Ridiculously excited to be interviewed in SLA Information Outlook

I love being a member of the SLA - although the word 'Special' in the title implies that it will be solely aimed at legal or business librarians, it actually has a large percentage of its membership coming from academic institutions like mine. Part of membership includes getting the magazine, Information Outlook. This is a really good trade mag - there's a lot of useful, intelligent, grown-up content there. My favourite part of it is the member interview section, 10 questions with... I've learned a lot from it (and loved reading Bethan Ruddock's one when she did it) so I was ridiculously excited to be asked to participate in it. I've done a few interviews now but, with the obvious exception of Circulating Ideas, they've all been via email. This one was a proper telephone conversation with Stuart Hales in Washington, which was taped and then transcribed. It was exciting doing it this way. I got a copy of the questions in advance, although we went off on different tangents in the conversation itself (Stuart told me a great wedding-crashing related tale which you should force me to tell you should we meet at a conference or in a pub...). I was a little bit apprehensive in the lead-up to it because the questions seemed slightly passive-agressive in a weird type of a way, but Stuart wasn't remotely like that in the actual conversation, so I think I just got an incorrect impression from them on paper!

We talk about marketing, the SLA itself (more on that below the interview), the Buy India a Library project, professional development, new technology, and taking a step back. (Whimsical tales of my ability to lead a walking tour of York are greatly exaggerated. :) ) Anyhow, here it is - it specifically says at the bottom of this page that it's for personal use only and not for reproduction, but I've got proper permission to use it, I promise...

Ned Potter Information Outlook Interview by thewikiman

If you're an SLA member you can read the whole July-August 2013 issue from which this came by logging-in here.

On the subject of the SLA, at the weekend I read this absolutely brilliant post about the organisation and the annual conference, by Penny Andrews. It articulated things I value about being a member which I didn't know I knew... It certainly seemed to chime with a lot of people judging by the Twitter response, so particularly if you're not an SLA member but have wondered about it, have a read.

I'm a member of both CILIP and SLA, and will continue to be so. I get different things from them - in some ways I feel that CILIP helped me more as I was growing up (which is partly why I'll keep paying my membership fees; I owe them) and SLA helps me more now I'm grown up. The SLA is / are a confident bunch, and very positive - perhaps this is partly because they are under less obligation to 'save libraries' than CILIP or the ALA, so there's a lot less hand-wringing. (Incidentally, I LOVE Penny's comments about MOOCs and gamification in that article!) There's a lot of money in the organisation (they work hard to build and maintain relationships with corporate sponsors) and quite honestly it's nice to be part of an organisation that can afford to do things with style and without an ever-present sense of worry about finances. The downside of this is that it is if you don't like wearing suits for work-related things, and aren't going to do so just to fit in (*raises hand*) you can feel under-dressed at the London SLA-Europe events! Penny talks about being treated as an equal at the conference in the US, regardless of the status of the person you're talking to - I'd agree with that, but if you start mixing with the sponsors in London, expect at least a couple of them to be baffled that dressing in a suit and schmoozing isn't your number one priority...

What the SLA does (in my view) is focus on making us into better, more effective information professionals. They can afford to focus on improving us, and let others worry about the Latest Big Library Crisis besetting the profession. Part of the way we can endure in libraries is to be really brilliant at our jobs - it feels like the SLA addresses making a practical impact in a very hands-on way, all of the time, rather than being side-tracked. The conference itself remains the greatest experience of my professional career - I'm over the moon to be going back, to Vancouver in 2014, to give a few talks and see everyone again, and generally drink up the atmosphere of niceness and happiness.

Here's the link if you're thinking of joining; I wish I'd done so earlier. I didn't sign up to the SLA previous to winning the ECCA which gave me a year of free membership, because of the cost. To spend a big chunk of money on something work related, especially after already paying for CILIP membership, is daunting. But it's based on a sliding-salary scale so you pay less if you earn less, and now as a proper fee-paying member from my point of view (and from that of all the members I've talked to), it's worth it.

Librarianship can be tough these days, but the SLA makes you feel good and gives you confidence - that's not a trivial thing.

A letter to a younger me

I've not been blogging for a month or so due to the arrival of baby Grace! But I'm back at work on Monday so I'm gradually easing back in to the world of librarianship, starting with some stuff I meant to blog links to ages ago but never got around to... I was delighted to be asked to write a post on the Letters to a Young Librarian blog run by Jessica Olin. It's a really good blog and one that I read a lot anyway, so it was really nice to do something for it. Here's my post.

I tried to really honestly (and at the risk of embarassing myself a bit) write a letter to the me that was about to start his first day in libraries, aged 25-and-a-half, back in 2006. I also tried to make it as relevant and useful as possible to a new professional today, so check it out and and tell me what you think. It includes a list of things I think we really should be doing in our profession:

• Communicating our value PROPERLY at every opportunity.
• Embracing informality.
• Trying to inspire people rather than placate.
• Understanding that work-life balance is important enough that it should not be considered with reference to what ANYONE ELSE IS DOING. 
• Libraries have always been product orientated, but now they need to be market orientated. .

Each of these is expanded in the post; it was fun to think about this stuff. Thanks to Jessica for asking me and the reader of her blog who requested the post!

I've written quite a lot of stuff on platforms other than here (or the Toolkit blog) in recent months - there's a complete list in the Guest Posts On... section down the right-hand side of the website (you'll need to scroll down!) but here are the most recent:

• Circulating Ideas - l was honoured to be a guest on the Librarian interview podcast. Listen to it here
• Expert tips for marketing your library - interview for LIBER
• Rebranding a Library: how did it all go so right? - for Information Today
• Marketing libraries is like marketing mayonnaise - for Library Journal
• Marketing your library - for American Libraries Magazine
• Marketing with video - my first column for Library Journal
• Six Questions with me about marketing stuff, on the 658.8 blog .

Normal blog service will now be resumed!

Gender and Digital Identity

 

In a way this is slightly off-topic in that it isn't about libraries, but in more ways it's on-topic because this blog is often about new technology, and social media, and higher education. In particular I think we as information professionals should be sharing our expertise in social media with the academic community - I do this via workshops, and one question I get asked in more than half the sessions I do, is, how do you deal with the unpleasant attention online which you (inevitably) get if you are both prominent and female?

When I was first asked this I really didn't know how to answer it very well - the second and subsequent times I'd looked into it a bit and felt better prepared, but there still doesn't really seem to be a good answer (outside of: Fix Society - which I'm not holding my breath for). With this in mind, I went along to a session called Female public intellectuals - the risk of exposure as part of the University of York's Intellectual Integrity conference. The panel discussion was revealing, fascinating, and depressing - I was going to say in equal parts but that's glib; it was basically mostly depressing. Here are some thoughts around this whole issue, for what they're worth.

The problem

I'm sure we're all familiar with the problem but let me set it out explicitly here: the problem is that as soon as you gain an amount of exposure, you open yourself to abuse. I think this is true across the board, because among every X number of people, a small percentage of them are bound to be fecking idiots: the higher the number X, the more idiots are in that number. However the problem of abuse is exacerbated by the internet in general (it allows disconnected contact in a fashion which allows cowards to flourish), social media in particular (it allows direct access and potentially even the feeling that you 'know' someone and so are entitled to comment on their appearance, etc) and is much much worse if you're female, gay, or in an ethnic minority.

Increasingly vital to researchers and academics is the need to have impact, and to have impact you need to be seen. To be seen is to open yourself to abuse, so how do you do your job in such conditions?

One of the panel spoke about how she appeared on the BBC for around 2 minutes - TWO MINUTES - and within hours had several emails from people either saying how sexually UNattractive they found her, or how sexually attractive they found her and what they wanted to do about it. Males on the same programme got emails too - about their arguments. But she just basically got abuse - and keep in mind, this is a BBC1 audience who had to Google her and find out her email, and took the time to do so.

The two things that really hit home for me attending this talk (and keep in mind I'm a social-media-workshop-teaching, feminist-lefty-leaning Guardian-reading, already-interested and somewhat-read-up-on-this librarian...) were A: how little exposure women need to get abuse (I naively thought it didn't happen until you'd been on TV, but people with 2,000 Twitter followers are finding that enough to warrant emails detailing sexual fantasies) and B: how there's no real preparation for dealing with it. It's not really discussed much. There's a tendency to laugh it off or, worse, to feel misplaced guilt about it - maybe I inadvertently led them on? So it doesn't get shared, and you don't get the relief and understanding that comes from realising other people are getting this abuse too, and it's not your fault.

We're not talking about a tiny number of 'sick' people abusing women online anymore. It's really, really common.

It's no longer about anonymity

For ages I thought the problem with the internet was anonymity. If you want to see how people act when they're unaccountable, go look at the comments section of ANYTHING - YouTube, the Guardian, heaven forbid the Mail - and check your faith in humanity at the door.  People say awful things, all the time, because they don't have to take responsibility for them - they can hide behind a random username.

But I don't think that's even the main issue anymore. Take a moment to look at this tumblr post from Feminist Frequency - she had the audacity to tweet a mild comment about lack of female lead characters in computer games, and got back an unfathomable stream of abuse. The abuse is not from people hiding behind the anonymity of the net. It is from people with their name and photo on their twitter account.

Another attendee at the session today mentioned the 'coarsening of society' - we are generally getting more unpleasant, more mysognistic all the time. I agree with that, but I think social media can make this a lot worse because of its unique ability to connect like-minded people.

Social media, tribes, and 'finding your (similarly repulsive) people'

I love social media. I love most how it can help you find your people - you can reach all the other Twitter users who happen to have your exact outlook on life, or taste in music, or professional interests, or whatever it might be. It gives us all the chance to deepen and enrich our experiences through sharing them with the like-minded. The old saying about how you can't choose your family, but at least you can choose your friends - that needs updating. Because even your friends are chosen partly based on logistics such as geography, place of work etc. Online you can find people just like you!

However... There's a darker side to this, which is that all the really repulsive people can find all the other really repulsive people. And what they do (this is my pet theory; others may have explored this with proper intellectual rigour) is form their own ersatz society, which comes with different standards of behaviour. It seems to me that a depressingly high percentage of humans really have no private morality at all - the only reason they aren't unpleasant to women (for example) all the time is because society's norms dictate that they can't. Hence, the original problem of anonymity and the net - if you're not accountable to society's norms you can finally act however you like (which for lots of people seems to be: Really Unpleasant!). But now that all these people can find their tribes online, they effectively create a new society where the norms ARE to be unpleasant and misogynistic - so they think nothing of abusing prominent women under their own name and their own image.

God it's depressing.

A project to tackle this

I'd like to see Higher Education Institutions tackling this by preparing academics and researchers (both male and female) for what will happen if they become prominent. I'd like to see students being taught about the scale of the problem as soon as they engage with the online world. Clearly this is a far bigger problem than just an academic one, but we can't all leave it for someone else to fix society. But even tackling this problem head-on is fraught with difficulty - as someone on the panel pointed out, this has the feeling of acceptance: getting abuse is part of being a successful female, so here's some coping strategies, off you go.

Anyhow there is work being done in this area, and I particularly wanted to highlight what Sara Perry, one of the panelists, is doing at the moment. She's collecting data about people's online experiences, and there's been around 200 responses to her survey so far (which is great as it's brand new) - including people saying how they deal with this and offering SOLUTIONS or at least ways of getting through the problem for individuals. That's a great thing, and I can't wait to see what Sara and her team publish at the end of it. (From a purely selfish point of view, I'd like to be able to better advise people who ask me about this in social media workshops about how to deal with it.) So please consider taking the survey - the details and the link are on Sara's blog. Sara is speaking up about really problematic issues here in the hope that it can help others who have endured similar incidents to those she's experienced, which is vital.

If anyone has anything they'd like to add to this in the comments, whether it's general discussion or advice on how to deal with online abuse, please leave a comment below. And if you've made it this far, thanks for reading!

Creating ambient awareness of the Library as authoritative source

 

I've recently become a columnist for Library Journal, along with several others, as part of an Advocates Corner feature all about library marketing and advocacy. Here's where you can read the first of my columns, about the increasingly important practice of marketing with video. The second one went online last week - you can read it here.

It's about creating ambient awareness of the Library as authoritative source - the reason it doesn't say that in the article itself is that it's a much better way of putting it than I could come up with myself! The particular phrase comes from Valarie Kingsland, as part of this tweet responding to the article (see more response below).

The central tenet of the article is something I first grasped when Terry Kendrick explained it to me - that it's very hard to get anyone to take an action as a result of any one-off piece of marketing, and that it is this unrealistic expectation which leaves so many library marketers disappointed. You really have to build an awareness of what you do over time, so you're the first thing people thing of when they DO need your services - rather than expecting them to drop what they're doing and run to the Library when they see your tweet / poster / email / leaflet or whatever... Hence the title of the column - marketing libraries is like marketing mayonnaise, in that no one sees an ad for Hellman's Mayo and rushes out to buy some, but when it comes to the time when they need mayonnaise, Hellman's are foremost in their minds because they see so many ads and promotions. Read the article to see what I'm on about!

The reaction to the piece was fantastic, and I'm really pleased to see how many people really 'got' it. I've documented a small selection of it on Storify.

Echolib / LISNPN / Advocacy: New Year's Round Up

A quick catch-up post for all the stuff I've not mentioned in previous posts but which has happened in the last couple of months.

The Echo Chamber

Lots of echolib stuff has been happening recently. The article I wrote a while ago for Library & Information Update has finished its embargo and so now can be made available - I've been displaying it on the Echo Chamber Netvibes page, but you can also download it in PDF format, here.

Continuing the Stealth Advocising theme from a few weeks back, I created a video version of my If you want to work in libraries... slide-deck. It has some funky hip-hoppy latin music in it that I wrote when I was about 17! Woof. Here it is - as ever, in the interests of spreading the messages far and wide, feel free to use this however you like, embed it wherever, etc etc.

The Slideshare version of this has now been viewed more than ten thousand times, so surely LOADS of those people must be outside the echo chamber, right..?

I also wrote an article for PostLib, the journal for retired librarians! I was really pleased to be asked to do this, I like to see the divide between senior and new professionals being bridged whereever possible. The resultant article is now available: Statistics, the Media and the Library Legacy (PDF) - and owes a big debt to Ian Clark [Thoughts of a Wannabe Librarian] who read it over for me and gave me his approval to use some of his ideas! It mentions the echo chamber in passing - but really the main thrust of it is to note that, if you take combined footfall and internet usage stats, public library use in the UK is actually UP over the last couple of years (quite considerably), contrary to popular reports.

Laura and I will present a new version of the Echo Chamber presentation in Cambridge in a couple of days, to an audience of 200 or so people - the biggest we've spoken to yet, so we're really excited about that.

LISNPN

There's also a couple of articles I wrote about LISNPN, the New Professionals Network, available elsewhere. They're both on CILIP platforms but both are freely available to all - Moving forward together opens Library  Information Gazette in digital form, and The LIS New Professionals Network takes you to CILIP's Information & Advice blog.

Look out for a BIG competition on LISNPN later this month, with a library-related-prize worth literally hundreds of pounds and well worth winning.

Library Routes Project

Remember Library Routes? It's still going! And there's plenty of great entries that have come in in recent months - there's now over 150 contributions from Information Professionals about how they got into librarianship, and their path through the profession. Check it out if you haven't already, or if you've not done so for a while. The project homepage has more than 25,000 views now, so maybe some of those will be from people outside the Echo Chamber too.

Gazette Profile

I was really pleased that Debby Raven featured me in the last but one edition of Gazette, following up on the Essential Careers Advice for New Professionals post. You can read the interview, again via the Digital Gazette magazine platform, here. Incidentally the permanent, to-be-added-to, and containing the wisdom of the people who've commented on the original, version of the Essential Careers Advice post is here on its own page of the blog - check it out and tell if there's anything that needs adding to it. What do you know now that you wish you'd known earlier?

All of these articles are available together on the Papers & Presentations page of my website.

And finally...

I created a hectoring advocacy poster a few weeks back - it's deliberately harsh and provocative, but I do think there is an underlying truth to it.

Phew!

- thewikiman