 Thank you. How wonderful to be here. I'm just delighted to be here. I want to thank Sheila for all the emails and arrangements and everything and for making everything so easy. I'm happy to be here to share some things with you all. I'm not going to talk about the economic crisis. I'm not going to talk about tough economic times. I could care less. Let's talk about other things for just a little while, if that's okay. We've all had enough of that. We can go back to reality tomorrow night. Well, you can go back to reality. I go back to teaching for a living. He's working for a living, so I'm more than happy to be heading back home. Our quarter hasn't started yet, so it's all still bright and sunny and shiny and the students turn up on Tuesday and they'll all be down hill from there. Before I get too far started, though, we have always known, those of us who educate people for our profession, have always known that our best eyes and ears for the next generation of the profession is you all, because a few pussies in the ground. Those students you work with, the people who work in your library, who have yet to receive the degree, et cetera, who you think are going to be the next great generation to take our places and do terrific work in the profession, send them our way. It's highschool.Washington.edu. There are lots of other really good schools. We're just slightly better. Highschool.Washington.edu. We've had a great, strong tradition of lots of terrific Montana folks over the last several years, especially in the online program, but also, residentially, application deadline for very first. I'm particularly happy to be here because it helps me fill in a little thing on the map. This is my 44th state. It's my first visit to Montana, which I find really hard to imagine. And it's my 44th state, so I'm doing fairly well. I'll never get to Delaware. How I miss Delaware. You can't quite see Delaware, it's in the center. How I miss Delaware all those years, looking back, you still never know. The ones in the bottom... Of course, I'm being on tape. Hi! I love to come to Arkansas someday, or Mississippi for that. I think it's hard to imagine I'm going to get to Arkansas. Oh, Georgia. I don't know why I'm going to Georgia. So, it's 25. Ooh, it's 25. See, I got picked up the statement. I don't even know I get it. It's got a little brain fart. I am delighted to be. And I am delighted to bring you greetings from the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Those of you who've been to Seattle know that it looks like that every day. It's looked like that every day this summer. We've had one of those summers that just won't quit. So, yeah, we all live on Queen Anne. We all live in the mountain every day. We all go around the space and do our video every day. It's amazing that things are beautiful. And if you've been to Seattle, you might have been here. Has anybody actually been to... It's quite a place, isn't it? This is the main central library of Seattle Public Library downtown Seattle. On the side of the original two buildings. So, it was a Carnegie library and it was sort of mid-50s monstrosity. And now we have this, which, say what you will about it, and people have said all kinds of things about it, is quite a striking building. And it's not a tourist map. It's kind of other... And you see it like in the background of commercials and so on, even national commercials. It's quite extraordinary. So, I want to start with a few pictures of libraries just to give us to thinking about the way we think about libraries and how they're used and what they're for. The main story I want to tell about this building is that it got killed. Seattle is one of those cities where everybody has to agree on everything. And so, consequently, nothing ever gets done. You know, we're all sitting around drinking lattes in the rain. You know, oh, I don't know what you think about this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And as a consequence, I mean, we can't get a decent mass transit system. We can't get the roads fixed. We can't... Nothing gets done. Except this building. So, the people of the city passed a bond issue 15 years ago now, which renovated every branch in the system, built new ones, expanded most of them, and built this thing. Now, it takes a lot of force of will to get a building like that built anywhere, let alone in a city where everybody has to agree on everything. So, this is the monument to Deborah Jenkins, who was the city librarian for many years, got this building built and used to teach for us when she was city librarian, taught the public libraries and advocacy class, and used to bring the mayor, the mayor of Seattle, and his two thuggish bodyguards. You can always tell when Deborah was teaching them, they, you know, meet the mayor class because you have these, you know, behemoths in the hallway, you know, little earpieces, and they even see the kids. Yeah, in a library school, they blend it really well. So, this building got built because the people of the city of Seattle thought it was important to spend the money on a bond issue to build libraries. This is my branch of Seattle Public. This is the northeast branch, about four or five blocks from my house. And some of them were washed out with the light, but you can see it. It looks like an urban public library. There's people on the computers, that's the DVDs and audio books in the backgrounds, the kids' room and, you know, there's kids all around the carpet over there, and there's an eating room and the stacks and a reference desk. You know, it looks like a public library. Actually, this branch was, is the largest in the system. Not much bigger than this room, but it's the largest in the system. And he's now being renovated again. This opened four years ago, five years ago. It's being renovated again because the whole space wasn't big enough. So they're expanding the whole space. They're moving the children's collection around. So already it's not, it's being fixed, which is fascinating to me. When you see a public library branch like this, it sort of looks like a living room. It's very comfortable. It's very warm and inviting, except for the halls, which are now the building and they're moving that around. This gives us a vision of libraries that are sort of every day a part of your life, a part of the community, part of the reason that the branches in Seattle were so small was because there's so many of them. Seattle is one of those cities where they decided to have lots of little branches all over the place. And so there's something like, I should know this, but I live there and I'm a librarian. It's 30, 40 branches in the city proper and the rest of the county has a different system and there's more there. So you're never more than, you know, 10 or 15 minute drive from anywhere in the city from a public library branch. And so that tells us something about the way we think about libraries, the way we feel about libraries, and in particular the way normal people feel about libraries. Not us because we're not normally more, but the way they do. So this is one of my libraries. This is the other one. This is the main, you know, the life idea. So this is the main reading room of the Sousa Little Library, which is the main university library of the University of Washington. And it's one of these big old, you know, mid-20s neo-Gothic parallels, you know, the way they did. This was built at a time when the president of the university referred to the University of Washington, which was still undergoing fairly radical growth in those days, referred to it as the University of a Thousand Years. And if you're going to build the University of a Thousand Years, that's the library that you put smack in the middle of it. So, I mean, it is physically in the dead center of campus, right on Red Square, and right off the vista where you can see Mount Rainier. And this tells us something about the way we think about libraries, too. If this is your living room and you're comfortable and you go get, you know, you get your sort of everyday needs mapped here, this speaks of libraries as something that is enduring and noble and important. This is important, too, but in different ways. So, sort of simultaneously, this is how people think about libraries. And it's sort of the way we think about them, too, the everyday and the eternal, the ordinary and the noble. And so this tells us how we think and feel about libraries. We want that to just sort of tickle away in the back of your head. As I switch gears a little bit and talk about reference. So I was born to be a reference librarian and my mother was a reference librarian. You know, it's a genetic thing. She gave me the whole almanac every year for Christmas and I used to read it and read it every year. You know, they moved an index from the front to the back. I didn't even know it for, like, five years because who uses the index? Because you know we're reading it. Say I agree. A lot of you probably read this article. This is the first article we know of that talks about reference. He doesn't use the word. Personal relations with readers. We don't call them readers anymore, but we don't call them personal relations anymore either. So that's probably just as well. Readers in popular libraries, what we would call public libraries today, need a great deal of assistance. This is 1876. This is particularly needed by persons unused in handling books or conducting investigations. There isn't a whole lot new there. Green in 1876 says we help people because there's too much stuff and it's hard to find. Now this is 1876 in the Worcester Free Library in Massachusetts, which I don't know, but I'm guessing fits in this room too. And there are people. Now this is also the time when there are the cataloging wars are going on. So there's like a couple dozen competing cataloging codes. You walk into different libraries with no idea what the cataloging structure was. This is when public libraries are being built. This is when there's the big debate about open stacks versus closed stacks. Not as a preservation argument, but as a service argument. So there was a strong service argument for closed stacks in public libraries that people would get better service if there were closed stacks. Because... Things stay in order? Well, things stay in order. So that makes it easier for us. But better service with closed stacks in a public library because... They would have to ask for assistance and you were more qualified than they were trying to say once more. They might pick the wrong thing. So we'll just stop that because we'll tell them what to write. Thank goodness we don't do that. Those days are over. Greene talks about searching Mr. Poole's wonderful new index, Poole's index period of literature, evaluating resources, instruction, consumer information, okay it's about lightning rods, but still it's consumer information. So for services, which is you go find something and give it to the mayor so that he will love you and then give you more money. Readers advisory, there's time at the end, I'll tell the readers advisory story yourself. Medical medical providers, etc. Be nice. Don't make it dependent on you. Don't take a point of view on politics. There's not a lot that's new here. And this is 130 plus years ago. My favorite work about reference is still Margaret Hutchins. I'm going to talk about reference in the middle part of the 20th century. This is 1944. Reference work includes the direct personal aid. Love that phrase. Direct personal aid within a library. So remember library. You know what a library is now. We know a library. Two persons in search of information for whatever purpose blah blah blah. Most of the rest of that is necessary. Direct personal aid within a library. That's a powerful concept. It's a powerful phrase. And we'll come back to that too. And then this is at the end of her book. This is a text book, but this is at the end of her book. Reference is becoming indispensable public service because it saves, she's making three points here. It saves the money of the individual. Okay. We make the money-saving argument all the time. You know, we subscribe to ProQuest and Nepsco, OED, Britannica. So that everybody else, so that everybody can use it. And you don't have to have individual subscriptions to journals. You don't have to have departmental collections, whatever. The money argument I think we may, probably don't make it as convincingly as we could. I don't think people really get how much money we're actually saving. But saving money in the end. Okay. We're cool with that. By furnishing skill built a graphical aid that would reference work. In the use of reference materials, it saves the time of busy people. I don't think we make the time argument as often or as well or as compelling. In an age of Google and Wikipedia and all of that, the time-saving argument may seem counterintuitive. It may seem like Google's got to be faster. And for many things, Google is faster. But there are also things where we are faster. Because we are able to do things that normal people can't do or think of. And I'll come back to that as we go. But I think the time argument, the time-saving argument in a world where the information is no longer in scarce supply. In Greens Day and Hutchins Day, for that matter, information is the commodity in scarce supply. Now it's not. In scarce supply, it's time and attention. So making the argument that we can save people's time and, by extension, they can do a better job with the time they have, is still a compelling argument and one that we've kind of lost track of over the years. And ensures, or third argument, ensures possession of facts which by themselves they could not obtain. You know, substitute information for facts and resources and materials, whatever you want to say. We let them do things that they couldn't otherwise do by themselves. And that's, I think that's the key to a lot of it, so we'll come back to that in a little while. So, we'll wash it out, too. I hope that looks like a reference desk. It is a reference desk. Here's what it is. Okay. And it's a beautiful, a beautiful, I mean it's not dissimilar to these chandeliers, actually. The beautiful raw iron chandelier and the nice carved wood reference desk and the beautiful wood columns of the books in the background and there isn't a laptop sitting on there, but if there was, you could probably work there tomorrow, right? And it'd be kind of cool. Which is lovely. And this is a hundred-year-old fiction. This is the Northampton Public Library in Massachusetts in 1905. Now, I'm all for charm, history, and la la la, and whatever. But, if we were nurses and doctors and if that was an operating theater from 1905, your first instinct would not be, hey, I'd be keen to work there. So, you know what we do. We examine the information needs of our communities and the individuals when they survey and understand the information environment, figure out what to do with it or else. I said I wouldn't talk about tough times or else. I don't know how many of you read inside higher ed on a regular basis. Just to see it this morning, this clown from somewhere in California, San Jose, San Diego, there's always some clown in California. Like the Vice President Frutman, Vice Provost for Administration, you know what they're like. Kill me. Who says, you know, most academic library services will be outsourced in the next ten years. Cataloging can be outsourced at other libraries. Why didn't we think about that? Why didn't we think about other libraries doing each other's cataloging? Holy cow! That's my key. Holy crap! What a bad idea! Or better yet, we could outsource cataloging to Google. Hey, that's going to save a lot of time. There's kind of nonsense going on, especially in this kind of climate. So that's my only, you know, good review about tough things in all the time. So this clown is running around in some kind of climate. Now I do James Mio from Columbia is like, you know, you're kind of full of crap, which is reassuring. Because he kind of is. But you know, it's kind of right, is that, you know, if you're our Vice Provost for Planning and Budgeting, your job is to, like, kill people. So, that's our focus. You know, I mean, your job is to get the budget down and, look, there's a tasty thing right across the square. Look at that big building. Is there anybody in there anymore? Does anybody go to the library? I just Google all the time. Okay, first of all, he probably does. So that's an education ever on our part. If Vice Provost for Administration sees us as a big old box that nobody goes to anymore, we're already there. So, go home to your Vice Provost of Budgeting and Administration, whoever that person is, buy them a muffin basket, take them on tour of the library, pet them, you know, buy them what their hobbies are, do a little alert service, you know, maybe slip something into their drink or whatever, you know, hypnotize them, whatever you have to do, you know, get pictures of them and some sort of I don't think we're about that sort of thing these days. And make sure that they know what you do because it doesn't matter. I mean, it matters if the students of the faculty and everybody else knows what you do, but if the people with the money don't know what you do, so that was a little unwelcome to anybody. The information environment that we live in continues to evolve. It always has. And so, I'm going to tell you about technology that you don't already know. It just keeps, it just keeps. The thing is that when people think about what's happening to libraries like this clown, or even O.K., I mean, it's never stopped before. You know, they think about the way things are changing in the library world and it immediately becomes a technological thing. You know, it's about the internet, it's about Google, it's about Twitter, it's about Second Life, it's about Facebook, it's about, it's about, well, it kind of is, but it is but it's also kind of about the incredibly volatile information marketplace we find ourselves in. You know, when Disney bought Marvel, you know, that's a big thud right there. There's, you know, this kind of consolidation when Elsevier, between Elsevier and, you know, a handful of others, Emerald, sorry. That's published in the same article over and over again. Sorry. I think one of those kinds of news today for some reason, so, just strap yourselves in. You've got more and more of what we always thought of as traditional stuff in fewer and fewer hands. You think about what Disney owns, you think about what Elsevier owns, you think about what Bertelsmann owns, you think about what the News Corporation owns, you think about Clear Channel owns, you know, a handful of these monstrous, maybe a double handful, these monstrous corporations in A.L. Thompson. And everything that they own. And so you've got fewer and fewer people to deal with, which is nice, except that you have fewer and fewer choices. And, you know, the big deal is a symptom of that and these horrible license agreements are a symptom of that and pricing structures for journals that are completely out of lack of reality or, you know, journals that cost $30,000, $40,000 a year about peace. How? All of that's a symptom of that. At exactly the same time that consolidation has happened at exactly the same time that there's this incredible explosion of free stuff. The blogosphere and social networking and podcasts and Twitter and the free web and all of that. So you've got all of this stuff that's now free and kind of out there and kind of everywhere and kind of, you know, you tell me and more and more of the traditional stuff in fewer and fewer hands. That's a, I don't think any previous generation of librarians has ever faced anything like that. Back to a shabbat call. You know, I think that's new to us. And what does that mean? How does that, among other things, it means that people don't pay attention because it's harder to get the good stuff and it's easier to get the crap or the free stuff and then you've got to figure out what the good stuff is among the free stuff. And you is everybody. We have a role to play in helping with that but I digress. So that information marketplace just continues to get volatile. There are profound social and demographic changes at work in our society. By the middle of the century there's, by the middle of this century there's no majority as a racial group. In the United States non-Hispanic rates will be 47% for the U.S. population by 2050. Within 20 years or so the median, the number of people 65 or older will be something like 60 million. That's going to be more and we'll age out into the over 65 category. That kind of society is going to have different kinds of information needed and approach information differently. And that's going to affect the way all the political stuff intellectual property copyright privacy intellectual freedom on and on and on I think we think differently now than we used to. Because I was driving to the airport yesterday how frightening is this? Because I was driving to the airport yesterday I was listening to NPR and there was this big story about texting while driving which first of all I don't have a cell phone never had a cell phone so I'm not one of these people but the study that they cited said that almost half of people under 30 said they text while they drive. Now this is on I5 as I'm in there this was not what I wanted to hear and they talked to this young woman who had this horrible accident she was texting she's like 19 she had this horrible accident ran through a stop sign broke her ankle broke her shoulder blah blah blah was in a wheelchair for 6 months yada yada yada and a year later she was texting she said I tried really hard I was only texting I could stop lights I only had 5 minutes but I just couldn't stop it was like she's a hero in that and she's and they talked to these teenagers who were like I like texting while I'm driving it's fine I got my freaking rose Utah just passed this law where you tell somebody texting while driving it's 15 years if that works Utah Utah good for that so we think they're from there I mean people can actually text while they drive they must do because they're now picking up bodies off the street every other day but we think different oh this is always a fun question so I'm not going to answer because it's a horrible question I want to go around this to the side door I want to talk about what it means to be in the library because I think that remember Margaret Hutchins direct personal aid would be in the library so what does it mean to be in the library I think that's a much more interesting question and I think it has an answer so physically this is an easy question to get you are in the library when you're in the library when you cross the threshold so when somebody crosses the threshold when they walk in the building they're in the library and we recognize that so people I'm imagining in most of your institutions people without borrowing privileges if I were to walk into one of your libraries tomorrow I would get to do lots of things I could use the catalog I could use the databases I could use Xerox I could browse the stacks I could read I could do a lot of things I can't borrow maybe I can print maybe I can't maybe I can download maybe I can't but I could do lots of things because I'm in the library so we all recognize that that's a thing and when people you know they're in the library in the library that's an easy thing to figure out are you in the library when you visit a book kind of I mean it's an extension of the library and that's a much the same thing about a branch either a departmental branch on a college campus or a public library branch you know part of the reason Seattle built lots of little branches all over the place and part of the reason why you know it has like 16 branch libraries on our campus is because you want you want libraries and their services and things to be as close to people as possible now you get advantages by collaboration but you also get advantages by dispersion so this idea of dispersing the library of having the library be in lots of different manifestations in lots of different places is a very old idea so virtual in the in digital space this gets a little sticky and this a lot of this manifests in license group but if you follow the same kind of reasoning people are in the library when they cross the digital threshold so when they hit the website when they do a search on the catalog or a database when they ask you a reference question on chat or email or a web form or something when they download an audio book or an ebook when they are somehow in contact with you or the resources or the space in some way virtually I think that's sort of crossing the virtual threshold I think they are in the library when they are on your website when they are searching your databases when they are gauging you for a reference interaction when they are doing something like that they are in the library and for I think for many people that's not a foreign concept there are a lot of people who use libraries much more virtually than they do physically I certainly am I certainly am in Seattle Public way more frequently online than I am in person because it's easier for them and I'd say much the same for the university library because I'm far more frequently engaged on the website than I want to build I have to go on the building quite a bit but buildings are quite a bit but hmm so this notion of being in the library in a virtual sense is important so this is my sort of distillation of being in the library people are in the library anywhere, anytime, any way that they are interacting with information is organized, provided, supported by their own community via the staff and there's lots of important pieces in there and they're pulled as a part of the set that's what it means to be in the library to me so what does that mean the library so let's go back around to the original question what's a library to me that's these things and I got my first introduction to this when a group of my students at Michigan many years ago built the internet public library so they were thinking really hard about what it means to be a library with no physical presence and we began to pull out what it meant to be a library and what the important features are so if this is a good definition for oops being in the library then the library is having an implication the place and I mean that both physically and virtually and stuff and the support and the interaction between people and information and resources and the values that surround to me those are the five essential things you have to be to be a library stuff place help the library interaction and value if you tweak those you get a different kind of inclusion if you tweak interaction you get an archive if you tweak values you get a bookstore you tweak stuff you get a museum and so to me that's a good sort of equation for thinking about what a library is and what it does and what it has to be everyone of those is going to change radically in the near term the nature of place I'll talk more about that in a minute the stuff is clearly changing as we become increasingly digital the nature of the interaction between people and information as I said texting and writing in-texticated that's a great word I love that driving on in-texticated just to stay off my freaking road which is all I got the values that's an interesting one are there new values that we should adopt for increasing the digital world in the library and clearly the nature of the support evolves with that as well so this implies to me a much broader notion of library and librarianship that I think we are used to thinking about that the library is now somewhere and everywhere to meet good libraries great libraries all libraries have to be somewhere and everywhere the physical presence matters the public library is living room the academic library is information commons I'm a huge fan of that because that's a place where you come and you study together you work together you investigate together it makes a point it makes a case for the importance of this sort of thing it is also absolutely necessary for housing physical objects like books and DVDs and part of all materials and print journals and so on so you gotta have a physical place for that stuff even if that stuff becomes increasingly digital so you have to be somewhere there has to be a physical location but you also have to be everywhere because you know especially in a state like Montana you know better than I do but you have people all over how creation and they're gonna want to interact with stuff all the time everywhere so both of those are important both of those are important somewhere and everywhere that to me captures a lot of stuff and this difference in the way we think about information and the difference that we interact with it I think it's deeply bound up with the notion of physical presence as someone who doesn't have a cell phone does anybody else not have a cell phone? we should have a club isn't it interesting to be the one that people bump into when they're walking down a sidewalk texting or whatever you see things that other people don't see because you're not on a cell phone I don't mean to be snide about this I just don't need one I don't want one of our kids just me and so I don't need one but what seems to what it looks like to me is that as people tweet and post Facebook updates and read on people's Facebook updates and I am with each other and text with each other and are involved in things like Second Life and World of Warcraft and Halo the new Halo just got released the other day there were like 5,000 people in Seattle at the release party they're on the phone they're in person it is easier and doing those things sometimes simultaneous it seems as though it's almost like little pieces of themselves are now in multiple places so you're on the phone with somebody but you're also reading people's Facebook updates and so there's a little piece of you on Facebook there's a little piece of you in World of Warcraft there's a little piece of you in a text message there's a little piece of you in a phone conversation I don't want to get metaphysical about this but I think people can be now in multiple places at the same time interacting with different groups people interacting with interacting with lots of different groups and this seems to be increasingly available and important so it's almost like people are shooting out little pieces of themselves as kind of I almost think of it like 10 girls like they're shooting these little pieces themselves out and those little pieces connect with other people's little pieces and so you know I'm reading people's Facebook updates and I'm like well I don't really remember you from high school but it's nice to know that your kid just went to soccer that's what I care for not going to reunion last summer and you know you just sort of little bits and pieces little connections all over the place in a much more enmeshed way I remember when it was a big deal if I could use the phone by myself when I was in high school and it's just entirely different things those presences those pieces of people are tied to these environments so people on Facebook have information needs they're getting solved one way or another people in second life are having information needs and other kinds of virtual environments have information needs and those are getting satisfied in some way and in all these other kind of ways of being as well and those information needs don't go away just because you're you know somewhere slightly more distant interacting with people so to me you put all of this together and I come up with two conclusions the first of which is to be where they are that's an old song I think and the book came up with that first it was under her or he but I'll give it to her you have to be where they are and and to me that is not just branches not just the appropriate hours not just it's positioned and ready to support and assist and participate in what they want to do on their terms in all of those places it's not unlike to me thinking about if your institution was developing a new degree program or you had a new faculty member with a research agenda who was joining the institution you would interact with them to try to design services, go to collections think about instructional needs that they would have you would work to as the institution is sort of gaining new territory in public library and interviews like a new neighborhood or a new area or something like that as you were adding new intellectual territory to what you do you would think about what services to offer I think there's an analogy to this kind of multiple present digital world that as people spend more and more time in these digital environments that's where they're spending their lives and they're still your people so infolding that into what you do infolding that into your services into your interaction into your concept of place into your values all of those because that will infold and embrace them and who they are and what they want to do that's a challenge I don't think it's insurmountable I think that's the sort of thing we do all the time but it's almost like you're adding new territory you add new territory to develop services and collections to satisfy so that's one way to think about it so that's conclusion number one conclusion number two this is really hard but I think it's true because we have to be better and we do a great job in person one of the things I love most about my profession is that student who's out in LJ a couple of years ago that asked the survey of librarians and I said you know if you had to do over again would you do it all again would you become a librarian like 90% of us said yes I would do it again I mean how many professions please my partner's a lawyer trust me 90% of them would not do it all over again certainly not the same way there's not a lot of professions that can say that and that's because we love what we do and we do a great job people walk into your buildings and interact with you and they get terrific service and we have to be better on them so when they cross the physical threshold and they walk into your building they've made a commitment they've walked across campus perhaps walking through the snow yes I remember how to drive through the snow but I don't have to anymore when they walk through the door and they've slogged across campus or they've driven to campus or made whatever trip they need to make they cross that threshold and they've made a commitment and they warned them like they were going to do what they came to do they're going to pick up the hold they're going to search the database they're going to meet with you they're going to browse the sacks interact with their study group whatever it is they're going to do they're going to do it and it's just weird physically and interpersonally to walk into a building and look around and like but it just doesn't happen so the comment will stay for a little while and then look up online if they're searching your database if they're searching your catalog if they're on a chat reference interaction with you if they're somehow interacting with you virtually and it's not going really well I'll try Wikipedia I'll try Amazon I'll try Google I'll try Yahoo Answers I'll try I'll try Amazon everything is a click away and so if the services that we provide online are not better more compelling more interesting of higher quality and this is a really hard thing to think about because it's how do we do better how do we do better than services that we've been after for a hundred years and have gotten the hang of to me this conclusion is inescapable that we have to better online because the competition is so much stiffer now there are situations where we're the only game in town I grant you that and when that's the case then but in an increasingly digital increasingly competitive information marketplace everything's a click away and for some people they're even proper we'll like Wikipedia better because it's easy to use but then you should actually read it and tell me if you'd still like it so I do have a couple ideas I'm going to spend the next day or so talking about this stuff just a couple things to get you thinking the word reference I'm going to be a reference librarian I'm going to be a reference librarian the six months that I spent a few days a few days a week working at the King County Library which is the big county library system and they had the phone reference service with the big lazy Susan and reference books and the little thing of drool just started going down my story and they let me wear the headset I'm like ohhhh I'm happy to stay in my life I think that's a terrible word reference is a dumb word because it means nothing it means something to us but to normal people means nothing weird and I wrote books about reference so don't get me wrong it tracks your thinking if you think of what you do as reference work you think of reference work as what you do and there's nothing wrong with that but now we're back to the reference desk in 1905 so you think of reference work as search and collection development and readers advisory and instruction yeah that's all fine try that that's been around for a long time so I'm not telling you anything you don't already know like mediation but if you it's like you know if you think about what we do as helping to connect people with what they're looking for then that opens up lots of interesting doors like outreach services now an outreach can mean going to faculty meetings department of faculty meetings it can mean trying a service on twitter somebody somebody I mean there's been a discussion on digiref about twitter services in the last few weeks which is interesting can everything prove it was I always want to say it's UCLA but it wasn't they talk at a conference once about they tried a twitter reference service and it kind of fumbled along for a while until the athletic department they loved it did anybody else read this story was it Penn State thank you I've been talking about UCLA for years Penn State and they loved it because that way you couldn't be doing the homework for them for the athletes because in 140 characters you can't do their homework okay great it's an easily virtue like any virtue we can get advocacy there's a lot to be advocated for on university campuses these days about things like open access about things like alternative methods of scholarly communication intellectual freedom that sort of thing I think marketing is in there somewhere if you think about that is helping people find ways to connect to what they're looking for and I'm a real fan of tool building some of my students think I invented the idea of a Pathfinder because they never heard of it Pathfinders are great on the web Pathfinder is a portal it's much more exciting it's much sexier to call it a portal but it's a little subject Pathfinder that I did in my reference class he's a great way of pulling together here are the right words to search here's the right journals, here's the right call numbers here's the right websites, here's the organizations it's a great way to put a lot of stuff together have you seen the videos that Cornell has done about the research minutes videos they put up on YouTube a little 90 second how to search a database how to tell the difference between a magazine article and journal article that kind of thing they're fun, they're cute, they have a little music in the background I love them because they're how many thousands of library brochures have been written about I think some of them which have been ignored by generation and generation of college students make a video, oh look it's huge follow the shiny objects but you know, okay if you're distracted by shiny objects we make shiny objects, this is not fun we can yell at them or we can help them can you do both? I think how many times can you watch an iPhone commercial there's an app for that before you start to wonder where those are there's an app for that, there's an app for that 75,000 apps in the app store so they tell me, I don't know myself 75,000 apps, there's gotta be library apps and widgets for people's you know, one of my favorite ideas this was years ago at Chapel Hill somebody presented this at an LA conference they were building an instant messaging reference service and they wanted people they wanted students to have their screen name so they could connect with them on an instant messaging service and they made stickers because you know, kids like the stickers on their laptops and it was like, hello my name is sticker with the name of the library reference service the screen name of it in the box and they passed them out in orientations and they stick them to their laptops and then it would be right there staring at them when they had a question and it worked like a charm their service went up like 10 times simple, simple, simple I gave a talk at Columbia a couple of years ago at Columbia University and it was in their business school and one of their marketing posters for the MBA program had that phrase on it and it kind of stayed with me ever since right now someone is thinking of a better faster cheaper way of doing what you're doing oh great there are things we probably do that we don't have to do or things that we have been doing that we probably don't have to do and one of the really important challenges that we face especially in a resource constrained time okay that's two is figuring out what to give up and you can do that either with the point of the gun or because it's a good idea in the long run it doesn't matter which but if there's a service or a function that just that somebody else can do better what I'm doing as much as I was born to be a reference librarian the idea that somehow a radio reference is going to come back it's really not and I'm sure people still do radio reference on the chat and so on and that's fine but that shouldn't be the message we give to people this to me is an example of this if you staff a reference service and make it look like your job is to answer a 30 second question you're cheating them and yourselves because Google will do a decent job in answering those questions it's not a great job it will do a decent job but if you set up your service making the point that you're there for detailed involved important information needs that will change the way you think about it that will change the way you think about it in fact the word reference people think reference is that how often do you hear people at the desk like this is a quick one well three days later it's a quick one but if you present the service as maybe we'll stand up to do it so clearly you're not supposed to be there for because you're standing up I used to spend a day or two a week at the Zuzala and I had a guy who every 90 seconds would back away from because he thought that was all he was going to get I don't think I was scaring him because he was liking it but I kept saying you know it's okay I got nothing else to do there's nobody else here I can help you for 20 minutes and it was like a revelation so figuring out how to orient what we do towards the kind of clients how we have and what they need and what nobody else can do any better I think works a few other things just to think about in your discussions or the next day or so and then beyond I don't think we do a really good job of telling people what we do so articulating our strengths and what we can offer that in terms of quality and depth and richness of the collections of the services and so on I'm not sure people get that answer I'm not sure people completely understand that we're there to help them this is not just a library thing I lived in Michigan for many years and our room has this big art fair 500,000 people come over and a couple of colleagues and I decided we would staff the information booths for the afternoon because it would be kind of fun and mainly I was passing out maps and telling people where the deli is and where the bathroom is which was fun and so we're standing in the middle of the street we're in the middle of the street there's a table with maps and a huge sign in the front of the table right here that says information in about three foot high level it's an informations point and this will haunt me the day I die this little girl and her mother are walking down the street and the little girl sees the tent and the table and she's like look mommy, information, they can tell us and mommy takes her by the hand and pulls her in the other direction and says no no that's okay honey we don't want to bother them I nearly jumped over the table BALAS for crying out the why do you think we're standing here now mind you I don't ask for help but the came already here so that's just me tools that help people without direct intervention things like apps videos widgets signs websites that make sense that don't say things like catalog and databases when people think landsend and DMV you know how about books how about research help I got to write a paper how about I want to write a grant as the top level of your website positioning ourselves in what we do as time savers figuring out what we're best at and so on mainly what I want everybody to do yourselves included is to try stuff and then tell the rest of us how it works does that look familiar to anybody is there anybody I won't say older enough experience the knowledge to remember this and is willing to admit it's the NEC pre-1956 imprint let me tell you so I still teach this because I'm really old and because because we still have it in open stacks we're one of the last places left in the world for those of you who are yet to be introduced to the joys of the national union catalog pre-1956 imprint it's exactly what you think it is it's this is 746 volumes lovingly embossed in green cloth I just want to pet it of every book printed in the United States before 1956 and who held it in the middle 60s so I mean it's a joke really for about 25 we're having little memories of this that's the column I got more response to than any other column I have written about every freaking thing in the information world that I can think of and then some this gets me an email oh I remember what I used to have to move from one building to another in the summer it was really hot and I didn't know what it was for I dropped a lot oh man I get it again so it's a joke I mean there's very few of these left they've been halted or sold or burned or made into modern art there's very few of these left in open stocks because it's really not particularly useful anymore I got the letters from the people at LC who said we use this all the time yes I imagine you do you're the only one but for about 25 years this was fantastic this was if you needed to find something you went to this and it was there you went and it was precise and a lot of blood and sweat and tears went into the making of this and then it just went away so you can look at this it's like wow we spent a lot of time and money on this and it went nowhere or you can look at this and say wow what an incredible intellectual achievement this one and would we have OCLC if we hadn't built this now there are days that would be such a bad idea we love OCLC some of my best friends work at OCLC so I mean I've got nothing bad to say about OCLC I don't know we should always remember we built it so but without without something like this which was basically with OCLC 746 dollars you know the idea of collaborative cataloging, collaborative collections this was a great boom for in your library alone and so on it would be very different I mean it's kind of a joke now but for a while there it was rocking so I say we keep doing it blah blah blah blah I love that phrase vision is a rudder for change I stole that I didn't guess appearance in one of my classes people were asking her about how do you navigate change and she said you gotta know what you're doing so vision is a rudder for change easier said than done somewhere in there is a cave painting of a bull that's Altamira in Spain about 15,000 years ago somebody painted that on the side of a cave and what you can you can't see the bull particularly well but you can't see the mole damage this lasted for 15,000 years on the side of the cave somebody discovered it about a while ago and body heat and moisture have raised the humidity and temperature from the cave and allowed this mole to grow just in the last few years so careful what you wish for but that bull was painted about 15,000 years ago and it's actually quite a good rendering of a bull unfortunately you can't see the light but it's quite a good rendering we don't quite know what it's meant to signify it's like the paintings at cave paintings go in France we don't quite know what it's meant to signify I saw this bull I killed this bull I hate this bull this bull ran over me we don't quite know what it is but we do know that somebody painted that for a purpose as long ago this 15,000 years ago and my other favorite image along these lines is that's in the Sonoran Desert from the Pueblo area of southwest I think in Mexico it's a negative handprint so somebody laid their hand against a cave against the underside of a rock and blew pigment against it and left that handprint we don't know when we don't know why it's a signature we don't know what that is but we know it's there and it's still there these two things speak about something very fundamental about what it means to be human and to me they kind of reduced that I was here if you go home tomorrow and look around your library I think almost everything in your collection is some representation of I was here and let me tell I was here and I tried to figure something out and here's my story that's science that's art that's statecraft that's law that's religion and faith that's politics that's drama that's almost everything we're trying to make meaning out of the universe around us and one of the ways we do that is by trying to understand it search and so all of this emphasis on search in the last 10 or 15 years I think there's a metaphysical undertone to that I think there's a search in the very broad sense of the word I don't think that's quite what it was in Google but I think there's something that's just one of those basic human urges is to communicate and to be heard and then to share that we have an urge to learn we have an urge to organize so the catalogers were actually red which is kind of scary but bless their hearts they are on the right track to search and make meaning and all of that happens in the inherently ambiguous context of language these basic human urges don't go away and they form the foundation of our society I think they form the foundation of what it means to be human where does human activity go where are people are trying to figure out the world and the universe around them and their place in it and tell their stories in the process we go along we are next to them we are in that gathering the products helping to create new ideas and new pathways and helping to blaze the trail as we try to make progress as a species which is really hard and so now I go back to Margaret Hutchins references become an independent opinion reference facts by which themselves they could not attain it's finding the pieces of the puzzle to figure out and understand and learn and express and be finding those pieces fill in the gaps make the puzzle complete lots of different ways lots of different environments lots of different settings lots of different purposes lots of different kinds of people that's what we do and thinking about how to do that in old ways in new ways in a high level of professionalism saving people's time and money and so on I tell my students all the time there's nothing better you can do with your lab there's no better time to do this I can just think about it any question is perfectly off and off I'm going to put you on the hot seat a little bit you mentioned at one point stuff that we are doing now that we should not do can you go into detail about stuff we should not do while I use the example I've heard this over the years at least I'm taking it now finally people have heard me say we shouldn't do ready referencing just not reliably but if we create staff and market of service that is oriented in that way that's a losing proposition the market for that is never going to grow and there are ways that people can do that more effectively without us and it makes us look like chumps so if you instead design and staff and market of service being that what we do best understanding what people really want how do people understand what they really want which Google cannot do exploring the wide range of resources that your institutions represent which Google cannot do figuring out multiple ways of engaging in searching that stuff which Google cannot do helping people to understand when they should stop which is a much more difficult prospect than anybody in real life instructing about the process and the resources where and when that's feasible because you can lay the horse to water that service is what a library is made typing stuff into Google is monkey work I do it every day and you do it every day that's the problem with that but if people think that that's all you do then they think you're a monkey but if people think you are there to engage with how do I start a new line of research how do I apply for a grant how do I start a new degree for a grant how do I decide what to be the one to grow up how do I decide what to write my senior thesis on how do I how do I then you say come and talk with me we'll meet for 30 or 45 minutes that is a much higher level of intellectual engagement it's a much more satisfying thing for you professionally I think and it provides a higher level of service to probably fewer people and that's one of the things that we have to engage is to what extent are we a niche profession because I've seen lots of libraries especially public libraries but we're all susceptible to this we give you the world we can do anything which is a lie we can't do anything we can, we never did, we never can we never should it's not our job we can do these things for you really well it's easy to say we give you the world because it sounds nice and we're good people so helping people to understand what we can and can do and focus and I would actually rather do more higher quality stuff for fewer people than monkey work for the multitude and I have no issue with monkey work for the multitudes I'm as happy as a clam to be tapping into Google and finding the answer or the role I'm in now I would be that would be when I go to that great reference desk in Liskow that's what I'll be doing surrounded by the big lazy Susan of resources I'm looking forward to that in the meantime if I were still practicing reference library I would much rather spend an hour with somebody making their senior thesis five times as good or helping a faculty member to write a grand proposal or that sort of thing because it's just much more sense and I think it sort of gets it why we got into business in the first place to me so that's not exactly given stuff up so much as it's kind of reorient to something that we can do much more effectively and efficient and better but it may mean that there are people you don't engage with them that's a decision I kind of score every individual step and there's people who would think that there's people who you work with who would think this stuff is a great idea and people who think it's correct okay, fine, figure it out it's up to all of us there's certainly, your mileage may vary trust me this is that one so much more because the expectation online is this and our whole model of service is where we succeed and where we are really the best is what you just described which is not this the idea of trying to engage a person online or to lead that person through a thought process or some other harder level work online is either we have to completely and then the idea then the question is can we can do everything we can't we don't have the resources we don't have necessarily an interest to compete with Google to compete with those kinds of things so I think that's probably the barrier for us to making huge views online we need to look at better tools for mining the research the data that we have so we make that a little bit in terms of the interpersonal engagement of mine I'm not so sure we want to do that much don't disagree that we need to do better but it's a kind of a hard one to figure out is better for what purpose and towards what end the last phrase that I couldn't I agree with everything you just said I couldn't agree more with that last piece as well is that better in one way better in one sense the idea that you're going to be able to do deep meaningful research engagement with people like Twitter is ridiculous nor would I think anyone should try what you can do in Twitter is while that's really interesting I can give you a look this is about six or eight tweets I can give you a little help here but this is a big problem and it's going to be a lot easier if you come in which some people will go with and some people won't but trying to provide that kind of high level deep service in a chat message or Twitter or something like that I don't think of anybody because it's going to give them a crummy answer and they're not going to feel particularly satisfied by the same token you have people who come in and are ready to work for an hour and a half and it's over in five minutes that's fine too or you know I'm going to need some time for this can I email this to you or can I call you or can you come back the modes by which people approach us and the modes by which we respond they necessarily have to be the same the better online thing I think at least on a superficial level is the quality of the experience and so I remember 50% of the time there's no reference in person, on the phone in chat that's just bad I can't imagine what that's like I mean I get it online you know yes you know because you're online and you're like I get that I mean I've done online references and email reference I was born in because it goes on for page after page and I'm decent I'm decent in person but the idea that there's no interview it's unfathomable to me how that really does but and I have my students as part of their reference point when I teach reference one of their sentences they have to ask questions of other services where they're not known because of email and chat and they get so mad when they're not interviewed because you know they ask a question sometimes a really well formed question and out comes an answer without a which wire where for it had nothing to do with what they were at but it was thanks Mike leave it 20 on the night stand off and so the quality of the experience making sure that there is an engagement on some sort of level to know that you're answering the right but they know what they're asking which is often not the case that the website is somehow engineered and organized and designed in such a way that it can be used and that people can easily make their way what they're looking for and can find their way back that there's a pleasantness to it one of my favorite phrases she's the about to be former director at he's about to go to Sacramento public she said I want people who use our library to be delighted well that gives you a whole new way of thinking you know delighted delighted is hard to do on twitter maybe not but that's a different kind of there's but the quality of the interaction I think online the quality of information can be higher but it's harder and sometimes harder to think about the quality of the interaction because so many of us are people people except the handful of those who aren't and I've worked with a few of them who actually are better online because they don't have to interact with actual people it's it's a challenge to think about how to re-engage in a new kind of domain and yet still feel like a professional there's a lot of there's a lot of things in motion here and as I say there's no right or wrong answer to but I know we're up against this and so we cannot beat them at their own game we cannot beat Google Wikipedia it's a losing proposition you don't have that kind of time in the month figure out how to use Google and Wikipedia and Twitter and all the other things and incorporate that into a professional practice that makes sense for you it's really tempting to like how do we get them to stop using Wikipedia this is left to build but so that project in relation to literacy thing that I think you read a piece about or you've heard about whatever that they're serving college students all over the country and they know that students are using Wikipedia and they don't feel good about it they feel bad about it because they know it's not a quality resource and they're not supposed to use it so they don't tell anybody they use it but they use it all the time and they use it to get oriented to pick a project to pick a topic and to find language to use to search database and to look at the public information instance that is exactly what we want people to do and yet the databases aren't easy to use so how about a workshop offered at the time when all the papers are starting to be ready which we know is in the last 72 hours 90% of students wait until the last 72 hours for 90% of them to come this is every college that they serve our word to community college workshops Wikipedia to the database how to use Wikipedia to find the right terms to search in database offered on a Sunday night not kidding when they're going to be starting to work on their papers for the following week it's worth a try it's worth a try because it's what they're doing they're using Wikipedia at the last minute design a workshop how to use Wikipedia at the last minute because they're doing it already I mean you're legitimizing it but you're also making it work that to me is a real that's a real potential so if you do one less how to use ProQuest session give that up how to use Wikipedia at the last minute and when the faculty said why are you doing that point to the research project information literacy projectinfo.org you may not like it but this is where your students are doing so that you can give me an overview shining out yes I mentioned the light earlier I'm just curious where in the whole process does the light happen does that happen after an interest is found does that happen after a change or sure I mean the joke is in the stacks of course decades and the bigger the building the more opportunities for you to like think about your retail experiences because in a lot of ways there are a lot of parallels between going to a department store to a home depot and going online experiences that you had that really stood out in your mind someone who went the extra mile someone who really understood what you were looking for someone who found exactly the right thing and you felt good about it those kinds of experiences you know sometimes the answer is no sometimes there isn't anything there isn't a good book there isn't a good article nobody's ever done this delivering that message in an appropriate way can be good too but trying to kind of do all this in such a way that it makes sense to them and to us and makes them feel good you can when you have to deliver bad news at least we're not lawyers or use car sales people or whatever we don't really have to deliver bad news very often so that's a virtue but why not why not make it good and by and large it is good but my experience at Suzoha would tell me hardly a shift went by I like that reference desk working with largely undergraduates and graduate students I don't think a shift went by when somebody didn't say to me I didn't go to a library okay well that's not your fault we'll work on that or I'd been in a library since I was in fifth grade because they were mean to me and I never went back so the message I gave to the children's libraries is that they're the most important because they screw up the rest of us pay for them so that's my message to them my message here is that there's a lot of people who just don't know me and I would imagine when the stereotypes are like crazy here imagine you get a lot of people from very small areas that have pretty sparse libraries and so they don't know anyone and they come to a place like yours and we get it all the time this coming week people will be walking into Suzoha and in a reading room like although it's on the third floor so they have to make an effort wow oh my god so they humanize that a little bit and to delight them I think we're going to actually have to stop now we're a little bit over and that's okay Joe's going to be here for the rest of the conference so you don't have any time to ask questions we'll take a 15 minute break and then when you come back