In brief: During my first professional position I found myself building a teen services program from scratch at a public library in a small town. In this article, I reflect on some of what I learned through that experience, including the value of data, the importance of having a vision, how much relationships matter, and the value of professional community. I conclude with a call for dialogue among other builders of teen services to share our experiences and lessons.

Teen Iron Chef Competition – photo by Gretchen Kolderup

When I finished library school (where I’d focused on teen services), I was expecting to work in a birth-through-eighteen youth services department and was hoping I’d be able to specialize in teen services while working alongside and learning from my other youth-serving colleagues. After all, there weren’t too many librarians I knew who did just teen services. Instead, I was hired as the first Teen Services Librarian at a library in Connecticut and found myself building a teen program nearly from scratch — all while working part-time (first 19 hours a week, then 21, then 28, with more hours each fiscal year). It was my first professional job, and I was building myself as a librarian as much as I was building the YA program at the library; I learned a lot about the real world of library work, about myself, and about the value of professional community.

I’ve written a few posts for the YALSAblog about my experiences ^{[1] [2]}, but I’d like to dig a little deeper and explore some ideas more thoroughly here. This isn’t going to be a practical how-to guide for others who are building YA services from scratch; for that, I’d recommend Sarah Ludwig’s excellent, encouraging Starting from Scratch: Building a Teen Library Program. This article is, instead, a collection of personal reflections on four things — the value of data, the importance of having a vision, how much relationships matter, and the value of professional community — that I wish I’d appreciated when I was beginning to build teen services from scratch.

I wish I’d known the value of data

Oftentimes I think the data we gather and report to our administration feels like a chore, but especially since I was building a program from scratch and only had 19 or 21 or 28 hours to do everything from selection and weeding to programming to outreach, I wanted to know what was working and what wasn’t, and numbers were one good way to assess that.

I was lucky enough to have taken a course in library school on how to evaluate library services using different kinds of data gathering methods and different kinds of analyses. It was one of the least popular classes (perhaps because librarians are, by and large, more word people than number people), but I’d done my bachelor’s degree in math and I enjoyed it and learned a lot. I didn’t realize, though, how useful the things I learned in that class would be — it was one of the most valuable courses I took.

Because I was the first librarian of my kind at this library, I didn’t always have data from before I started. Circulation data that predated me were easy to get, but there were only a handful of teen-focused programs held before I arrived, so it was important to choose my metrics and start establishing baseline data as early as possible.

My supervisor was the head of collection management, so I was able to watch closely how the YA collections were performing. Every month, I tracked circulation for YA fiction, nonfiction, audiobooks, graphic novels, and periodicals, and calculated what percentage of the entire library’s circulation was YA materials. I compared that percentage to other months that year and the same month in previous years. I tracked the turnover rates for our general YA fiction collection versus the recently purchased (and differently shelved and displayed) YA fiction. I carefully recorded and graphed everything and could thus prove that what I was doing was working. For example:

• YA fiction circulation as a percentage of all circulation had been falling in the three years before I was hired, but after I began working, that trend reversed itself.
• Even though print circulation across the library was falling, circulation of YA print materials was increasing.
• After creating the new YA fiction section and shelving more items face-out, circulation increased.
• When I suggested moving the YA audiobooks from the teen section to instead be shelved next to the adult audiobooks, circulation increased.
• After introducing a teen summer reading program, circulation of YA materials increased drastically in the summer months.

Because I had data that showed that what I was doing with the YA collection was working, I could prove that having a YA librarian was good for the library (increased circulation stats were something the director could include in her reports to the board and the community) and good for teens.

But while I had a relatively easy time improving circulation of materials, successful programming proved to be more complicated. Part of this, I think, was because programs for teens were totally new to my library, whereas books for teens were not. Teens thought about books when they thought about the library, so getting them to check out more or getting more teens to visit to borrow materials wasn’t hard. However, because teens didn’t think about events when they thought about the library, building a consistent program audience was more challenging.

For each program I held, I counted attendance, which is pretty standard, but then every month I’d analyze it. How had average program attendance changed from the month before (or the year before, once I’d been at the job long enough)? Which programs were attracting more teens (or fewer)? How was attendance at our book club versus the Teen Advisory Board trending over time? In the last year, what was the average attendance — but what was the standard deviation, too? (That is, was a particular monthly program attracting a consistent number of kids, or were there some months where we had a lot of attendees and some where we had few or zero?)

These data were really useful in deciding which programs were worth the time it took to plan and run them and which weren’t — or which ones needed extra publicity or promotion through outreach. For example, I had no problem ending movie nights when no one was coming, but I refused to let our book club die and was going to try everything I knew to do to increase attendance. (Even though libraries are certainly more than books, it’s one thing our community expects from us that other organizations likely don’t offer.)

Before I started at this library, there was a summer reading club for children and one for adults, but not one for teens. Summer reading programs are paramount in the youth services world, so I designed a program based on the one at the library where I’d done a summer internship during library school and made sure to collect a lot of data along the way via reading logs and at the end with a survey to kids who participated.

Once the summer reading club was over, I put together a report — in part for my director but mostly for myself — that analyzed how the club had done. Since it was the first year, I didn’t have previous data to compare it to, but I was able to analyze who participated in the program, how they’d heard about the club, how the number of registrations and reading log entries rose and fell through the summer, what prize levels participants reached, what formats they chose for their reading, and which authors were popular.

Because I knew in detail how the club had played out and what kids thought about it, I was able to make changes for the next year that saw a major increase in the number of kids who registered and increased participants’ reported enjoyment of the program. I was also able to use the data they generated about what and how they read to shape my collection development efforts. It took work to collect and analyze the data, but both my patrons and I were much more satisfied with the summer reading club in its second year, and, had I stayed at that library, I’m sure the third year would have been even better.

I also collected data on how many questions I answered when I was at the newly-created YA service desk, what kinds of questions those were, and how many questions per hour I was answering (since I didn’t always spend the same number of hours at the desk in a given week). I didn’t know ahead of time what the data would show, but gathering as much data as possible helped me make connections I might not have otherwise. For example, the way desk transactions correlated with program and circulation data was interesting: most of my reference desk transactions were performing readers’ advisory or helping patrons locate books, and a rise in reference transactions per hour matched closely with increases in circulation from month to month. Had most of my questions been homework help, I would have expected my transactions per hour to peak around the beginning and end of the school semesters rather than during the summer as it did. The data told a story, and being able to track and compare data helped me better understand what my patrons expected from the library.

The metrics you choose really do matter. My director wanted to know the number of reference transactions performed at the YA desk every month for her own reports, but I was much more interested in the number of transactions per hour since the number of hours I spent at the YA desk changed from month to month. (I was the only one who ever staffed the YA desk, so if I took a week-long vacation, that’d be a week that no questions were answered, and a 25% drop in the number of transactions wouldn’t be unexpected — but also wouldn’t be very helpful in knowing how I’d served my patrons that month.)

Sometimes statistics are for directors or for reports to the state library, but statistics can also be an irreplaceable way to know how you’re doing, what’s getting better, and what needs either more attention, restructuring, or to be phased out. It takes work to collect the data, but what it tells you about your patrons and services is invaluable.

Of course, numbers aren’t the whole story. Especially in teen services, a lot of what we do is focused on helping kids develop into happy, healthy adults and lifelong learners and readers, which can be tough to measure numerically without large-scale longitudinal studies of both library users and nonusers. We measure some of our impact in how many teens we reach through programs or through lending materials, but we measure a lot of our impact in how we change lives in large and small ways. In addition to my spreadsheets of statistics, I also kept a text file of what I called “good library moments” — things like when a mother told me her son hadn’t been much of a reader but was now totally hooked on our summer reading club or when a teen told me she loved the manga club because she felt like she was around people who understood her and that she could be herself in a way she couldn’t at school. I’d look through that list on bad days to help me remember why I was in this profession, but I’d also use those anecdotes (with identifying information removed) in the monthly reports I sent to my director alongside statistics. Statistics help us know how we’re doing with our work, but personal stories of the impact we have on kids’ lives help us remember why we do that work in the first place.

I wish I’d known how important it is to have a vision

All of the data collection and tinkering with services I was doing would have been scattershot if I hadn’t had an idea of where where I was and where I wanted to be (or could be). I wouldn’t have believed you as a library school student, but after my experience with building teen services from scratch, I believe that developing a vision for your department is one of the most important things you can do. This was something we touched on a little bit in my library management class, but we didn’t spend a lot of time on it and it all felt very silly and corporate.

After I’d been at my library for about five months, our director wanted to put together a vision statement and strategic plan for the library with input from each department head. I was nervous about the prospect: I had less than half a year of hands-on experience, and I was still introducing so many new things for teens that it was hard to know how those efforts would be doing in a few months, much less a year or five years. But through the process of coming up with a vision statement for my department, I really had to think about why we were doing what we were doing, what I wanted to provide to my patrons, and how what my department did fit in with the rest of the library.

The town where I worked has a teen center, and I spent a lot of time trying to decide what differentiated the library from the teen center. Obviously the library is more media-focused (we devote a lot of our building and budget to books, music, and DVDs in a way that the teen center doesn’t, and they do more teen programming than we do), but if we were going to be offering teen programs like video game tournaments or Teen Iron Chef competitions, what made us and the teen center different? Was it possible for me to do those things and still maintain the library perspective?

I’m still not sure I have a great answer for that (other than the library being more focused on lifelong learning), but having to write a vision statement and look to the future of my department forced me to clarify and articulate the library’s values when it comes to teen services. This was good for me because as I was planning new projects and programs and outreach, I was grounding them in what I had decided was important.

Working on a vision statement was also immeasurably useful in being an advocate for my department and my teens. Once I had a vision statement and had identified my department’s five core values, I could take that vision with me to talk to administration, to parents, to schools, and to the community at large. It was easy to explain why a program was appropriate for the library and why it was good for kids. It was easy to explain why the teen perspective mattered in the library as a whole and how what I was doing supported the library’s mission statement. It was easy to talk about why the library was a natural partner with different organizations. It was easy to explain why we wanted funding for new projects. I knew why I was doing what I was doing and how everything I was doing connected to everything else, and that gave my outreach and advocacy efforts such clarity.

Now that I’m working in a more established program, I’m not sure I feel as compelled to create such a detailed vision for teen services, but I do want to have a direction, good justification for why I’m doing what I’m doing, and a sense for how everything we do for teens connects. Creating a vision or a mission statement, regardless of the final product at the end, is a good thought exercise that has helped me be more reflective about my work.

I wish I’d known how much relationships matter

This might be a function of working in a small town, but while trying to build something new at the library, I was continually reminded how much relationships — between me and my teen patrons, between my department and others in the library, between the library and the schools, and between the library and the community — mattered. This definitely wasn’t something we touched on in library school; my youth services classes were all about programming or youth development or books for young people. We didn’t talk a lot about community building or how to raise awareness of what the library does for teens.

But relationship-building affects all other aspects of library services to teens. The first month or so of programming that I did was a disaster: no one came to anything, because no one knew anything was happening, or if they did know, they had no reason to come and none of their friends were going anyway. It wasn’t until I got to know our regular library teens and could convince them to come to programs and bring their friends (and had learned what programs they were actually interested in) that my attendance numbers were non-zero. Knowing kids in the community personally and then using their relationships with their friends was key to getting my programs off the ground.

Trying to get the word out about anything I did was also hard because while the library had established channels for reaching adults — via an e-newsletter, our website, press releases in the paper, and announcements via other community groups, for example — we didn’t have a way to get the word out to teens. I put up posters in the teen area and around town, but it wasn’t until I developed relationships with the schools, the PTA, and other groups in town and could ask them to tell their students or members about what we were doing that I started to see kids I didn’t already know come to my programs. Building relationships with other community groups gave me the opportunity to use their PR outlets to promote my programs.

And finally, while I could do programs or buy materials for teens who were already using the library, it was by forming partnerships with other organizations that we were able to do something special. I worked with the teen center to get books into their rec room, reaching kids we would never see at the library. I worked with a local private psychiatric facility and drug treatment center to get books to the kids living there, and when I left, we’d been talking about doing a book discussion with them or bringing an adapted version of our summer reading club to them. A few months before I left, I also started working with the creative writing teacher at the high school to launch a literary magazine for teens that would solicit submissions from across the entire county. The relationships I built with the librarians and staff members at these organizations helped both of us create something neither of us could have done alone.

I’m glad I knew how valuable it is to have a professional community

This one is a little bit of a cheat because it’s something I discovered in library school and brought to my first job with me, but I still want to emphasize it.

So many YA librarians are basically solo librarians (and so many school librarians are quickly becoming the only librarians in their schools or districts) that working with teens can be lonely work. Having connections with other YA librarians — whether through local or state library associations, national associations, or just forming relationships online — is essential if you want to be exposed to new ideas, keep on top of what’s happening in the field, and find companionship with like-minded people. Once you’ve built a network, relationships can be sustained through email and Twitter exchanges, Facebook groups, and meet-ups at conferences. Especially since this job was my first one out of library school, I depended on my peers for practical ideas from programs to displays to ways to run a summer reading club. I also depended on them for encouragement when no one turned up for a program or when I met resistance to new ideas in my community. Honestly, I don’t know how I would have done my work without being able to rely on the inspiration and support of my colleagues across the country.

And as I found myself growing and learning, I discovered other librarians who were also building teen services programs from scratch, and we were able to learn from each other. We could share common concerns and questions and encourage one another. For example, after all the work I put into creating the spreadsheets I was using to track circulation, program attendance, and reference transactions, it felt great to share those templates with a fellow builder of teen services, have her crunch her own numbers, and see her use what she’d discovered in an annual report to her administration.

I also found that the work I was doing for YALSA and the work I was doing for my job fed one another. I served on (and then chaired) YALSA’s Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults committee, which made me a much more sophisticated listener and a better listeners’ advisor — and the conversations I had with kids and parents who enjoyed audiobooks helped me remember what to listen for in the titles the committee was evaluating. Chairing a committee helped reinforce my supervisory skills (useful in Teen Advisory Board meetings!) and time management skills. Managing YALSA’s YA lit-focused blog, The Hub, positively steeped me in the world of young adult literature, and the trends and connections that I noticed while I was ordering books or putting them on display or recommending them to patrons gave me ideas for posts for the blog. And through all of that work, I was meeting more people to add to my personal learning network.

Writing, both for my own blog and for the YALSAblog, also helped me live a more examined professional life. Having to sit down and think through what worked or didn’t for a program, how I was going to plan a new project, or what I had learned through some experience reinforced those lessons I’d learned and gave me the chance to see things from a different angle. This relates to writing a vision statement in that the more you think about what you’re doing and why you do what you do and how it’s going, the better equipped you are to make good decisions later.

I certainly wouldn’t have been as good at my job if I hadn’t had a network of peers, connections with other librarians further along in their careers, and fulfilling association work that reinforced what I was doing at my library. A library science degree is a static thing that you get once, but a good professional community is a never ending source of continued learning throughout one’s career.

Are there other builders of teen services out there? In 1995, 11% of libraries reported having a dedicated young adult librarian (either full-time or part-time); in 2007, that number was 62%^[3], so when I started my job, I assumed that the upward trend would continue and that we’d see more builders of teen services. Unfortunately, the most recent Public Library Data Service (PLDS) survey from 2012 found that the percentage of libraries that reported having a full-time YA librarian dropped from 51% in 2008 to 33% in 2012^[4], so it seems the number of builders of YA has likely shrunk. If library budgets ever improve and the YA librarian community can advocate for itself, it may be that we see more rebuilders of YA in the coming years — at least, I hope so.

There’s a lot I wish I had known when I started my last job and found myself unexpectedly building teen services from scratch, but there’s a lot I learned during my time with that library. Now that I’m in a new supervisory position, heading teen services at the New York Public Library’s Bronx Library Center, I’m once again finding that there’s a lot I don’t know — but I’m looking forward to learning, reflecting, and sharing with my professional community.

While there are other young adult librarians who are also the first YA person their library has had, their experiences are bound to be different from mine based on their libraries, communities, backgrounds, and circumstances. I was a new librarian, I was the first teen services librarian and a department of one, and I was part-time. I’m interested in how my perspective and experiences are similar to and different from those of other librarians who are building teen services from scratch, and I think we can benefit from sharing our stories with each other.

If you’re in a similar position, building YA services from scratch or rebuilding YA services after your library was without a staff member whose job was to serve teens, what has your experience been like? I found data collection and analysis, writing a vision, building relationships, and cultivating a professional network really important, but I’m sure others learned different things. Did you struggle with some of the same things I did? What have you had to learn quickly on the job? What about the job has surprised you? We can all benefit from each others’ experiences and become better librarians by sharing!

Acknowledgements

My sincerest thanks to Lead Pipe Editorial Board members Ellie Collier and Emily Ford for their patience and thoughtful editing and to my colleague Emily Calkins Charyk for her unique insight and immensely useful observations. Without them, I would have given up on trying to coalesce and condense my thoughts into this article long ago.

Citations

[1] Kolderup, Gretchen. (2011, January 24). Learning as I go: building a foundation for teen services. The YALSAblog. Retrieved from http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/2011/01/24/learning-as-i-go-building-a-foundation-for-teen-services/

[2] Kolderup, Gretchen. (2012, October 11). Connect, create, collaborate: Building teen services (nearly) from scratch. The YALSAblog. Retrieved from http://yalsa.ala.org/blog/2012/10/11/connect-create-collaborate-building-teen-services-nearly-from-scratch/

[3] Flowers, Sarah. (2012). Evaluating teen services and programs. Chicago: Neal-Schuman. 13.

[4] Young Adult Library Services Organization Board of Directors. (2013). Reaching Library Administrators. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/yalsa/sites/ala.org.yalsa/files/content/Administrators_MW13.pdf

In Brief: This article offers a reflection on my pursuit to become a writer-librarian. In addition to participating in a professional writing program at my institution, in November of 2012 I participated in Academic Writing Month and Digital Writing Month. Through these immersive experiences I worked to figure out who is my writerly librarian self and discovered some tools and techniques to help me along the way. This article begins with an explanation of Academic Writing Month and Digital Writing Month, discusses writing in Library and Information Science, and then offers more reflection on my discoveries as I tried to become a writer-librarian. Among my discoveries, the most helpful were getting to know my writing barriers and making writing social. Finally, this article offers advice to others who may wish to incorporate writing into their professional lives.

Thanks to Flickr user Urbanworkbench for use of this image.

Introduction

I always tell people that if I hadn’t become a librarian I would have become a chef, but this is a lie. The truth is that I always wanted to be a writer. To be a manipulator of words and to caress them into meaning—this was the thing I wanted, and yet it is the thing that has taken me thirty-three years to publicly admit.

When I had the opportunity to write in my professional life and work with In the Library with the Lead Pipe, there was no decision to be made. Over the past four years I have become immersed in the world of professional writing and editing as a Lead Pipe Co-Founder and Editorial Board member. Writing, as I had always perceived and experienced it, was a lonely task. As a child and teenager I journaled alone. I wrote poems alone. Writing papers throughout the course of my career in higher education as a student and professional had also always been a mostly lonesome task.

1. During this time I was working on both a literature review article that will be forthcoming this summer provided the publisher and I get the author agreement worked out, and the article Carol Bean and I published in December: “Open Ethos Publishing at Code4Lib Journal and In the Library with the Lead Pipe.”
2. “The community of practice is, then, the group of practitioners with whom learners must engage and in whose activities they must be able to participate in order to learn. Learning is, ultimately, the process of becoming (and becoming recognized as) a member of such a community. As such, learning involves much more than acquiring the explicit knowledge associated with a particular practice. It also requires developing the tacit understanding, inherent judgment, and shared identity that come with participation.” (Duguid, 2003, p. 234)
3. The Pomodoro Technique is a method of time management wherein one concentrates on a task, typically for twenty-five minutes, and then takes a five minute break. After four pomodoros, as these twenty-five minute chunks of time are popularly called, one takes a longer break.

In brief: The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) launched last week. This article attempts to tease out the librarian response to DPLA and explore what it means for the future of the library in popular imagination, as well as in our field. I describe the what, who, and how of DPLA and ask, after two years of work on the project, what can librarians can expect from DPLA and what does DPLA expect from us? This article concludes by proposing that librarians want four things from DPLA: Advocacy, Inclusion, Investment and Clarity.

Introduction:

Two years ago I took a gigantic leap of professionalism and subscribed to my first mailing list ever, the Digital Public Library of America Discussion list. The concepts and ideals behind the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) were just coming into shape and I was so excited about it that I went so far as to agree to have it inundate my email inbox. Not long after, I wrote a post about DPLA for the blog, HackLibrarySchool, in which I spelled out some of my interest in the project, as well as some important questions to consider. Quoting myself, “the reason [DPLA] feels so important, is that a group of capable and brilliant folks from a variety of reputable institutions (libraries, institutes, universities) have identified a need, and have initiated a grand idea to address that need.” Now, with the launch of DPLA, I’d like to provide a quick overview of how the project has grown, where it is going, and most importantly, what it means for librarians. Following a brief introduction to the project, I survey the literature about it, introduce some questions and issues with which the DPLA still needs to contend, and close by suggesting a possible collaborative future including the work we do in large-scale projects like this.

What is the Digital Public Library of America?

The concept of a national public library is not new. Traditionally, the Library of Congress (LOC) is seen as the national library of America, for good reason, but the LOC’s stated mission is primarily to serve the research needs of the U.S. Congress. With the wealth of digital information and the tools finally becoming available, extensible, and accessible, governments around the globe are beginning projects to create “digital libraries” of their heritage and history. In fact, DPLA planning documents mention the national libraries of Norway, The Netherlands, and South Korea as models to explore.

 There are three layers to the project: a portal, which is the public-facing website with search functions; a platform, the code underlying the technical infrastructure, which is open source  so that others can build on top of it; and a partnership, which pairs this project with libraries, museums, archives, funders, universities, schools, and other institutions, to advance the mission of libraries in providing access to information. The DPLA, in its current incarnation, is primarily a metadata repository that pulls open data from cultural heritage collections at multiple institutions and centralizes it. As stated in DPLA’s mission, “The DPLA is leading the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all.”

While collecting numerous digital objects into one point of access may seem idealistic, DPLA is taking practical steps in a sensible direction. Building on the work of related projects like HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America intends to capitalize on previous and ongoing digitization projects by letting many digital objects be discoverable on one platform. However, there are numerous things to consider when launching a digital project with regards to the target audience/participation, scope of content, finances/business models, governance, legal issues, and technical aspects. Luckily, those were the exact areas that the DPLA identified as “workstreams,” in which qualified and competent professionals worked for the past two years. Those workstreams have now been consolidated into committees that will continue to inform the development of the project.

The focus on cultural heritage collections, an early example of which can be seen in Leaving Europe —a jointly curated DPLA/Europeana virtual exhibit—allows DPLA to begin quickly with content that is already easily accessible. John Palfrey, of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and lead spokesperson for DPLA, states, “In its first iteration, the DPLA will combine a group of rich, interesting digital collections, from state and regional digital archives to the special collections of major university libraries and federal holdings. DPLA will demonstrate how powerful and exciting it can be to bring together our nation’s digitized materials, metadata (including catalog records, for instance), code, and digital tools and services into an open, shared resource” (Palfrey, 2013).  There has been a great deal of discussion about including books (e- or otherwise), orphan works, scholarly materials in open access institutional repositories, and other readily available digital corpora. Going forward, these other content types may be considered for inclusion in the DPLA, though the version of the DPLA that launched last week includes only metadata related to cultural heritage objects.

Who is involved in DPLA?

Committees

Conversations about a broad, multi-institutional collaboration on a national digital library in America began at an October 2010 meeting of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, culminating in a Steering Committee. In December 2010, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society convened a meeting that would produce the DPLA Secretariat, directed by Maura Marx of Open Knowledge Commons. With the foundations laid, these teams began to define the details, possibilities, and grand ideals of the Digital Public Library of America. The work of the Steering Committee and the Secretariat was invaluable to the early progress of DPLA, in addition to the individuals listed below.

Robert Darnton

“A Library Without Walls,” a piece written by Robert Darnton for the New York Review of Books, is generally seen as the inception of the DPLA. Darnton is a historian and the Director of Harvard University Libraries. He has remained involved in the conception and governance of DPLA, serving on the Steering Committee as well as being a public voice for the project from time to time.

John Palfrey

A director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Palfrey has been the most vocal and visible proponent of DPLA since early planning meetings, and currently serves as President of the DPLA Board of Directors. He previously directed Harvard’s Law School Library and is now the Head of School at Phillips Academy in Andover. Palfrey’s book Born Digital may have run across your desk at some point.

Dan Cohen

Only recently announced as Executive Director of DPLA, Dan Cohen brings years of experience leading the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) on high-profile digital humanities projects like Zotero, Press Forward, and Hacking The Academy. Cohen, a digital historian, brings – as the Library Loon has pointed out –  public presence, authority, and gravitas to the position.¹

Emily Gore

The first official employee of DPLA, Emily Gore has worked in libraries and technology for 12 years. As the Director of Content, Gore oversees the “what” that will become DPLA’s collections. She was most recently employed as the Associate Dean of Digital Scholarship and Technology at Florida State University and is a 2011 graduate of the Frye Leadership Institute.²

Amy Rudersdorf

As DPLA’s Assistant Director of Content, Amy Rudersdorf “is responsible for digitization partnerships and related workflows, metadata normalization and shareability, and community engagement to promote the DPLA as a community resource.” She is a leader in digital preservation and also teaches metadata and digital libraries for graduate programs in library and information science.

Partner Organizations

From the very beginning, DPLA was lent credence due to the partner organizations that signed on in support of the initiative. The Smithsonian Institution and the National Archives pledged content partnerships early on, and in recent weeks the New York Public Library, ArtSTOR, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and The Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have all signed on as well. The fact that there is an open invitation to “join” allows DPLA to build a coalition that will draw more interest and investment. A full list of the current partner organizations is available on the website. In addition to content, DPLA secured funding from the Sloan Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the National Endowment for the Humanities and others, marking it as a worthy investment for prestigious funding organizations.

The Public (Me and You and Everyone We Know)

Early conversations surrounding DPLA included worries that a project of this scale might not include enough people from the library community. These concerns were addressed in multiple ways, which I will illuminate later in this article. Primarily, the project extended multiple calls for participation, including a public wiki, the aforementioned listservs, open workstreams, Appfests, and Beta Sprints, and many librarians and others had a hand in creating what it now is. A Get Involved page invites continued participation and asserts the DPLA’s insistance on this project continuing to be built as a community.

 The prevailing zeitgeist of open, collaborative, “public,” project-based, and community-built and -owned initiatives serves the DPLA well. Margaret Heller, writing for ACRL Tech Connect, reported from DPLA Midwest, “I found the meeting to be inspirational about the future for libraries to cross boundaries and build exciting new collections. I still have many unanswered questions, but as everyone throughout the day understands, this will be a platform on which we can build and imagine” (Heller, 2012). In a similar spirit to the crowdsourced participation of Wikipedia, “The DPLA… [is] very leanly staffed with tons of volunteers,” says John Palfrey.  Thousands of librarians, technologists, students, professors, curators, and administrators worked to build the project over two years through discussions and hackathons. “This may feel like a utopian project,” Palfrey continues. “If we don’t aim for what we want, we’ll sell ourselves short. We need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade” (Borman, 2012).

What DPLA isn’t

DPLA is not a public library, a content repository, or a threat to traditional library services.

In defining a massive project of this scope, calling it a “public library” has led some in the profession to dismiss it outright, or at least question its motives. The Chief Officers of State Library Associations went so far as to issue a resolution [PDF] that the name be changed. How could a well-funded, Harvard-based, academic-focused, non-librarian-led thing purport to call itself a “public library”? The inclusion of “public” in the title is important in defining the role of this organization in our country’s mind. People understand that the items in a public library’s collection belong to them and are available for their use. So it should also be with DPLA, Dan Cohen wrote, claiming that public libraries engender trust, localness, relevance, and familiarity. The ultimate decision to call the project the Digital Public Library of America was a conscious one, reflecting an intention to make it known that the public are invited and expected to claim ownership of the collection. It is not a public library in the same way that the Brooklyn Public Library is, yet the goals and hopes of the organization are the same.

 As it is now, content (digital objects/files) from digital libraries that partner with DPLA will remain with the institutions. Only the metadata about those objects will be harvested for display and discovery from “hubs” like the Smithsonian Institution or the Digital Library of Georgia (the full list of hubs is available online). This approach accomplishes two things at once: 1) it utilizes the “open data” that is becoming more essential for the discoverability of online digital collections, and 2) it is creating a model by which potential future “donors” can participate in the DPLA. Digitization efforts at regional, state, or local institutions will have a single point of access to make their cultural objects and artifacts available to their communities, the general public, and researchers. The motivation for including your library’s digital collections in the DPLA is the increased discoverability and cross-collection connections that will be more evident when searching inside one aggregated platform.

It is important to remember that we (DPLA and the field of librarianship, writ large) are on the same team, working diligently to provide access to information. It is for the users, not for us. DPLA has the potential to be an additional resource for the library community to connect our patrons with the wealth of knowledge and information we protect and preserve. Seeing it as anything but an incredible resource would be a disservice. Peter Murray, in a report from the Audience and Participation Workstream meeting at George Mason University, lists the variety of groups that this resource might affect. His list includes “Casual Searchers, Genealogy, Hardcore Enthusiasts, Wikipedia/Open Source Folks; info nerds, Small business/startups, Writers/Journalism, Artists, Students, Public School Teachers, Home schoolers, Scholars, Other Digital Libraries, State Libraries, Public Libraries/Public Librarians, Museums, and Historical Societies” (Murray, 2012). Approaching the DPLA as a resource for our users, in combination with the long list of skills and competencies that librarians of all types possess, will serve to strengthen our shared goal to enlighten and inspire.

What librarians think of DPLA

Nearly absent from taking a leading role in DPLA is the American Library Association. Aside from the occasional editorial in American Libraries magazine, time and space at annual conferences for DPLA-based discussions or presentations, and the current president of ALA, Maureen Sullivan, sitting on the Marketing and Outreach committee, there has not been any significant visible support for the project in the multitude of committees, offices, round tables or divisions of ALA. A statement from Alan Inouye, director of ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy, expresses nominal interest, without much substance, saying, “ALA is following the development of the DPLA with great interest and optimism… The very creation of the DPLA enterprise has raised the profile of libraries in the digital age… ALA appreciates the ambitious and perhaps daunting scale and scope of the DPLA undertaking” (Cottrell, 2013). Representing some significant portion of librarianship, with membership at 60,000, ALA appears to have purposefully distanced itself from active participation in the DPLA for reasons that have yet to be disclosed.

The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) is also largely missing from the DPLA infrastructure. Perhaps indicative of their thoughts on the project, the OCLC report, “America’s Digital Future: Advancing a shared strategy for digital public libraries,” vocalizes desires for public library involvement in the creation of a national library. The opening pages of the report, based on a meeting at Los Angeles Public Library, state,

Library leaders contributing to this discussion agreed: many public librarians feel behind in the evolution to a more digital library. Participants noted that academic and research libraries have made more strides in shaping a digital future, evidenced in the major projects and new efforts of organizations such as the HathiTrust. Participants also noted that the rapidly evolving digital activities in the commercial sector, such as e-books and e-book reading devices, are “changing the game” for public libraries, and that public libraries have been too slow in generating a national, concerted plan (De Rosa, et al, 2011).

Early criticisms of DPLA included charges that public libraries had not been consulted or included in the planning or leadership of the project. To the contrary, everyone involved in DPLA— including Robert Darnton, John Palfrey, Emily Gore, and Dan Cohen—have made it clear that DPLA is meant to connect people with the local and public institution, not direct them away from it. Palfrey goes so far as to urge libraries that their involvement is fundamental and necessary. He writes that “libraries must make a digital shift, charting a course that is different from our present direction. No one should fear (or act like) libraries are going away, but we need to continue to strive to change the services they provide and to build the case for them in a digital era” (Palfrey, 2013).

David Rothman, founder of TeleRead and LibraryCity.org, has been vocal about approaching this project cautiously, especially in regards to K-12 education and school librarians, who are intended as a primary target of this initiative. His editorial in the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “It’s Time for a National Digital-Library System: But it can’t serve only elites,” mentions the extreme focus on humanities-based content, to the exclusion of scientific, medical, mathematical, business, and vocational collections. He also accuses DPLA of engaging in high-academic rhetoric, “while ignoring, for instance, reference services, user communities, and grass-roots content like oral histories” (Rothman, 2011). Some of his concerns (a breadth of content beyond cultural heritage objects and flexible technology) are now recognizable goals of DPLA’s continued growth. Rothman’s suggestions that DPLA remain invested in literacy and the digital divide are also well-taken; these issues will remain at the forefront of libraries regardless of a national digital library’s claims of access for all.

Nate Hill, Assistant Director of the Chattanooga Public Library, offers a different take, proposing that DPLA offers public libraries a reformative path.

I think that the DPLA is a great opportunity for libraries to shift their focus to supporting a different set of activities in our buildings… creation activities: the production of new knowledge for personal growth and sometimes even the public good.  The future of public libraries lies in supporting creative endeavors in their local community and empowering the patrons to contribute their creative work back to the community or to the whole world via the internet… There is no other institution doing this work, and public libraries are best situated to fill the gap (Hill, 2011).

The evolving mission of the library is a discussion that flows across interdisciplinary lines and Hill encapsulates it nicely. His assertion could as easily be applied to academic libraries. Since DPLA is a concept of an academic librarian and the investment of many in the higher education enterprise, it seems the research library community has more easily embraced the project. This is in no small part due to the focus on research and access to primary sources that has led academic libraries, museums, and historical societies to actively pursue digitization projects, content which can easily be ingested to the DPLA version 1.0. The DPLA will play an important role in the ongoing transformation of “The Library” from a strictly consumptive space to a broadly creative space due to its open infrastructure, collaborative ethos, and hopefully even involving the public in the creation and curation of content.

In late 2011, Molly Raphael, at the time President-Elect of the American Library Association, echoed Hill’s opportunist bent, albeit cautiously. Listing “the issues that generated the most passionate discussions,” she writes (adding her own thoughts in parentheses):

●   Should we only consider open access, or should we think about the possibility of tiered access? (My take: Open access seemed to rule the day.)

●   What is being conveyed by including “public” in the name? (My take: Let’s not get too bogged down on the name, but we need to be careful about what we convey by the words we use.)

●   Whose voices were we missing, such as school librarians or others, and how do we make sure that the tent is “big” and welcoming? (My take: The tent kept getting bigger as more people were invited, but we knew that we needed to consider the question: “Who is not in the room that should be in the room?”)

●   How should we approach the challenge—look for low-hanging fruit, such as material already in the public domain? Seek to tackle the issue of orphan works, where much of the content that researchers want can be found? Build on the work of those who are already building large digital libraries? (My take: We have opportunities to build more coordinated access to much that is already available digitally, but let us not lose sight of the importance of access to those sources that have legal complications.)

●   How can we be sure that we put needed focus on metadata and APIs and not just on capturing the content? (My take: Thank goodness this effort is being driven by librarians and researchers who care about the keys to access.)

●   How important is it to tackle copyright revision? Do we have the tools we need without thinking about that now? (My take: This is a tough one. Opinion about what we can or can’t do under current law is divided, but generally most agreed that we would need to press for copyright revision eventually, particularly for orphan works) (Raphael, 2012).

Many of the issues Raphael lists are similar to the current focuses of the research and academic librarian community: copyright, re/use of metadata, open access, and the “big tent” approach to building and consensus-making, are defining the culture of higher education. In contrast to the aforementioned public library considerations, there has been much less of an active response from academic librarians. Several research libraries have joined as partners, expressing obvious support at the institutional level, but individuals have been less forthcoming. Perhaps this is due to the fact that academic libraries are more deeply invested in access to primary source materials and are more agile in approaching technological changes, as that seems to be the trend in higher education. The academic library conversation, then, is more topic-specific (ex. copyright) than focused on large-scale projects. Or, academic libraries are approaching the project with distanced interest, beholden first to the goals of their school and the bureaucracy that often entails. College and Research Libraries News briefly mentioned DPLA in its Top Trends of 2012 report as a project worthy of attention. That report lists trends that include digital preservation, data curation, and scholarly communication, which are all related to the work and goals of DPLA.

Finally, for a personal perspective on DPLA, Andy Woodworth provides a specific sense of why this massive project may have yet to breach the consciousness of the larger library community. He writes,

“The Digital Public Library of America seems like the Manhattan Project: it’s massive, complex, has great minds from many different fields working on it, and not many people know about it. Not because it is secretive [and] not for a lack of exposure… It just hasn’t arrived at the tipping point of intruding on the lives of librarians on their home turf. That’s where I find myself: how will this affect my community?” (Woodworth, 2012.)

As open and inviting as DPLA has been, they have yet to purposefully and single-mindedly answer that question: What are the implications of DPLA for the library community? How does this affect our patrons? The distance between large-scale initiatives and the insularity of library work (either public, academic, school, or special) is a singular factor in librarian buy-in. Woodworth continues, “From my perspective, the DPLA is at the opposite end of action spectrum for digital content and digital rights from me. We are both working towards the same goal, but I am operating from the grassroots level while it operates from a top-down perspective.” Following the launch of DPLA last week, Library Journal compiled an article titled “Librarians respond to DPLA launch” including opinions from Jason Griffey, Jessamyn West and others, ranging from excitement for the open API to noticeable errors in legacy metadata.

What librarians want from DPLA

Themes from the various responses to the DPLA can be condensed into four broad areas that I’d propose encapsulate what librarians want from the Digital Public Library of America: Advocacy, Inclusion, Investment, and Clarity on why we should participate and how we can get our communities involved.

Advocacy

The political climate in which we function requires consistent messages, constant efforts, and collective representation. If DPLA intends to function as a highly recognizable (“public”) facet of our ecosystem, it must advocate at the highest levels for the needs of the future library. Dan Cohen, representing the interests and influence of many behind the scenes at DPLA says, to that point, “I see a strong advocacy role for the DPLA, to say that a better balance is needed in the twenty-first century, so that the landscape for reading and research isn’t further circumscribed and hindered by digital friction” (Enis, 2013). It is the hope of the library community that this will ring true as DPLA moves forward.

Inclusion

Libraries want to be included in the construction of a national digital library. Again, DPLA has worked to ensure that this occurs, and as more libraries and librarians become aware of this project, I hope that time, energy, and resources will be devoted to participating in this grand experiment. Already organizations like the American Council of Learned Societies are offering positions for post-doctoral fellows to work on the project. I would call on the library community to proactively pursue inclusion, and encourage our professional organizations to consider offering similar opportunities (fellowships, internships, scholarships) to prove our vested interest in working together to build the DPLA.

Investment

DPLA will have to prove its support for existing institutions. As a starting point, providing a portal into the work of others is an efficient strategy, but as we all know, there’s much more where that came from. How does the Digital Public Library of America plan to utilize their funding, resources and momentum to reinvest in, and enrich, the collections and communities that are not yet digital?

Dan Cohen: “I want the American public to know that the DPLA will be the place to go to find documents and images about their hometown, scanned and curated locally; to be able to pull out their smartphone, launch an app powered by DPLA’s data, and take an impromptu walking tour of the hidden past of their current location; to see the DPLA’s open and free content spread across classes from kindergarten to graduate school; and many other exciting possibilities enabled when formerly disparate collections are knit together—entirely new kinds of searching, discovery, and learning. Forget the massive technical infrastructure; if the DPLA can ignite that wonder that only libraries can provide, we will have done our job” (Enis, 2013).³

Clarity

Many initiatives that garner excitement in the library community look great from the outside, but are fraught with loosely defined goals, aims, and a general lack of detailed plans for moving forward. Librarians, eager and skeptical at the same time, require a deep sense of purpose tied to real, concrete outcomes. DPLA is close to providing that level of clarity, but additional information would be helpful, such as:  what methods are in place for rural libraries to begin collecting and submitting oral histories?; will there be a PBS-style curriculum module to engage school librarians?; is there a media campaign targeted at public libraries?; a toolset for scholarly utilities that could help with citing items and repurposing metadata?. These details would address Andy Woodworth’s question, “How does this apply to my patrons?” It is still a little early in the process to expect the fullness of clarity that many of us would like, but continuing to ask and expressing our detailed needs will keep practicality at the forefront of this developing initiative.

 These four areas require as much from librarians as they do from those steering the Digital Public Library of America. Rather than approaching the DPLA as a Harvard initiative, I’d like to propose that we take them at their word and take ownership of this as a realistic, collaborative, inclusive, “public” opportunity to showcase one aspect of value for libraries in a digital world. Considering the practical implications of a national digital library for our daily work, we should contribute to the conversation and development of the platform, the portal and the partnerships that define the DPLA. If it is successful, DPLA could be a national treasure which brings to light the value and essential qualities of our beloved organizations, as well as the physical collections and intellectual issues that we labor on daily (copyright, fair use, information literacy, access). Even if we don’t each have the time to get personally involved, we ought to articulate the wide-ranging possibilities and benefits of such an idealistic enterprise to public schools, to higher education, and to citizenship and government. In fighting for the ideals on an ambitious project like DPLA, we are fighting for our own place in the information economy.

The Digital Public Library of America is, as Robert Darnton puts it, “the confluence of two currents that have shaped American civilization: utopianism and pragmatism” (Darnton, 2013). Let us then envision the grand ideal while rolling up our sleeves. What role could be more fitting for American librarians than a passion for principles blending with an enduring work ethic? It is who we are and what we do.

Further reading and discovery:

StackLife, Library Observatory  and DPLA Map - examples of what can be built on top of the DPLA’s open API.

Now, With No Further Ado, We Present… The Digital Public Library of America! The Atlantic, 4/18/2013.

DPLA Launches to the Public. Huffington Post, 4/18/2013.

How the DPLA hopes to build a real public commons. The Verge. 4/3/2013.

What We Hope the DPLA will Become. Open Knowledge Foundation blog. 4/17/2013.

References:

Borman, Laurie. Building the Digital Public Library. American Libraries Magazine, 4/19/2012.

Cottrell, Megan. A Digital Library for Everyone. American Libraries Magazine, 4/15/2013.

Darnton, Robert. The Digital Public Library of America is Launched. The New York Review of Books. 4/25/2013.

De Rosa, Cathy, Chrystie Hill, Andy Havens, Kendra Morgan and Ricky Erway. America’s Digital Future: Advancing a Shared Strategy for Digital Public Libraries. 2011, OCLC.

http://dp.la/

Enis, Matt. Q&A: Dan Cohen on His Role as the Founding Executive Director of DPLA. The Digital Shift: Library Journal. 3/12/2013.

Heller, Margaret. Report from the Digital Public Library of America Midwest. ACRL Tech Connect. 10/22/2012

Hill, Nate. What a National Digital Library means for Public Libraries. Text of a talk given to Digital Library Federation, 2011.

Palfrey, John. What is the DPLA? Library Journal. 4/8/2013

Palfrey, John. What the DPLA can mean for Libraries. The Digital Shift: Library Journal. 1/3/2013

Raphael, Molly. The First Digital Public Library of America Workshop. Inside Scoop: American Libraries Magazine. 3/9/2012.

Rothman, David. It’s Time for a National Digital-Library System: But it can’t serve only elites. The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2/24/2011

–                              The risks if the DPLA won’t create a full-strength national digital library system: Setbacks for K-12, family literacy, local libraries, preservation, digital divide efforts? LLRX.com. 12/19/2012

Vandegrift, Micah. The Digital Public Library of America. Hack Library School. 5/10/2011.

***Thanks, as always, to Lead Pipe colleagues Emily, Ellie, Erin, and Brett for editing and challenging my writing and ideas herein. A special thanks to Emily Lloyd of Hennepin County Libraries for serving as an external reviewer. 

1. The Library Loon’s article “DPLA and the so-called ‘Feral Librarian’ is a must read for insight on Dr. Cohen’s role in the project.
2. Full disclosure: Emily hired me into my current position and was my direct supervisor for eight months before joining DPLA.
3. See also: Emily Gore’s Scannabago concept

In Brief: In this editorial, In the Library with the Lead Pipe Editorial Board members Erin Dorney, Emily Ford, Kim Leeder, and Micah Vandegrift discuss their upcoming panel presentation that will take place at the ACRL 2013 National Conference in Indianapolis. The panel, with the same title as this editorial, will address what we believe constitutes do-it-yourself (DIY) library culture, its presence in academia, and its implications for the future of librarianship. We conclude by asking readers to contribute your voices and ideas to the discussion by blogging, tweeting, YouTubing, and attending the event in person. Be sure to tag your remarks with #diylib and, if tweeting, mention @libraryleadpipe.

By John Manyjohns on Flickr

Introduction

Librarianship has seen a groundswell of innovative do-it-yourself (DIY) activity in recent years. Projects have popped up here and there; creative, independent efforts with the goal of solving problems, increasing effectiveness, and making positive change in the field. Take, for instance, Library Juice Press, the Library as Incubator Project, the Blended Librarian webcast, and ALA’s Library Lab. We see our own blog-turned-journal, In The Library With The Lead Pipe, as a DIY effort. DIY projects are shiny and exciting (and time-consuming), but to what end? For academic librarians this DIY culture is closely tied with professional development and scholarship, but what does it say about the future of the academic library profession?

This is a question we propose to answer in a panel session at the ACRL National Conference this month. The panel, with the same title as this editorial, will address what we believe constitutes DIY library culture, its presence in academia, and its implications for the future of librarianship. However, we wanted to “flip” the presentation, take it out of the box, and shake it around a little, so we’re sharing our content in advance of the conference in this editorial. What this means is that instead of spending our hour in Indianapolis presenting content, we can focus on conversation and interaction to explore the issue together and showcase a variety of voices and perspectives (now that sounds pretty DIY-y, doesn’t it?). Please read on, contribute your thoughts (using the tag #diylib) and, for those who will be attending ACRL National, join us to continue the conversation in person on Thursday, April 11th at 3-4 p.m. in the JW Marriott Grand Ballroom 9-10.

Kim

DIY activities are always creative by nature, but DIY culture in libraries is less about creativity and more about basic survival. A traditional library is a dead library. We know this: if libraries don’t change they will fade away, eclipsed by the free, the instant, and the easy. The mantra of twenty-first century librarianship is and must be: change, change, and more change. DIY is what we call the change that we invent rather than waiting for others to invent it.

I embrace this attitude. I finished my MLIS in 2006 and joined the field, like many of my contemporaries, with the full awareness that my brand new career might only only have another ten or twenty years of gas in the tank. I was perfectly comfortable with this uncertainty. I was optimistic, and continue to be optimistic, that I was joining a field that was actively evolving, and in whose evolution I would be lucky enough to participate and, perhaps, even influence. But I was also willing to accept the possibility that I might be making another career change in the future when librarianship disappeared or became something totally different, even unrecognizable.

As academic librarians, we have a wide array of daily tasks to accomplish. We answer questions, we collect, we teach, we budget. Beyond those daily tasks are the bigger concerns, the bigger questions: what does it mean? What are our big-picture goals? Where are we headed as a field? And when we dip our toes into those questions, we find that there are no easy answers. We also find that no one else is going to answer those questions for us, so we begin to imagine, and plan, and create, and build. We begin to recreate ourselves and to make meaning that will sustain us, and our field, long into the future.

We are DIY because we can’t be anything else, because anything else would be raising the white flag of librarianship letting the future sweep us away. We must reinvent ourselves and our libraries or we will become anachronisms, defeated by time. We will not give up. We have too much to offer.

Erin

The thing I love about the DIY movement in libraries is that you have the freedom to pick things that are important to you. You don’t have to fit the mold of what a librarian or a library “should” look like. You can reinvent yourself, the services your offer, the resources you provide to the community, and more based on your continual growth as a person and as a professional. You can be responsive to the needs of your community by moving towards the outskirts and taking action. Yes, it might mean you work on your DIY project on nights and weekends. Yes, it might mean volunteering and doing work with no monetary reward. Yes, it might mean that some of your colleagues snub their noses at your “most recent trend.” But to me, those seem to continually wind up being the projects that make me feel most passionate about being a librarian, and quite honestly have kept me engaged in this field. Ever since I graduated from library school in 2008, people have worried about the future of libraries and if we’ll be around in 20 years and if so what libraries will look like. To some, that might be scary. But I didn’t become a librarian for stability. I became a librarian because of its potential–the opportunity to be part of redefining the status quo. DIY is about reinventing yourself and reinventing librarianship in the process.

Emily

In a way, we academics have been doing the DIY thing ever since the academy was the academy. With intellectual curiosity we pose questions, design experiments, conduct research, and reflect and report on our findings. In essence, the academy has born the ultimate DIY culture. However, over hundreds of years what was at first DIY has become institutionalized, regularized, and politicized.

For those of us in tenure-related positions, our work is evaluated by our peers via promotion and tenure processes. So how is our current DIY work valued? How is it assessed and evaluated? What tensions lie between the “traditional” form of DIY and its contemporary manifestations? Will contemporary DIY simply morph into a new traditional form?

It remains unclear whether DIY library culture has indeed become mainstream or whether it will remain on the periphery. In the academy, where tradition seems to rule the proverbial roost, how can contemporary DIYers positively change their libraries and communities and successfully play the institutional and political games inherent in higher education?

Micah

When DIY is the topic, I tend to lean toward a historical view, placing everything I know about self-madeness behind the culture/mindset/ideology of DIY born out of the post-punk subculture of the early 80s. What kids like Ian Mackaye and Henry Rollins did was DIY, sure, but not the same thing we are talking about here. Their “Doing It Themselves” was born purely out of necessity; no one was going to put out their records… ever. DIY, as it became enmeshed in our cultural consciousness, began as an imperative not a luxury; a must, not a choice. In the subcultural movement that followed, “DIY” evolved to be a code of conduct, an ethic or a principle. An important one, truly, but losing some of the grit and gall of which it was spawned.

I think I have to take an oppositional view than I had originally presented to my colleagues – I think what we do is not DIY. It is a new culture of professional development, yes, one driven by what we want, and how we work, rather than what professional associations or historical guidelines tell us. But, I do not see subversion of bureaucracy. I do not see radical shifts in the work we do, especially in academic librarianship. If I take a hardline, DIY-historicist point-of-view, there is little that might qualify as DIY in librarianship. Don’t get me wrong, we are overwhelmed with self-motivation, passion, creative projects, community building and scrappy, get-it-done attitude. But what is it that we MUST do? That we do BECAUSE no one else will do it? What do we do ourselves that compels others to participate based on the “damn the man” principle?

Ingenuity and innovation in our work is essential. But, to truly adopt a do-it-yourself culture in academic librarianship I think we should stop talking about the ebook problem and build our own platform-agnostic e-reader. We should stop writing for publishers that are unwilling to adapt to our intellectual property demands. We should invest in developing publishing partnerships within our Universities and Colleges. We should teach our students to be the best god damned googlers on the planet. We should hack every software and challenge every vendor to provide an open API so we can build what we really need, not what they sell us. Or we should walk away. Currency in the future DIY Culture of Academic Librarianship will be exactly what it was in the DC punk scene: relationships with other similarly-minded peers, willing to do what it takes to accomplish the task at hand.

There’s a lot of confusion in librarianship about what constitutes DIY-ness. Can we clear that up and come to some sort of agreement as to what, how and why it matters to our current state of “work”?

Conclusion

This is a DIY panel and we want to hear it from you. Is DIY library culture a precursor to more traditional praxis? Or is DIY culture, as Micah claims, ultimately a subversion? Where is DIY culture taking our profession? What are the practical outcomes of DIY culture for professional achievement? Do you agree or disagree with some or all of what we’ve said? Tell us about it!

We want you to share your 1-minute videos, comments, and tweets before our panel at ACRL next week. Make sure you tag your responses with #diylib and be a part of something awesome!

Tweets about “#diylib”

The Gates Through Central Park Benches by Sterling Ely / CC-BY-SA

In Brief: Library ebooks are currently read in different, unconnected reading platforms. Because all library ebook vendors use the same Adobe ADEPT system to circulate ebooks, they could be delivered to a single aggregated reading app. This article discusses social reading and why libraries should look at the technology, and details the Adobe ADEPT DRM system, OAuth, and application programming interfaces (APIs) to illustrate how an aggregated reading app could be built.

Book Bench: An Aggregated eBook Reading App

It’s a Tuesday morning, I am talking with my co-worker, Sally. She teaches a lot of the ebook classes at our library. She tells me about a new reading app she found on a technology blog. It’s called Book Bench.

“It’s a new reading app,” she says. “I’ve got my OverDrive, 3M, and Ingram books on it.”
“Wait. What? You put all your library ebooks in one app? Can I do that?”
“Yes,” she tells me. “Just go to the App Store and download Book Bench.”
“Okay,” I say, “ I’ve got the app. Now what?”
“Tap ‘Sign Up’ to make a Book Bench account. Then use your new account to sign in to the app.”
“Got it. Where do I add my Adobe ID?” I ask.
“You don’t need one,” she says. “The Book Bench username and password takes care of the Adobe authorization. Isn’t that cool?”
“Yeah, that will make helping people a lot easier. How do I get my books?”
“Use the settings to log in to our library’s ebook services with your library card and PIN.”
“Okay, give me just a second.” I use the app to log in to OverDrive, 3M Cloud Library, and Ingram. “Hey! There are all my ebooks!” I exclaim.
“You’ll love this next part. You know how you can’t add 3M books to your Goodreads bookshelf?”
“Yes,” I tell her. “That does bug me.”
“Book Bench has Goodreads integration,” she says. “So, when you get your books in the app, you can save your 3M and Ingram books to Goodreads too.”
“Oh, you’re reading In a Sunburned Country?” I ask. “I’m reading that too. I love Bill Bryson.”
“I’ll send you an invite to join my reading group in the Book Bench app,” she says. “We can talk about the book while we read!”

Book Bench isn’t real. We just made it up. But it illustrates how we imagine library ebooks could be. It could be exciting to explain that you can get ebooks from the library. We could be connecting with friends inside a book, sharing ideas about the books we’re reading together.

Instead, we wind up apologizing: for getting an Adobe ID; for having several separate ebook systems; for the number of steps involved in getting an ebook onto a reading device. And that’s just to the 38% of library users who even know we have ebooks (Raine and Duggan).

We want to suggest a new app. We’re calling it Book Bench. It’s an aggregated ebook reading app that would bring books from all library ebook vendors together in one place. This would allow libraries to promote a single service with a consistent user experience. It would provide a platform to support conversation around books, the kind of discussion that libraries already encourage with our in-person programming. An app like Book Bench would allow people to connect with one another inside a library ebook.

Libraries purchase ebooks from different distributors—including OverDrive, 3M, and Freading—and each distributor delivers ebooks in different reading apps. But a multi-vendor aggregated reading app is possible. DRM technology does not require a vendor-supplied platform for ebook reading. In fact, because all of our vendors use the same “Adobe Digital Experience Protection Technology” (ADEPT) system for DRM, library ebooks could be delivered to a single app, like our theoretical Book Bench app.

We will discuss social reading and why libraries should look at the technology. Then we’ll detail the Adobe ADEPT DRM system, OAuth, and application programming interfaces (APIs) to illustrate how an aggregated reading app could be built.

Connecting Readers Inside Books

Reading is both a solitary and a social activity. We read in solitude then come together to talk about what we’ve read. Our desire to talk about books is the same whether we read ebooks or print. The digitization of books did not change our desire to talk about books, but it has given us new possibilities for how we can share ideas and connect to one another (Alber and Miller, Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto).

Kindle allows readers to highlight text in order to associate a comment with a specific passage in a book. You used to have to wait to see what a friend thought about a specific passage. Digital books, where readers are connected to the Internet as they read, allow us to share margin notes in real time. While Kindle highlights let you see what someone thought about a specific passage, you aren’t able to comment back and start a conversation. We need to be able to leave comments for one another if we want to foster conversation.

Goodreads, a social network for readers, allows people to share what they are reading and discuss books. If you are on page 185 of In a Sunburned Country, you can find the title on goodreads.com and post a status update with a comment:

“Australia is terrifying. I never imagined the animals he’s talking about. Is this hyperbole on Bryson’s part? Or is the country really so deadly?”

Your Goodreads friends can see your progress update and can comment back. You can’t see the passage from the book your friend is reading, but you can have a discussion about the passage they found interesting. It is a different experience than Kindle highlights. Kindle shows you comments while you are inside a book. Goodreads shows you comments in a separate website.

Social Reading

Social reading combines the convenience of Kindle highlights with the discussion capability of Goodreads. Users are able to bring the conversation into the ebook they are reading.

Connecting inside the book is important. When you move discussion to the comment section on a blog, a discussion forum, or email, you’re no longer in the book. You have to leave the reading app and open up another program. It is easy to become distracted instead of remaining focused on the thoughts you wanted to share. If discussion can happen inside a social reading app, readers can communicate with one another while staying focused on the text.

Our colleague, Sally, uses Subtext, a social reading app that allows her to create reading groups, so she can have a discussion with her book club while they read. At the end of each chapter, a small box appears at the top of the screen where Sally can record her thoughts. At the prompt, she pauses and writes a note to share with her reading group. A small “discussion” icon in the corner shows when there are new notes from other group members. The group can talk to one another by replying to comments. (Figure 1)

Figure 1 – Discussion in Subtext

The discussion you have while you are reading is different than the one you have when you are done. Social reading keeps comments in context, which allows for a shared experience of the text. As you read, you have thoughts about characters, situations, or plot, that you want to share with someone in the moment.

The asynchronous aspect of social reading lets members carry on a discussion even if they read at different times of day. Readers can record their thoughts as they occur, rather than wait for a club meeting. Groups can stretch the book discussion across an entire month. Group members can talk to one another when it is convenient and pick up a thread of conversation hours or days later. A night owl reading at 2 a.m. can carry on a conversation with her early-bird friend, who was reading at 7 a.m.

Social Reading in the Aggregated Reading App

There are different ways to organize social reading. How we organize discussion and connect people in our imagined Book Bench app, or any aggregated reading app, will determine how successful the social interaction will be.

There are two kinds of sharing: broadcasting to anyone or sharing with a limited group of people. Kobo Pulse is an example of this first kind of sharing, where you see comments from everyone in the Kobo store. Kobo has more in common with Kindle highlighting than the group discussion that happens in Subtext.

As you read a Kobo ebook, you see icons in the margins of the book which lead to comments left by everyone who bought the same book. While reading Jane Eyre, you might run across a passage that has 237 comments. It might be interesting to read the comments, but the chance that you’ll engage in a conversation with 237 people you don’t know is pretty slim.

Social reading apps are most successful when they facilitate conversation between readers with existing real-world ties. While studying BookGlutton, a social reading website, creators Travis Alber and Aaron Miller noticed patterns in user behavior. Users were 80% more likely to participate in a social reading group discussion when they were invited by someone they knew. The groups with the most participation had users who weren’t just familiar with one another, but were part of a real-world group, like a book club or a class. The actual discussion was better because people knew one another and there was a sense of trust and familiarity (Alber and Miller, Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto).

While library users might enjoy social highlighting, sharing notes, and reading community comments, a library social reading experience needs to enable private group discussion. If five library members want to form a group, they need to be able to find one another, establish their group, and organize their discussion around chapters or page numbers. A group member needs to be able to pose a question in a Chapter 3 thread, inside the book. A reader can reach out to the four other group members and ask “What is Michael Chabon talking about in chapter 3? This sentence is 12 pages long and I’m lost. Do you guys know what is going on?”

Adobe DRM & the ACSM File

If we want to enable readers to connect with one another inside a book, and create a consistent user experience, we need to bring everyone together in a single app. The key to aggregating ebooks from different vendors into a single reading app is the common Adobe ADEPT DRM system, and especially one of its features, the Adobe Content Server Message (ACSM) file.

Publishers sell eBook files encoded with Adobe DRM. DRM controls what you can do with an ebook besides read it—how many devices a book can be on at a time and how long it can be checked out. DRM-encoded ebooks get stored in a retailer’s Adobe Content Server.

OverDrive, 3M, Freading, Ingram, and Baker & Taylor all sell Adobe DRM-encoded ebooks. Whether you are purchasing directly from Kobo or checking out an item from a library that contracts with OverDrive, after you click ‘Download,’ the behind-the-scenes action is the same.

Key parts of the Adobe DRM system (ADEPT)

• Adobe Content Server: Server that stores DRM-encoded ebook files and tracks the use of those books once they’ve been delivered to the user. Each retailer/vendor has its own Adobe Content Server.
• Adobe: The activation service keeps track of registered Adobe IDs and the devices authorized with those IDs.
• ACSM file: “Adobe Content Server Message.” Carries the name of the book and the location of the Adobe Content Server that stores the book.
• Adobe ID: Unique ID associated with a specific user. It unlocks the ACSM file.
• Adobe Reader Mobile SDK: Software development kit that companies use to build their own Adobe DRM compatible mobile reading apps.

Downloading an eBook to a Laptop

Sally wants to borrow Fahrenheit 451 from OverDrive to read on her Sony Reader. She uses her library card to check out the book, then clicks a link to download the ebook to her computer. As far as Sally is concerned, she has just downloaded the ebook. After she opens the file, the book loads in Adobe Digital Editions and she moves it to her Sony Reader.

What Sally doesn’t see is the complex interaction between her computer, Adobe, and OverDrive’s Adobe Content Server. What is hidden from her is the key to the aggregated reading app, the ACSM file.

First, Sally clicks the download link in her OverDrive account. Adobe’s Content Server 4 Overview shows how this works (Figure 2):

1. A request is sent to OverDrive’s Adobe Content Server: “Hey, someone wants an ebook, Fahrenheit 451.”
2. OverDrive’s Adobe Content Server returns an ACSM file. The ACSM file is not the ebook. It is an access token for the ebook. The token contains only the title of the book and the location of the Adobe Content Server where the book is stored.

Figure 2 – Downloading to a laptop, step 1

Next, Sally opens the ACSM file with Adobe Digital Editions, though she does not realize that is what she is doing; in her mind, she is just clicking on an image of the book cover. Opening the ACSM file triggers a series of interactions between OverDrive’s Adobe Content Server, Adobe, and her computer. (Figure 3)

1. Adobe Digital Editions asks for an Adobe ID, then connects to Adobe’s servers to see if the Adobe ID is valid. If Sally has not reached her limit of authorized devices, Adobe sends an authorization message and associates her computer with her Adobe ID.
2. Once the computer is authorized, Adobe Digital Editions grabs Sally’s Adobe ID and the ACSM file, and passes this information to OverDrive’s Adobe Content Server. OverDrive’s Adobe Content Server encodes the ebook with Sally’s Adobe ID and adds the lending period set by her library, usually one to three weeks.
3. The Adobe Content Server delivers the DRM-encoded EPUB file to Sally’s computer, where it opens in Adobe Digital Editions. Since the EPUB ebook, Fahrenheit 451, is associated with Sally’s Adobe ID, only devices with her Adobe ID can open it.

Figure 3 – Downloading to a laptop, step 2

No matter where she borrows or purchases a book, the ACSM file is handled the same way. (Adobe Systems, Architecture)

Adobe DRM and ACSM is the Same on Mobile Devices

When Sally moves to a mobile device, like her iPad, downloading looks different, but nothing changes with Adobe DRM. She uses her library card to borrow a book from OverDrive and she clicks a download link to download the ebook to her OverDrive app. The behind-the-scenes communication between her device, Adobe, and OverDrive’s Adobe Content Server is the same. But the outcome is different.

On her laptop, Sally downloads an ACSM file. She must open that file with Adobe Digital Editions. On an iPad, the ACSM file is sent directly to her OverDrive Media Console app. The difference lies with how OverDrive download links are coded. When she clicks the download link on an iPad, the OverDrive web site detects she is on a mobile device and automatically opens the ACSM file in the OverDrive app. This makes using OverDrive on iPad easier, but has nothing to do with Adobe DRM.

ACSM files can be opened by any Adobe compatible app. You can open an OverDrive ebook in the Books-a-Million app. You can open a Freading book in the Bluefire app. The brand of the app doesn’t have to match the store where you get a book. What matters is that the app is authorized with an Adobe ID.

The ACSM file is the common denominator for all library vendors. Each vendor makes Adobe DRM-encoded books available for checkout. Checked out books are listed on Sally’s bookshelf in her OverDrive account. If she can access the ACSM file, she can download the book to any Adobe-authorized reading app.

Vendor ID: Adobe Authorization without Adobe ID

Vendor ID is a part of the Adobe ADEPT DRM system. It allows bookstores to authorize their branded reading apps with a store login instead of an Adobe ID. The Adobe authorization process still occurs, but the customer never sees it.

Any ACSM file can be opened by any Vendor ID, no matter where a book was purchased. Books-a-Million is a good example of Vendor ID in use.

Sally creates a Books-a-Million store account to buy an eBook at booksamillion.com. She uses her email as her login. When she finishes payment, Books-a-Million instructs her to download the BAM Reader 2 app. When Sally opens the BAM Reader 2 app, she is asked to authorize the app with her new BAM login. This is just like authorizing Adobe Digital Editions with her Adobe ID.

When Sally authorizes the BAM Reader 2 app with her BAM ID and password, she triggers an interaction between the BAM app, the BAM store database, and Adobe. The steps for authorization with Vendor ID are described in Adobe Digital Publishing: Vendor ID Specification (Figure 4):

1. BAM Reader 2 takes the BAM ID, then connects to the Books-a-Million customer list to see if the BAM ID is valid.
2. The Books-a-Million customer database sends back a message that confirms that the BAM ID is valid.
3. BAM Reader 2 communicates with Adobe to complete authentication. The app contacts Adobe’s Activation Server and provides an authorization token that says the BAM ID is legitimate.
4. The Activation Server connects to the Auth Service at Books-a-Million to look for an authorization record that matches the authorization token that was sent by the app.
5. The Auth Service confirms that the BAM ID is legitimate.
6. The Activation Server takes the authentication token and records the BAM ID and device information into the Adobe database.
7. The Adobe Activation Server authorizes BAM Reader 2 with the BAM ID (Vendor ID). No separate Adobe ID sign-up is required because the Vendor ID is an Adobe ID. (Adobe Systems, 2)

Figure 4 – Authorizing an iPad with Vendor ID

Once BAM Reader 2 is authorized, Sally sees a list of the books she has paid for and can download them. The word authorize is important. Sally isn’t just logging in to see the list of ebooks she has paid for. She’s authorizing the app with her Books-a-Million ID to unlock Adobe DRM-encoded ebooks.

Accessing an Adobe DRM-encoded ebook works the same as our previous example. When Sally wants to download Water for Elephants, which she previously purchased at booksamillion.com, she taps the cover image in her BAM Reader 2 bookshelf to download the book. (Figure 5)

1. BAM Reader 2 sends a message to the Books-a-Million Adobe Content Server.
2. The Adobe Content Server sends back an ACSM file with the name of the book and the location of the Adobe Content Server where the book is stored.
3. BAM Reader 2 grabs Sally’s BAM ID and the ACSM file, and passes this information back to the store’s Adobe Content Server. The Adobe Content Server associates the ebook with Sally’s BAM ID.
4. The Adobe Content Server delivers a DRM-encoded EPUB file to Sally’s app. Since the EPUB ebook, Water for Elephants, is now associated with Sally’s BAM ID, only devices authorized with the same Vendor ID can open it.

Figure 5 – Downloading an ebook to iPad

This series of interactions between an app authorized with a Vendor ID, Adobe, and the Adobe Content Server is identical when dealing with any ACSM file.

The user experience for Books-a-Million is straightforward and simple. Sally signed up for a Books-a-Million account to purchase an ebook. She signed in to BAM Reader 2 to read her book. Sally was never asked to create an Adobe ID. She didn’t need to create one because her Books-a-Million login is dual purpose: it 1) signs her into the web site and 2) authorizes the app.

Building the Aggregated Reading App

If you can gain access to the ACSM file, you can put library books from any vendor in one reading app. Our imagined reading app, Book Bench, could use either Adobe ID or Vendor ID. There are four general ways Adobe ID or Vendor ID could be implemented.

1. Universal App with Adobe ID

Our aggregated reading app with Adobe ID could be used by any library system. The advantage of using Adobe ID is versatility. Patrons would be able to add library books and purchased ebooks to the same reading app without tying them to a library Vendor ID. Readers who want to participate in a reading group discussion could bring their borrowed and purchased books together in the same app.

Readers would still create an Adobe ID at Adobe.com, just as they have for years. The drawback is that the Adobe ID is perceived as an extra step. It also brings DRM to the forefront. It is disappointing to sign up for Adobe ID, since the only purpose is to add DRM to the books you want to borrow. It feels like a barrier that makes it take longer to get free books from the library.

Bluefire Reader and Readmill, reading apps not associated with any specific store or ebook vendor, are two examples of type of universal reading app. Douglas County Libraries has an individual version of this called DCL Reader. Their app is branded to a single library but, because it is authorized with Adobe ID, can display ebooks from anywhere.

2. Individual App with Vendor ID

Our aggregated reading app could use the library card number as Vendor ID. Individual libraries would each purchase both a branded app and a Vendor ID implementation. Patrons would download their library’s app and sign in with their library card and PIN. They would load ebooks from all their library’s distributors to their library’s single app. The negative perception of an extra step would be eliminated by using an existing user ID, the library card number.

Adobe would communicate with the patron database to authenticate users and authorize the reading app. Because the authorization occurs through the patron database, the app would only work for one library. Unlike our first option, this app would be for library books only because patrons would not want their purchased books to be tied to the library’s Vendor ID.

3. Consortia App with Vendor ID

Libraries could join together as a consortium in order to create a single, shared aggregator app that uses library card numbers as the Vendor ID. Individual libraries would each have to purchase a Vendor ID implementation. The user interface on the shared app would require patrons to first identify their library, then enter their library card number and PIN. Because cardholders would choose their library from a menu, the app would work for any library in the consortium.

The 3M Cloud Library is an example of a shared app that uses Vendor ID.

4. Library-Agnostic App with Vendor ID

Libraries could join together as a consortium in order to create a single, shared aggregator app and a new web service we refer to as “Book Bench.” Instead of using the library card number as Vendor ID, the Book Bench username would serve as each cardholder’s Vendor ID. When patrons sign in to the Book Bench app with their login, they would also be authorizing the app, just like the Books-a-Million example described above.

The new web service includes an additional step, as with signing up for an Adobe ID, but the perception would be different. Instead of having to sign up for an additional account, the Adobe ID, users are signing up for a service, Book Bench, that will enable them to read all their library books in one place, whether those ebooks are hosted by OverDrive, 3M, Freading, or another library vendor. The reason for signing up for the ID can change the perception that the ID is a negative. Plus, the web service can have additional features and add value in a way that signing up for Adobe ID does not.

Bookish is an example of this type of Vendor ID authorized app and web site.

The two universal aggregated reading apps described above, one with Adobe ID (1) and the Book Bench Vendor ID (4), could be used and promoted by any library, anywhere. A single app promoted by all libraries would improve the visibility of library ebooks because we would all be advertising a single service.

Getting Books to the App

We’ve shown that the ACSM file is the key to downloading ebooks to a non-vendor reading app. To access the ACSM file, a user needs to be able to login to an account and view all of their borrowed ebooks. We’ll refer to this as a bookshelf view, similar to what we saw with the BAM Reader 2 app in our Books-a-Million example. Only this time, instead of viewing a bookshelf inside the retailer’s app, we’ll be accessing an online account on an app that is outside the store ecosystem.

The tools we’ll need to duplicate the bookshelf functionality seen in BAM Reader 2 are OAuth and an API. An API is protocol or interface that “gives programs access to information” (McGuire and Croll). OAuth is a web standard that enables users to grant apps or websites limited permissions to personal information stored in another account (Brail and Ramji, 5). If you’ve ever used “Sign in with Facebook” or “Sign in with Twitter” on a web site, you’ve used OAuth (5).

Subtext and Readmill, two social reading apps, use OAuth to connect users’ online ebook accounts and APIs to display ebooks in a bookshelf view within the reading app. These apps will help us illustrate two ways libraries might create a bookshelf view in the Book Bench reading app. One option would use OAuth to connect directly to a patron’s individual accounts with each ebook vendor. Here, the ebook aggregation would happen in the app. The other option would use an OAuth connection to display ebook titles already compiled in an online account. The ebook aggregation would happen in the account.

Use OAuth to connect to multiple vendor accounts

Sally uses Subtext on her iPad. Subtext has an option that allows her to connect the app to her Google account using OAuth. The Google Books API allows Subtext to display titles Sally has access to in her Google Play account. When Sally chooses to open a book, the Google Books API confirms she owns the book, then delivers the full-text in Subtext (Goldman). The reading app is pulling books in from an outside retail account. The aggregation is happening inside the reading app instead of in a central online account.

The Subtext-Google connection is analogous to the connection that would occur between Book Bench and Sally’s OverDrive, 3M, Axis 360, and other ebook vendor accounts. If ebook vendors develop a bookshelf API, Book Bench could use that API and OAuth to pull in books from separate library ebook vendors. For instance, Book Bench could pull in books from a user’s OverDrive, 3M, and Axis 360 accounts and aggregate them in a single view within the reading app.

Use OAuth to connect to a single online account

Our colleague, Sally, uses Readmill on her iPhone. Readmill allows her to aggregate all her ebooks from different retailers into a single online account, so she can access them from the Readmill app. When she purchases an ebook from Google Play, Feedbooks, or another ebook retailer, she can add the ACSM file to her readmill.com cloud account. She authorizes the Readmill app to view her online account and titles are displayed in the app bookshelf. When she taps on the title of a book, an ACSM file is downloaded to the Readmill app. Adobe confirms that the app is authorized with an Adobe ID. The book is then transferred to the Readmill app.

Readmill is analogous to the aggregation that exists in New York Public Library’s BiblioCommons implementation. The Digital Checkouts and Digital Holds section in Sally’s New York Public Library BiblioCommons account displays all her borrowed ebooks from 3M Cloud Library and OverDrive on a single bookshelf. (Figure 6) Ebooks from different vendors are consolidated in a single online user account. Sally can use the download link in her BiblioCommons account to send her OverDrive ebook to a reading app. This is accomplished with screen scraping, a way of grabbing data without a formal software connection between databases, but it illustrates what a bookshelf API would do.

Figure 6 – NYPL BiblioCommons Digital Account View

ReadersFirst and the Development of Vendor APIs

The New York Public Library BiblioCommons implementation demonstrates that a single, consolidated bookshelf is possible. Library ebook distributors do not yet offer a bookshelf or lending API or OAuth connection to developers across the board, but it is technology libraries could ask them to add.

The missing pieces that would enable an aggregated reading app are uniform authorization protocols, and holdings and lending APIs. ReadersFirst, a coalition of public libraries, is working with content providers and urging them to develop these protocols and APIs.

Creating a Community of Readers

Libraries have always connected people around books, creating communities of readers through book clubs, storytelling, book festivals, and author talks. These connections have been made in the physical space, bringing neighbors from the local community together. But communities span more than local geography. A reader’s community isn’t just their local library; it is anyone they know, from college roommates and friends to family members, all of whom might all live in different states and belong to different libraries.

The social tools we see appearing in ebooks can help make connections through reading beyond the walls of the local library.

The Future of Social Reading

The future of reading will include social discussion and sharing. Library readers will want to connect with one another inside the pages of a book.

Social reading is going to be broader than what can happen in a library’s aggregated reading app. Readers will want to connect to friends in the library app and also friends reading on other platforms, like Nook or iBooks. This kind of cross-platform communication is coming. In fact, the kind of bridge that creates a connection between two different reading platforms already exists.

Social reading services ReadSocial and Readmill both offer software APIs that can connect users on different reading platforms. The connection works by having each store’s platform install the exact same API. If Book Bench and Nook both install the same social reading API, users could share highlights and comments even though they are reading on two separate platforms. The API is the bridge that lets readers communicate.

Help Create a Successful Community of Readers

Support ReadersFirst and tell ebook vendors that we want APIs and authorization protocols that will allow us to move books and data to our library accounts, and also move them directly to ebook reading apps. Ask vendors if the APIs they are developing will incorporate a bookshelf feature so that borrowed books can be displayed inside an app on a virtual bookshelf. Look at license agreements and make sure that ebooks can be moved to other apps. Ask vendors about their roadmap for the future to see if their vision matches your library’s goals.

Try social reading. Learn how it works and experiment with friends or book clubs at your library. Experiment with Subtext, Readmill, Copia—social reading apps that will open Adobe DRM-encoded ebooks, including library ebooks. Try Bookshout!, a social reading app and store. Figure out what features you like in these apps and what you would like to see improved. Existing social reading apps can help us determine what type of interaction would best support conversation for library book clubs as well as discussion among friends.

Book Bench is entirely theoretical, but an aggregated library reading app is possible. It could do more than unify a patron’s reading experience. It could help bring readers together. By working together, libraries can make this a reality.

Many thanks to our reviewers, Brett Bonfield, Erin Dorney, Jim Loter, and Bryan Jones, for their edits and perspective. In addition, thanks to Micah Bowers, Jason Sacks, Andrew Goldman, Matthew Bostock, Travis Alber, Aaron Miller, Natalie Rios, and  Jeremy Zhe-Heimerman for help with our research.

Further Reading

Above the Silos: Social Reading in the Age of Mechanical Barriers, by Travis Alber and Aaron Miller, for a history, overview, and outlook of social reading.

“On the Adobe eBook Platform,” by Micah Bowers, for an overview of the Adobe ADEPT platform.

Sources

Adobe Systems, Digital Publishing Group.

• Adobe Digital Publishing: Vendor ID Specification. October 10, 2011.
• “Architecture.” Adobe Content Server 4. Retrieved from: http://www.adobe.com/products/content-server/architecture.html 

Alber, Travis and Aaron Miller.

• “Above the Silos: Social Reading in the Age of Mechanical Barriers.” Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto: A Collection of Essays from the Bleeding Edge of Publishing. Edited by Hugh McGuire and Brian O’Leary. Sebastopol, CA: O’Rielly Media, Inc., 2012. 127-144.
• Personal interview. Nov. 2012.

Bowers, Micah.

• “On the Adobe eBook Platform.” Bluefire Reader : News and commentary from Bluefire Productions, the creators of Bluefire Reader.  Parts 1 -7.  Jan. – Jun. 2012. Retrieved from: www.bluefirereader.com/blog/?cat=4
• Personal interviews. Feb. 2013.

Bostock, Matthew. Personal interviews. Feb. 2013.

Brail, Greg and Sam Ramji. OAuth: The Big Picture. n.d. Retrieved from: http://info.apigee.com/Portals/62317/docs/oauth_big_picture.pdf

“Downloading 3M Cloud Library eBooks for NOOK.” eReady Richland.  Apr 2012. Retrieved from: http://rcpleready.wordpress.com/3m/nook/

Goldman, Andrew. Personal interview. Feb. 2013.

Google Inc. “Using the API – Google Books API Family.” Apr 2012. Retrieved from: https://developers.google.com/books/docs/v1/using#WorkingBookshelves

McGuire, Hugh and Alistair Croll. “Book as API” 15 Feb 2013. Slide 9. Retrieved from: http://www.slideshare.net/bitcurrent/book-as-api-hugh-mc-guire-and-alistair-croll-toc-nyc-2013

Rainie, Lee and Maeve Duggan. “E-book Reading Jumps; Print Book Reading Declines.” Pew Internet. 27 Dec 2012. Retrieved from: http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/12/27/e-book-reading-jumps-print-book-reading-declines/

Sacks, Jason. Personal interviews. Feb 2013.

Yue, Ching. “Vendor ID Part 1: Overview.” Datalogics Blog.7 Jan 2013. Retrieved from: http://blogs.datalogics.com/2013/01/07/vendor-id-part-1-overview/#more-634

In Brief: On average, it takes approximately five months for LIS graduates to find a library job, according to Library Journal’s 2012 Placements and Salaries Survey (Matta 2012). This time frame represents the experience of 34% of 2011 graduates, but stories of months- or year-long job searches are common (Weak 2012). While some can afford to wait or get by with part-time work, others cannot, so they begin to look outside the LIS field for opportunities. This article identifies effective strategies for maintaining connections to the library world while employed in a seemingly unrelated field and draws on interviews, research, and the author’s personal experience to illuminate these strategies.

Photo from Seattle Municipal Archives

A Familiar Story

I began my job search in earnest approximately three months before I graduated from library school. Realizing that the job market would be competitive, I applied to both professional and paraprofessional positions, but to no avail. I graduated and moved back to my hometown, taking advantage of my parents’ offer of free housing, but eager to begin the professional career that I had been confident would start shortly after graduation. I was lucky that one of my rejections came with an offer for a part-time, paraprofessional job staffing the reference desk of a mid-sized university library. Thankful for the experience I would gain, I eagerly accepted the job and found that the position reignited my passion for reference. I was excited to have discovered my niche: I was a reference librarian.

However, even as I steered my full-time job search towards reference and instruction jobs, I grew increasingly discouraged. I knew that I couldn’t support myself only working part-time, so I began applying to non-LIS positions. It took two months of persistence, but I was able to land a communications job at a nearby university. Since my undergraduate degree was in print journalism, it was related to my interests. However, I didn’t go to library school because I wanted to continue working as a freelance writer and editor! I went to library school because instead of telling people’s stories as a journalist, I wanted to empower them to find the information that they could use to tell their own stories.

I accepted people’s congratulations about my new position while fighting back the nagging feeling that I was a fraud. I felt like I was giving up on my dream, even though accepting this job didn’t mean I would stop looking for a librarian position. As a person fortunate enough to have both a supportive family and a part-time library job, I still felt that I should be taking advantage of that support to gain more direct LIS experience, even if it meant more personal struggles. Something had to come through eventually, right? In the end though, my impending student loan payments, lack of healthcare, and desire for stability won out over the waiting game.

Does my story sound familiar? Many new librarians get caught in the catch-22 of needing experience to get a job, but unable to gain that experience for some reason or another. Perhaps part-time LIS work wasn’t fiscally possible, so you couldn’t build your resume sufficiently to get an interview for a full-time position. Maybe you couldn’t wait six to nine months to hear back from your dream academic library, or discovered that the public libraries in your area hadn’t hired new employees in years. For whatever reason, you just couldn’t get a job in a library. You’re not alone: Library Journal’s 2012 Placements and Salaries Survey reports that 18.3% of job placements in 2011 were outside LIS in the private industry, nonprofits, and the fields of law, retail, and finance (Matta 2012). The good news for those of us stuck in LIS “unemployment” is that even if you take a job outside of the field, you can still find your way back. Your MLS degree can be put to use in a variety of research, customer service, and marketing positions, and all of those fields can provide you with skills that will prepare you for future library work. This article is about how to make that happen.

Taking a Job Outside LIS

Imagine that after months of futile searching for a librarian position, and then any position at all, you finally get a job offer. As is the case with any hiring scenario, it’s important to think carefully about how a job will benefit your resume before accepting it. It’s tempting to take the first job offer you receive, especially if you’ve been rejected many times before, but you won’t be helping your long-term professional goals if you take the a position that’s the wrong fit. There are several factors to take into consideration beyond wages and benefits. Will the position allow you to refine your current skills or, better yet, grow in an area where you don’t have much experience? If you’re considering taking a job as a receptionist, it’s likely that you won’t just answer phones. You’ll be the face and voice that people associate with the organization, giving you an opportunity to hone your customer service skills.

Jessica Olin, Director of the Robert H. Parker Library at Wesley College, recently wrote on her blog Letters to a Young Librarian about how her past experience as a waitress has made her a better librarian:

With a customer who had never been to my restaurant, but who was obviously there for a special occasion, I acted one way. With a family of regulars who had been coming to that restaurant longer than I’d been alive, I acted another… Similarly, with a first generation college student in his/her first semester of college, I act one way. With a graduate student who just needs help refining a search strategy, I act another.

On the surface, it may not seem like a non-LIS position has anything to offer the career you are trying to forge, but drawing connections is a matter of both perspective and practice. If you want to be a reference librarian but your current data entry position doesn’t offer you much interaction with the public, think about how you’re increasing your efficiency and furthering your attention to detail. While it can be challenging to repackage your skills in cover letter, the effort won’t go unrewarded. It may just take longer than you would like to see that reward.

Career-Relevant Activities

You don’t have to be working in a library to do work that’s related to librarianship. Making plans, goals, and timelines to build related skills will allow you to regain some control over your career direction. It might seem like more work to formulate plans for your current job while simultaneously continuing your LIS job hunt, but focusing on the beneficial aspects of your current position will enable you to get the most out of the experience—and help you translate that work to future positions.

Britta Barrett, a 2012 MLS graduate, had no plans on quitting her office administration job at Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle to focus on securing a library job, but she realized that she could add a project to her duties that would expand her skill set while helping her employer. The museum boasts a library, but as Barrett explains, “it has been over a decade since the museum has had full time MLS librarians on staff and there is no indication that will change in the future” (B. Barrett, personal communication, February 4, 2013). Still, she proposed a practicum for academic credit on top of her daily administrative duties, which included conducting a needs analysis, weeding, physically moving materials to a new location, creating a strategic plan, and training and supervising four new cataloging interns. While EMP has not hired her as a librarian, they were so impressed by her work that they’ve officially added librarian duties to her current position and compensated her for the increased workload.

Whether or not your employer rewards your hard work and initiative monetarily, this sort of approach to non-library work offers a variety of opportunities. Finding ways to bring your career into your day job can benefit your job search: Alan M. Saks and Jelena Zikic (2009) write that “career-relevant activities were positively related to job search self-efficacy and job search clarity. Job seekers who spent more time in both environmental and self career exploration…reported higher job search self-efficacy” (125). Of course, career-relevant activities may encompass a whole variety of things. Maybe it means reading LIS blogs on a daily basis or volunteering twice a month at a library. However you look at it, by committing to continuous professional development, you’ll actually improve the way you feel about your job search.

Strategic Networking

Although you may feel a pressing need to seek out opportunities to meet people who can help your job search, your focused professional development strategy should translate to any networking you may want to do as well. Networking is a way to get something you want, but it has to be a journey in and of itself. If I go to an event for the sheer purpose of chance networking rather than because I’m interested in the event itself, I walk away disappointed. For me, it makes the most sense to seek out events and opportunities that revolve around reference and instruction so that I can stay up-to-date on what local university and college libraries are doing to engage users. If I can meet someone who’s doing that work at an event, great! If not, I’m still learning about an area of librarianship that’s exciting to me and that I want to continue learning about.

Instead of assuming that each person you meet could be your ticket to a great library job, a better approach is to attend events and talk with people you find interesting. Ultimately, networking is about developing and fostering relationships, and if you try to build a relationship based on something you want, you’re not likely to get very far. Emily Cable, a 2012 MLS graduate and full-time restaurant manager, observes:

[W]hile it is good to meet a lot people in the field, I have found it has been really helpful to form better acquaintances with a smaller number of librarians that you really like. I know a handful of librarians that I meet up with about once a month socially. There is a little bit of shop talk that happens, but it is primarily social. It is through this group that I set up both my practicum and my impending volunteer work/internship with Oregon Health and Sciences University Library” (E. Cable, personal communication, February 2, 2013).

To find your own groove, think about strategic networking. An article from the Harvard Business Review defines strategic networking as “figuring out future priorities and challenges [and] getting stakeholder support for them” (43). In that light, what are you doing when you’re networking if not figuring out future priorities (your career) and getting stakeholder support for them (by gaining contacts in the library field)? Erica Findley, a 2008 MLS graduate and Digital Resources and Metadata Librarian at Pacific University, explains her experience working post-graduation as a temporary Workforce Management Coordinator for Netflix and volunteering at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU):

During the time I worked at Netflix, I was volunteering at the Oregon Health & Science University writing data for their digital collections. I did this for about 2-4 hours per week (on weeknights) until July 2010. I began the internship through a lot of serendipity (read: NETWORKING). I was working as an intern on another project at OHSU for someone that interviewed me for another library position; I think in early 2007. I kept in touch with the person and became involved in their project when they moved to OHSU. I started my volunteering in digital collections by hearing about the need for help through word of mouth.

Findley continued volunteering while working a temporary, non-MLS staff position at Pacific University, which kept being extended. Eventually, a new MLS position was created, and Findley stepped into that role in July 2010 with digital collections experience under her belt (E. Findley, personal communication, February 13, 2013). This story reminds me that networking is not a numbers game. It’s about finding people who you click with and keeping up with them and their work. While I was attending presentations and conferences during library school, I would tell myself that I had to speak with a specific number of people before I left. I meant for this to be an antidote to my shyness, but it turned networking into a competition rather than an engaging experience. I’ve since scrapped that idea, and feel much more at ease with my professional social network.

Fitting It All In

Continuous professional development? Taking on additional projects without compensation? Networking? Who has time for all that?  When you’re employed, it can be difficult to carve out time to ruminate on goals and tackle extracurricular activities. But if you don’t know what you want, you certainly won’t be able to take the steps to get it. Also, it’ll be good practice for your future career. Many librarians exceed their forty hours a week with professional development and volunteer projects even when they are employed in a library.

First things first, though. What kind of time are you willing to dedicate to professional development? Evenings? Weekends? A couple of days a month? Depending on the demands of your current job and your personal life, the answer will vary. Your time commitment will likely dictate the kind of activities you can engage in. If weekends are out of the question, then conferences may not be the best opportunities for you. If you’re willing to dedicate some evenings to pursuing your passion, you may be able to teach a computer class at your local public library. Remember: becoming a librarian or information specialist is your dream career. The extra work is worth it.

Of course, as many of you know, even volunteer opportunities in libraries can be difficult to come by. As in all things, flexibility is key. Try to look at your interests from all possible angles. You may want to be a children’s librarian, but if your local libraries are fully staffed, why not take the elements of children’s librarianship and try to find an organization that works with children and education? As Kat Tkacik (2012) explains in Library Journal,

If there’s a waiting list for volunteers at the library, look for other organizations promoting literacy and education. And don’t forget social services. Many shelters and soup kitchens include a computer or two—volunteer your expertise and help a neighbor navigate the job listings on Craigslist.

On the other hand, if your search is so successful that you find yourself flooded with volunteer opportunities and projects, remember that working yourself into the ground won’t help you succeed. In case you need further advice on doling out the big N-O, check out Emily Ford’s (2009) In the Library with the Lead Pipe article on the subject. Personally I find that if I take on more than a couple of projects outside of work at a time, I’m less than pleasant to my friends and family. Have I taken on more than I should have in the past? Of course. Am I proud of that? Not anymore. To take on projects beyond my capacity does not help my career, nor does it help the organization I’m volunteering with. Working hard also means knowing your limits, and not worrying that those limits will keep you from getting a job you love.

Continuing Your Search While Maintaining Your Sanity

Google “job seeking while employed” and you’ll find plenty of blog posts and news stories about the importance of not searching while on the clock or on a work computer. You may think you work in an easygoing environment, but no supervisor will condone job hunting while they are paying you. In addition to limiting your job search to your lunch hour, evenings, and weekends, make sure you keep your hunt manageable. Nothing says “I’m living a balanced life” like working and then rushing home to check thirty job boards while eating a Lean Cuisine. While I have found interesting jobs via a one-off search on Indeed.com (Warning: searching “library” yields loads of nanny postings from parents that are desperate for you to take their children to the library), you will have more luck focusing on curated sources like I Need a Library Job, ALA JobList, or state library association job boards.

You are in a stage of life that requires some relaxation time, too, so find a way to carve out time for yourself. Maybe that means you don’t look for jobs on the weekends, or that Tuesday nights are your crafting/cooking/doing absolutely nothing nights. Thea Evenstad, a 2012 MLS graduate and program assistant at a children’s science museum, explains:

Graduate school and the job search have made my life feel lopsided. I think self-care is an important part of the job search and that it’s too easy to feel down with the dramatic highs and lows of the cycle of job applications, interviews, and rejections. I don’t feel guilty enjoying a weekend at the beach with my partner, knowing that I might move to another state soon for a librarian position (T. Evenstad, personal communication, February 11, 2013).

The calm you gain from that time off will assuage any anxiety you may feel about not looking for a new job or professionally developing yourself during that period of time. Leslie A. Perlow and Jessica L. Porter conducted a study in which they found that by challenging the idea that  a person must always be available and ready to work, people were more likely to take time off,  and their work improved as a result (104). Since you’re working and trying to find another job, be sure to relax and build in breaks for yourself. You’ve earned them!

Conclusion

I’m several months into my communications position, and I’ve developed web design, project management, and interpersonal skills that I know will help me when I’m on a future committee that’s redesigning a library website, implementing tools to better track reference interactions, or fostering relationships with faculty members. I spend about thirty minutes several evenings a week checking three LIS job boards and perusing the employment pages of a couple of local university libraries. I continue to apply for positions, but am pickier than when I was unemployed, and I’ve had several phone interviews in the past month. I believe that’s because I’m only writing cover letters for positions I’m truly passionate about.

In addition to my job search, I’ve managed to create a small but mighty professional network, which includes a librarian that I’m working with to help develop the children’s literature collection at his institution. I’ve never participated in collection development before, and I love every aspect of it, from physically surveying the current collection to figure out what gaps exist to identifying the best children’s awards to draw materials from. I’m thrilled that I’ve been invited to help draft the collection development policy for this particular collection, and feel that the professional writing I do in my current position will serve this project well.

If, like me, you’re working outside the field, remind yourself that LIS skills aren’t solely developed and utilized within a library. Your day job — whether you’re working in retail, acting as an office administrator, or waiting tables — is providing you not only with a paycheck but with professional qualities that a library will be lucky to have. It might feel overwhelming at times to work while trying to find another job and pursuing professional development opportunities, but that dedication will benefit you throughout your entire career, not just your job search process. It’ll take time and it’ll take a lot of patience, but if you persist, good things will happen. At least that’s what Conan O’Brien and I believe (Glamourbombtv 2010).

If you ever feel like you’re the only one balancing your future career with your day job, know that you’re not, and reach out! Whether on Twitter, in these comments, or with your former classmates, you’ll be surprised how many people will respond with “I’m going through the same thing, let’s talk” or “Yup, that was me last year, and this is what I did.” If you’ve been or are currently in a similar situation, I’d love to hear your strategies for making the most out of your current or past jobs and how you balance job searching with employment. Please share them in the comments below.

Thanks to Kim Leeder and Heather Martin for their thoughtful edits and comments as reviewers; additional thanks to Britta, Emily, Erica, and Thea for their time and personal contributions to the article.

References

Ford, E. (2009). How do you say no? In the Library with the Lead Pipe. Retrieved from http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/how-do-you-say-no/.

Glamourbombtv. (2010, Jan. 5). Conan O’Brien takes a bow [Video file]. Retrieved from http://youtu.be/DxOHez1zlms.

Ibarra, H., & Hunter, M. (2007). How leaders create and use networks. Harvard Business Review, 85(1), 40-47.

Matta, S.L. (2012, October 15). A job by any other name: LJ’s Placements and Salaries Survey 2012. Library Journal. Retrieved from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/10/placements-and-salaries/2012-survey/a-job-by-any-other-name-ljs-placements-salaries-survey-2012/.

Olin, J. (2013, February 5). Could I show you the wine list?, Or, how waitressing made me a better librarian. Letters to a Young Librarian. Retrieved from http://letterstoayounglibrarian.blogspot.com/2013/02/could-i-show-you-wine-list-or-how.html.

Perlow, L.A., & Porter, J.L. (2009). Making time off predictable — and required. Harvard Business Review, 87(10), 102-109.

Saks, A.M., & Zikic, J. (2009). Job search and social cognitive theory: The role of career-relevant activities. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 74(1), 117-127.

Tkacik, K. (2012, June 4). The Class of twentysomething: Degreed and jobless. Library Journal. Retrieved from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/06/opinion/backtalk/the-class-of-twentysomething-degreed-and-jobless-backtalk/.

Weak, E. (2012, Sept. 14). Further questions: How long did it take to get your first library job? Hiring Librarians. Retrieved from http://hiringlibrarians.com/2012/09/14/further-questions-how-long-did-it-take-to-get-your-first-library-job/.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are a few things our email exchange illustrates:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaron Swartz: A Timeline

1999

• 1999: Joined the RDF Core Working Group. Stayed on until 2000.

2000

2001

• 2001: Interviewed by Lew Koch, WBEZ 91.5.
• October 2001: Published (with James Hendler), “The Semantic Web: A Network of Content for the Digital City,” Proceedings of the Second Annual Digital Cities Workshop, Kyoto, Japan. (Based on “The Semantic Web in Breadth“).

2002

• 2002: Joined Creative Commons as a Metadata Advisor. Stayed on until 2004.
• January 2002: Published “MusicBrainz: A Semantic Web Service” in Intelligent Systems (IEEE), 17(1), 76-77.
• October 8, 2002: Camped out at the U.S. Supreme Court the night before it heard oral arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft.

2003

2004

• January 23, 2004: Interviewed by Jesper (Waffle.net).
• April 20-24, 2004: Attended 14th Conference on Computers, Freedon, and Privacy in Berkeley, California (see photo of him participating in a mock vote during the conference).
• December 17, 2004: Assists John Gruber in publishing the definition for Markdown, “a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.”

2005

• May 15, 2005: Posted “What’s Going On Here?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 20, 2005: Attended Free Culture: Phase Two conference at American University in Washington, DC (see photos of him at the conference).
• June 1, 2005: Posted “Getting Back On Track” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 1, 2005: Posted “The God Who Wasn’t There (And The One Who Was)” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 4, 2005: Posted “Stanford: Season Finale” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 6, 2005: Posted “Sneak Peek” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 9, 2005: Posted “SFP: Home, Sweet, Home” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 11, 2005: Posted “Stanford/SFP: Leaving on a Jet Plane” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 15, 2005: Posted “SFP: First Contact” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 16, 2005: Posted “SFP: Dinner with Dan” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 16, 2005: Posted “SFP: Fire Alarm” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 17, 2005: Posted “The Immorality of Freakonomics” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 23, 2005: Posted “The Intentionality of Evil” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 3, 2005: Posted “Of Washington And Worcester” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 5, 2005: Posted “SFP: The Spirit Inside” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 14, 2005: Posted “Help Wanted: Programmers for Startup” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 16, 2005: Posted “Change of Course” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 20, 2005: Posted “Our Next Superjumbo” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 21, 2005: Posted “Serious Social Science” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 22, 2005: Posted “Faces of Fame” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 26, 2005: Posted “Simon Arrives” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 26, 2005: Posted “iCommons Summit” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 2, 2005: Posted “Eat and Code” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 8, 2005: Posted “Behind the Rant: Maciej Ceglowski” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 25, 2005: Posted “FOO Camp” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 26, 2005: Posted “Reflections on Cultural Fragments” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 16, 2005: Posted “Narcissism Notice” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 21, 2005: Posted “Paul Graham is Wrong” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 24, 2005: Posted “The Republican War on Science” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 24, 2005: Posted “Serenity” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 29, 2005: Posted “Serenity: A Review” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 5, 2005: Posted “David Lynch and Vedic “Science”” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 12, 2005: Posted >The New McCarthy: Bill O’Reilly” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 16, 2005: Posted “Founders Unite for Startup School” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 26, 2005: Posted “The Startup News” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 28, 2005: Posted “Trials of Testing” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 8, 2005: Posted “Birthday Thoughts” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 25, 2005: Posted “Understanding Economic Jargon” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 6, 2005: Posted “Rewriting Reddit” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 2005: Merged Infogami with Reddit and became a Co-Founder of their new parent company, Not A Bug. Stayed on January, 2007.
• December 22, 2005: Posted “A Brief History of Ajax” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 28, 2005: Posted “HOWTO: Be more productive” to his weblog, Raw Thought.

2006

• January 4, 2006: Posted “Colombia is Bleeding” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 5, 2006: Posted “Some Announcements” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 8, 2006: Posted “Say Goodbye to Embarrassment” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 17, 2006: Posted “In His Own Words 2” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 27, 2006: Posted “More MLKJ Day” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 28, 2006: Posted “The Disappearance of Thought” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 27, 2006: Posted “Wassup?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 17, 2006: Posted “What It Means To Be An Intellectual” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 23, 2006: Posted “Do Faces Cause Depression?: Self-Experimentation in Science” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 26, 2006: Posted “The Miracle Diet” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 28, 2006: Posted “A Future Without Fat” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 7, 2006: Posted “Book Reviews” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 7, 2006: Posted “Fat Backlash” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 10, 2006: Posted “Public Service Announcement” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 15, 2006: Posted “The Book That Changed My Life” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 22, 2006: Posted “The Conservative Nanny State” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 24, 2006: Posted “Introducing feeds.reddit” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 27, 2006: Posted “A Non-Programmer’s Apology” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 31, 2006: Posted “Gmail Down” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 1, 2006: Posted “Legacy” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 6, 2006: Posted “An Inconvenient Truth” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 6, 2006: Posted “Shifting the Terms of Debate: How Big Business Covered Up Global Warming” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 7, 2006: Posted “Making Noise: How Right-Wing Think Tanks Get the Word Out” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 8, 2006: Posted “Endorsing Racism: The Story of The Bell Curve” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 9, 2006: Posted “Spreading Lies: How Think Tanks Ignore the Facts” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 10, 2006: Posted “Saving Business: The Origins of Right-Wing Think Tanks” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 11, 2006: Posted “Hurting Seniors: The Attack on Social Security” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 15, 2006: Posted “Fighting Back: Responses to the Mainstream Media” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 16, 2006: Posted “Life in Suburbia: Land of Cliche” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 20, 2006: Posted “In Offense of Classical Music” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 20, 2006: Posted “A Clarification” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 23, 2006: Posted “What’s Freedom?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 5, 2006: Posted “Release Late, Release Rarely” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 11, 2006: Posted “The Hard Sciences” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 12, 2006: Posted “The Attraction of the Center” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 17, 2006: Posted “What Makes a Personality Scary?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 18, 2006: Posted “The Fruits of Mass Collaboration” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 19, 2006: Posted “The Techniques of Mass Collaboration: A Third Way Out” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 26, 2006: Posted “I Love the University” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 26, 2006: Posted “On Losing Weight” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 26, 2006: Posted “What Does Blogspace Look Like?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 28, 2006: Posted “Nutrition Basics” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 29, 2006: Posted “What is going on here?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 31, 2006: Posted “Simple Tips for Longer Living” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 8, 2006: Posted “Solidarity for the Shy: Achieving Critical Mass” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 11, 2006: Posted “Growth” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 16, 2006: Posted “The Smalltalk Question” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 31, 2006: Posted “Wikimedia at the Crossroads” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 4, 2006: Posted “Who Writes Wikipedia?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 5, 2006: Posted “Who Writes Wikipedia? — Responses” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 5, 2006: Posted “False Outliers” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 7, 2006: Posted “Who Runs Wikipedia?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 11, 2006: Posted “Making More Wikipedians” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 14, 2006: Posted “Making More Wikipedias” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 18, 2006: Posted “Code, and Other Laws of Wikipedia” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 22, 2006: Posted “(The Dandy Warhols) Come Down” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 24, 2006: Posted “Weekend Update” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 25, 2006: Posted “of the MBTA” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 26, 2006: Posted “Alone in the Hospital” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 27, 2006: Posted “A Feminist Goes to the Hospital” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 28, 2006: Posted “A Unified Theory of Magazines” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 29, 2006: Posted “Take the Easy Way Out” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 1, 2006: Posted “Life in the Hospital” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 2, 2006: Posted “Fashion Notes” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 3, 2006: Posted “The Awfulness of College Lectures” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 4, 2006: Posted “The Greatness of College Lectures” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 4, 2006: Posted “What’s Radical About the Liberal Arts?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 6, 2006: Posted “College: Commodity or Community?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 8, 2006: Posted “Mamet on Auditions” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 9, 2006: Posted “Visiting Mission Hill” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 10, 2006: Posted “Visiting Olin College” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 11, 2006: Posted “iz r childrens lrnng?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 12, 2006: Posted “Getting it Wrong” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 13, 2006: Posted “Getting It Right” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 15, 2006: Posted “Blast from the Past” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 16, 2006: Posted “The Sexual Life of Savages” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 17, 2006: Posted “Talking Right” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 18, 2006: Posted “Science Summaries” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 19, 2006: Posted “The Invention of Objectivity” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 20, 2006: Posted “I Hate the News” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 22, 2006: Posted “The Archives” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 18, 2006: Posted “That Isn’t Science!” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 24, 2006: Posted “A Night at the Coop” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 25, 2006: Posted “Somerville’s Oddest Park” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 26, 2006: Posted “Google and the Gradient” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 27, 2006: Posted “Founder’s Syndrome” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 29, 2006: Posted “What is Elitism?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 30, 2006: Posted “Up Against Love” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 31, 2006: Posted “And Now, The News” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 1, 2006: Posted “The Aftermath” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 2, 2006: Posted “The Afterparty” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 3, 2006: Posted “Everybody Tells Me So” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 6, 2006: Posted “Mr. Millionaire” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 7, 2006: Posted “The Early Days of A Better Website” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 8, 2006: Posted “Robert Walker, Road Warrior” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 9, 2006: Posted “The Millionaire’s Ball” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 10, 2006: Posted “Life at the Office” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 12, 2006: Posted “The Meaning of Borat” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 13, 2006: Posted “Meeting Peter Singer” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 14, 2006: Posted “The Existential Terror of San Francisco” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 15, 2006: Posted “Office Space” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 16, 2006: Posted “Kahle v. Ashcroft write-up” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 18, 2006: Posted “Ostensible Networks vs. Friendship Networks” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 19, 2006: Posted “San Francisco: Silicon Valley’s Ghetto” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 20, 2006: Posted “Disinfecting the Sunlight Foundation” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 21, 2006: Posted “Identity Fetishism” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 23, 2006: Posted “Bread and Cheese” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 23, 2006: Posted “Free Speech: Because We Can” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 5, 2006: Posted “Pay it Forward” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 27, 2006: Posted “Why It Makes Sense to Bite the Hand that Feeds You” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 27, 2006: Posted “A Trip to the Courthouse: Part 1” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 28, 2006: Posted “A Trip to the Courthouse: Part 2” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 29, 2006: Posted “Lazy Backup” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 1, 2006: Posted “Two Conceptions of Taste” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 2, 2006: Posted “Never Back to School” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 3, 2006: Posted “Drop Out” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 4, 2006: Posted “The Genius is in the Details” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 5, 2006: Posted “The City with No Heart” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 7, 2006: Posted “Competition of Experimentation?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 11, 2006: Posted “Business “Ethics”” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 11, 2006: Posted “The Politics of Wikis” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 12, 2006: Posted “The Politics of Wikipedians” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 12, 2006: Posted “Seven Habits of Highly Successful Websites” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 12, 2006: Posted “Eight Reasons (Some) Wikis Work” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 13, 2006: Posted “The Goog Life: how Google keeps employees by treating them like kids” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 14, 2006: Posted “Think Bigger: A Generalist Manifesto” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 15, 2006: Posted “Tips for Better Thinking” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 17, 2006: Posted “The Grim Meathook Future” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 19, 2006: Posted “Medium Stupid” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 19, 2006: Posted “Drugs and Guns” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 21, 2006: Posted “Museums and Exploratoriums” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 22, 2006: Posted “Cliche Finder” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 23, 2006: Posted “Sociology or Anthropology” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 24, 2006: Posted “The Journalist’s Creed” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 27, 2006: Posted “Cultural Imperialism Sucks: a visit to Berlin” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 27, 2006: Posted “Wither the Two Cultures?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 28, 2006: Posted “Welcome to the Panopticon” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 28, 2006: Posted “Causes of Conformance” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 29, 2006: Posted “Products That Should Exist” to his weblog, Raw Thought.

2007

• 2007: Joined Open Library as its Tech Lead. Stayed on until 2009.
• January 2, 2007: Posted “Happy New Year” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 2, 2007: Posted “The Sociologist’s Creed” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 10, 2007: Posted “The Capital of Scandinavia” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 18, 2007: Posted “A Moment Before Dying” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 22, 2007: Posted “Last Day of Summer Camp” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 23, 2007: Posted “The Fundamental Law of Sociology” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 24, 2007: Posted “Fired” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 30, 2007: Posted “Cities” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 30, 2007: Posted “Dresden” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 30, 2007: Posted “Berlin” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 31, 2007: Posted “Stockholm” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 1, 2007: Posted “Cambridge” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 3, 2007: Posted “San Francisco” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 6, 2007: Posted “Justifications for Myself” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 7, 2007: Posted “The Logic of Open DRM” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 7, 2007: Posted “Neurosis #9” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 8, 2007: Posted “The Enemy Too Close to Home” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 8, 2007: Posted “Getting Past” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 9, 2007: Posted “Our Underachieving College Presidents” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 11, 2007: Posted “The Activist’s Creed” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 12, 2007: Posted “It’s Faust!” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 12, 2007: Posted “Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 14, 2007: Posted “Average People” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 16, 2007: Posted “God Is My Dungeonmaster” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 17, 2007: Posted “Bandwagon” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 18, 2007: Posted “Classism at Google” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 11, 2007: Posted “Ode to a Blue Bicycle” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 13, 2007: Posted “Why You Shop At Wal-Mart: Economics Eats Itself” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 13, 2007: Posted “Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 14, 2007: Posted “Hating John Searle” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 16, 2007: Posted “Write Web Works With Me!” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 18, 2007: Posted “How Quantum Mechanics is Compatible with Free Will” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 23, 2007: Posted “This Television Life” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 25, 2007: Posted “Newspeak™” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 26, 2007: Posted “The Secret Behind The Secret” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 27, 2007: Posted “Aaron’s Patented Demotivational Seminar” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 28, 2007: Posted “John Hockenberry on Reporting the War at NBC” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 29, 2007: Posted “Everything Good is Bad For You” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 22, 2007: Posted “Secured Leisure” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 24, 2007: Posted “A Call for Science that Matters” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 6, 2007: Posted “The Incurable Romantic” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 7, 2007: Posted “Lengthy Interview” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 14, 2007: Posted “Follow Your Heart” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 23, 2007: Posted “Discrimination and Causation” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 30, 2007: Posted “That Vision Thing” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 28, 2007: Posted “Books I Recommend Without Reservation: 2006” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 4, 2007: Posted “Real Good Books” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 10, 2007: Posted “Fear and Loathing in Biotechnology Firms” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 16, 2007: Posted “Announcing the Open Library” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 18, 2007: Posted “Fear and Loathing: A Correction” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 1, 2007: Posted “Consciousness Clarified” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 4, 2007: Posted “Sci Foo 2007 Gossip Liveblog” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 5, 2007: Posted “Improving the Foo Camp Format” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 20, 2007: Posted “The Interrupt-Driven Life” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 31, 2007: Posted “Perfectionism” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 7, 2007: Published “A Non-Programmer’s Apology” in The Best of Technology Writing 2007.
• September 16, 2007: Posted “Sweating the Small Stuff” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 20, 2007: Published “Rachel Carson, Mass Murderer?” in Extra! September/October 2007.
• September 21, 2007: Posted “Was Rachel Carson a Mass Murderer?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 27, 2007: Posted “The Joy of Public Speaking” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 12, 2007: Posted “Dear Colleagues: Orders from China’s Minister of Internet Censorship” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 22, 2007: Posted “Area Scientist’s Study Confirms Own Prejudices” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 25, 2007: Presents on Open Library at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
• October 29, 2007: Posted “How to Build Decent Productivity Software” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 31, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Preface” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 1, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 1” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 2, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 2” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 3, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 3” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 6, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 4” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 6, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 5” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 6, 2007: Posted “GPhone Announced, Morons” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 8, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 6” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 14, 2007: Posted “Cooling the Mark Out” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 15, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 7” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 18, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 8” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 19, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 9” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 19, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 10” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 27, 2007: Posted “Sick” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 6, 2007: Posted “The Handwriting on the Wall” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 10, 2007: Posted “Judgment Day” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 14, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 11” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 17, 2007: Posted “No Superpowers” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 24, 2007: Posted “The Theory of The Game” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 28, 2007: Posted “Starting Out in the Morning” to his weblog, Raw Thought.

2008

• 2008: Founded Watchdog.net. Stayed on until 2009.
• January 2, 2008: Posted “2007 Review of Projects” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 5, 2008: Posted “2007 Review of Books” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 15, 2008: Posted “Introducing theinfo.org” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 19, 2008: Posted “How Dumb is Daniel Dennett?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 28, 2008: Posted “A Very Speculative Theory of Free Will” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 4, 2008: Posted “Election Slate: February 2008” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 22, 2008: Posted “Very Good Introductions” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 2, 2008: Posted “The Visible Hand: A Summary” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 9, 2008: Posted “Review: The New Ruthless Economy” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 16, 2008: Posted “Banff” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 14, 2008: Posted “Welcome, watchdog.net” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 15, 2008: Posted “Slaves of Some Dead Sociologist” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 20, 2008: Posted “Money and Worth” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 20, 2008: Posted “Money and Control” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 11, 2008: Posted “The Toolbox Does Not Shrink” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 12, 2008: Posted “How to Fix the News” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 12, 2008: Posted “Science or Philosophy?: Jon Elster and John Searle” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 13, 2008: Posted “Simplistic Sociological Functionalism” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 14, 2008: Posted “Tectonic Plates and Microfoundations” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 19, 2008: Posted “The False Consciousness Falsehood” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 9, 2008: Posted “How to Promote Startups” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 12, 2008: Posted “Is Undercover Over?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 16, 2008: Posted “Moving On” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 19, 2008: Posted “Scenes” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 19, 2008: Posted “Last Goodbyes” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 30, 2008: Posted “Capital and its Complements: A Summary” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 2008: Publishes “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto“
• July 21, 2008: Posted “The Percentage Fallacy” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 11, 2008: Posted “Utilitarian Equilibriums” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 19, 2008: Posted “The Predator State: A Summary” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 22, 2008: Posted “How To Launch Software” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 24, 2008: Posted “Everyday Utilitarianism: Who Gets the TV First?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 25, 2008: Posted “My Life With Tim” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 10, 2008: Posted “A Theory of Change” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 14, 2008: Posted “A Saipan Story” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 15, 2008: Posted “Obama’s Next Move” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 16, 2008: Posted “My Slate” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 18, 2008: Posted “High Gas Prices Are Reagan’s Fault” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 15, 2008: Posted “Blame the Terrorist Black Muslims” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 24, 2008: Posted “In Defense of Anonymity” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 31, 2008: Posted “What Could Happen” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 1, 2008: Posted “Whatever It Takes?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 7, 2008: Posted “November 4” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 13, 2008: Posted “Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 15, 2008: Posted “OCLC on the Run” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 15, 2008: Posted “The Credibility Gap” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 16, 2008: Posted “Kafka for the Kindergarten Set” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 18, 2008: Posted “An Obama Story” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 19, 2008: Posted “Inside GE” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 22, 2008: Posted “Obama’s Strategy: A Debate” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 25, 2008: Posted “Blogs I Would Like to Read” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 11, 2008: Posted “The Forgotten Sidekick” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• >December 15, 2008: Published “Sokal Affair” in Encyclopedia of the Culture Wars: Issues, Voices, and Viewpoints, Roger Chapman, ed.
• December 29, 2008: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 12” to his weblog, Raw Thought.

2009

• 2009: Co-Founded Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Stayed on until February, 2011.
• January 3, 2009: Posted “2008 Review of Books” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 5, 2009: Posted “The True Story of the Telephone” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 8, 2009: Posted “Felten for CTO?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 12, 2009: Posted “Why are online ads cheaper?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 16, 2009: Posted “Cass Sunstein, Concern Troll” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 28, 2009: Posted “Economic BS Detector” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 3, 2009: Posted “Belém” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 4, 2009: Posted “How Depressions Work” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 13, 2009: Posted “NYT Personals” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 16, 2009: Posted “Non-Hierarchical Management” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 21, 2009: Posted “RSS Hits the Big Time” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 4, 2009: Posted “A 24 Puzzle” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 5, 2009: Posted “The Intellectual’s Creed” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 9, 2009: Posted “In Defense of Elections” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 16, 2009: Posted “Journalistic Capture and Fixing CNBC” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 23, 2009: Posted “Who Really Rules?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 24, 2009: Posted “Margo Seltzer” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 13, 2009: Posted “The Logic of Loss” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 14, 2009: Posted “What Are Intellectuals Good For?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 15, 2009: Posted “A Non-Local Revolution” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 23, 2009: Posted “Transparency is Bunk” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 28, 2009: Posted “Investigative Strike Teams” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 5, 2009: Posted “A New Kind of Writing?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 17, 2009: Posted “How Policy Gets Made: A Primer” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 18, 2009: Posted “This Month in Sociology” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• May 18, 2009: Posted “A Life Offline” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 20, 2009: Posted “Namedropping” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 24, 2009: Posted “My Life Offline” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 27, 2009: Posted “Writing a Book: Part One (Ambition)” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 28, 2009: Posted “The Median Voter and the Mixed Voter” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 31, 2009: Posted “Hot Girl Syndrome” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 2, 2009: Posted “Life in a World of Pervasive Immorality: The Ethics of Being Alive” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 6, 2009: Posted “Writing a Book: Part Two (Structure)” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 8, 2009: Attended Boston Wikipedia Meetup (see photos at Wikipedia and Archive.org.
• August 11, 2009: Posted “Reading Samuel Bowles” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 12, 2009: Posted “Poverty Kills” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 17, 2009: Posted “Scenes 2” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 18, 2009: Posted “How to Save A Life” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 20, 2009: Posted “What Kind of a Thing is Twitter?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 24, 2009: Posted “The Newswipe Manifesto” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 25, 2009: Posted “Google Voice Security Flaw” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 27, 2009: Posted “Why I Won’t Use Rimuhosting” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 7, 2009: Posted “The Trouble with Nonprofits” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 8, 2009: Posted “A Political Startup” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 8, 2009: Posted “Why I Am Not Gay” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 14, 2009: Posted “A Short Course in Ethics” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 15, 2009: Posted “Honest Theft” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 16, 2009: Posted “On Finishing Infinite Jest” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 16, 2009: Posted “What Happens at the End of Infinite Jest? (or, the Infinite Jest ending explained)” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 18, 2009: Posted “Tim DeLaughter and the Boundary of Spectacle” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 21, 2009: Posted “The New Science of Causation” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 23, 2009: Posted “Redesign” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 24, 2009: Posted “Keynes, Explained Briefly” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 22, 2009: Posted “A Summary/Explanation of John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 5, 2009: Posted “Wanted by the FBI” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 19, 2009: Posted “djb” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 19, 2009: Posted “Subjectivism” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 20, 2009: Posted “Disciplinary Bubbles” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 20, 2009: Posted “Because We Can” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 3, 2009: Posted “Election Ballot 2009” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 3, 2009: Posted “The Logic of Google Ads” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 14, 2009: Posted “Is the DMCA a scam?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 29, 2009: Posted “How I Hire Programmers” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 14, 2009: Posted “Googling for Sociopaths” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 27, 2009: Posted “Researcher Job” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 30, 2009: Posted “Against Reflective Equilibrium (or, What is ethics for?)” to his weblog, Raw Thought.

2010

• January 3, 2010: Posted “A Backup Solution?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 3, 2010: Posted “2009 Review of Books” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 8, 2010: Posted “Should our cognitive biases have moral weight?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 8, 2010: Posted “Do It Now” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 27, 2010: Posted “Is Apple Evil?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 30, 2010: Posted “Fewer Representatives or More Monitors?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 10, 2010: Posted “The Vioxx Story” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• February 11, 2010: Posted “When Is Transparency Useful?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 1, 2010: Posted “HOWTO: Lose weight” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 2, 2010: Posted “HOWTO: Read more books” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 4, 2010: Posted “On DIRFAs” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 8, 2010: Posted “Philosophical Puzzles Resolved” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 14, 2010: Posted “Theory of Change” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 14, 2010: Posted “The Reason So Many People Are Unemployed” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 16, 2010: Posted “The Anti-Suit Movement” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 29, 2010: Posted “A Reading Machine” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 7, 2010: Posted “How to Get a Job Like Mine” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 18, 2010: Posted “That Sounds Smart” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 20, 2010: Posted “The Political Philosophy of Toy Story 3” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 21, 2010: Posted “Brought to You by the Letter S” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 29, 2010: Posted “Management, Organizing, Mobilizing” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 1, 2010: Posted “The Perils of Parfit 1: Credible Commitments” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 27, 2010: Posted “You Don’t Know John (Maynard Keynes)” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 4, 2010: Posted “Campaigners, Please!” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 7, 2010: Posted “Rethinking Hyperbolic Discounting (or, The Percentage Fallacy, Continued)” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 8, 2010: Posted “The Real Problem with Waiting for “Superman”” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 18, 2010: Posted “When Brute Force Fails” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 18, 2010: Posted “Outline of a Digital Preservation System” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 2010: Joined Demand Progress as its Executive Director. Stayed on until June, 2011.
• December 21, 2010: Posted “A Censorship-Resistant Web” to his weblog, Raw Thought.

2011

• January 3, 2011: Posted “2010 Review of Books” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 4, 2011: Posted “My Twitter Viewer” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• January 6, 2011: Posted “Squaring the Triangle: Secure, Decentralized, Human-Readable Names” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 6, 2011: Posted “Individuals in a World of Science” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 2012: Joined Avaaz as an Advisor. Stayed on until February, 2012.
• June 22, 2011: Posted “New Homepage” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 18, 2011: Posted “Goods, Services, and Delegations” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 18, 2011: Posted “Watch That Space” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 22, 2011: Posted “How Apple Works” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 18, 2011: Posted “Understanding Groupon Means Understanding ACSOI” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 22, 2011: Posted “What Does Google Mean by “Evil”?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 4, 2011: Posted “A Better Travel Guide for Geeks” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 1, 2011: Posted “Revolutions on the Internet” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 3, 2011: Posted “Apple and the Kindle” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 3, 2011: Posted “Steve Jobs and the Founder’s Pain” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• December 14, 2011: Posted “On Intellectual Dishonesty” to his weblog, Raw Thought.

2012

• February 2012: Joined Change.org as a Consultant. Stayed on until April, 2012.
• February 14, 2012: Posted “When will experiences replace movie theaters?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• March 9, 2012: Posted “How Python 3 Should Have Worked” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 2012: Joined ThoughtWorks as a Tech Lead. Stayed on until he died.
• April 18, 2012: Posted “y the power of exponents, just five levels of councils, each consisting of only fifty people, is enough to cover over three hundred million people.?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• April 19, 2012: Posted “The 2011 Review of Books” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 8, 2012: Posted “Perfect Institutions” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 20, 2012: Posted “America After Meritocracy: Chris Hayes’ The Twilight of The Elites” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• June 26, 2012: Posted “New: The Pokayoke Guide to Developing Software” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 5, 2012: Posted “Thinking Clearly About Piece-Work” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 6, 2012: Posted “Libertarianism and the State” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 8, 2012: Posted “Thoughts on Citizen Kane” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 23, 2012: Posted “Is Awkwardness Avoidable?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• July 29, 2012: Posted “What Happens in The Dark Knight Rises” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 5, 2012: Posted “What do startup founders want?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 10, 2012: Posted “Do I have too much faith in science?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 18, 2012: Posted “Look at yourself objectively” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 18, 2012: Posted “Believe you can change” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 18, 2012: Posted “Take a step back” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 18, 2012: Posted “Raw Nerve” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 19, 2012: Posted “Edmund Burke Explains The Dark Knight Rises” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 22, 2012: Posted “What Happens in Batman Begins” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• August 29, 2012: Posted “What are the optimal biases to overcome?” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 1, 2012: Posted “Lean into the pain” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 9, 2012: Posted “Confront reality” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 17, 2012: Posted “Cherish mistakes” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• September 25, 2012: Posted “Fix the machine, not the person” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• October 8, 2012: Posted “How Looper Works” to his weblog, Raw Thought.
• November 1, 2012: Posted “What Happens in The Dark Knight” to his weblog, Raw Thought.

1. The LISNews post was picked up, with permission and supporting documentation, by ACCESS, Asia’s Newspaper on Electronic Information Products & Services, which republished it in September 2007. Here are a few other times I’ve referenced Aaron in library-related publications:
   • October 15, 2007 (Library Journal): “Consuming Information.” I recommended rss2email, software that Aaron developed in his teens. Lindsey Smith has done a great job of maintaining it since May, 11 2006 or thereabouts, when Aaron handed it off to him. It remains great software, and I continue to rely on and recommend it.
   • November 15, 2007 (ACRLog): “Aaron Swartz is Speaking at Midwinter.”
   • November 19, 2008 (In the Library with the Lead Pipe): “A Useful Amplification of Records That Are Unavoidably Needed Anyway.” Aaron also reviewed the article before it was posted.
   • December 12, 2012 (Letters to a Young Librarian):  “I Began Saying Yes to All the Interesting Projects That Came My Way.”

2. As one of my readers noted, this reads like a reference to Cory Doctorow’s novel, Little Brother, and its sequel, Homeland, which was released on February 5, 2013 and for which Aaron wrote the afterword and made suggestions while it was in progress. The only reason it isn’t a reference is because I still need to read both books, something I plan to do soon.

In Brief: This article investigates the idea of library student advisory boards as mechanisms for building more student-centered libraries at colleges and universities. Benefits of these types of organizations, measures of success, and the importance of acting on evidence-based user feedback are discussed.

Student Orientation by Tulane Public Relations

Introduction

A Google search for “library student advisory board” returns hundreds of results from different schools, leading us to documents that describe organizational structures, missions, and goals. It is clear that many academic and public libraries have bought into the idea of soliciting feedback directly from their users. However, while some of the literature has focused on the need for these bodies to exist, it is more difficult to find explorations of how libraries are translating feedback from their advisory boards into relevant change, how they are measuring their advisory boards’ success, and how much status or authority they are imparting to the board.

This article, which focuses on academic libraries, explores the idea of students as stakeholders by examining the framework and uses of library student advisory boards. When possible, we favor evidence provided by our users over our own assumptions.

Advisory Boards

According to Lee Teitel, in an ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education report, an advisory committee is “a group of volunteers that meets regularly on a long-term basis to provide advice and/or support to an institution or one of its subunits” (1). Many academic libraries have developed such a group in order to provide more direct lines of communication between the library and the student body. Some library student advisory boards are volunteer-based, some are elected through student governance bodies, some are official clubs, and some are ad-hoc—it all depends on local institutional factors. Teitel states:

“Advisory committees can provide mechanisms at all levels of higher education to help improve communication and interaction with the outside world. They can provide fresh insights, powerful connections, access to valuable resources, and excellent public relations. In conjunction with a strategic plan or total quality management, they can be key elements in renewing and revitalizing an institution” (2).

For a practical guide on starting a library student advisory board, check out the book The Library Student Advisory Board: Why Your Academic Library Needs It And How To Make It Work by Amy L. Deuink and Marianne Seiler (McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009). The book covers topics not included in this article, such as how to recruit members, examples of club activities, advisor duties, fundraising and relationship building.

What Students Have To Offer

In 2011, Zahra et al. completed a study of over 30 academic advisory boards that supported entrepreneurship centers. These boards consisted of community leaders and businesspeople convened to provide guidance on outreach, service, teaching, and fund-raising.

Defining an advisory board as a group of individuals brought together to help an institution better achieve its mission and goals, the study found that advisory board members provided the following resources to their organizations:

• legitimacy
• resources
• market intelligence
• access to data
• expertise
• industry reach

(Zahra 113)

These resources form a basis for comparing how student library advisory boards may contribute within the context of higher education.

Legitimacy

Students are the primary clientele of most academic libraries. By giving them an opportunity to participate in the decision-making process, libraries can ensure that the collections, services, and programming they offer are truly student-centered. When communicating the importance of the library, one strategy would be to point to student-initiated decisions that demonstrate the value the library is providing to its community.

Resources

While students pay tuition and fees to the institution that funds the operation of the library, many of the resources they bring to an advisory board are intangible in nature. These resources include many of the factors discussed below, including market intelligence, access to data, expertise, and industry reach.

Market Intelligence

With a fresh group of students arriving every year, working with a student board offers a way to gather information about changing needs and desires. Students are immersed in current trends and can share information about the different technologies and behaviors that shape their information-seeking and usage. What form of social media is popular? Are students using torrent sites to download textbooks? What type of program would be interesting enough to get people out of the dorms? Libraries may be able to forecast or observe some of these factors, but working directly with users ensures that we are providing relevant services rather projecting what we think students want. Much of this market intelligence will be specific to your institutional culture, strengthening the library’s hold on niche services and collections that provide local value.

Access To Data

Coming from varied backgrounds, students have a diversity of experience that libraries can only glimpse from the outside. This is particularly true if board membership is solicited from underrepresented segments of the university community. While we are deeply entrenched in the profession of librarianship, students are engaged in the pursuit of higher education. Librarians might all remember being students, but with technological and pedagogical change taking place all around us, we need to go directly to the source. Students on an advisory board have a different kind of access to their peers because they see them regularly in classes and live with them in the dorms. They can keep their ears open for complaints and engage in discussions about how the library is being used (or ignored) by their friends. Students are also an excellent source for into research and study habits (sharing their personal calendars, for example).

Expertise

One of the most valuable resources that could be made available by student advisory boards is related to marketing: students know what will get the attention of other students. No one can use a service, collection, or attend an event if they don’t know about it. Some students may also be experts in using library systems—experiencing them holistically from an outside perspective. Much of our work as librarians is siloed, with cataloguers working on records, systems librarians building interfaces, developers building websites, subject librarians providing research help, and administrators creating policies. A student’s eyes may see gaps between these different segments and perhaps even affordances that we didn’t realize were there.

Industry Reach

The strongest industry power students have is as peer influencers. An informed and engaged board member can become a library advocate on campus, and champion the resources and services that are available. Additionally, many students are more comfortable approaching their peers than a librarian, so if board members are identifiable they can provide a more comfortable line of communication. This can be facilitated by soliciting known “influencers” on campus to serve on the advisory board, such as students who are deeply involved in campus media outlets, student government, or other activities that put them in contact with a variety of their peers.

Measures of Success

While the existence of so many library student advisory boards indicates that many librarians have been persuaded that these types of groups are valuable, data on measuring their effectiveness is slim. As Teitel states, this is likely because “…not everyone agrees on the definition of effectiveness” (3). Many libraries include the existence of their student advisory board in bulletins, annual reports, and on their websites, but actual information about outcomes and accomplishments are difficult to locate. For instance, a recent search for “library student advisory board” in Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) returned minimal results—reviews of Deiunk and Seilers’ book and a few tangentially-related articles. For many libraries, the fact that the group exists seems to be success enough. This is particularly relevant when inviting critical users to join the advisory board. In her 2011 article about developing a faculty advisory board, Farrell states:

“This is an opportunity to turn a complainer into a champion as the board reviews services and collections and the complainer may gain a broader understanding of their complaints. If the library is failing to serve a certain segment of the faculty, then what better way to gain insights into this population than by listening to their perspectives?” (193).

The quality of feedback gleaned from student advisory boards is another potential area for assessment. This measure is subjective and may vary based on organizational culture or require the negotiation of multiple (possibly conflicting) agendas. Student rejection of an initiative that a library/librarian has invested a substantial amount of time and funding into may not be well received.

Farrell also states that “An advisory group’s success is ultimately determined by…its impact on library collections and services” (196). In their book The Library Student Advisory Board, Deuink and Seiler express the need for clear and measurable learning outcomes for all board activities. Among other activities, their organization at Penn State Schuylkill raises money to build library collections, which can then be tracked and reported for assessment purposes. This form of assessment relies on the traditional metrics of collection usage to demonstrate value and success of the advisory board. In terms of areas ripe for future study, the assessment of library student advisory boards would be a valuable research topic. The adaptation of existing studies regarding non-student library advisory boards¹ would also be intriguing.

Privileging the User

While many academic libraries have student advisory boards, the techniques for measuring the success of these groups are, at best, lacking any sort of consensus. It is also unclear whether these groups have the ability to influence library decisions or if they exist solely because they sound good “on paper.”

The idea of soliciting feedback directly from users is a sensible one, but privileging that feedback and actually making changes can be much more difficult. It sounds good when we can say to administrators (or the president of student government, or even the occasional student who seems to offer nothing but complaints) that we have a mechanism for getting student input on ideas and initiatives. But are we really listening? Are we using that feedback to improve our services and systems? In their article on student advisory committees in academic libraries, Benefiel et al. question why our largest user group (students) have the least amount of input regarding library decisions and policies that impact them. This disconnect between library decision making and its primary customers reinforces the stereotype of libraries as gatekeepers, doling out services that we deem “good for” our users regardless of their desires.

Conclusion

It is a challenging time for all libraries, including those at academic institutions. While public libraries are familiar with responding to their communities (or board of directors), academic libraries have maintained more autonomy based on the traditional underpinnings of the library as the center for knowledge and intellectual growth within higher education. However, in an age in which accountability, responsiveness, and transparency are made priorities within higher education, the role of students as stakeholders in the direction of the library might not be far off.

Libraries need to solicit feedback directly from their users and use that information to bring about change. Not just change for its own sake, but relevant change that will keep us vital to the communities we serve. Imagine if we shifted the paradigm from “Students don’t know what they need so libraries need to educate them” to “What exactly are they asking for?” What if libraries became really good at the things our users want, even though those things might be different depending on the institution? We could increase satisfaction and use, and display some sophisticated tricks along the way, building an evidence-based, student-centered library.

If your library has a student advisory board, please talk to us in the comments section! I am eager to hear how your group measures success, and if you’ve had difficulty making use of user feedback, especially when it appears to conflict with feedback from other librarians, faculty, or administrators.

Many thanks to Amy L. Deuink, Melissa Gold, and Lead Piper Brett Bonfield for edits, comments, and thought provoking questions regarding this article.

References and Further Readings

Benefiel, Candace R., Wendi Arant, and Elaine Gass. “A New Dialogue: A Student Advisory Committee In An Academic Library.” Journal Of Academic Librarianship 25.2 (1999): 111.

Deuink, Amy, and Marianne Seiler. The Library Student Advisory Board: Why Your Academic Library Needs It and How to Make It Work. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009. Print.

Farrell, Maggie. “Developing A Faculty Advisory Group.” Journal Of Library Administration 51.2 (2011): 189-197.

Kane, Jennifer J., and Jay E. Jisha. “An Analysis Of Sport Management Clubs And Advisory Boards In Sport Management Programs Across North America.” International Sports Journal 8.1 (2004): 132-138.

Teitel, Lee, Washington, DC. ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education, and Washington, DC. School of Education and Human Development. George Washington Univ. The Advisory Committee Advantage. Creating An Effective Strategy For Programmatic Improvement. ERIC Digest. n.p.: 1994.

Zahra, Shaker A., Lance R. Newey, and J. Myles Shaver. “Academic Advisory Boards’ Contributions To Education And Learning: Lessons From Entrepreneurship Centers.” Academy Of Management Learning & Education 10.1 (2011): 113-129.

1. Leonhardt, Thomas Wilburn. “Key Donor Cultivation: Building For The Future.” Journal Of Library Administration 51.2 (2011): 198-208.; Kendrick-Samuel, Syntychia. “Junior Friends Groups Taking Teen Services To The Next Level.” Young Adult Library Services 10.2 (2012): 15-18.; Farmer, Lesley S. J. “Collection Development In Partnership With Youth: Uncovering Best Practices.” Collection Management 26.2 (2001): 67.

Shadow Steps by elycefeliz

A few years ago I learned of the “Peter Principle”: the concept that in hierarchical organizations, whether public or private, individuals are promoted up to their level of incompetence, and there they remain (Peter and Hull 16). In their book of the same name, the authors observe with satirical accuracy that, regardless of career field, high-performing individuals are continuously promoted over time until they reach the point at which the challenges of their new position exceed their skills, thereby decreasing their performance, eliminating the possibility of future promotions, and reducing the effectiveness of the organization as a whole. In short, most people advance in their careers until are promoted to a level at which they cease to achieve. Peter and Hull attribute this phenomenon to the fact that promotions are generally based upon performance in the old position, while each higher-level position requires new and different skills. Strong job performance as a staff member is not a predictor of strong performance as a manager.

It’s an appalling theory, and no less disturbing because it rings true. We’ve all seen it in action. For instance, a reference or cataloging librarian may suddenly be promoted to head of their department because they performed well as a librarian; but as a department head they now need a whole new array of skills to be successful, such as effective communication, strategic planning, and people management skills. Instead of being promoted to their new role because they displayed the requisite skills to perform well as a department head (or the potential to develop them), they have been plunged into an entirely new situation without much, if any, preparation. Perhaps they are lucky enough to already possess the aptitude for their new work and savvy enough to obtain whatever training they may need; in this case they have not yet reached their level of incompetence. But it is just as likely that they will muddle through, keeping the metaphorical lights on, but never achieving much or inspiring others.

In exploring strategies for combating such a seemingly inevitable process, the answer is both the simplest and most challenging one possible: by recognizing and respecting our own professional boundaries. This sounds easy but is complicated by certain external factors that drive people to accept promotions, such as financial pressures, retirement concerns, and the appeal of a role with greater power to (ideally) effect positive changes in the workplace. The effects of the former two are obvious. With an eye on the mortgage payment or retirement account, individuals who know a promotion isn’t right for them may just take the position anyway. And who could blame them? There are bills to pay, children to send to college, and the security of the future to consider. Regardless of our aptitude for a new position it would be difficult to turn down any opportunity to ease our financial burdens. Obviously compensation models in any organization are deeply entrenched, but why do we all accept that the positions that involve the most administrative tasks should be the highest paid? Why not consider a model based upon actual job performance regardless of role, that would actually encourage everyone to excel in the jobs we are best at? These are tricky questions, considering that administrators are often paid more because they are the most experienced (in years) and the most difficult to replace, but a high-performing administrator would still be paid well in a performance-based compensation model–along with high-performing staff at all levels within the organization.

If we consider the latter factor that influences many of us in deciding whether to accept a promotion, the waters become a bit muddier. Of course it is appealing to have greater power over one’s work and, potentially, over the work of others. But with such a motivator at hand, some may accept roles that they are not prepared to fulfill effectively. Telling people what to do sounds easy enough, but true leadership is far more challenging. Despite traditional concepts of management as a top-down activity, an increasing amount of scholarship points to the greater effectiveness of collaborative, bottom-up leadership based upon the cultivation of emotional intelligence (Goleman 1995, 1998) and humility (Owens & Heckman 2012). Decisionmaking through consensus, as discussed in last January’s Lead Pipe article by Emily Ford, may play a substantial role in this. Owens & Heckman’s research in particular indicates “that to effectively lead their firms amidst growing market complexity, leaders increasingly must be able to humbly show their followers how to grow by admitting what they do not know, modeling teachability, and acknowledging the unique skills, knowledge, and contributions of those around them” (811-812). This is a far cry—and happily!—from the “what I say goes” management strategies of old.

When it comes to our ability to recognize when our skills and abilities match our job and when they don’t, emotional intelligence (which will be explored in more depth below) can play a critical role. Are we making decisions about our work and the work of others for the right reasons? Goleman notes, “it is not that we want to do away with emotion and put reason in its place, as Erasmus had it, but instead find the intelligent balance of the two” (29). Those who are able to gracefully recognize and combine such factors may have the potential to overcome the fate to which Peter would say they are otherwise destined.

Leadership is a Dirty Word

Rhetorically speaking, the term “leadership” is inherently problematic. It implies that one or a few individuals “in the lead” possess the power and can take all the credit for an organization’s accomplishments. It limits our discussions about organizational effectiveness by implying that a powerful few are the ones who “make” an organization effective. Overly emphasizing one person’s importance is a disservice to that organization and all who function within it. It’s time to update our terminology. In The Deep Blue Sea: Rethinking the Source of Leadership, Wilfred Drath asserts, “Leadership will be understood not as a possession of the leader but as an aspect of the community (the team, group, organization, association, nature, culture). Leadership will be framed as a communal capacity and a communal achievement” (xvi).

Over the years, some organizations have adopted “upside-down” organizational charts, which generally flip the display of employees and place the customer or patron at the top, with each layer of staff, from frontlines employees to the company’s executive positions, displayed below. For many organizations, it would look something like this:

While this type of organizational chart certainly could function as a marketing strategy to reassure customers of their importance, a company that fully embraces this reverse hierarchy is making other statements as well. A traditional organizational chart is defined by lines of supervision and power: a manager is a salesperson’s boss, therefore the manager is displayed above the salesperson. This ties into the ongoing, traditional ways that salary and job titles have been assigned. But when this is flipped and an organizational culture reinforces a flipped hierarchy, there is one critically important difference: rather than defining levels by power, this chart defines levels by support. Executives support the work of managers, who in turn support the work of frontlines staff, and so on. Better yet, de-emphasizing the supremacy of managers and executives may support more flexibility in the workplace that may, in turn, allow those who have risen to their level of incompetence to find a way out through a shift in position.

In the process of flipping the organizational chart, another truth comes to the forefront: managers don’t have staff. If anything, the staff has the manager! Such shifts in rhetoric, while seemingly simple or even nitpicky, can have a profound impact on the psyche of an organization. Each employee, regardless of their relative position in a traditional hierarchy, is considered one element in a collaborative team. Reinforcing the hierarchy through possessive rhetoric, such as language that implies that a manager “owns” a staff, can diminish a team’s collaborative environment. This type of language not only inflates the manager’s role in guiding and supporting the team, but reduces the visibility of those employees’ knowledge, skills, and self-determination.

Who really needs to be led, after all? Competent staff know their jobs, and if they’re not competent then the organization has other problems. Very few of us need ongoing, daily supervision. In fact, most evidence points to the fact that employees who are given ownership of their job and the freedom to accomplish job-related goals in their own ways are happier and more productive (for instance, see Seibert, Silver, & Randolph 2004). The best thing a so-called leader can do is support the team, offer guidance and inspiration to create a common vision, and otherwise stay out of the way. “Leadership is not domination,” writes Goleman, “but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal” (1995, 149). At its best, leadership is simply about empowering and bringing out the best in an organization’s staff.  Shouldn’t that be called something else?

Emotions Rule

We’ve all heard the term “emotional intelligence” (EI), but how many librarians apply it in the workplace, or even fully understand the concept? In an article in the current issue of American Libraries, David Lee King and Michael Porter (2013) hail EI as a critical factor in cultivating positive relationships between and among library staff and customers. While it’s heartening to see the concept appearing in the pages of such a widely read publication in libraries, its cursory treatment in this article leaves much to be desired. Is EI so well-understood and widely adopted in libraries that it no longer requires definition or context (or even an attribution to the book that made it a household term, Daniel Goleman’s 1995 Emotional Intelligence?). Surely not. Yet King and Porter barely scratched the surface of the idea, providing little more than the circular reasoning that “We must work to develop our emotional intelligence because it will help us more accurately perceive emotions in ourselves and others” (81). While EI sounds like an idea everyone can easily grasp – after all, aren’t we all de facto experts on the subject of our own emotions? – it is far more than just understanding the basics of human psychology. It has to do with how we recognize and understand our emotions and those of our coworkers, and how we address those emotions in constructive ways. People respond differently to the same situation, so emotional intelligence demands sensitivity to those various responses.

Considering that King and Porter omit a definition of emotional intelligence, it’s worth revisiting the concept here. In a 1998 Harvard Business Review article, Goleman succinctly summarized the components of emotional intelligence as follows:

1. Self-awareness, defined as the ability to understand and recognize your emotions and their effect on others;
2. Self-regulation, the ability to put emotions or impulse reactions aside and respond rationally to a situation;
3. Motivation, or the drive to achieve;
4. Empathy, the ability to recognize and understand others’ emotions and to respond strategically; and
5. Social skill, the ability to connect with and relate to others.

None of this is easy, particularly during challenging interactions or difficult times. Perhaps the two greatest calls to action in this list are to “respond rationally” to situations and to “respond strategically” to others’ emotions. Together, Goleman argues, these qualities describe a leader who is likely to motivate and inspire those they work with and create a positive, higher achieving work environment. Those embracing the importance of EI in the workplace recognize that the key is not to try to leave emotions at the door, but to address and manage them constructively. This includes recognizing when decision-making may be inappropriately driven by emotions (or simple personality conflicts), and ensuring that reason prevails.

While Goleman’s research is already fifteen years old, its impact seems only to grow. A recent article in Harvard Business Review provides what is essentially an update to the EI concept. In “Leadership is a Conversation,” Groysberg and Slind (2012) note, “Smart leaders today, we have found, engage with employees in a way that resembles an ordinary person- to-person conversation more than it does a series of commands from on high. Furthermore, they initiate practices and foster cultural norms that instill a conversational sensibility throughout their organizations” (78). The shift to more global organizations, increases in the number of younger staff with different views on communication, and the spike in technological changes and social network activity have combined to effect a shift in the way employees interact on a daily basis and in the way leaders might most successfully function. Groysberg and Slind see this as taking place through what they dub the four “I”s: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality. The article, which includes a chart summarizing these new practices as compared to traditional ones, brings EI to the forefront yet again.

Leadership in Libraries

As organizations like any others, the same rules apply in libraries. Just as Groysberg and Slind describe the effects of changing technologies and workplace demographics, so too are these forces playing out in the staffing profiles of our libraries. King and Porter recommend a simple approach to these shifts, which serves as a starting point for discussion:

A good first step is simply to recognize its importance and maintain an awareness of our reactions as they happen. Examining the emotionalreactions of others, particularly in difficult times, is also important. Listening, understanding, having patience, empathizing, and showing strength and resilience—these are all key components (81).

By this reasoning, EI is just about being kind and rational with our colleagues. Decades of top-down administrative theory have given way to a humanist approach to the workplace, driven and formed by the core fact that we are all human and subject to human joys and passions. Shedding the belief that work requires the repression of emotions, and instead allowing those feelings to pass through the office in constructive ways, can provide needed catharsis for all involved.

The challenge for library leaders is to support such catharsis. Library work can be stressful, and every office environment has moments when not everyone gets along. When emotions flare up, the manager’s task is to acknowledge, understand, and defuse them by making appropriate changes. Small adjustments to the daily life in the office may help, such as reconsidering who reports to whom or how workflows might be eased if personalities conflict. If changes are made, they must be made openly and with the support of all parties involved. This requires some level of sensitivity and flexibility to do well, but any efforts are sure to be appreciated. In many cases, just listening and allowing staff members to vent may be all that is needed.

Embracing a new, humanist framework in the office may be liberating. Certainly it changes the model upon which Peter’s Principle is based, and holds the possibility of empowering us each to recognize when we have reached the right place in an organization that best fits our skills and interests. This is not to suggest that we should be afraid to try taking on new roles, nor that we should avoid a challenge. Continuous growth and development is an important aspect of any career. But for those who rise to their level of incompetence and are emotionally intelligent enough to recognize their unfortunate position, the opportunity to shift (possibly “backwards”) within the hierarchy to a more suitable role is invaluable. An organization that functions based on supporting roles rather than reporting structures, one that endorses the importance of emotional intelligence in its daily functions, will be flexible and wise enough to support such shifts. In the end, isn’t that the sort of organization we’d all like to work for?

Many thanks to Brett Bonfield and Jason Martin for their patience and feedback as reviewers of this article.

References

Drath, W. (2001). The Deep blue sea: Rethinking the source of leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Goleman, D. (1998). What makes a leader? Harvard business review, 76 (6), 93-102.
———. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.
Groysberg, B., & Slind, M. (2012). Leadership is a conversation. Harvard business review, 90(6), 76-84.
King, D. L., & Porter, M. (2013). Develop your emotional intelligence. American libraries 44(1/2), 81. Available at http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/archives/issue/januaryfebruary-2013.
Owens, B. P., & Hekman, D. R. (2012). Modeling how to grow: An Inductive examination of humble leader behaviors, contingencies, and outcomes.”  Academy Of management journal, 55(4), 787-818.
Peter, L. J., & Hull, R. (2009). The Peter principle: Why things always go wrong. HarperBusiness: New York.
Seibert, S. E., Silver, S. R., & Randolph, W. (2004). Taking empowerment to the next level: A Multiple-level model of empowerment, performance, and satisfaction. Academy Of Management Journal, 47(3), 332-349

In Brief: In this editorial, In the Library with the Lead Pipe Editorial Board members individually answer three questions: If you had to work on only one project for the next year, what would it be? Are you writing/researching for the love or for the tenure? (Submitted via Twitter by Lead Pipe reader Kenley Neufeld.) And, what was the most inspiring idea you encountered this year?

Photo from Flickr user Anonymous9000 – CC-BY

If you had to work on only one project for the next year, what would it be?

Ellie

I pick weeding. This is very much a community college perspective, but I LOVE weeding. I love pulling the circulation reports and doing the sorting to look both at what is high use and what goes on my weeding list. I love walking through the stacks and getting more familiar with the collection. And I love pulling those unused and outdated items out of circulation. Within the community college setting I feel very strongly that books are for use. I’m sad when I see that 1997 copy of the Opposing Viewpoints on alcohol getting more recent circulations than the 2012 copy next to it. I’ve been doing a first pass level weeding at my current library: items that we’ve had since 1995 (the date of our ILS migration) and have never circulated, but I would love to be doing a much more thorough job.

Emily

Ever since I’ve been at Portland State, there has been a project to which I’d like to be able to fully commit. My predecessor received an LSTA grant to create a digital library of local and regional grey literature from community stakeholders regarding urban planning – the Oregon Sustainable Community Digital Library. (One of my liaison areas is Urban Studies and Planning.) The project was high profile, inventive and included creating and maintaining community relationships with local agencies and organizations. However, due to a variety of circumstances it hasn’t been active, nor has the site been given any attention for quite some time.

Although I’m currently working with a team to assess the project and move it forward in some fashion, I don’t know what that fashion will be. Had I the resources and time, I would dedicate an entire year to this project to make it what stakeholders and I wanted. It would mean getting into the community to talk to local agencies, organizations and faculty and student stakeholders; assessing the current collection; innovating ways to display its content and data; and incorporating all of these things into one meaningful, flexible and beautiful end product.

Brett

Maybe it’s the nature of managing a smallish, solidly middle class public library, or maybe it’s my lack of imagination, but my job doesn’t seem to lend itself to focusing on one project to the exclusion of others. Fortunately, I’m able to supplement my day job with volunteer projects that reward sustained effort.

The volunteer project I’d like to spend next year working on is the one Kim alluded to in the editorial she published last October, specifically her discussion of turning words into action. These actions can be summarized as funding fellowships, organizing conferences, and providing venture capital. I’m particularly interested in that last idea: seeing if it’s possible to apply to libraries what we’ve learned from innovative start-up incubators like YCombinator, Google Summer of Code, SXSW Accelerator, and maybe even the tongue-in-cheek Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud.

Erin

The George Street Carnival, a student-run literary journal at my institution, was revived in 2011 after a 3.5 year hiatus. If I had the chance to pick one project to focus my energy on for the next year, it would be to help that organization design a beautiful and streamlined online journal. The group of students working on the journal are amazingly talented and dedicated to showcasing the creative work of students, faculty, staff, and alumni (including poetry, fiction, and visual art). However, the journal is only offered in print. I’d love to help them expose the work to a broader audience, build the reputation of the publication, and maybe even digitize the past 37 years of print issues as a unique digital collection.

Micah

I would build a digital scholarship center/program at Florida State University. We are slowly working toward it and have some great folks involved already, but if I could dedicate all my time to making it happen in the next year, I would. In my mind this would encompass many of the things I’m interested in: securing financial support/grants, writing, brainstorming, working on teams with people I never get to work with, working with faculty in a new and different way, identifying the most interesting thing that we’d want to create, creating said thing, promotion and outreach about the project, then restarting the whole cycle. I’d really love to be actively involved in doing, making, building, participating, especially as things like the DPLA, PressForward and Anvil Academic are moving forward so quickly.

Kim

Don’t make me pick one thing! No really, I don’t want to. Please?

The truth is that my first librarian job in reference and instruction is also the first job I’ve ever had that never got boring. I tell people this all the time, non-librarian people, and they raise their eyebrows at me. I know what they’re thinking. To the uninitiated, being a librarian sounds like the most boring job they could imagine, but the truth (according to me, anyway) is that we have one of the richest, most varied, and wonderfully complicated careers in the world. Of course, that’s also what makes our jobs so challenging, since we have to juggle all those things and still try to maintain both our professionalism and our mental health. It’s not always easy, but it definitely keeps things interesting.

Becoming a small library director has taken my love of variety to a whole new level: I’ve gone exponential! Not only do I get to do all the things I enjoyed as a reference and instruction librarian, but I’ve added, well, everything else that libraries do. All of it. It’s a delight.

From @kenleyneufeld, “Are you writing/researching for the love, for the tenure?”

Ellie

Both of my full time librarian positions have been with community colleges and while they both have something roughly akin to tenure, neither call it that and neither have a publishing requirement. So while I’ve transitioned to only editing here at Lead Pipe, I was writing and am editing and researching for the love, but also for the experience and the “it looks good on a resume” factor. I’m proud to have written what I have for Lead Pipe, and I definitely grew as a writer thanks to the review process, but I’m even more proud of how much I’ve grown as an editor.

Emily

Not that I should speak for anyone else, but I will: we all definitely do it for the love. For myself, never did nor do I currently see my participation in Lead Pipe because of promotion and tenure. (Although it doesn’t mean I won’t include my Lead Pipe activities as part of my annual reviews, third year review and tenure review!)

When we started Lead Pipe I was frustrated with the library profession and its discourse. I was a new librarian (just out of school one year!) who had endured a very unfulfilling Emerging Leaders experience and was already in my fourth post-degree job.((For more on this multiple jobs experience, see my Struggling to Juggle article from February 2011.)) I was hungry to have my voice, my thoughts and ideas heard. When Kim approached me to join this forming group blog I jumped at the opportunity. I had no thoughts regarding my career, promotion or tenure (I wasn’t in a tenure-related position at the time)–I just wanted a platform to contribute my ideas and to participate in professional discourse.

I completed both my MLS and MIS in 2007, but I did not have a “permanent” job until February 2012. (I am currently serving under my ninth job title, and the first that is an actual line-item on my library’s budget.) Throughout my career the one thing that has been steadfast has been working with this publication and with this group of people. It is my community and it is my librarian home. That’s why I do it.

Brett

I write because I don’t know what it feels like not to write, and I don’t ever want to find out. Fortunately, we’re in a profession that values writing and offers many opportunities for those of us who wish to publish. Unfortunately, our profession also frequently requires people who don’t wish to write to come up with something publishable in order to meet their tenure requirements.

Erin

For me, both. Like Brett, I love writing and couldn’t imagine my life without it. I’ve had my own blog since 2008 which has been an outlet for my journey as a library school student and professional librarian. When I was invited to join the Lead Pipe, I knew that it would be a great opportunity to move beyond my comfort zone (doing more research-based, peer-reviewed writing versus the very casual posts I do on my own blog) and get experience with project management, group dynamics, and editing. I’m in my fifth year at my institution and just submitted my tenure and promotion applications this past November. I was definitely thinking about those things when I accepted the invitation to join the Editorial Board. I wasn’t just thinking about the importance of having Lead Pipe publications and responsibilities on my CV (although they are there, of course). I am also interested in sparking conversations on my campus about open ethos and non-traditional scholarly publishing. I figured that one of the best ways to “put my money where my mouth is” was to include Lead Pipe articles in my tenure application as peer-reviewed articles and include information about the importance of our journal within the field of librarianship (including some alt metrics). I am hoping that this inclusion will create conversation and debate among the Tenure and Promotion Committee when they review my applications this spring. Hopefully we can move toward the point where these new types of open scholarship are viewed on par with publishing a book or article in a traditional journal.

Micah

In my case, librarians at Florida State are non-tenure track, so to answer the question as asked, I write for love of the game. But, I would say that I also write for reputation and thinking about the future of my career as a librarian, which is sort of a “tenure-ish” sense of doing. I’m committed to the idea of “Big Tent Librarianship” and writing for a publication like In The Library with the Lead Pipe causes me to be engaged with new and different ideas that circulate through the field. There’s also that underlying thing where I just plain feel like I have something to say, and learning to write for the web has helped me express ideas that I might not have expressed elsewhere. I am very interested in the structures of promotion and tenure, especially as applied to librarians, and I hope that there will be many more productive conversations about where writing fits into our professional practice. I’m glad to (hopefully) be a part of those discussions.

Kim

I write for the fame and fortune! I hear the check’s in the mail.

And I write for the same reasons as Brett: because I can’t not. I make sense of the world by putting my fingers on a keyboard and seeing what comes out. I make sense of my work in the same way. A friend of mine recently fell in love with the idea of using dictation software to write. He thought it would be much easier to talk into a microphone and “magically” compose articles and other documents without having to write or type. I’m the absolute opposite; I need to see words appear on a page or screen in order to fully process ideas and feelings. I wouldn’t call it “love,” exactly, because while the process is rewarding I don’t necessarily enjoy it. But I do find it valuable and necessary to the way I live and work. If there are some professional benefits, that’s just a bonus.

What was the most inspiring idea you encountered this past year?

Ellie

I’m going to go with this ALA panel: Insert Catchy Label Here or the End of Gen Y, Digital Natives and the Millennial Student Myth, in particular Virginia Eubanks. I like to call myself a technophile Luddite. I trend towards early adopter in my personal life, but I do a lot of very basic tech support and computer help at the reference desk and balk at high tech movements in libraries. My students can’t afford their textbooks, they definitely don’t have iPads and most don’t have smartphones. This talk gave me another perspective on the assumptions we (on this side of the digital divide) make about technology and how best to combat the digital divide.

Emily

The month of November was really inspiring this year. During November I participated in two community writing events, both of which were organized and conducted using social media: Academic Writing Month (Acwrimo) and Digital Writing Month (Digiwrimo). They are both challenges asking authors to write 50,000 words in one month, or to set some ridiculous writing goals and to do their damndest to achieve them. Although November seems to have been some sort of writing month for quite some time, with National Novel Writing Month beginning in 1999, the idea was novel to me, and 2012 was the first year Digiwrimo existed.

During November I attempted to write seven hours a week, and I think I just about did it. Without Acwrimo or Digiwrimo, this would definitely not have happened. My next article at Lead Pipe will probably address my experiences with these events, and engage the idea of librarians as writers. So, more to come!

Brett

I’m not as methodical in my self-testing as Seth Roberts and others who are leading self-tracked lives, but I like to experiment with new ways of doing things to see how they feel for me. The most effective techniques I’ve found in the past year involve intervals and repetition, the kinds of technique that Erica Jesonis discussed in her Lead Pipe article. For me, it’s Pomodoros at work (I like Tomato Timer) and Tabatas at home (I like the free version of the Seconds interval timer), plus I incorporate intervals in one of my runs each week. Also, while it’s not exactly interval training, I found BJ Fogg’s free, weeklong, 3 Tiny Habits course to be useful in much the same way: small tasks, clearly defined, associated with reasonable expectations, and repeated at sensible intervals.

Erin

I’m very excited about Librarian Design Share, launched in early December by April Aultman Becker and Veronica Arellano Douglas. The design of the visual tools we use in libraries (handouts, web graphics, signage) is important and I think this kind of resource will inspire library communities to think more creatively about sharing their message, whatever that message happens to be at the moment.

Micah

I draw inspiration from so many different things, it’d be difficult to narrow it down to one idea. This year I read much less professionally, but much more personally. I started my first job. I listened to a lot more music, and saw a lot fewer movies. I bought a home, voted for a president and am preparing for a first child. I left something behind and joined something new.

There are a few stand out things that have stuck with me through it all. I had the opportunity to see Henry Rollins speak here in Tallahassee in October. Aside from the fan boy, “OMG that is actually HENRY freaking ROLLINS” thing, he said some things that sunk in. He said all around the world when he asks people what they want they most often say “a little water.” I still don’t really know what to do with that, but I think about it all the time.

Professionally, I have returned many times to two articles: Giving it away by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Reality Bytes by Bethany Nowviskie. Both talk about the future directions of academia, and by extension the academic library, in the context of higher education, and both are from the perspectives of not necessarily librarians, which I tend to think is in incredibly valuable perspective to consider. I could quote these to bits, but I’d encourage you to take a few minutes and just glance through them. The idea that I’ve pulled from these is that things are changing, and for the better, and that there are opportunities to be involved in good, new work. That has really defined my year, and I hope it continues to for years to come.

Kim

A fun, slightly quirky, inspiring idea that I’ve been revisiting and rehashing all year comes from a book called The Library 2025 (forthcoming from ALA Editions) that I’m editing with former Lead Piper Eric Frierson. The book is a collection of visionary essays about the future of libraries, and one chapter compares future librarians to park rangers. Now it may be that my nature-loving, granola-munching past is an influence here, but the metaphor of librarian as park ranger strikes me just right: I love thinking about the world of information as an environment that we inhabit just as we inhabit an ecosystem or landscape. I also love the idea of librarians as individuals who would have a home base (the park lodge/office) but would also rove the landscape to help people at the point of need. The idea is a little mindbending and the essay itself is both realistic and deeply imaginative. All in all, my props go to Hugh Rundle for lighting up my brain with the vision of librarian park rangers. The more I think about it, the better I like it.

And, of course, I’m eager to see the uniforms.