Category: hve

A collection of the signs I removed from my library

I  never thought I would care passionately about library signage, let alone write a blog post about them, but here we are.

My job title is “Faculty Services and Outreach Librarian” and I have joked that “Outreach Librarian” is the job duty equivalent of “other duties as assigned.”  For me, anyway,  “outreach” includes making the library a welcoming, friendly place for our patron base.

You know…marketing.

Unlike my academic and public library brethren, when I think about marketing and the library, I don’t really have to worry about getting bodies in the door.  Law students will pretty much always use the library.  Heck, they’d live here if we’d let them.

Why bother trying to make them feel welcome? Marketing goes beyond getting them in the door. Or even checking out books (especially in an academic law library where much of the collection doesn’t circulate.)  I hate to break it to you, Gentle Reader, but students don’t always separate the “library” from “the librarian.”  For all they differentiate, you might as well be physically attached to your reference desk.

If the library doesn’t feel friendly and welcoming, then the librarians don’t seem friendly and welcoming. If the librarians don’t seem friendly and welcoming, then the students are not going to feel comfortable asking us questions when they need to.  (Law students are already having to overcome the perceived sense of weakness by having to ask for help in the first place – let’s not make it harder than we have to, eh?)  So I’m implementing alternative venues for students to ask questions and making the website more user friendly and pondering creating Social Networking profiles and revamping the blog and yes, worrying about the library’s signs.   Any gateway to the library, be it real or virtual, is getting the once over from me.

So, let’s talk about the signs.

The picture above is a collection of the signs I removed last week from my library’s walls.   Every day, in getting from the front door of the library to my office and then to the magic coffee machine in Tech Services, I would pass by six of these.  An outdated picture of a cellphone with a giant international no sign over it and “CELLULAR PHONES PROHIBITED” in capital letters.

Granted, I have a well-documented problem with Authority and The Man, but these signs just seemed unnecessarily harsh.  I’d look at them and think, “Geez, did cell phones make fun of your mom? Did they run over your dog? Did one steal your prom date?  WHY THE HATE FOR CELL PHONES???”   Not only were they harsh, but they were also inaccurate.  We don’t care if people text or play games or surf the web with their phone. (I guess there’s also a chance they might be using them productively.)  All we cared about was that the library stayed quiet so that our patrons could study.

After clearing it with the Powers That Be and consulting with the library communities on FriendFeed, I came up with the following new sign….TA-DA!

New Library Cell Phone Sign

This is for the front doors of the library and there are similar ones for the restrooms, stacks, etc.  Clean, peaceful, friendly and up-to-date.  Instead of telling our patrons what they CAN”T do, we’re telling them what they CAN. Plus, it accurately reflects our cell phone policy.   I am pleased.

Sometimes it’s the little things.

Imagine you're at the AALL 2050 Business Meeting in San Francisco, CA:

A librarian no one in 2010 has met, because he hasn't started his career yet, presides as president. After the treasurer's report, it's time to award the president's certificates of recognition. Among those called to the stage: a wizened Jenny Westlaw, honored for 40 years of service to the law library community. As Jenny makes her way to the stage, the librarians spontaneously rise to their feet and give her a standing ovation.

Yeah, right.

I've been trying to figure out something (polite) to say about Ms. Westlaw and her counterpart Johnny since I discovered their existence a couple months ago. (Incidentally, via a site with a url that revealed Thomson Reuters is outsourcing some of their marketing--sloppy, but not a huge surprise.) Since that discovery, the Westlaws have been easy targets for private jokes and mockery.

So here's the thing: the scene described above happened just as I described it this year, except with Cathy Lemann presiding instead of some unknown whipper snapper. And in place of Jenny Westlaw, it was HeinOnline's Dick Spinelli being honored for his 40 years of good work.

And I'm not sure why it took me so long to figure out, but that's when it really struck me: the reason some of us have such a strong negative reaction to Johnny and Jenny is that they are fake people. Characters. Dick is real. And he's got his own, non-scripted personality and has taken time to get to know us over the years, and isn't going to disappear when corporate HQ decides on a different marketing direction.

I like Dick Spinelli. When I visited the Hein booth at SEAALL as a baby librarian, he made me feel welcome and also made it clear that he had a working relationship with my director, mentioning her name without any prompting or guessing. And it's not a problem of old vs. new ways of doing business, because I also like Fastcase's Ed Walters, who let his personal passion for design shine through in the session he spoke at, especially as compared to the more corporate Lexis and Westlaw speakers. I even like my local Lexis and Westlaw reps.

Beyond being merely fake, there's also something a little creepy treehouse about Johnny and Jenny--like we're supposed to pretend it's normal for a legal information vendor to hire actors for us to interact with. (I think I heard that J&J were already Thomson Reuters employees, but the point remains since they're not playing themselves.) I don't know about anyone else, but if that's something I want to do, I'll go to a dinner theater show or visit the Plymouth Colony reenactment, thanks very much. I'm at a loss as to whom they are supposed to appeal to. Maybe students, but definitely not librarians young or old. And I doubt students love them either--they're usually even better than us at detecting fakes.

Sure, it's harder for Westlaw as an entity to connect with us because it's part of a giant corporation. Giant corporations like to be uniform and careful about their public presences, which often results in bland, personality-free communications. No surprise, but I'd rather have bland than fake.

I had a boss in my pre-library life who used to stress to the account reps that ours was a relationship business, not a transaction business. I've come to believe that outlook is valuable across many fields, including our own. I'd bet Spinelli and Walters might even agree with it. Unfortunately for Westlaw, it's pretty hard to have a relationship with a fake person.

So, how about that annual meeting? Law librarians have been talking, just a little. Here's the recap, followed by my two cents:

• Caren Biberman: Some thoughts on Programming at the AALL Annual Conference
• Mark Gediman: A Modest Proposal on Programming at AALL
• Caren Biberman: Dream Big or Comments on “A “Modest Proposal on Programming at AALL” and the Report of the AALL Annual Meeting Review Special Committee
• Mark Gediman: Programming at AALL – A Modest Follow-Up…
• Nina Platt: My Experience in Participating in the AALL Programming Process or AALL Educational Programming Needs to go Back to School
• Jason Eiseman: A defense of AALL (sort of)
• Tracy Thompson-Przylucki: AALL Conference - How About a "Less is More" Approach?
• Tom Boone: Three suggestions for improving AALL program selection
• AALL: Annual meeting program planning – FAQs July 2010
• Richard Leiter: Time for change at AALL?

First, an observation: as I mentioned on Twitter after the first couple posts in the list above, I'm not entirely happy with the AALL annual meeting--content, process, and format--so I'm amused by the implication that we academic librarians love it just as it is. I know there's a longstanding assumption that AALL is academic biased, but that doesn't mean we don't have just as many suggestions on how the meeting could be better.

How many times have you heard someone say (or said yourself) the best parts of the meeting happen between sessions or after hours? After attending the meeting for just a few year (Denver will be my fifth), I know I was saying it as early as after my second meeting. And we usually say it like it's a good thing, although there is an element of putting down the programming sometimes.

I'm not going to say much about the content of programs other than to say I've been to good and bad sessions that have been both targeted and for general audiences. Some of the best programs I've attended have been those not in my general area of interest (if you go by my job description), or those that might appear frivolous (the fabulous program last year about comic books). So I'm not sure that changing the focusing or targeting will do much to improve the programs. My biggest complaint about the content has to do with accuracy in labeling of beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, and wanting more intermediate and advanced programming--something I know is being worked on.

The process of proposing and coordinating programs is getting closer to where my concern is. First, proposals have typically been due within weeks of the previous meeting. The proposal deadline was pushed back this year, which is great, but not enough. Information, technology, and library trends are changing too rapidly to have the entire program save a handful of hot topics decided on so far in advance. When I go to a session, I want to hear more of what people are working on this year, and less about what they did last year.

The process also feels mired in a time when we relied on post office and the AMPC members meeting live to discuss it. It wasn't easy to distribute proposals to more than a handful of people. But that hasn't been the case in a long time. AALL did a great job of explaining the rating and weighting process in the program planning FAQ, but it's time to have more content decided on by direct vote of members. Others have mentioned and I have long (well, okay, two years) been a proponent of doing the selecting for, say, half the sessions by a system like SXSW's panel picker. Are there sound alike sessions? Let us decide which one sounds better. Are there trends or topics that the 7-member committee is missing? Let the membership find them. That said, if people are unhappy now, it might be complete chaos if AMPC didn't exist to provide some checks, but the balance in the process could nevetheless be shifted a few more notches from oligarchy toward democracy without danger.

The format of the meeting is where most of my concern is. Those in-the-hallway, between-sessions, after-hours moments when solutions are shared and new ideas are sparked? Let's figure out a way to have more of those during the meeting.

The majority of AALL presentations fall into the broadcast format: many people listening to one person or panel for the majority of the session, followed by a small question and answer period, but not much interaction among the attendees. I've seen intra-audience interaction happen during both main and feedback segments of programs, but it's rare.

If we're all going to the trouble and expense of getting ourselves together, wouldn't it be great if we could find more ways to facilitate more generative programs? Check Roger Martin's definition of generative meetings:

a meeting designed for the participants to generate through the dialogue something that didn't exist before the meeting and wouldn't come into existence except through the dialogue. Generative meetings have always been extremely valuable because, in a sense, they generate new intellectual property that comes about because of the real-time interplay between the minds of intelligent people.

That sounds a little like Lawberry Camp, doesn't it? The Camp is happening again this year, but I was disappointed when AALL decided not to accept it as an official workshop. Sure, the explanation that workshops require measurable learning outcomes makes sense rationally, but "learning outcome" is not the only valuable outcome. I appreciate the statement that the association believes the unconference and PLL summit should be held and supported, but as a member of the sponsoring SIS on the former, it didn't feel supportive when we heard how the program was accepted--especially when there was a snafu that initially led to it not getting a room assignment on the schedule or the requested AV equipment.

What would I most like to see change in the annual meeting? More open and practical support of non-traditional programming. Not just Lawberry Camp, but unconference sessions in other programming slots. More variety and creativity in formats. To toot the CS-SIS horn again, sessions like the Cool Tools Cafe that got people moving around the entire room. I'm not sure about everything that needs to change to make that happen, but I do know we need more support from AALL/AMPC and a willingness to be flexible on what constitutes an outcome. On the other side, maybe we need to do stuff like encourage Sarah and Jason to list outcomes from previous instances of Lawberry Camp as potential learning outcomes, or focus on the types of problems that attendees can expect to work on solving.

Here's what I don't want to happen: new, creative, innovative sessions just stacked on the existing, already overflowing program schedule to compete with the main stage(s). Like Tracy said, less is more. Many people are overbooked already. I'd love to see the dominant but deprecated broadcast format give up some space to opportunities to generate new ideas, solve problems, build relationships, and make the annual meeting a must-attend event. Here's Roger Martin again:

most meetings are still run on the tried-and-true broadcast platform and that is why the majority of people think that meetings are generally a waste of time. They don't have to be, but they generally are.

Need evidence that law librarians love generativity? Don't listen to the haters; check out the thriving law librarian community and conversations--serious as often as silly--that happen on Twitter.

Here you’ve put me in an awkward position.

See, now I have to defend AALL’s annual meeting program, and that really isn’t something I wanted to do.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the criticism of AALL’s programming you need to catch up. First, read Some thoughts on Programming at the AALL Annual Conference, then A Modest Proposal on Programming at AALL, then Dream Big or Comments on “A “Modest Proposal on Programming at AALL” and the Report of the AALL Annual Meeting Review Special Committee, Programming at AALL – A Modest Follow-Up…, and finally My Experience in Participating in the AALL Programming Process or AALL Educational Programming Needs to go Back to School.

Just to tell you where I am coming from in this discussion: I have worked at an academic library for the last year and a half, and spent 5 years before that as a firm librarian.

There seems to be a lot going on in these various posts and I’ll try to break it down.

Several of the blog posts and some comments say there is not enough relevant programming for firm librarians. But as a former firm librarian I can see relevant programing at almost every time slot. The very first time slot includes sessions on supervisory skills and digital collection development. Sessions on authentic online legal information, copyright, and instruction skills are also have relevance to firm librarians. From my own experience, I could see relevance in sessions on FOIA requests, accounting skills, and even historical legal research. I think, selfishly, one of my own sessions, Going Mobile: new tools to keep your library’s information moving is very relevant. At the firm I was at every lawyer had a Blackberry. Just today I heard a story of lawyers at one firm demanding IT support their iPads.

I suspect the real underlying complaint is not that there is a lack of relevant sessions, but a lack of sessions specifically targeted to firm librarians. For example, the Copyright session is not “Copyright for firm librarians,” it is a general copyright session. This complaint is, in my opinion, slightly more valid if somewhat untrue.

Like Nina Platt, I do not see firm librarians getting the short end of the stick. In fact, part of the problem with annual meeting programming is that it seems too often to try to cater to everyone and in some respects ends up not catering to anyone in particular. One of the surprises I’ve found as I’ve become more involved with AALL as an academic librarian is that many academic librarians don’t think AALL does a good job of catering to them at all. So while firm librarians may think they have it bad, they are not alone, they are not victims (despite Nina Platt’s anecdote), AALL needs to do a better job of catering to all their member’s needs.

Mark Gediman at the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog suggests breaking up the conference into tracks based on type of library. This solution may certainly be worth a try. And apparently the Private Law Library section Summit was created in response to the problems firm librarians have had with AALL programming. I can’t say that as a firm librarian I would have been uninterested in the PLL Summit agenda, but the agenda does not seem particularly geared towards firm librarians compared to the general annual meeting agenda.

The first part of the summit addresses persuasive communications, time management, better presentations, and business skills. These are not skills unique to law firm librarians and some even seem to be addressed by AALL regular programming. For example, annual meeting program E1 is “Using Pecha Kucha to Enhance your presentations.” Comparing the summit agenda with the annual meeting programming you will see additional items already covered in the annual meeting.

I think the need for such a summit would be a little more convincing if the opportunities for such a thing hadn’t already existed within the AALL annual meeting. Besides the examples I’ve already mentioned there is also the Lawberry Camp unconference I’ve worked on with Sarah Glassmeyer. When we were originally proposing the unconference we asked both PLL and the Academic section to co-sponsor it. We then wanted to include the Court section, thus trying to include all members. When PLL and ALL-SIS seemed to not be interested we abandoned that plan.

Lawberry Camp is currently free, and Sarah and I are dedicated to keeping it at a very low cost for members in the future as well. Firm librarians would be welcome to come to the unconference, start up firm-specific round tables, give firm-oriented lightening talks and get to interact with librarians from other library types. We would also be willing to work with them to provide some sort of forum within Lawberry camp, as we’ve tried to do with attendees of the cancelled Creative Commons workshop.

Now, some criticism of AALL programming is warranted. At the recent CALI conference a random law school IT worker sitting next to me on a bus complained about the programming process and how onerous it was. And the process for presenting this year, my first experience, has not been pleasant.

But AALL has made some efforts to improve. Already AALL has shown a willingness to try adding tracks to the conference, moving around deadlines, and hopefully more improvements will come. Furthermore, AALL goes out of it’s way to ensure firm librarians are recognized in AALL leadership, committees, and organization.

There’s plenty to criticize with the AALL annual meeting. But having now attended AALL as a firm librarian and an academic I’m not convinced that firm librarians have a particularly strong grievance against AALL compared with the grievance every member should have over the current programing process.