Professional Development

Today, a full day of discussion and presentations continued. In the small group discussion this morning, we spent an hour trying to frame a mini-case written by one of our group members. Earlier this summer, each person was asked to submit a mini-case in which we described a challenging situation in which we are involved. Each morning, we pick one to “dissect.”

In the large group presentations today, Jim Honan led us through a case study that helped to teach how to monitor institutional performance. We looked at case written about UNITEC Institute of Technology’s plan and process to systematically evaluate the viability of their programs as part of a strategy to be competitive and gain university status. In examining the case we talked about contexts for planning (external environment and competition, leadership, resource allocation, and governance & decision-making) and how these contexts are all occurring simultaneously so all must be included as you consider how to proceed.

Our second session, with Joan Gallos, was spent talking about 4 leadership challenges

• How do we find vision for ourselves so that we can offer it to others?
• What do we bring to advance that vision?
• How do we identify and involve others to advance a shared vision?
• How do we give personal voice to the vision so that others take up the call?

For me, this was the session where I felt less experience. We were asked to talk about our greatest leadership moment and our most disappointing and then try to describe what differences we saw between the two.  We heard terms including: “soul”, “creativity”, “values”, “charisma.” The example shown to us was Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. How can you ever think you’d compare with that??

But there were some good, practical aspects also. We were introduced to Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference. We learned about important people alliances to help deliver your message (the power of social context): connectors (people who have major social relationships established across many different groups), mavens (people who are seen as knowledgeable and respected), and salespeople (those who are seen as charismatic and influential). It made me start to consider who those people might be at Wake Forest?

Our afternoon session was led by Maureen Sullivan, who focused us in on library-specific issues. We spent 2 hours considering critical forces for change in the academic library; actually, things we are all familiar with, thanks to our strategic planning process: students as customers, shifts from teaching to learning, changes in the nature of our collections, scholarly communications, changing demographics, ownership to access, etc. Maureen showed a You Tube video, A Vision of Students Today, that helped to get her point across.

The nice surprise for the day, however, came with the news that one of the Widener librarians in the Institute had made arrangements for all of us to be admitted to Widener Library for a tour. As I mentioned a few days ago, one needs a Harvard ID to gain access. Any other exceptions have to be specially approved. So you’ll see the picture above shows my special pass. The other picture is a screen capture of the virtual tour of the library on the Harvard website, as  they do not allow photographs. The building is beautiful, but our access was restricted to a very small area. We were able to admire the Memorial Room, which is in honor of Harry Widener, for whom the library is named.  As we learned on our campus tour yesterday, Harry was a graduate of Harvard, and was a bibliophile. He obtained a copy of the Gutenberg Bible which is on display in the room. Harry perished on the Titanic and his mother donated the money to build Widener Library. It had a few strings attached: The footprint of the library can never change, or else ownership of the building reverts to the city of Cambridge. This means that they are not able to add on or alter the outside dimensions of the building. So stacks go underground 5 stories. The Memorial Room I mentioned above is dedicated to Harry. It is a requirement that fresh flowers are maintained in the room and nobody is allowed in there to read. That is because the room is reserved for use by Harry’s ghost! But we got to stand at the entrance, see the flowers, and the bible. It was an impressive room. We also got to see two murals painted by John Singer Sargent.

The other areas we were able to see were the reading room and reference on the second floor, and the periodicals room and circulation on the main level. I must make mention of the fact that, in the circulation room, there is an information desk staffed M-F from 9-5 by a reference librarian, to help users who might be intimated by the prospect of 50 miles of shelves and 3 million volumes.

This week I’m in Seattle attending a Library Assessment Conference entitled “Building Effective Sustainable, Practical Assessment.” Of the 375 Librarians in attendance, some 15 % are from outside the United States. The day began with keynoters Susan Gibbons, University of Rochester; Rick Luce, Emory University and Betsy Wilson, University of Washington discussing what they perceived as the most important challenges for Library assessment. Gibbons began by reminding Librarians of their love to count and how they count everything. But what do these numbers teach us? Her library’s reference queries have dropped by 10,000 during the past decade. Does this mean they are failing? No. Everything has changed about user needs and demands. Their assessment plan included handing out disposable cameras and asking students to take pictures of their favorite places on campus, favorites within the library, study patterns, favorite times of the day and what items are essential to your daily activities? Among their many findings they concluded that all students have cell phones and they don‘t leave home without them. From a web page study that involved printing the page and presenting the copy to focus groups, they discovered among other things, missing contact numbers. Ironically though Rochester joined some 41 % of all ARL libraries failing to list their contact numbers on their web pages. Gibbons also stressed the importance of knowing the uniqueness of your community, timing is everything, when’s the point of need, accessing, looking, connecting, reallocating and refocusing.

Rick Luce was a good speaker with interesting slides which he was careful to remove before I could write down complete statements. He viewed assessment as the catalyst for organizational change. Statements without performance measures are nothing more than wishful thinking. What’s the framework for greatness? Do something others can’t; do something well others do poorly; or do something others have great difficulty doing well. Keys to successful assessment should include a strong customer focus, effective leadership, continuous improvement and management by fact. Luce advised against the following pitfalls; measures that don’t focus on strategic initiatives, no accountability, too many initiatives and lack of discipline. It’s a struggle and it’s sometimes very painful but libraries should strive for an honest self assessment.

Betsy Wilson cited the number one challenge for Librarians is to accelerate the relevance. We can’t live without assessment. It is the lifeblood to any successful organization. She encouraged attendees to turn a “culture of complaints” into a “culture of assessment.” If we stay ahead of the assessment game, we have more chances of controlling the future agenda. But to do this effectively, we need frameworks and models which reflect our values and our aspirations. We have to tell our stories. We have to be intimate with our users and engaged with our communities.

This conference groups two to three presentations together in one room for an hour and a half time slot. It works out ok, however you begin to feel that sessions are rushed and sometimes a lack of sufficient timing for questions and answers remains. Our colleagues over at UNC-G were squeezed in between a LibQUAL presentation from the folks at Radford University and the University of Chicago’s review of “wayfinding efforts.” UNCG presenters Kathy Crowe and Michael Crumpton sported name changes as Associate Dean and Assistant Dean respectively. Their presentation was entitled “Using Evidence for Space Planning.” The three year study they conducted included an in house survey, observational studies and focus groups. A space consultant was also used in the assessment process. Many of their resulting upgrades from the studies mirrored changes that we here at ZSR have also implemented. They repurposed spaces, implemented quiet study zones, reduced the size of reference collections, expanded their information commons area, went to 24/5 hours of operation, began allowing food and drink in the library, brought in more comfy furniture and have began weeding the government documents collection.

Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka is tasked with studying how new technologies affect academia and how those changes they bring can best be managed. For the Assessment conference he reviewed, “Strategy and Leadership in the Transitions Away From Print.” Schonfeld visited 14 American academic libraries for 1 -3 days each, meeting with Library directors, staff, faculty, students and campus leadership. Findings from these visits seem to indicate that budgetary limitations and space management considerations play a major role in format migration. While most libraries see the digital future as beckoning they have not allowed for effective community wide strategic planning. Smaller libraries are relying on larger libraries to preserve or keep the print. Larger libraries are not seeing this as their role and are not doing so. Schonfeld warned that librarians should remember the lessons learned when transitioning from newsprint to microform. Are we Librarians preserving the intellectual content for those around in the year 2050?

More later, Wanda.

Large group class time

The past two days have been filled with in-depth discussion and analysis using the four frames (perspectives) for making leadership choices. As I mentioned in my overview a few days ago, this week is being structured around the framework of Bolman and Deal’s four frame model of organizations (structural, human resources, political and symbolic). After our Sunday afternoon overview of the model, Monday and Tuesday have been filled with studying and discussing various case studies of scenarios where we have been asked to apply each of the four frames to examine the different perspectives you would want to consider when deciding how to handle the situation. Our instructors for the two days have been Joan Gallos, Joe Zolner and Maureen Sullivan.

One of the first things we did was a self assessment to find out what our preferred frame really is. We used a self-rating survey to accomplish this. Most people found that they had one or two strong frames, and then the other two were weak or almost non-existent. As you might expect, the strongest frames were structural (after all, it is a group of librarians) and human resources. The other two frames, political and symbolic, were very under represented. As one moves up the leadership ladder, these two frames become the more important ones to master.

To help visualize the types of issues that might be focuses of the different frames, here are some concepts that the instructors highlighted:

Structural: rules, regulations, goals, policies, roles, tasks, job descriptions, chain of command, assessment and reward systems, spans of control, formal feedback loops, specialization/division of labor

Human Resource: needs, skills, relationships, perceptions and attitudes, morale, motivation, training and development, interpersonal and group dynamics, teams, job satisfaction, participation and involvement, support, respect for diversity

Political: key stake holders, divergent interests, scarce resources, agendas, bases of power, influence, conflict, competition, coalitions, alliances, networks

Symbolic: culture, ceremonies, stories, myths, symbols, metaphors, vision, charisma, values

The structural leader

• clarifies organizational goals
• develops clear rules and effective procedures
• defines roles and clarifies responsibilities

The human resource leader

• identifies people’s needs
• offers personal support
• recognizes participants’ strength
• provides opportunities for growth

The political leader

• understands distribution of resources
• identifies major constituencies
• builds coalitions
• assesses risks and opportunities
• negotiates differences and reaches compromises

The symbolic leader

• interprets meanings
• articulates vision or purpose
• strengthens norms
• reinforces culture with traditions or rituals

We have been learning that, in every organizational situtation, each of these four frames plays a role. And a good leader will try to examine every situation through each of these four lenses. Instead of settling for the perspective with which we are most comfortable, we can expand our choice of options by “flipping the frame” and looking at the situtation through one of the other lenses.

Yesterday Giz and I helped give a NCLA workshop hosted in a beautiful facility at Elon University.

As an officer of NCLA’s Technology and Trends Roundtable, I helped pull together the group of speakers that also included Lynda Kellam and Amy Harris of UNC-G and Ed Hirst of Rowan Public Library (also an officer).

The goal of this program was to help people who missed the blogs/wikis/google docs/etc craze, but who are beginning to see a need to be up to speed on these technologies.  We demonstrated free tools and tried to make the connections to libraries as much as possible. The technologies we covered were: social networking, google docs, blogs, wikis, librarything, delicious, and Drupal.

I was particularly impressed with the audience.  With less than two full weeks to register, we had 35 participants. The group seemed to be really engaged and interested in what we had to say, and gave good feedback on the session.

We had a great time, and it was rewarding to work with folks who are just starting out in these areas. We had a group with a wide variety of skills and backgrounds, so hopefully everyone got something out of the session!

Program Materials

The Leadership Institute began Sunday afternoon by assigning each of the 99 participants into one of 10 small discussion groups. We will be with our assigned group throughout the week and will start each day off with the group to discuss, share and/or to supplement content covered the previous day or assigned to us to read overnight. The groups aren’t task-oriented, they are designed for sharing. Our first session was a get-acquainted period. There are 10 in my group and the people range from a library director to a person who has just been given a person to supervise for the first time. We shared our professional backgrounds, our current responsibilities and our reasons for coming to the Institute. Somehow the discussion did get around to talking about the popularity of coffee shops in academic libraries and the politics of Starbucks!

The first general session followed. Throughout the week, all participants will meet as a group 3 times daily. One reason is to create a shared group experience. Yesterday’s large group session introduced the concept of the case study, which is going to be the primary way leadership issues are explored this week. Since many in the class have not had experience learning using case studies and with discussion-based learning, this first session was a way to teach us how they are used and what we can do to best prepare to take part in the discussion.

When the 2 hour session ended at 5:30, we were all given Harvard umbrellas (there have been substantial afternoon storms daily) and were led to the Radcliffe Gymnasium for an opening reception. This provided another venue to get acquainted with participants outside of my discussion group. I finished off the evening by going to dinner with two new colleagues where we had spirited exchanges of how things are at each of our libraries. One of the women is a bibiliographer/collection development librarian at Widener Library. The whole decentralized organization of the Harvard Libraries is fascinating, making our consensus building among 3 libraries seem like child’s play.

Small group discussion starts this morning promptly at 8. I’ve been up since 4:30 finishing my reading assignments. Now off to find a good cup of coffee and a cheap breakfast (read, not here at the hotel!).

Harvard College Campus

I arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts late this morning to spend a week at Harvard to attend the Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians. The Harvard Institutes for Higher Education collaborates annually with ACRL to present this institute. Their goal (and mine) is to increase attendees’ (my) capacity to lead and manage.

The program starts tomorrow afternoon, so I arrived today to get acclimated and be ready to dive into what promises to be a fairly intense week of discussion and study.  Issues that we will examine are:

• How well positioned is our organization to meet current and future challenges?
• How effective is my own leadership?

We’ll be looking at characteristics of effective leadership in academic organizations, transformational learning, planning, and organizational strategy and change.

One of the main texts that will be used to help shape discussion is Bolman and Deal’s Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership. It advances a four-frame model of organizations -as factories (structural frame; formal roles and responsibilities), families (human resources frame; organizations as extended family), jungles (political frame; organizations as contests), and temples (cultural frame; organizations as tribes). Each of these has its own image of reality. We will be learning how it is important to understand all four and use all of them to gain a better overall understanding by viewing different perspectives. They maintain that learning multiple perspectives is a good defense against cluelessness (think Lay/Enron).

I’m looking forward to this opportunity to spend a week where I can focus in-depth on issues that are very important to me in my new role and to our library as we start the process of implementing our ambitious strategic plan. I will try to keep a daily update (if we don’t have too much homework!).

Yesterday I attended the ASERL-Auburn Forum on Library User Services. As usual, I took copious notes and posted them to my blog. If you’re interested in reading more I’ll put the links at the bottom of this post. To keep it interesting, I’m posting the main points here.

There were four big take aways for me:

1. Assessment is very important.
2. User research will make our services/collection/building/web presence better.
3. A little bit of time, invested early on, can save time later on.
4. Successful programs at other places won’t necessarily be successful in every organization. Best to talk with users before implementing new things.

The day was packed (but not too rushed) with great presentations talking about everything from the practical to the more theoretical. We heard about trends in user services, usability testing and user studies on how students do research, we learned about how Rochester did their anthropological studies and how the University of Virginia built a culture of assessment, we heard about the fabulous work done at Georgia Tech that positioned them to win the 2007 Excellence in Academic Libraries Award and how statistics can be useful in evaluating services.

This was particularly good timing for me as I have been thinking more lately about usability and talking with users about their experience on the web side of things.  This forum addressed the same issues in a much wider way. Interestingly, many people come to user studies/experience through web usability or space design. People see how useful studying these issues can be and then begin to apply the principles to a broader spectrum of library work.

It also became clear to me that in order to effectively implement broad scale user studies, a library would need some level of processes in place. User studies appear to happen largely before the prototyping phase, during development, and after implementation. Having clear stages of development makes it easier to incorporate user studies.

Now for the detailed notes:

• It’s all about U: The ASERL-Auburn Forum on Library User Studies

This is the introduction to the day.

• Keynote: User Studies: What are We Learning, and What Does it Mean for the Future of Research Libraries?

This really interesting talk focused on trends found in a recent study of research libraries.  A fair amount of the talk was on instruction, which was particularly interesting to me in my instructional design role. He echoed much of what the ID world has been saying about blended learning, collaborative student work, facilitator teaching, etc. Good talk!

• The Realities of Virtual Space: Lessons from Observing Library Users

John Law, of ProQuest, gave this fantastic talk on a study of student research behaviors. It was an excellent study, from recruiting participants to meeting them where they were. He used some really excellent software as well. He had some interesting points about the different roles that Google and databases play in student research.

• Case Study #1: Georgia Tech’s User Studies of Their Physical Space

This talk described the work that Georgia Tech has done in their library and the way they incorporated user studies in their work. He talked about the space, marketing, and studies, and generally set us up for our tours of the space.

• Case Study #2: Translating User Studies into Everyday Services and Spaces

This talk was on the fabulous work done at Rochester. They’ve done some amazing work that I suspect would be fairly applicable here based on the similarities between our schools. Interesting stuff!

• ASERL Panel on User Studies-Who is Doing What?

This panel included Joe Williams of NCSU, Erin Mayhood of University of Virginia, and Brian Mathews of Georgia Tech. Each instituition is doing really excellent work, and I wish we had more time to hear from each of these speakers.

It was a great forum. If you want to talk about user studies and services, just let me know!

The 2008 NC ILL Users Group meeting was held at UNC-Chapel Hill on July 29.  It has always been a gathering that I look forward to participating.   Not only do we get to hear about the latest developments with OCLC’s products, we get to exchange information and learn what each library is doing.

The meeting started out with Julie Nye updating us on OCLC Resource Sharing (ILL), such as Reasons for No and Conditional, Deflection Enhancements and Auto-IFM trigger for items not updated in time.   She reported a 34% increase of participating countries in WorldCat Resouce Sharing.   And we are getting more and more ILLs filled by non-US libraries, a 92% increase from last year according to her statistics.  She also discussed the WorldCat.org website that OCLC has created and how it can be used to enhance usability for both staff and patrons.

Madeleine Bombeld at UNC-Wilmington did a survey on AV materials lending policies.   Her library does loan out to good borrowers the audio books, CDs and VHSs, but not DVDs, which are used heavily, 40% of all circulating materials.   At this point, we don’t loan out DVDs, since they are heavily used by our patrons and many for classes.   Occasionally, we will send out documentaries to trusted borrowers.

The afternoon session was mainly a report of the WorldCat Group Catalog that the UNC system will implement sometime this year.    A group catalog will be created from records already cataloged in WorldCat by the UNC member libraries.   From the group catalog, patrons can see which library has the item he wants and requests it.  Staff can use it for collection development purpose.  There were quite a bit of discussions about the system and it will be interesting to see how it will work out and what the benefits are for both the patrons and the library staff.

Other than all the information I received, I also enjoyed talking to other ILLers.   It was nice meeting new faces in the ILL land and exchange information about ILL issues.

Yes. We had an earthquake. We felt it — a bit scary but when the locals didn’t run for the hills we figured we were ok. We are meeting in a brand new building so it has all the requisite earthquake resistance built in, but still a bit unnerving.

Day two was a good one. Just a few impressions. We started by discussing in small groups some research studies we found and brought with us that focused on pedagogy, library instruction, classroom experience, any thing in that area. What I came out of it with is a realization that we often need to go outside the library literature to find really good research on teaching and learning, but that if we do - it can be very informative. We all expressed a desire to have more time for keeping up with the literature that is out there on good teaching and are crafting some ways to help us do that.

We spent another part of the day discussing our students. Who they are, what they need, what they would ask us if they could. Very enlightening exercises but the most interesting one was one we did about assumptions. We all had to list three assumptions we make about the students when we enter the classroom - we then listed them all (75) and found some real insights. We discussed how our assumptions affect how and what we teach in good and bad ways. We also talked about how reluctant we often are to give up our assumptions even when faced with ample evidence that they are no longer valid. Food for thought.

We finished up the day developing the perfect job description for the perfect librarian as seen from the student’s perspective. Not as easy a task as it sounds — hard to keep putting yourself in the shoes of the student. But as I have been thinking a lot about job descriptions lately - it was a good exercise.

Now to dinner and then some lighter viewing fare tonight — Parker Posey in “Party Girl!”

This week I am in San Diego in one of the ACRL Immersion programs. For those unfamiliar with them, these programs are week-long immersion programs focused on various aspects of information literacy. There are four tracks. Assessment (not running this time, but focuses on how to assess student learning and program success), Program (focusing on how to get an IL program going at your institution), Teacher (focused on instruction strategy for new teachers) and Intentional Teacher (the one I’m in) which focuses on people who have been teaching for a while in an effort to make them more aware of their teaching.There are 25 of us in the Inentional Teacher group from all over the country (and Canada) and from all sorts of libraries, backgrounds and stages in their careers.

As the ‘Immersion’ moniker suggests, it’s an intense program with long days, many activities, much discussion and even more reflection. I’m not going give a play-by-play of each day but will instead highlight as best I can those things that stuck out to me. Once I’m done I hope to also have some bigger picture thoughts to share.

Today we first focused on the two books we read before arriving. Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach and Steven Brookfield’s Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher.  Both books had their moments for me (usually surrounding concrete examples rather than lofty theory) although both tended to obscure points with too much jargon for my taste. What was interesting in our discussion is how what one person found depressing in one book, another found exhilarating; what I may have dismissed as unimportant, another person really connected with. So I came to see both books in a new light.

Later in the day we discussed our results of the Teaching Perspectives Inventory.  This measure was developed to show teachers where they stand within the five teaching perspectives identified: Transmission, Apprenticeship, Developmental, Nurturing and Social Reform. I won’t bore you with the specifics, but I’d love to get a group of our ZSR instructors together to take the test and discuss the results when I return. Taking the inventory is free and it can offer real insights into how we approach teaching and where the disconnects are between what we believe about teaching and what we actually do in the classroom. It was a fascinating discussion and one I’ll be mulling over for some time to come.

One of the goals of the week is to begin to develop our own teaching philosophy statement so I will close here and begin my work on that. Tonight we have a movie and tomorrow it’s another all day set of discussions and activities beginning at 7:30am and ending at 9:30pm. What I find really nice is to have the time to really reflect about the part of my job that brings me the most joy and satisfaction, but the part that I find I don’t spend enough time really thinking about. It’s also very invigorating to be around colleagues that do what you do on a daily basis. I’ve already shared stories and gotten inspiration from the folks I’ve met.

The fact that it is 70 degrees, sunny with a nice breeze doesn’t hurt, either. San Diego has it made in terms of weather!!