating in an increasingly consolidated market, will continue to raise prices beyond inflation and restrict libraries through complex big deal licenses. They do have us at their mercy. Open access may be the eventual solution (and I think it is) but, in the interim, the detrimental impacts of their dominance (smaller market for monographs, for instance) will continue to be significant. One thing libraries can do—and many have done—is never again enter into big deals, where flexibility is traded for cost savings. Another thing libraries can do is to be less fixated on collecting for posterity. Scholarly work is increasingly preserved beyond our walls: a significant percentage of the best articles are already openly available on the web (and this segment is growing), while another significant percentage is made openly available by publishers after an embargo period. Libraries, collectively, will have to be less dogmatic about licensing (and replicating) complete and official versions of the STM (scientific/technical/medical) literature. At risk are two dimensions of our mission that have historically (and justifiably) defined us as research libraries: developing collections of significant breadth to meet the needs of all our constituents and maintaining the capacity to invest in new services.

If a large library had to make big cuts, what are the first expenses that should go? What are the programs/positions, etc. it should absolutely protect?

This is very much a local decision and depends on where the library has already had to cut back and where its strengths lie. While downsizing is an opportunity to be strategic about positioning our organizations for the future, I don’t think we’re yet in a climate where our parent institutions will tolerate unbalanced cuts, i.e., cuts that too disproportionately affect either collections or services. One of the provocative statements (or perhaps two) addresses the need to reduce speculative spending;⁶ I think that will have to come to pass, and sooner rather than later. I also think we’ll have to get out of the local catalog business within a couple years, and that has significant implications for our technical services staff. Digital library development is still starved in most institutions, resulting in the poor discovery tools and websites that we see now. How each library faces these challenges, both the process they take and the outcome, will reveal much about the character of an organization and its leadership. I also see that libraries will have to focus somewhat less on serving the broader library community and community of future scholars, and much more on their mission within their own organization.

For libraries with limited resources, there’s often a tension between serving the broader scholarly community and meeting local needs. How do you see this playing out?

This question gets at what I think is a big challenge for us. Our special collections may be where we are unique, and can make the greatest contribution to the cultural heritage community at large, but they will never be where we will make the greatest contribution locally. And the path forward (digitization) is expensive. So the question arises, why would—or should—our universities fund that work? One of the Taiga statements mentioned that these efforts would be privately funded, and I think that will have to be the case, although this will result in organizational inefficiencies and relatively slow progress overall.

But special collections are not the future for most academic libraries. The future that we all share is becoming much better integrated into campus life, and closer to teaching and learning (there’s a Taiga statement about that, too, the “blended librarian” idea).

Let’s finish on a positive note. What have been some of your most pleasant surprises over the last five years? What’s happened for you professionally, for NCSU Libraries, or for the profession as a whole that’s far exceeded your expectations?

As far as NCSU Libraries goes, the biggest surprise has been that the state legislature funded a new library for NC State University. The $126 million library, the James B. Hunt Jr. Library, is currently completing the design phase and is scheduled to open in 2012. Librarians who have lived through retrofits and add-ons to existing buildings know how constraining that can be in terms of creating new spaces for users. The opportunity to participate in the design of new learning, collaborative, and research spaces, rich in technology and good design, has been a huge thrill for me. If we do this right, it will serve as a model for what an academic library can be going forward.

In terms of the profession as a whole, I would return to the topic of the new graduates that our library schools are producing. I would say that, without question, the graduates of the last five years are more well-rounded, smarter, and better prepared to make immediate contributions than at any time since I’ve been a librarian. These people are, by definition, our future. It’s up to us to give them the tools they need and the latitude to realize their potential within our organizations. If we can do that, libraries will have a bright future.

Thanks to Kristin Antelman for her thoughtful responses and her generosity, and to Stephanie Atkins, Beth Picknally Camden, Claire Stewart, and Hilary Davis for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

1. The full quote by Alan Kay: “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!” He said it during an early meeting of PARC members and Xerox planners.
2. Yegge writes later in the essay: “Incidentally, they hired plenty of other brilliant seed engineers who were equally responsible for Google’s great technical infrastructure. I’m just using this one guy as an illustrative example.” I’m doing the same. A lot of people are responsible for making NCSU, in my opinion, the best library in existence. But I got the sense, from my conversations that day, that they credited Kristin with keeping them all in line.
3. As Kristin noted, “I’m uncomfortable speaking for the group in that way, i.e., interpreting the meaning behind the statements or characterizing the discussions of the day (I couldn’t even accurately recall such, even if we didn’t tell people they were confidential).” I think this makes a great deal of sense, especially once you understand how Taiga works and the reason the statements were drafted.
4. Some of the writers who have been involved in the conversation inspired by the 2009 provocative statements include: Steven Bell (ACRLog); John Dupuis (Confessions of a Science Librarian); Meredith Farkas (Information Wants To Be Free); Steve Lawson (See Also…); Dorothea Salo (Caveat Lector); and Roy Tennant (Library Journal Digital Libraries).
5. The official version of the Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians is hosted at John Blyberg’s blyberg.net. For more on the Darien Statements, see posts by Cindi Trainor at Citegeist and Kathryn Greenhill at Librarians Matter.
6. Statements 2 and 7, which read as follows:

   2. In five years collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron-initiated. Ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. The only collection development activities involving librarians will be competition over special collections and archives.

   7. In five years libraries will have abandoned the hybrid model to focus exclusively on electronic collections, with limited investments in managing shared print archives. Local unique collections will be funded only by donor contributions.

Money Grab by Steve Wampler / CC-BY-NC

I want you to think rationally about money. That’s my goal for this article. After you read it, I want you to feel more in control.

That sounds easy, but it’s hard to think clearly when it comes to money. Daniel Kahneman was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work in documenting our irrationality, and Ivy League professors have written bestsellers about it, including Irrational Exuberance, Predictably Irrational, and Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes. It’s tempting to bury our heads in the sand. “Money,” we want to tell ourselves, and anyone who comes to the library in search of answers, “can’t buy happiness. Plus, it’s the root of all evil. Best not to think about it.”

After all, it’s not like we went into librarianship in order to get rich. And if we were good at thinking about money and enjoyed it, we probably would have become accountants or bankers or entrepreneurs. I’m not suggesting that we’re innumerate, only that most of us prefer to think about other things.

Still, that doesn’t let librarians off the hook. About 80% of us are in the 25% tax bracket, which means we should have enough to save and invest, and not just in our retirement plans. We may not feel like saving money is an option for us, especially in this economy, but if you’re concerned about our economic future, the viability of social security, or outliving your savings, then you have a strong incentive to educate yourself about your money. It can be comforting, but also startling, to realize how well off we really are.¹

We also owe it to our constituents: our neighbors, students, faculty members, and colleagues. There is a great deal of discussion about the economy, and there are good reasons to be concerned, but many people have a difficult time distinguishing between good reasons and bad reasons. They also have a tough time understanding the magnitude of these issues or what they, personally, can do about them. As librarians, we help people undermine fear and ignorance by providing them with the tools to educate themselves. Unfortunately, we’re not doing quite as well as one might hope.²

I won’t be discussing economics in this article, but I will discuss personal finance. Some of the topics I’ll discuss relate to the economy as a whole, though most will be about you and the people you see at the library, because we can do better for them and we can do better for ourselves. Imagine if we went to the mall and paid cover price on all the books, movies, and music we purchased for our collections. That would be rational compared to the way many of handle financial decisions.³

Disclaimer

No one has certified that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to personal finance, investing, insurance, shopping, or anything else that involves spending or saving money. In other words, these are my opinions: agree with me at your own risk.

That aside, it’s a topic that has interested me for some time, and my understanding of personal finance has enabled me to do things I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. It hasn’t made me a lot of money—my small investments have served me reasonably well, but I don’t expect to retire young. However, unlike most people, I almost never worry about money. I’ve also helped family members and friends alleviate their own concerns.

A few basic questions come up a lot when I talk to people about money. I’ve started with the ones that have short, easy answers—Where should I start? What are the first things I should do? What do you recommend I read?—and then I move onto the longer ones that require a bit of explaining.

Books

Every library should own, and every librarian should be familiar with, the latest version of Andrew Tobias’s The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need and Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street. All the rest is commentary. And there’s plenty of it, most of it overly simplistic, overly complicated, speculative, or easily refutable.⁴

Tobias’s book, which was first published in 1978 and is now on its fourth edition, is especially easy for beginners. He doesn’t assume that you know anything in particular, he avoids charts and graphs, and he keeps things light and entertaining. Malkiel’s book, which was first published in 1973 and is now in its ninth edition, is a bit more academic and focuses primarily on investing (as opposed to saving, insurance, and other aspects of personal finance), but it’s also a comfortable read, especially after Tobias gives you the lay of the land. Each of these books has sold well over a million copies.

Insurance

A lot of people, when they think about personal finance, spend a lot of time on the best things that might happen: winning the lottery, finding the next Google, inheriting millions from a long-lost relative, finding a kernel of useful investing advice in the mainstream business media. That’s human nature. We lead active fantasy lives.

The reality is that it’s more rational to prepare for the worst things that can happen—an expensive illness, a disability that prevents you from working, your own death (if people you love depend on your income)—because they’re a lot more likely than the best things. If you’re alive, insure your health; if someone else depends on your income, buy (term) life insurance. If you own a car or a house, insure it. Disability insurance is usually a good idea; long-term care insurance and an umbrella policy may make sense as well. If your job provides these benefits, so much the better, but make sure that you understand what you’re getting and that you have enough coverage to meet your needs.

I’m not suggesting that you should buy more than you need—the goal is to buy just enough to cover your expenses—but you (and your employer) absolutely should buy insurance from a company with a strong financial rating and a good record for honoring its commitments. The point of insurance is for the insurer to give you money when you make a claim: if it goes belly up, or shirks its responsibility, you might as well have not even bothered.

As far as honoring commitments, Consumer Reports regularly surveys its members about their insurers, and J.D. Power conducts annual evaluations. Unfortunately, guessing which insurers will be around long-term has gotten dicier lately, especially because the agencies who rate insurance companies’ stability have had their own credibility called into question, which is all the more reason to make sure your insurers are rated highly by A.M. Best, Fitch, Moody’s (free registration required), Standard & Poor’s, and TheStreet.com Ratings (formerly Weiss). Yes, there’s a chance that all five could be wrong, but it seems less likely than one or two of them overestimating an insurer’s long-term viability.

Planning

For many people, money and stress are like “jacknifed” and “tractor trailer”: they don’t think of one without thinking of the other. In my experience, there are a few things you can do to take a bit of the stress out of dealing with money. The first is education. My hope is that reading this article, and reading the articles I’ve linked to and books I’ve recommended, will make you feel more sure of yourself.

It’s also important to have the discipline to spend less than you make. Much less, if possible. One way to help control spending is by making a list of the things you want to buy. Do you want a house, a car, fashionable clothing, vacations, cable television, presents for your friends, veterinary care for your pet, meals at nice restaurants? Probably, and likely many other goodies as well. Prioritize your list. Figure out how much each thing will cost you. Figure out how often and how long it makes sense to delay gratification. Always remember that items on the list are more important than anything that isn’t on the list.

If at all possible, it make sense to establish an emergency fund with at least three to six months of living expenses, perhaps more if you have children. Put your rainy-day fund somewhere safe where your money will be working for you, such as a savings or money market account, and, as the name implies, don’t touch it except in an emergency.

Along with educating yourself, spending less than you make, and maintaining a rainy day fund, the other important way to minimize financial stress is to avoid bad debt. Credit card debt, auto loans, consumer loans… these are not good debt: the interest rates tend to be high and you can’t deduct the interest like you can with a mortgage or a student loan. Though even for tax advantaged loans like mortgages and education, make sure that you shop around for the lowest rates, learn about refinancing mortgages and consolidating student loans, and that you pay off even these debts as quickly as makes sense.

Wills, etc.

In Sweet and Low, Rich Cohen does a great job of documenting how his family, the founders of the Sweet’N Low company, allowed money to drive a wedge between parents, children, siblings, and cousins. It happens all the time: to my mother (twice), to my father, to my best friend. As with the Cohens, the money wasn’t really the issue, and anyway it wasn’t enough to justify a lawsuit. But that doesn’t diminish the pain of having your sibling manipulate you, of having your stepmother subvert your father’s wishes, of having your stepfather mishandle the modest estate your mother spent a lifetime carefully stewarding. In many ways, the fact that not all that much money is involved only magnifies the pain.

There are ways to avoid these situations. Not perfect solutions—in each of the above instances, there was a will involved—but having a will and other directives in place lessens the likelihood of your instructions being disregarded. Nolo has a useful website, with a very good section on wills and estate planning that includes a clear explanation of Nolo’s inexpensive, clearly written guides, and also includes a directory of wills, trusts, and estate lawyers. You may also want to familiarize yourself with the Internet Legal Research Group‘s Legal Forms Archive and with FindLaw, both of which offer forms online for free. Ultimately, your goal is to have a will, a durable power of attorney, a healthcare proxy, and a letter of instruction.

Retirement Plans

You probably have access to a 403(b), a 457, or a 401(k). The first is for employees at nonprofits, including those who work at educational institutions, the second is for government employees (many public libraries fall into this category), and the third is for people who work at for-profit corporations.

A retirement plan is a container, like a building. That building could house a library or it could house a Wal-Mart. So if you ask someone if they’re saving for retirement, and they tell you they have a 401(k) and leave it at that, they either don’t know what they’re talking about or they’re blowing you off.

Employers hire companies to handle their retirement plans for them. The ones you hope your employer has hired are Vanguard and TIAA-CREF⁵ because they’re huge and stable, they’re the lowest-cost providers in the industry, and they’re both essentially nonprofits.⁶ If your employer is using anyone but Vanguard or TIAA-CREF, ask them to switch if they can’t explain why their current provider is a better choice. This actually worked for me once.⁷ The only potential gotcha: depending on the number of people who participate in your employer’s retirement plan, you may be too small for Vanguard or TIAA-CREF. If that’s the case, encourage your employer to use Employee Fiduciary as a low-cost intermediary.⁸

If these are not options, or if you’re able to reserve additional funds for retirement savings, consider a Roth or Traditional IRA. If possible, set it up so that money for retirement is automatically deducted from your paychecks. In that way, you get in the habit of paying yourself first.

Investing

Sometimes, instead of saying “I have an IRA” or “I have a 401(k),” people say, “I’m in mutual funds.” Once again, they’re either clueless or think you are.

Mutual funds are like libraries. Just as libraries can house books, DVDs, CDs, and many other types of objects, depending on their charter mutual funds can invest in stocks, bonds, real estate, commodities, or other assets. Some of them only hold U.S. stocks, some of them only hold non-U.S. stocks. Some of them hold whatever their manager thinks is appropriate. Mutual funds’ holdings are owned by the people who invest in them.

In general, it makes sense to determine what you should invest in—usually a mix of stock mutual funds, bond mutual funds, and real estate mutual funds—and put your money into those funds with the very lowest overhead (i.e Vanguard or TIAA-CREF). Any investment company will help you determine the right mix for you, and they’ll do it for free, either in person, over the phone, or online. Malkiel also does a good job of walking you through the process in his book.

The idea behind this sort of asset allocation is that it helps you manage risk. In general, bonds carry less risk than stocks, which is why bonds typically have more consistent returns from year to year, but stocks have higher returns on average.⁹ For people who won’t need the money for a while and can wait out the bad stretches, it makes sense to invest mostly in mutual funds that focus on stocks. Keep in mind that the bad stretches can last for a decade or more: Japan’s stock market currently trades at 20% of the value it attained in 1990. For retirees who need the money for living expenses, or people approaching retirement, it makes sense to invest most of your money in mutual funds that focus on bonds. As you get closer to retirement, you change your target mix, gradually, from mostly stocks to mostly bonds.

Having a target mix—for instance, 60% stocks, 25% bonds, 10% real estate, and 5% cash—also helps you buy low and sell high. Rather than trying to guess if stocks or bonds are going to do better, you automatically buy the funds in your asset mix. Every year or so, you check to see if one of your asset classes is doing especially well or especially badly. For instance, maybe stocks have been going through such a bad stretch that, even though you’ve been putting 60% of your money into it, your stock mutual fund now represents only 45% of your holdings. Having a target mix would help you have the discipline to sell enough of your bond and real estate mutual funds to get your stock fund back up to 60%. Investors, in aggregate, do not have the discipline to sell high and buy low; in fact, as an often cited study called “Quantitative Analysis of Investor Behavior” reveals, most investors do the opposite: they buy just before bubbles burst and sell just before recoveries.

You can automate your rebalancing by investing in Vanguard’s Target Retirement Funds or TIAA-CREF’s Lifecycle Funds. You pick the year you expect to retire and the company does the allocation and rebalancing for you.

Indexing

Let’s say you had to run a library all by yourself and had almost no money with which to do it. You could install self-checkout machines, have all reference questions handled remotely, and set up standing orders for shelf-ready books, such as anything that made the best-seller list or was included in the appropriate Core Collection.

That was the idea behind the first index fund, the Vanguard 500, which started in 1976. Rather than researching which stocks to buy, Vanguard founder John Bogle set up his mutual fund to buy everything in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, a collection of 500 large companies whose aggregated stock prices are intended to mirror the U.S. stock market as a whole. By eliminating research and other overhead charges, Bogle found that he could generate returns that did better than most other mutual funds, often much better.

Today, there are low-cost index funds that track most segments of the market. For many people, that’s the easiest way to get consistent returns in the asset classes it makes sense for them to hold.

Hiring an Advisor

If you aren’t investing directly in an index fund, you’re either picking your own stocks and bonds (which is almost always a bad idea, even for professionals) or you’re using an advisor to pick your investments for you. Some people aren’t going to be satisfied with Tobias or Malkiel, or they don’t have the attention span to read about personal finance, or they feel so overwhelmed by money that it shorts out their ability to think rationally. For these folks, hiring an advisor probably makes sense (though if they haven’t read a book like Tobias’s or Malkiel’s, it’s going to be awfully difficult for them to know if their advisors are doing a good job).

As I mentioned, Vanguard and TIAA-CREF (and pretty much every other investment company) will give you free advice if you use their services. You can also get very good advice at an online forum called Bogleheads.org (formerly known as Vanguard Diehards).

If you want to pay someone to manage your investments, and you have a pretty fair nest egg (minimum amounts vary), the low-cost advisors that seem to get a consensus of support at Bogleheads.org are Portfolio Solutions, Evanson Asset Management, and Cardiff Park Advisors, roughly in that order. For those with a bit less money, Bogleheads posters seem to like a new advisor called AssetBuilder, which was co-founded by investment writer Scott Burns. For those with a bit more money, the posters also like Buckingham Asset Management.

If you don’t have enough money to meet these advisors’ minimums, or if you want to work with someone in person, you have two reasonable options. One would be to hire a local, fee-only advisor. Rather than getting paid a percentage of your assets, or taking a commission each time you make a trade, fee-only advisors negotiate their fee up front. To find a fee-only advisor, go to the website for the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors and select “Find an Advisor.” The alternative would be to work with a more traditional broker who can help guide you into mutual funds that make sense for you. These brokers get a percentage of the money you invest each time you buy a mutual fund (or a high commission on your stock trades). As a rule, this isn’t a good deal for many investors because these brokers only get paid when you trade, so they tend to find excuses to move your money around. An exception to this rule is Edward Jones, whose brokers have a good record of encouraging investors to buy solid mutual funds and hold them long term.

There’s one other avenue for hiring an advisor that may make sense. The alternative to indexing—investing in a mutual fund that mechanically buys the stocks or bond or other assets that make up its index—you can invest in a mutual fund in which managers use their judgment to decide what to buy. There are thousands of managed mutual funds to choose from—even Vanguard offers them, and most TIAA-CREF funds are managed as well. The key, as always, is to keep costs down and to limit risk as much as possible. For that reason, if you aren’t going to go with an index fund, choose a fund that has had the same manager (or management team) for a decade or more, ideally a manager who owns the company and whose record is considered legendary. Martin Whitman, who founded and manages the Third Avenue Value Fund, fits that description, as do the partners of Tweedy, Browne, who manage three mutual funds. If you’re thinking about investing with Third Avenue, read Whitman’s books and his last several shareholder letters; if you’re thinking about Tweedy, Browne, read the material in the Research and Reports area of their website.¹⁰ If you’re unconvinced, confused, or bored to tears, stick to index funds.

Socially Responsible Investing

I’ve been a vegetarian for twenty years, so it’s hard for me to get excited when McDonald’s is helping to prop up the indexes. I have a good friend who’s a big Linux advocate; he’d love to see Microsoft go out of business. Both McDonald’s and Microsoft are members of the Dow, the S&P 500, and most other major indexes. What to do?

A popular sub-industry known as socially responsible investing attempts to fill this breach. You can read up on social investing at SocialFunds.com and the Social Investment Forum. You might also want to check out the largest players in the field, Calvert Investments and Domini Social Investments. For those people whose employers offer TIAA-CREF 401(k), 403(b), or 457 plans, there’s the CREF Social Choice Account, which invests in a mix of stocks and bonds; for those who invest in TIAA-CREF directly through mutual funds (or through a Keogh or SEP-IRA), there’s Social Choice Equity, which invests only in stocks. Vanguard offers a Social Index Fund that invests in a modified version of the FTSE4Good Index Series.

One of the main problems with social investing is revealed by Mark Pilgrim’s joke about Unicode:

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said, “Stop! Don’t do it!”

“I can’t help it,” he cried. “I’ve lost my will to live.”

“What do you do for a living?” I asked.

He said, “I create web services specifications.”

“Me too!” I said. “Do you use REST web services or SOAP web services?”

He said, “REST web services.”

“Me too!” I said. “Do you use text-based XML or binary XML?”

He said, “Text-based XML.”

“Me too!” I said. “Do you use XML 1.0 or XML 1.1?”

He said, “XML 1.0.”

“Me too!” I said. “Do you use UTF-8 or UTF-16?”

He said, “UTF-8.”

“Me too!” I said. “Do you use Unicode Normalization Form C or Unicode Normalization Form KC?”

He said, “Unicode Normalization Form KC.”

“Die, heretic scum!” I shouted, and I pushed him over the edge.

It’s tough, perhaps impossible, to find a set of screens that block out the companies you want blocked out (I’ve never seen a screen that blocks out Microsoft, which my friend considers heresy) and also lets in enough companies to offer a diverse set of investments (and if you don’t have a diverse set of investments you’re taking on an awful lot of risk). In addition, it’s expensive to pay people to review pretty much everything about any company that might not pass social muster. As an investor, you pay those expenses. It might be worth it to you—I happen to be a big fan of the CREF Social Choice Account—but there’s a chance the fees you pay are hurting you long-term.

Finally, there’s no overwhelming evidence that social investing changes the world in ways that social investors want it changed—but then, I haven’t seen as much evidence as I’d like to see about libraries and librarians making the world a better place. Some of us still think it’s worth doing, but that doesn’t mean people should feel bad about investing in regular indexes (or going to the bookstore or using Netflix).

One final thought on investing, specifically social investing: giving back is a great way to invest in our common future. I’ve worked most of my adult life in nonprofits, mostly as a fundraiser. I won’t make suggestions about which organizations are deserving of contributions, but I urge you to make donating to worthy organizations one of your priorities. I also suggest answering the following questions: Does it make sense to give a little bit of money to a lot of different organizations or larger amounts to fewer organizations? Does it make sense to give them money in cash, on a credit card, or through a stock transfer? Could you do more good by setting up a personal foundation or donor-advised fund (it’s easier and requires less money than you might imagine)?

Ultimately, the key is to feel confident in all of your choices regarding money, to understand them and, ideally, to educate those around you. This is what we, as librarians, have to offer.

Thanks to Jeff Bonfield, W. Keith McCoy, Mike Overholt, and Bill White for reading an early draft of this article, and to my ItLwtLP colleague, Kim Leeder, for helping me with its final version.

1. In 2006, the most recent year for which data is readily available, for the 25% tax bracket the lower bound was $30,650 and the upper bound was $74,200. According to the BLS, in 2006, “The lowest 10 percent (of librarians) earned less than $30,930, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $74,670.” So we’re within a rounding error of matching both boundaries of the 25% tax bracket.

   While we may not think of ourselves that way, the 25% bracket might well be considered rich. It certainly would be in a global sense: according to data available at the World Bank’s PovCalNet, a librarian making $30,930 would have a higher annual income than 99% of the people throughout the developing world (follow the link to PovCal, select WorldBank’s Regional Aggregation, select 2005 as the reference year, and select this librarian’s average monthly earnings, $2,577.50, as the poverty line). It could also be considered rich domestically: in 2006, 68% of the the population made less.

   Note: For the sake of simplicity, and except for the World Bank statistics, all number are from U.S. and refer to “Unmarried Individuals (other than Surviving Spouse and Heads of Households)” because we’re comparing tax brackets for individuals to individual (librarians’) incomes (for that reason, capital gains are also excluded). The 68% figure refers to the number of “Unmarried Individuals” who did not earn enough to qualify for the 25% tax bracket; among all tax payers, 64% were below 25%.

2. For instance, Warren Buffett’s partner, Charles Munger, is one of the world’s most respected investors. His talks, lectures and public commentary have been collected in Poor Charlie’s Almanack, which features a foreword by Buffett. In his most recent letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders (February 2008), Buffett wrote, “Without any advertising or bookstore placement, Charlie’s book has now remarkably sold nearly 50,000 copies.” It is held by 67 WorldCat libraries, which isn’t bad, but we could be doing a lot better. (By way of comparison, the underground Islamic punk novel, The Taqwacores, was held by 64 WorldCat Libraries when last I checked.)
3. Just to be clear, I’m not picking on librarians. Irrationality affects everyone, even the world’s best programmers. To combat it’s employees’ irrationality, Google, when it was preparing to go public, did a sort of workplace wellness program, only instead of being about physical health its program was about personal finance. An article by Mark Dowie describing Google’s personal finance education program is a nice primer on this topic.
4. Which isn’t to say that no one else has anything useful or interesting to say about money. Among my favorite writers in this area are Warren Buffett, John Bogle, and William Bernstein—and those are just a few of the B’s. But most people will get most of what they need if they stick to the books I’ve recommended by Tobias and Malkiel.
5. See “Yale Money Whiz Shares Tips on Growing a Nest Egg.”
6. Vanguard is mutually owned by the people who use Vanguard to handle their investments; TIAA-CREF lost its federal tax-exemption in 1998, but is still run by not-for-profit corporations and retains its nonprofit structure.
7. Dan Otter, founder of the 403(b)wise and 457(b)wise websites, has additional recommendations.
8. If your employer is too small to participate in a Vanguard or TIAA-CREF 401(k), 403(b), or 457, they may be eligible for a SEP-IRA or SIMPLE IRA. In addition, in case you some day find yourself suggesting resources for someone who is self-employed, or if you’re thinking about starting your own business, be sure to investigate Keogh and Solo 401(k) plans as well as SEPs and SIMPLEs. Call the Vanguard or TIAA-CREF to explore these options.
9. Bonds are IOUs; when you buy them, you’re betting that a company will be able to pay you back. Stocks are an ownership interest in a company. If a company is doing well, and making a lot of profit, it’s more valuable to own the company than to be owed money by the company. However, when a company isn’t doing well, especially if it looks like it may go bankrupt, you’re better off being owed money by the company because, if it needs to, it can sell its assets in order to pay a portion of its IOUs.
10. In addition, if you go with Third Avenue or Tweedy, Browne, you might want to be begin thinking about a back-up plan: Third Avenue’s Martin Whitman is 84 years old, and the partners at Tweedy, Browne are approaching retirement age as well

Le Mundaneum à Mons (Belgique) © dalbera / CC-BY-NC

Depending on books can feel like relying on snail mail. “Now that I’ve showed you how to find some articles,” I say to people at the reference desk, “I’ll show you how to use our website to find some books you might want to check out. And after that, wouldn’t it make your grandmother’s day if you wrote her a letter?”

For anyone accustomed to the Internet, books can lack the immediacy of articles or websites. Books generally have slower developing narratives, and often have longer paragraphs, sentences, and words, which means they don’t lend themselves to skimming. Compared to digital material, relevant passages can be hard to find, and even finding the right book can be challenging.

Although library websites are improving, keyword searching doesn’t work well at most libraries and faceted browsing—the links down the left side of the page on Amazon—is still a rarity. More importantly, with one notable exception, there is a good chance that nothing on the shelf that is “printed on paper and constructed on the model of the codex” includes the exact information you have in mind.

This is where universal catalogs come into play. If there’s nothing on the shelf that meets your needs, the next step is to figure out if such a book exists. There are five websites that provide relatively complete and easily accessible lists of books: Amazon, Google, LibraryThing, WorldCat, and Open Library. In order to make the best use of these websites, it can be useful to learn how each of them started, what keeps them going, and how their business models and practices affect the data they collect and and how they go about sharing it.

Amazon

It’s tempting to think of Amazon as a technology company. That’s how Werner Vogels sees it, which is understandable: he’s their Chief Technology Officer, and he seems to have done a very good job of it, because Amazon’s technological initiatives have taken a leap forward since Amazon hired him away from Cornell in 2004. Over the last couple of years, Amazon has made its mark as a service supplier, rewriting the rules for online hosting with its Amazon Web Services; it has developed a successful consumer electronics product (the demand for its Kindle e-book reader consistently exceeds supply, and it seems to be extraordinarily popular with publishers as well: they have made almost 200,000 titles available); and it has also made use of its infrastructure with offerings as diverse as its Mechanical Turk and Fulfillment services.

But if you look at its revenue stream, it’s pretty clear that Amazon has very little in common with a traditional technology company, such as Microsoft, its Seattle-area neighbor. Instead, Amazon is probably most like a different neighbor: Costco.

Amazon’s founder, Jeffrey Bezos, seems to have a firm grasp of three important aspects of retailing:

• Look for items that can be sold in near limitless quantities (such as “books, music and videos”);
• Figure out how to sell them profitably but with minimal markup (“He said he would ‘relentlessly slash prices,’ even if it cut into incremental profits, because he was convinced that it was the right thing to do”); and
• Focus your energy on building customer loyalty (“Satisfaction surveys show that Amazon enjoys a golden reputation among most of its 49 million active customers”).

Similarly, Costco’s founders, James Sinegal and Jeffrey Brotman, stock their retail outlets to the rafters, refuse to mark up items more than 15%, and, in their most recent report to shareholders, they note, “This past year we also enjoyed the highest membership renewal rate in our history at 87%, attesting, we believe, to the high level of satisfaction our members have in our products and services.” Think about the things you typically shop for at Amazon: are they more like what you buy from Microsoft or are they more like what you buy from Costco?

Because of Amazon’s size, breadth, and ubiquity, it can be easy to forget that its original business model was pretty basic: it resold books it bought from Ingram and Baker & Taylor. As Tim O’Reilly points out in an apologia on Web 2.0, Amazon purchased a database of book information from R.R. Bowker, put it on the still new World Wide Web, and encouraged its customers to share reviews, bibliographies, and even correct any mistakes or omissions in its data. Two years later, when Amazon went public, it carried more than 2.5 million titles, “including most of the estimated 1.5 million English-language books believed to be in print, more than one million out-of-print titles believed likely to be in circulation and a smaller number of CDs, videotapes and audiotapes.” Out-of-print titles were generally available within two to six months.

Amazon’s original formula hasn’t changed all that drastically. In 2007, books and other media accounted for 62% of its net sales, down from 66% in 2006 and 70% in 2005. The trend may be downward, but media sales are actually improving—it’s just that other sales are improving even faster.

Despite investments in other areas, Amazon knows that it is still primarily a retailer of books and other media, and it continues to invest in complementary initiatives and businesses that fortify its ability to sell these items. Its recent acquisitions, including Audible, Shelfari, and AbeBooks (which brings with it a 40% stake in LibraryThing), join other Amazon businesses, including the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), Alexa, and BookSurge. It also developed its own search subsidiary, A9, it was an important participant in creating ONIX, “the international standard for representing and communicating book industry product information in electronic form,” and it published a hugely successful API (now a part of its Associates program) through which it makes book jackets and summaries available to affiliates (including libraries), and also shares a percentage of sales, inspiring creative programmers to develop websites like BigBookSearch and Zoomii.

Amazon does all this so it can sell more goods and, in general, it seems to be working. Consumers are getting deeper discounts on a broader range of books and other media than ever before, and they have an easy time finding the items they want thanks to Amazon’s faceted browsing interface, its active user community, and its search engine which, in many cases, makes it easy to search within the text of published items.

While Amazon does everything it can to provide you with as much information as possible about the items it has in stock, there’s no motivation for it to share information about items it can’t sell in volume, such as out-of-print material. If the information you’re seeking is likely to be included in new, commercially available books, then Amazon is an excellent resource. If not, you’re best served looking elsewhere.

Google

Amazon is one of two major corporate alternatives to libraries; Google is the other.

Amazon followed one of the two traditional paths for forming a giant corporation: it was founded by an entrepreneur who had a good idea for a company and then hired talented people to build its technological infrastructure. Google followed the other path: its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created something the world wanted and then hired people to turn their idea into a profitable corporation.

While still graduate students at Stanford, Page and Brin took Eugene Garfield’s work on citation indexing and adapted it for the World Wide Web. Garfield, who marketed information products through his company, the Institute for Scientific Information (now a Thomson Reuters subsidiary), records how often scholarly papers are cited by subsequent scholarly papers, which is useful because citation frequency is a reasonable proxy for importance. Similarly, Google’s PageRank algorithm is primarily a scheme for measuring and weighting links between Web pages: the more links to a page or website, the more likely it is to be important, especially if those links come from other important sites. PageRank is intended to determine which Web pages are likely to be perceived by Google’s users as relevant.

It was soon apparent that Google worked—users found what they were looking for—but no one saw any money in it. Page and Brin tried to sell their technology for $1 million to the big players in the Web market. After everyone turned them down, they decided to start their own company, focusing their attention on attracting as many users as possible.

Where Amazon is a retailer that can be thought of as a virtual Costco, Google is an entertainment company like News Corp or Viacom—it generates 99% of its revenue from advertisements. Just as Amazon is primarily a reseller of products others make, Google is primarily a portal into content others create. Its mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Note the absence of the word “Web” in that mission statement: Google’s goal is to organize every bit of information. For instance, Google created its free telephone directory assistance project, GOOG-411 in order to develop speech recognition software. In turning spoken words into text, Google opens up the possibility of searching audio and video files through the same Google search box that is currently used to search websites.

Though the Web has become many people’s primary information source, a great deal of the world’s information is still found in books. In order to harvest that data, in December 2004, Google announced that five libraries—the University of Michigan, Harvard. Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library—had agreed to let Google begin scanning their collections (and several more have since joined the project). Multiple elements of this arrangement remained secret, including the terms of these agreements and the rate at which books were being scanned. It was also unclear how Google would deal with potential copyright issues, especially after the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild almost immediately filed a joint lawsuit.

This copyright lawsuit mirrors another: Viacom’s suit against Google acquisition YouTube for copyright infringement. There was some speculation that Google bought YouTube specifically to make sure YouTube didn’t lose its lawsuit, establishing a precedent that Google would have to overcome if it were ever sued for hosting video files. When Google reached a settlement in its book scanning lawsuit this past October, Viacom saw a potential concession in its own suit.

The book-scanning settlement has raised concerns about preservation and access for Google-scanned materials. Harvard has expressed its reservations publicly, and Peter Brantley has been doing an extraordinarily good job of identifying and summarizing the issues involved. How all this will affect people who want to read books online has yet to be determined.

What does seem settled, at least for now, is that Google has archived an unparalleled number of books (and also scholarly articles) whose entire text could be as easy to search as the Web. With the success of Google-411, it seems likely that Google will soon be able to offer text-based searching within audio and video files as well.

What’s not clear is whether advertising will make these ventures profitable or if Google can successfully transition to alternative business models for subsets of its data. Right now, it resells access to scholarly articles and newspaper stories for several publishers, and it appears that it will soon be selling access to the books it has digitally archived. It’s also not clear if Google sees any point in developing an active user community around books. While Google allows users to add reviews at its book website, user-contributed content is not a focus in the same way it is at Amazon or at LibraryThing.

LibraryThing

Founder Tim Spalding’s LibraryThing is a new kind of Internet-enabled organization, the small company that operates on a large scale. This method for doing business has been best documented by programmer, essayist, and venture capitalist Paul Graham, one of Spalding’s inspirations, though LibraryThing probably resembles Craigslist more than it resembles any of the YCombinator companies Graham has helped to shepherd into existence.

Like Craigslist, LibraryThing has an evangelical faith in its users, maintains a simple and easy to understand interface, is satisfied with steady and modest profitability, and competes for attention in a field with significantly larger entities (Craigslist is often cited as a cause of the newspaper industry’s financial difficulties, even though it employs fewer than 30 people).

LibraryThing gets its data from Amazon, from libraries that make their catalogs available through the Z39.50 protocol, and from its users, who supplement the data by providing reviews, cataloging information, adding tags, and disambiguating records. These last two seem to be particularly successful even though they vary from standard library practice.

The tagging concept, popularized by Joshua Shachter’s group bookmarking website, del.icio.us, allows users to catalog items using whatever keyword they wish. This enables works like Bridget Jones’s Diary to be tagged “chicklit” or Neuromancer to be tagged “cyberpunk,” subject terms that differ greatly from Library of Congress designations for these works by Fielding and Gibson.

Disambiguation allows users to clarify records by taking actions such as combining entries for works that are identical but released under different titles, or aggregating work under a single author heading even though that person has released work under multiple names. These can be difficult tasks when a small group of staff members attempt to take this on manually, and it has proved tricky to teach computers to disambiguate records programmatically. For instance, author Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s name is subject to multiple permutations (C.N., Cyril N., C. Northcote, etc.), and his most famous work, Parkinson’s Law (which expands on his belief that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”), has been released with multiple title variations and in numerous editions. Amazon struggles to make it clear which edition of Parkinson’s Law a potential customer might wish to purchase and Google offers a few different options that are not readily distinguishable from one another. LibraryThing, while representing more options than either of the other two, also makes it clear which title its users believe should be considered definitive.

It’s worth noting that Amazon, Google, and LibraryThing are not operating on a different scale when it comes to the number of books they’re cataloging. LibraryThing, which launched on August 29, 2005, has catalog entries for over 32 million books. While open cataloging has its limitations, LibraryThing’s website regularly demonstrates the power of crowdsourcing big tasks to a large, devoted community.

That community is the key to LibraryThing’s success. Just as del.icio.us users socialize around shared bookmarks and tags, LibraryThing users socialize around the books in their collections. Users can add 200 books for free, but to add more they have to pay either $10 per year or spend $25 for a lifetime membership.

That’s one way LibraryThing makes money. The other is LibraryThing for Libraries, a service that allows libraries to integrate LibraryThing’s tag database and, as of September 2008, its user reviews, into participating libraries’ websites. This service is offered on a sliding scale, with the smallest libraries paying $1,000 per year.

While Amazon’s business model does not target libraries in any discernible way (either as customers or competitors), and Google appears to be interested only in the largest libraries as partners, LibraryThing seems to be actively interested in selling its services to pretty much every kind of library—dozens have already signed up for LibraryThing for Libraries—and in digesting Z39.50 feeds (or getting records in other formats) from any library willing to share. In a pinch, it appears that LibraryThing will even take care of your cataloging.

WorldCat

OCLC is a nonprofit consortium that includes almost 70,000 libraries as members. It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Consortium. In 1977, it began allowing libraries outside Ohio to become members, and in 1981 it changed its name to the Online Computer Library Center. It has made multiple acquisitions as it has grown, including the Dewey Decimal Classification System and its only competitor, the Research Libraries Group, which operated from 1974 until 2006. This sort of activity, and OCLC’s business model, led to its nonprofit status being investigated, but ultimately recognized. Understandably, OCLC uses its tax status to its advantage, just as some nonprofit hospitals take advantage of their status and IKEA makes use of its unusual structure.

OCLC’s most widely visible product is an amazingly good website, WorldCat.org, which provides free access to over 110 million library catalog records, most of which are for books: member libraries provide access to their entire collection, which includes articles, audio, and video. Right now, WorldCat.org is the best free website that lets visitors use keywords to conduct serious research across all media types, a feature which all on its own would make it valuable. On top of that, OCLC has integrated its work on FRBR and xISBN—projects that make it easier to find what you’re looking for—helping to turn WorldCat.org into an invaluable resource.

One of the two major problems with WorldCat.org is what it doesn’t include: the long tail of library records. With 70,000 libraries contributing records, it’s tempting to assume that just about every book is included in the WorldCat.org database, but that’s probably far from true. OCLC’s Karen Calhoun has written about its efforts to position its pricing and services so smaller libraries can participate, and OCLC is making inroads, but it still serves far fewer than half of the smaller libraries in the United States. This won’t affect most of the popular material—big libraries have just about every major work held by a smaller library, so the small libraries’ records are redundant in these instances—but it does mean that more obscure works collected by smaller libraries, representing local authors and regional historical resources, may not be included.

This sort of limitation affects everyone from amateur genealogists to academic researchers. For instance, I have a friend who is writing her doctoral thesis on the history of illness in the counties surrounding Philadelphia. Almost none of the libraries, archives, and historical societies she is relying on have shared their catalogs with OCLC. This means she must make use of each of these collections individually, usually in person, and spend time learning how each collection is organized. This is the research equivalent of using a manual typewriter instead of a MacBook Pro to type her dissertation, and represents a failure to make the best possible use of available technology. These collections’ records should be included in WorldCat.org.

This kind of wasted opportunity to assist researchers is one major disadvantage of WorldCat.org’s omission of smaller libraries’ holdings. The other major problem arises when researchers try to make use of one WorldCat.org’s signature features. When users search for an item in WorldCat.org, they can select a tab labeled “Libraries,” which takes them to a list of local libraries that have that item in their collection. However, only libraries that share their records with OCLC are listed. For example, search for Daemon: a novel by Leinad Zeraus and select the Libraries tab. WorldCat.org displays ten libraries where you can find this book, in descending order of proximity. It would be natural for WorldCat.org visitors to infer that these are the ten closest libraries that have this book. Unfortunately, that’s probably not the case. Instead, WorldCat.org is displaying the ten closest libraries that share their records with WorldCat. Users who believe that WorldCat.org is helping them search their nearby libraries may be led to believe that their local libraries don’t have any books at all—or, at least, none of the books they’re hoping to find.

Of course, it’s possible that some libraries may not want their records included in WorldCat.org. I’m not sure why they would feel that way, aside from the recent hullabaloo over licensing which appears to be getting increasingly heated. However, the library where I work very much wants its records in WorldCat.org so that our neighbors in town can use it as an alternative way of looking for the books that are available in their local library.

OCLC markets WorldCat and other services through a network of regional service providers. The provider for our area is PALINET, so if we want to get our records into WorldCat, we have to go through PALINET. Unfortunately, between OCLC and PALINET, a sort of “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it” pricing structure seems to have emerged for getting records included in WorldCat.org.

I don’t think this is anyone’s fault. Everyone I’ve met at OCLC and PALINET is smart, dedicated, and helpful. My guess is that it’s more like Kate Sheehan’s post office story in which her attempt to pick up a package left her feeling “broken or inept.” That’s certainly how I felt after spending a month exchanging emails with PALINET. At the end I was so confused that it just didn’t seem worth bothering to get an accurate price to take to my board, because the one thing about which I was relatively certain was that we didn’t have enough money to share our records on the WorldCat.org website.

The folks at OCLC seem to be working hard to remedy this situation. I have faith that they’ll get there. But until they do, there will probably be a lot of libraries that would like to share their records in WorldCat.org and either can’t afford it or can’t figure out if they can. That means researchers are going to have to keep working harder than necessary, WorldCat.org users will keep being misled by its Libraries tab, and frustrated libraries may find themselves looking for more accommodating partners.

Open Library

Along with OCLC’s WorldCat.org, Open Library is one of two major nonprofit initiatives centered on creating a universal book catalog: its goal is a page for every book ever published, and to enable those pages to be updated by users, just as LibraryThing or Wikipedia pages are edited by site visitors. Since its founding in July, 2007, it has added over 30 million records to its book database.

For now, Open Library may be best known for its founder, Brewster Kahle, and its technical lead, Aaron Swartz. Both are Internet celebrities and serial entrepreneurs, though both specialize in nonprofit startups. Kahle has sold companies to AOL and Amazon, but he is best known for his work on the Internet Archive, home of the Wayback Machine, which attempts to archive the entire Web. Swartz was a founder of Reddit, which was sold to Condé Nast, and a developer of RSS, which enables websites, most notably blogs, to deliver content directly to readers. Open Library is currently funded by the Internet Archive and the California State Library and is committed to remaining entirely free, right down to the code that runs the site, which it makes available through an open source license.

Unlike our experience with OCLC, sharing our records in Open Library was dead simple: I emailed Aaron Swartz and he replied that receiving our records “was cause for much rejoicing.” (I also emailed Tim Spalding at LibraryThing to see if he might be interested in our records, and I found out he was as well.) Open Library is actively soliciting these contributions from libraries. However, it could, potentially, get these records directly from library websites. The technology involved is pretty simple and fairly well understood.

For example, the library where I work recently introduced a new website that’s powered by Casey Bisson’s fantastic Scriblio project. To import the Collingswood Library’s old records into our new website, we had Scriblio visit the web page for each record in the old catalog and import its data into the Scriblio database, turning blah into beautiful. We also use scrib_availability to show website visitors if the book is on the shelf.

Open Library clearly has the technical knowledge to do something like this and, because just about every library has a web-based catalog, it could easily include every book from pretty much every library in its database, enabling site visitors to learn if their local library has the book they want. For now, Open Library’s book pages, LibraryThing’s book records, and Google’s About this book pages link to WorldCat.org. (Edit: I originally wrote that Google’s About this book pages did not link to WorldCat.org. In the future, I’ll try to remember to disable my Firefox extensions before making such claims.)

The issue isn’t technical; it’s legal and ethical. On behalf of the library where I work, I uploaded our records to archive.org, making it possible for Open Library to use them, and on behalf of my library I uploaded them into our Scriblio-based website. It seems unlikely that libraries will have their records aggregated without their permission, at least in the near future. However, it wouldn’t be surprising if Kahle or Swartz, instead of asking for our records, began asking for our permission: what if they came to us and asked if they could automatically index our catalogs, creating for free a service that costs libraries thousands of dollars through OCLC? Even non-OCLC libraries are used to sharing their records. Why wouldn’t they accept Open Library’s offer to create a universal catalog? For most libraries, there’s no downside, but there’s an enormous upside: a single website where the world could see their records, and a free hub they could use for sharing records with each other.

A Useful Amplification

In his 1992 Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto, Michael Buckland writes that, “(f)rom an operational perspective the library catalog can be seen as a useful amplification of records that are unavoidably needed anyway. The information in a catalog can be useful in a variety of ways to library staff and library users. The difference between modern library catalogs and those before the late nineteenth century is essentially that the modern catalogs have a much larger bibliographical superstructure added to the locational information than had previously been the case.” In a nutshell, Buckland is saying, libraries decided that, since they had to keep a list of what they owned, they might as well describe each item and make sure they knew exactly where copies of it could be found. “With materials on paper, having copies stored locally is a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for convenient access. With electronic materials, local storage may be desirable but is no longer necessary…. The answer is to shift from catalogs to union catalogs or linked catalogs…. Arguably the present day catalog… is more a product of the limitations of nineteenth century library technology than of present day opportunities.”

Between Amazon, Google, LibraryThing, WorldCat, and Open Library, we’re getting ever closer to setting aside nineteenth century models and to more fully taking advantage of present day opportunities. There is no technological reason preventing us from building a universal catalog that contains information on every book in existence and locates that book in every library that has a copy available for use.

We’re also closing in on having a digital scan of every book, making full-text searching possible, as well as concurrent, remote use of scarce resources (by which I mean, I can look at the text of a book on my screen while you’re looking at it on yours, a feature not available in a paper-based book, which is limited to being used in a single location and, generally, by a single user). It’s an exciting time to be a booklover, and it gives one hope that, with better resources available, books will begin to seem as accessible and vital as born-digital resources.

I like the alternatives that Amazon, Google, LibraryThing, WorldCat, and Open Library make available. I think each has made the other better, and I like having alternatives in researching books just as I like having FedEx, UPS, DHL, and the United States Postal Service available when I’m trying to send a package. I don’t think researchers are generally lazy, and I don’t think they want fewer options. What they want are a few really good choices, and they have them. It’s exciting for all of us that these good choices seem intent on becoming great ones.

Thanks to Tim Spalding and Aaron Swartz for reading an early draft of this article, and to my ItLwtLP colleague, Hilary Davis, for helping me with its final version.

Scenes From The MOMA: sometaithurts © LarimdaME / CC-BY-NC

In 1968, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, a couple of newlywed architects, had the humility to laugh with Las Vegas rather than at it. A few years earlier, Tom Wolfe had written,

Las Vegas has become, just as Bugsy Siegel dreamed, the American Monte Carlo-without any of the inevitable upper-class baggage of the casinos… At Monte Carlo there are still Wrong Forks, Deficient Accents, Poor Tailoring, Gauche Displays, Nouveau Richeness, Cultural Aridity-concepts unknown in Las Vegas. For the grand debut of Monte Carlo as a resort in 1879 the architect Charles Garnier designed an opera house for the Place du Casino; and Sarah Bernhardt read a symbolic poem. For the debut of Las Vegas as a resort in 1946 Bugsy Siegel hired Abbot and Costello, and there, in a way, you have it all.

For Wolfe, this was neither a good nor a bad thing, but many architects found Las Vegas and what it represented (such as Route 66′s commercial strips and the emergence of suburban Levittowns) less than inspiring. Venturi and Scott Brown thought architects should “suspend judgment on it in order to learn and, by learning, to make subsequent judgment more sensitive.”

Though relatively young—Venturi was 43, Scott Brown, 37—they were established and confident. Influenced as much by Pop artists as by Rome’s piazzas, they believed Las Vegas could help their peers “learn a new receptivity to the tastes and values of other people and a new modesty.” For them, the charm of Las Vegas was inextricable from its neon-steepled wedding chapels (“credit cards accepted”) and reproductions of Venus and David with “slight anatomical exaggerations;” they described the exaggeratedly phallic sign at the Dunes as “an erection 22 stories high that pulsates at night,” yet still declared it “more chaste” than the sign for the Aladdin. They saw in Las Vegas an architecture that acknowledged Americans’ desire for pleasure and catered to their taste.

Venturi and Scott Brown first published their thoughts on Las Vegas in the March 1968 issue of Architectural Forum. A few months later they turned their article into a graduate studio course at Yale: for the fall semester, thirteen students and three instructors—Venturi, Scott Brown, and their partner, Steven Izenour—“spent three weeks in the library, four days in Los Angeles, and ten days in Las Vegas,” followed by ten weeks back in New Haven. In 1972, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour documented their article and course, and detailed their philosophy of Pop-influenced architecture, in Learning from Las Vegas, “a collage of passages, short essays, maps and diagrams… meant to evoke the lived experience of the Strip (and) challenge traditional two-dimensional modes of representation.” The book included frames from a movie, tourist brochures, and their students’ studio notes.

Like Learning from Las Vegas, Sophie Brookover and Elizabeth Burns’s Pop Goes the Library is part textbook and part manifesto. Instead of growing out of an article and a studio, it grew out of a blog, also called Pop Goes the Library, that Brookover founded in 2004 and has since expanded to include eight regular contributors, including her co-author, Burns. In place of studio notes, Pop Goes the Library has survey responses from librarians—they call these “Voices from the Field”—that read very much like comments on a blog post. And, as Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour did in Learning from Las Vegas, Brookover and Burns in Pop Goes the Library argue that understanding, anticipating, and accommodating popular taste is a professional responsibility:

You don’t have to like pop culture to embrace its importance in your library. You read that right: You can be uninterested in pop culture, or even harbor a bit of antipathy toward at least some aspects of it, and still put it to use in your library’s collections, services, and programming. So take a deep breath—if you don’t watch American Idol, have no interest in anime, or think most Top 40 music is unlistenable—it’s okay. Obviously, we encourage you to enjoy a varied media diet and to experiment with your listening, viewing, and reading habits—after all, having access to your library’s holdings is one of the small luxuries of working there, right? But we recognize that not every pop culture trend is going to float everyone’s boat. That’s reality, and it’s perfectly fine. What’s not fine is dismissing pop culture as something that’s of interest only to teens (or any other demographic group) to rationalize its perceived unimportance.

Brookover, the Library Media Specialist at Eastern Regional High School in Voorhees, New Jersey, and Burns, the Head of Youth Services for the New Jersey State Library for the Blind and Handicapped, have written a book “about identifying and harvesting the power of your community’s pop culture… about your library, your community, and how to build better and stronger relationships between the two using pop culture,” which they define as “whatever people in your community are talking, thinking, and reading about”—an intentionally broad definition. Anything and everything can be pop; readers are taught how to identify what pops in their community, as well as how to make it as accessible as possible for their neighbors.

The book is itself as accessible as possible. Where Learning from Las Vegas is occasionally tongue—in-cheek-like Warhol’s soup cans it is a high art appreciation of low art—Pop Goes the Library is written like the well crafted blog entries that Brookover and Burns and their blogging collaborators produce, in general, a few times each week. Imagine an articulate, pragmatic how to article in a glossy magazine or a great email from a friend, useful yet chatty, full of rhetorical questions and exclamation points. For instance, here’s a typical passage, taken from its chapter on advocacy, marketing, public relations, and outreach: “Since outreach is about going where you patrons are, don’t forget the patron at home. We don’t mean instituting door-to-door outreach projects! Just don’t forget the person sitting in front of his or her computer. Knowing that your website reaches a sizeable portion of your audience, why not view it as an outreach opportunity?”

There is a message, and that message is important, but Brookover and Burns have decided not to dress that message up in theory or historical context. Instead, they focus on combining practical advice with serious fun: Melanie Griffith’s character in Working Girl provides an example of applied research; Angelina Jolie’s transformation from wild child into latter day Mia Farrow illustrates good public relations; and Johnny Cash, David Bowie, martinis, and iPods are listed as celebrities and trends that are Cool (Kenny Chesney, KC & the Sunshine Band, cosmopolitans, and Zunes are Not Cool).

If you’re not interested in pop culture, it may be tempting to dismiss the importance of this book’s message or to overlook its ambitiousness. That would be a mistake: Brookover and Burns cover most of the important lessons on librarianship that can be taught in a book: creating a niche; building a collection; using technology; and developing crowd-pleasing programming, among others. As an added bonus, their writing style is as much fun to read as Michael Buckland, S.R. Ranganathan, Jesse Shera, or Elaine Svenonius. (Speaking of pop culture: does anyone know if Elaine is related to Ian?)

Like Learning from Las Vegas, Pop Goes the Library is meant as an example of the ideas it is promoting. In addition to its pop-inflected, chatty tone and “Voices from the Field,” it includes interviews and guest essays as sidebars, an extensive list of links and other resources, a calendar of events for pop-related programming, and it features a companion wiki. Some of this works marvelously—think Martha Stewart meets Jesse Shera—and some of it seems less effective. As with Learning from Las Vegas, there may be a need to publish a revised edition before this book reaches its full potential. The first edition of Learning from Las Vegas was expensive, included pieces that were not central to its thesis, and suffered from some design flaws. It still deserved the attention it got, and would likely have remained influential had its authors not released a smaller, more tightly edited, and less expensive revised edition, but it’s likely the work they put into their revisions helped their book remain a generalist classic.

If Brookover and Burns decide to produce a revised edition, they might consider:

• Making the sidebars into traditional sidebars, with text adjacent to the narrative. Right now, the text is periodically interrupted, a guest writer takes over for a couple of pages, and then the narrative resumes. Because adjacent sidebars are tough to include in a small paperback, it may have made more sense to include these pieces at the end of chapters or in the appendix. Another option: go larger. Edward Tufte’s beautifully designed and manufactured, full color, hard back books on information design have about the same retail price as Pop Goes the Library. It would be fun to see what Brookover and Burns would do with added space and color, and with better print quality;
• Deleting anonymous responses from “Voices from the Field.” It didn’t seem like the anonymous responses were needed, since none of the responses seemed to require anonymity, and dozens of respondents to this survey identified themselves and were comfortable with attribution. It is also useful to know what type of library the respondent is referring to, as well as its location;
• Making “Voices from the Field” easier to read. The responses are presented in a tiny typeface against a grey background, which is not a reader-friendly combination;
• Focusing as much attention on recipes as ingredients: that is, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of exceptionally good ideas, but little explanation of how to assign those ideas a priority or sequence;
• Providing a conclusion. The book just sort of ends after the chapter on pop programming year-round.

It’s worth mentioning that Sophie Brookover lives in a neighboring town and she gave me my copy of Pop Goes the Library. However, we’ve only met once and I’ve enjoyed her writing for a number of years. Her generosity was certainly welcome and appreciated, but not enough to compromise my objectivity. The fact is, I very much like this book’s execution and I strongly agree with its message: we’re going to remain relevant by acquiring and marketing materials, and by providing programs, that appeal to the people whose libraries we steward. You don’t have to like every popular item in the collection, you just have to make sure it’s available.

As Denise Scott Brown wrote a year before the publication of Learning from Las Vegas,  “…liking the whole of pop culture is as irrational as hating the whole of it, and it calls forth the vision of a general and indiscriminate hopping on the pop bandwagon, where everything is good and judgment is abandoned rather than deferred. Yet artists, architects, actors, must judge, albeit, one hopes, with a sigh. After a decent interval, suitable criteria must grow out of the new source. Judgment is merely deferred to make subsequent judgments more sensitive.” Scott Brown and her co-authors succeeded, not just in deferring judgment about architecture, but in making sensitive subsequent judgments about their own work. Brookover and Burns excel at figuring out what people want and delivering it to them, so they’re certainly capable of doing the same. They’ve already done a wonderful job of creating a book that everyone who cares about libraries should read. And they may well have a book, in this version or a revision, that attracts a far greater audience to the sort of questions we ask ourselves on a regular basis.

Reaching a general audience is a tall order. Few fields have a Stephen Jay Gould, Paul Krugman, or Atul Gawande, serious practitioners who document the major issues of their field in popular essays that are collected in bestselling books. In Pop Goes the Library, we have an encouraging sign that librarianship might someday produce its own bestselling scholar.