On the importance of drinking the Kool-Aid

At present, MPOW appears to be retreating from what is arguably its most forward-looking project, a major collaborative enterprise that won’t start to bear fruit for any of the participants until a couple of years down the road. Although we contributed a fairly large sum to participate in the project, I thought we all understood from the outset that we were embarking on a daring experiment, not buying a turnkey system. Lately, though, it seems like we are much more interested in articulating the reasons why the project won’t succeed than doing what we can to ensure that it will. This is personally embarrassing to me and also, IMHO, a bad strategic position for MPOW.

I’m not generally a faith-based person, but my recent foray into strategery has taught me that sometimes we have to believe in something to make it real. I’m completely in favor of debate, discussion, and inquiry, but if the bottom line is that we just don’t believe in the outcome then skepticism doesn’t serve any constructive purpose – it just becomes a polite, faux-academic way of tearing down something we didn’t really want to do anyway. It appears that MPOW is having a crisis of belief at every level these days, and it’s starting to take a toll on those who are committed to and excited about change.

But it’s not all gloom and doom. My most treasured project just got a green light, and although I know it will unfold more slowly and cautiously than it should, it will ultimately go forward because it must.

A modest proposal

I discovered yesterday that MPOW is firmly committed to precisely the scenario described in this article. I'm not actually suggesting that we start firing colleagues in their golden years, but this situation is really starting to chap my hide. Why?

1. At this stage of my life, I'm more concerned with buying a house than with buying all the beer I want.
2. I and my technology-forward colleagues – mostly new and/or junior members of the profession – are being asked to create a vision for the future and be invested in its outcome to a level that, in my opinion, far outmeasures our status, authority, or pay grade. This problem is not exclusive to MPOW; in many different arenas my professional cohort is being asked to provide policy recommendations and other critical directions to those in more official leadership positions.
3. In addition to doing much of the innovating, we are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to wrangle resources and policy decisions from administrators. This makes #2 a lot more strenuous than it needs to be.

I wish my professional education had prepared me better for #3, because there's a lot more to overcoming internal resistance than merely writing a good proposal. It takes organizational intelligence, fortuitous timing, and compromise. A litigious tendency doesn't hurt, either…

ETA: Just this morning a colleague gave me an interesting perspective on #2. Despite our relative youth and inexperience, WE are the ones who feel most compelled to take the long view because we will be spending several more decades in the profession. I thought that was interesting.

The first rule of fight club is, You do not blog about fight club

This week I'm trying something new. I have been in the habit of blogging at the end of the week, but my exhausted and frustrated Friday posts make me feel like a walking attitude problem. Thus, the Monday blog and some nifty things I'm working on right now.

1. Praise be for technical difficulties, which forced me to install a new version of the MarcEdit utility. In doing so, I came across the very thing I have been looking for: an EAD/MARC crosswalk. Terry Reese is my hero! Perhaps the days are numbered for one of MPOW's sillier practices: transcribing finding aids from EAD to a paper workform, then transcribing them back into MARC.

2. I have been working on an ETD proposal since last October, and it will finally see the light of day. The graduate studies committee I have been working with wants to unveil it for the university administration, and hopefully legal counsel won't obstruct it for too long. ETDs come with many associated intellectual property issues, but plenty of other universities have covered this territory already. Since we are a late entry in this event, we actually have a great opportunity to see where repositories are going and build ourselves a rights environment that will be favorable to us over the long term. For example, we would like to retain an unambiguous right to share our ETDs with cooperative repositories with which we are affiliated – this environment already exists in a small way, and we can prepare ourselves for it to happen in a big way. It's all very exciting, and in my next life I might be an intellectual property lawyer.

3. Meanwhile, my fellow bloggers will have to fill me in on Lawrence Lessig's visit, because I'll be meeting with several other metadata geeks about preservation metadata. This is largely uncharted territory – we just don't know that much about digital preservation at this point, so this is likely to be a policy discussion as much as a technical discussion. I get the feeling, more through abstract hints and forensic evidence than actual communication, that MPOW is on the verge of a massive digitization effort, so I'm hoping that my research on behalf of the TDL consortium will have an application here. And, you know, yield a publication or two.

4. A post without strategery would be like a day without sunshine, so here we go. It is clear that in order to meet its significant objectives, MPOW will have to overcome some deep-rooted aspects of its organizational culture. These include risk aversion, passive resistance to change, and a reluctance to commit to specific objectives or policies. I do not know how to overcome these factors, other than for the people who want change to keep pushing a little at a time until resistance becomes futile.  Nudge, nudge.

On a mission

Management consultant-speak generally makes me want to commit seppuku with a frisbee. Nonetheless, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on MPOW’s secret shame, the mission statement. Who cares about mission statements, you might ask? Well, lately I have realized that I do, because low expectations are the enemy of progress and ours are pretty damn low. Without further ado:

[We] support the teaching and research needs of [our university] by providing access to relevant information resources and by offering instruction to users to enable them to identify and evaluate appropriate information resources on their own. Additionally, [we] provide access to these resources to the greater [major city] community.

Our organizational mission is to…fulfill the minimum criteria necessary to call ourselves a library? Arrgh. We make no promise to innovate, to strive to be the information provider of choice for our constituency, or to offer any particular level of service. Of course, I have many colleagues who perform miles above this standard, and a mission statement is just words anyway. All the same, this mission statement sends a message loud and clear: We don’t trust ourselves to excel. Despite the inevitable shortages of time, money, staff, and resources, I think we need to aim much higher. And then get there.

Speaking of levels of service, earlier today I saw a webcast about patron service by the always-entertaining Rick Anderson. The main thrust of his talk was that we need to respect our users’ existing work patterns and desire for efficiency, and design our tools and services to meet those expectations rather than trying to convince them to do things our way.  He had a lot to say about the “eat your peas” (EYP) mentality that pervades many libraries, particularly those of the research persuasion. The EYP philosophy is that our users must learn how to slog through our tools so they will appreciate that research is hard. I have two thoughts about this: (1) ultimately, the only person who is going to make a student care about the quality of his or her research is the person grading his or her work, and (2) academic research IS hard, but finding the documents that support it should not be. Sad to say, EYP is alive and well at MPOW, where we have been known to reject a product on the grounds that it makes it “too easy” (seriously) for our users to find what they are looking for.

Why did they come to our concert just to boo us?

I went to ALA Midwinter this past weekend, and it was a pretty good conference. There is starting to be a lot of interesting content about institutional repositories and digital libraries, including quite a few actual case studies about live projects. University of Oregon has a very thoughtful DSpace implementation, policy-wise, even though they are using the technology right out of the box, and it sounds like Washington State is working on some ambitious projects that are highly interactive. I’m really hoping to get some of that going here, because there is so much exciting work to be done and you don’t have to be MIT or the University of California to do it (though it helps).I’m also excited about the prospect of redesigning the ALCTS website – there is certainly a lot to be done there. At the planning meeting I found myself evangelizing for more “action” options at the section level. Right now the section pages are basically an archive of old documents and references to past events. But the sections actually do stuff too – there are programs, continuing education opportunities, publication opportunities, and so on, but you can’t find them. I’d like the site to reflect less of the organization’s bureaucracy and more of its activities.

The one distressing aspect of this conference was the number of people who attended participatory meetings about timely and interesting topics, then either sat there silently or left the room when their input was solicited. I brought this up with a colleague who said I was about the fourth person to mention this occurrence to her. This is incredible to me – I suspect that many people just want to look to someone ahead of them and be told what the next big thing will be and not have to think of it themselves.

Library Web Chic has interesting things to say about political demarcations, and I feel her pain about the growing deficit of communication and innovation. MPOW is obsessed with equal representation. For example, Department X has a thoughtful, creative, committed candidate for the web committee, but we will only consider representatives from Department Y. At the same time, I have major issues about performing primary work functions across departments. I used to be a big cheerleader for the cross-training concept, but lately I have started thinking otherwise. I figure my job is to know about and work with metadata, and to innovate and make good decisions in this arena. For me to do this well takes time, lots of it. I can’t just hole up in my office with a pile of standards – digital projects are interconnected with many areas of the library – but for me to spend a couple of hours a week on the reference desk enhances neither our reference services nor our metadata services. I’d like to work on opening up communication within the organization and getting people with the right expertise involved in critical projects without everyone doing everyone else’s job.

Planning to plan

Our e-only subscriptions for 2006 are starting to trickle through, so quite a bit of random cataloging popped up in addition to what was held over from last week. I anticipate the first quarter of 2006 will have a lot of these kinds of changes.One of my major goals for this year is to get the journals back onto a systematic review schedule. So many of our journals are e-only now, and we can’t afford to have access lag behind the coverage.

I finally got the ball rolling on redesigning the e-resource list. The existing list leaves much to be desired on both the front end and the back end, and we want the new version to play nice with our subject blogs. This will be the first step of a much more sweeping redesign. Meanwhile, I haven’t updated site metadata for ages. User testing starts next month, so I need to get descriptions and keywords up by then.

I’m also responsible for leading the preservation metadata recommendation for the Texas Digital Library, so I’m starting to research that. Experts agree: preservation metadata is hard. It’s impossible to know how much information to gather, and it sounds like a lot of digital projects are starting with a comprehensive schema and then discovering that they can’t keep it up. I haven’t dared to look at the PREMIS data dictionary yet…

This week involved a lot of procedural discussion about the strategic planning process. The working calendar is up, the announcement of department meetings will be ready to go out first thing next week, and questions for the test group are up on the project site for discussion. Cataloging has agreed to be the test group for the facilitated meetings, so we’ll see how those questions go. I’ll feel a lot better about this process once we move past all the procedure and start working on the recommendations. I’m open to surprises and it’s always good to have hard data to fall back on, but I don’t think we’re going to hear anything too unexpected in our series of facilitated meetings.