Also, I’d like to nominate the author of this blog as a guest (or perhaps regular) blogger: http://deweysnotdead.blogspot.com/

It’s important to be able to speak to our funders in a language they understand. Business speak is just one of many languages with annoying buzzwords. Education has its own annoying buzzwords. (I’ve seen eyes glaze over when the word pedagogy comes out.) Annoying buzzwords shouldn’t stop us from pulling out whatever valuable information lies beneath them.

I’m lucky to be in an academic institution where the currency is primarily student success (which sometimes draws its own eye rolls) rather than dollars and I’m lucky to not be in a position where it is one of my main responsibilities to be able to justify the library or our funding to higher ups, but I’ve seen some of those conversations in action and it’s important to be able to talk the talk if you want to be able to fund whatever items and activities you are planning to help your community thrive. And it’s a very very different talk depending on who you’re asking for money as Brett explained in his talking to donors article. (http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/what-your-donors-and-would-be-donors-wish-you-knew/)

The other aspect that I think is important is that the business sector has been studying and publishing on these topics and has valuable research that we can learn from. As much as I might instinctively dislike terms like branding, marketing, and PR, the fact remains there are better and worse ways to interact with your patrons and if people are hiding those better ways under terms I don’t like, I’m the only one who loses by ignoring them.

That said, I also agree you can lose your staff if you switch over to using the same annoying buzzwords with them. I signed up for a certain type of job which was distinctly not business focused and am much more likely to be motivated by language and systems of evaluation that play to my beliefs in what a library is and should be.

There will always be articles and books saying how we all need to do X, and taking on a more profit sector approach has had its turn as X. I think it’s that “we all need to” approach that turns normal words into those annoying buzzwords. I hope in general, you won’t find those “you must” admonitions here. We tend to fall into, “is there anything we can learn from X and apply to libraries?” I’ll call back to Char’s recent post about librarian as shapeshifter. (http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2010/librarians-as-__________-shapeshifting-at-the-periphery/) I think it’s valuable to be able to understand as many approaches to a situation and motivators of people as possible so we can be more informed about what is likely to give us the results we want.

Broadly speaking, in order for these two entrepreneurs to succeed, they need to have a product that people use (that would be true whether they’re for profit or not). So their discussion of user behavior in terms of information seeking is interesting to me. In particular I like the idea of making user feedback at the point of the problem (on our website in particular) a simpler process. I just looked, and once you’re in my library’s catalog there is no button to ask a librarian or provide feedback. Providing search may be only one of the many things we do, but it is something we do and I’m happy to see how others approach it and what I can learn from them. Now I need the next article to be on working with committees to implement the cool things we learn…. (Great recent Shelf Check on this – http://www.toondoo.com/cartoon/1998046)

So Caleb, I’m with you that I don’t think it’s the only way we should frame ourselves, but I do think that we shouldn’t ignore good research that we can use. Thanks Brett for the interesting questions and Gabriel and Pete for taking the time to answer them. I’ve already sent the article, highlighting the natural feedback section to our web team.

On a more personal geeky level, I love the precision v. recall discussion. Thanks again.