Working with your CIO and IT, by Holly Heller-Ross

Note: This post is adapted from a talk that the author gave and the blog owner attended.

My career in libraries has taken me from a public, to a hospital, and now to an academic library. Along the way, I’ve picked up some experience working with information technology (IT) and currently serve as both Library Director and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for a medium-sized public higher education institution - SUNY Plattsburgh.

The working relationship between library and IT at a higher ed institution can have a profound impact on the success of a library, so here are my thoughts on how to build and sustain one that is positive and productive.

First, recognize the CIO as a kindred soul with the same pressures library directors face. That will help break down any initial us vs. them thinking. Staffing, budget and time limitations, concerns about effective leadership strategies, the need to prove value and measure impact, insufficient space, inflationary expense increases well above any increases in higher education funding …all these things library directors face? Yeah, CIO’s face also and on a campus-wide scale!

Just take service hours as an example. For the library director students are always asking for 24/7 open hours, and most libraries are not staffed or budgeted to provide that. And then there’s the question of when to put your top performers or most skilled staff on the front lines? Should your librarians be teaching or developing online guides, or both, but in what proportion? Now imagine the CIO, who is asked to provide network, helpdesk, telecom, and information security coverage…also without the staff or budget to really provide that. Also wondering whether to task the software trainer with group workshops or one-on-one faculty conferences? Surely that’s something to bond over with a cup of coffee or tea! [Editor’s Note: Or a nice imperial stout?]

I’m not suggesting the only commonalities are ones of insufficiency though. The joys of problem solving, assisting faculty with teaching and scholarship, measuring impact on student learning and showing positive correlations, getting a great purchasing deal with a vendor, and mentoring staff through career pathways you’ve helped create are some commonalities you and the CIO can celebrate together.

Second, appreciate their goals and tell them about yours. One good way to keep up on IT goals is to read the EDUCAUSE “Top 10 IT Issues” annual article. This will provide both a listing and some good contextual material for general understanding of IT priorities. Once you have the basics, start to match your library top issues with the IT issues your CIO is likely to already be thinking about.

Like in any relationship, shared values and objectives make all the work and effort easier to align. Information Security for example, has been a Top 10 IT issue for quite a while, and will likely remain so. It might be time to engage in an Information Security Review of library resources, including database access, patron record storage and security, login protocols, off-campus and proxy access, and library web pages. Any improvements here will be gains for the library and for IT. Other possibilities for common goals include improvements to login-times and quick print, switching from custom quoted staff desktops to standardized purchases and images, assignment of off-campus proxy admin rights to a technology minded librarian, and collaborative training of student employees for efficiency. I’m sure you’ll think of specifics for your library, it just takes a bit of effort.

Then, share your library goals with the CIO or other IT staff. Feel free to share ALA and ACRL reports and white papers, your own assessment results, and your own strategic plans with the CIO and others.  Executive summaries will certainly be welcome, but some folks will want the whole thing, and as librarians, we can be ready to provide that at the drop of a hat!

Third, be clear about your priorities and their impact on students and faculty. Clarity enables boldness, as the inspirational posters read! Once you have established your priorities, make sure all your campus partners know what they are. 

Whether your priorities are facilities upgrades, green initiatives, patron or staff technology upgrades, improved technology support, library service enhancements for the teaching and learning environments, mobile technology improvements, or anything else, make sure people know what you care the most about.

Remember that your priorities are more likely to get attention when they fit in with an overall campus goal, and that timing matters! Like all of higher education, library impact on faculty teaching and scholarship, student learning and success, and institutional efficiencies, are what matters now. During the span of my career, higher education has shifted from input measures, to output measures, to impact metrics.  If your institution is focused on improving the learning environment and fostering student engagement and retention for example, my advice would be to also focus on that for your library. Let the other initiatives wait. Get in sync with your institution and that will make it much easier to get support from your CIO and all your other campus partners.

Fourth, keep the communication channels open and flowing at all levels of your organization. You probably already know how the library and IT intersect in the formal communication channels such as reporting, leadership teams, and organizational committees. Is this enough? Map it out and you’ll be able to see where there are gaps in substance or in timeliness. If there is an important committee that meets only once a semester, look for ways to supplement that information exchange with email updates or some other activity.

Then, dig a bit deeper to look for both informal communication channels as well as sub population channels that could be enhanced.  Do you have vertical and diagonal communication channels? Can you arrange for other affinity groups to collaborate and communicate? For instance, could you and the CIO put a group of recent hires together for a specific task? If you could, not only would you get a specific task accomplished, but you’d start to build the next generation of collaborative colleagues. Do you have group and one-on-one communication channels open and functioning? A greater variety of channels will yield a greater variety of information flow, and that’s exactly what you want! 

And finally, if things go wrong, don’t get mad… get curious! That’s not just good personal relationship building advice; it’s good for the workplace too!

Holly Heller-Ross is the Dean of Library and Information Technology Services, and CIO, at SUNY Plattsburgh.

Welcome to the Library, Now Put Together Your Career, by Amelia Rodriguez

I have a bad habit of letting other people’s opinions overshadow my own. I get so focused on not making a stir that I get swept along in what other people think or feel and lose myself in their ideas. This can clearly be seen by my choices in my undergraduate study. I changed majors three times and with each change came a new school. The first two majors were influenced by what other people thought would be good areas of study for me. My mom, ever the voice of reason, asked me what I wanted. She was also the one who guided me towards library school.

By a lot of accounts I’m rare for a librarian and one of those people who was like, “I love books. Being a librarian sounds fun.” I didn’t work in libraries as a teen; I don’t have family who worked in libraries; and I didn’t come into librarianship via another profession. Anytime I hear someone mention how these are good reasons to become a librarian not just a love of books/reading, I feel a little hurt because it's how I chose this profession.

Because of my tendency to listen to other’s opinions over my own feelings, I left myself open when I started school. We didn’t have to pick an area of study and could build our own curriculum as long as we took certain classes or so many in a given area of study. I took a variety of classes from archives to cataloging to digital libraries. When presented with the opportunity to work in one of the libraries on campus, I jumped at the chance to work the reference desk and teach library instruction. Lucky me: I found what I wanted to do with my degree!

I got a great first job in a small branch of my local county library system. I got to learn about all different aspects of the running of a library. I worked the circulation desk, re-shelved books, pulled holds, processed new books, ordered books, fixed books, and so many more things that I didn’t learn in library school. Three years ago the branch started to go through a period of transition and it seemed like it might be a good time to consider a transition for myself. A lot of my friends (both librarians and non-librarians) had already moved jobs a few times, advancing their careers and I got swept up in the idea of it all. I worked on my resume and reached out to some co-workers within the system to ask about being a reference.

One of those people was in the IT department. She asked if I wanted a change from the library system or just in job because there was a possibility of an internal move. I said I was happy with the system but felt like I needed something different. That sounded perfect to me, since it would give me time to decide what I really wanted next.

It was even more perfect because I had related experience. One of my duties at that time was to serve as the IT Liaison. I did small troubleshooting and updates for the IT Department, and my responsibilities grew over the years. As the liaison I learned how to do so much with a computer that when this possible opportunity became a reality, it was an easy transition. I’ve been in the IT department for a little over a year now and I’ve learned a lot. I’m in a really good place, too. It may have seemed like an easy transition but it was filled with anxiety and doubts. So many of them were based on things other people have said to me, about me, and just around me.

There was a manager who believed that people shouldn’t spend their whole careers in one job or with the same library or system. Over the last year I’ve learned more about some of the librarians at other branches, and just how wrong that manager was. A lot of them have spent a number of years working in this system. It was refreshing to learn that it was okay to stay put and keep a job for more than 2 or 3 years. Libraries are all about growth and change, and I’ve learned you can grow in the same place. There is so much focus on the larger picture of the profession but sometimes you need to look at your community and what they need. I can see that in my current position there is going to be growth. Further, with the variety of communities that our county system serves, there will always be opportunity for change. Being with the IT department puts me on the front lines of seeing the system through the growth spurts. It’s a good place to be.

Amelia Rodriguez is an IT librarian for the Mercer County Library System. In her free time she geeks out over a lot of things including Jane Austen, James Dean, and prison/cop shows. If you want to read tweets on these topics you can find her at @LitJrzyGrl. 

On the Job Learning: We're Not Egg-laying, Wool-bearing, Milk-giving Sows, by Dale Askey

Source

What's an egg-laying wool-bearing milk-giving sow and what's it got to do with libraries? It's German in origin: eierlegende Wollmilchsau. Germans toss this out octosyllabic gem whenever someone expresses the desire to have their cake and eat it, too, bitte schön. This mythical beast might seem familiar to anyone who has ever seen something like this under “required qualifications” for a librarian job:

• expert in all traditional library work: reference, instruction, liaison, cataloguing;
• expert with CSS, XSLT, HTML, XML, RDA, LOD etc.;
• ability to code in common scripting languages, e.g.- Python, PHP;
• demonstrated experience leading software implementation projects;
• systems administration skills in Solaris/Linux/Windows environments;
• ability to juggle while chewing gum, standing on one foot, and singing the national anthem of your ancestral forebears.

OK, fine, I threw that last one in just to enhance the absurdity, but all too often one sees such lists as part of advertisements for librarian jobs that are otherwise geared toward early-career librarians. Given that library schools aren't producing enough graduates with those hard technical skills to sate the demand, how does one get those skills? At this point one could also ask why libraries persist in thinking that it's OK to ask someone to be a typical “traditional” librarian, and a programmer and/or systems administrator to boot, as if those weren't, oh, separate career tracks. Sure, such librarians exist, but they are few and already have good jobs, so why would they lateral out to your library when it's clear to them they'll be flying solo with no support from a skilled team. But I digress.

So what to do when a job posting asks for the kitchen sink, and you've only got a random assortment of kitchen gadgets on your CV? For starters, accept the fact that you're not going to have everything they want. I know that many people giving job advice will say you're wasting the search committee's time if you apply and lack the required qualifications. That may be the case for an MLS degree—you either have it or you don't—but for other qualifications it is often a bit squishier. As a Canadian colleague recently aptly put it on Twitter: “I never understood postings requiring specific skills. I have never known how to do something before it was my job.” Exactly.

The trick becomes getting yourself in the door in the first place. The tactic I've used and that I'd endorse could be called “skill parlaying.” Rather than using a hypothetical example, here's how it actually went down for me. I made my first Web page in 1995 doing hand-coding on a greenscreen terminal (simultaneously enriching my ability to appreciate irony) while working as a library paraprofessional. Spent about a year doing that with progressively better tools on larger chunks of the site, and became proficient at hand-coded HTML (note for you young-uns: this was pre-WYSIWYG editors and CSS), and then applied for a job in an IT department at the institution's medical school. They hired me because I knew how to make Web pages—which used to be a marketable skill, however briefly—but I knew nothing about much of what they did. I was sure for a couple of months that they would discover my ignorance and fire me, although I had been open about my limitations. Far from it. They trained me, took me under their wings, and filled my head with copious knowledge, at least some of which is still useful 15 years on.

Not long after that, I got my first librarian job, and as I've moved around I generally trot out my steadily expanding IT skills to land a job, and then once in the job do what I said I could do and use the security and resources offered by that employment to build more skills. Colleagues taught me things, I went to seminars and training sessions, I taught myself still other things, and generally tinkered, hacked, and experimented when and where I could.

Fast forward a number of years, and I'm now in an IT leadership position, and the brutal truth is that I don't qualify—on a straight reading of the required qualifications—for some early career IT librarian jobs. On the one hand, that's a reflection of inherent limitations: no person can do everything, and in my case programming is my personal kryptonite. On the other, it's a reflection of how desperate many libraries are for technically proficient staff (so they want it all, and now, and in one salary), but also to no small degree of how little many library managers understand about what is reasonable to expect when offering an entry- or mid-level IT position. Far wiser is for employers to skip the laundry list of acronyms and IT skills du jour, and focus instead on aptitude and potential. We're hiring a couple of IT librarians at the moment, and I sincerely hope that that last bit came through in the postings.

The key advice here is just get yourself in the door. Don't misrepresent what you can do, but if you mostly meet the job requirements, throw your name in the hat. Tout what you can do, and how you want to grow and develop. A smart employer will also be considering your intangibles, and someone may well open the door. That's step one.

Step two is to become a habitual boundary-pusher. Get involved in projects, seek out talented colleagues, go to conferences where you are challenged not reaffirmed, and always push one step beyond what you know. Expert with HTML and CSS? Fine, now tackle XSLT. Bored with Windows? Ditch it, and wade into a Linux distro. Learn the joys and benefits of working from the command line. Install stuff on servers, pound on it until it breaks, and then figure out how to fix it. This can all be done for little real cost. Best time to start: yesterday.

The final step is to remember, once you've achieved status in a library, how little you knew about the job you're doing when you walked in the door. Let's start extending some ladders instead of building barricades.

Dale Askey is the Associate University Librarian, Library and Learning Technologies at McMaster University Library. He tweets @daskey and blogs at Bibliobrary.

Initiation Pain Level: Zero, by Anthony Helm

About 17 months ago I joined a new community, one that I had only ever imagined myself joining about a dozen times before. But the entrance was barred, I believed, by the lack of a degree. Specifically, I became a part of the library community, and I did it without an MLIS degree. Much to my surprise, I was not alone, though I still refrain from calling myself a “librarian.” Librarians, after all, have earned the title through years of study, practice and/or a combination of both. Nevertheless, I was welcomed to the community and am quite happy to be here. Of course, it helped that the library staff and administration here at Dartmouth College Library made my transition a smooth one.

Before I go into how they managed that, allow me to provide a little background. I have been bouncing, albeit slowly, between technology positions (computers, multimedia) and teaching positions (Japanese, English, technology) for a number of years, ultimately bringing the two together as an academic technologist. I came to Dartmouth four years ago to head up the Arts & Humanities Resource Center (AHRC), which provided technology and teaching support to A&H faculty. During the economic crisis of the past few years, Dartmouth saw a lot of reorganization and the AHRC as it existed was no more. I applied for and was hired as the Head of Digital Media and Library Technologies in the spring of 2011.  That’s how I joined one of the biggest organizations on campus, with close to 150 staff members and probably the largest population of student employees, too. Despite having heard some rumors about the library community here from friends who work there, I still didn’t know what to expect. I have since learned that our library takes “community” very seriously. Here are some of the things we do to promote that:

Orientation

Two or three times a year we run new employees through a library orientation process. Over the course of six weeks, the group spends up to an hour in each of the library’s departments (e.g. cataloging/metadata, acquisitions, interlibrary loan) and affiliate locations (e.g. special collections library, biomedical library, storage library), getting to know the staff in each location as well as gaining an understanding of the work done there and the role that department plays in the overall library organization. The orientation begins and ends with sessions with library administration. While the immediate benefits seem obvious, there is an additional benefit, too. The group of new hires is itself comprised of staff from around the library, which helps you make personal connections beyond your own department.

Candidate Presentations and Hiring

As you may expect, we do a fair amount of hiring throughout the library. For all professional positions, the candidates are expected to do a presentation. What is unusual is that the presentations are open to the entire library staff. Having gone through the experience myself, you can imagine the surprise on candidate’s faces when they have an audience of 50 people. What’s more, all staff members are invited to weigh in on the candidates through an open online feedback form. You may be a library programmer, but your opinion of the biomedical librarian candidate is just as valued. We’ve talked to candidates who have commented that the audience for the presentation was not only memorable in comparison to other interviews, but also that the diverse audience sent a strong message of library community. Oh, and once hired, there is almost always a welcoming event that is open to all staff.

All-Staff Meetings

Twice a year we have all-staff meetings. But if everyone’s in a meeting, who’s taking care of the Library? On all-staff meeting days, the program is run twice, with a morning session and an afternoon session. This allows staff to come at a time that is most convenient, while still keeping our service desks open. The meetings usually begin with introduction of new staff (sensing a theme here?) before launching into programs that are designed to inform the community of projects or changes, and may also include invited guests from other parts of campus. One all-staff meeting also becomes our annual “Inspiring Ideas Conference.” After opening comments and introductions, a keynote session is followed by break-out sessions where staff present to other staff on activities, tools, and services provided throughout the library. Past sessions have included coping with collection disasters (work, home, community), personal finance tools available through library resources, an insider’s look at the University Press of New England (UPNE), and hardware and software available for personal use through the media center.

DCLSA

Our organization also maintains a social support group known as the Dartmouth College Library Staff Association. You can see on the DCLSA home page  that the purpose of the group is three-fold:

• Promote communication and cooperation among staff in the library through membership and participation in the DCLSA; 
• Provide a scholarship fund that offers members partial tuition reimbursement for continuing education courses or programs; 
• Promote staff morale and social relationships by welcoming new staff, administering staff welfare funds and sponsoring social or educational events

The events throughout the year are well-attended.

Taken altogether, I honestly can say that there is not another department or organization on campus that I’d rather be a part of. I’m glad to be a staff member of the library, and I do feel the initiation pain level was just about zero, without even a spoonful of sugar.

Anthony Helm is the Head of Digital Media and Library Technologies at Dartmouth College. Once in a great while, he tweets @kajiai, but you can contact him more easily by emailing him at anthony.helm@dartmouth.edu. 

Library R&D, by Daniel Messer

“Where does he get those wonderful toys?" ~The Joker, Batman (1989)

Every librarian knows this story, so I won't take up a whole lot of time with it. See, around 2,300 years ago there was a library in Alexandria. It was a big thing, even by today's standards, because the staff at this library did their level best to acquire every single book and parchment that they could. Ah, but sometimes, there's a piece left out of the historical record.

The Library of Alexandria actually made things and took an active role in fostering progress.

The great library had more than its share of great librarians who took it upon themselves to move things forward. Zenodotus is credited with coming up with the idea of alphabetizing the scrolls. Aristophanes did the world of writing a small favor by creating punctuation. Eratosthenes did the world the small favoring of measuring it.

To put it more plainly: in Alexandria, when the librarians needed something for the library, they made it.

Now let's get a little more modern. Take a look at Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, or Ford. Where'd the iPhone come from? What about Windows 8? That Galaxy Tab is pretty sweet and Ford's Sync system is amazing. Where'd they get that stuff? Simple, they got it from R&D.

R&D, or research and development, is something common to big companies. You don't just make an iPhone. You have to design it. Test the specs. Reality check it. Prototype it. Test it. Fix it. Fiddle with it. It took years to make an iPhone. If you want to make something, you research it and develop it. That said; let me tell you a story. I'll keep it short, I promise.

When I scored an awesome job as the Head Circulation Guy for the busiest branch in my system, I walked into a really odd situation. Every day we’d process around 1,000 requests sent in from all over the county. To do this, we loaded the requests onto carts, checked them in using the ILS, and then looked at the patron's name that popped up on the screen. Then we'd hand write that name on a slip of paper and stick it in the item so it could be put on a public pick up shelf.

This process took all day. But wait a second, why couldn't the computer do that for us? Isn't that what computers are for? Well, as it turns out, that functionality was “coming in a future release,” but how far in the future was anyone's guess. Sure, we could ask the vendor to fast-track the feature, for a pretty hefty fee. Needless to say, the library isn’t made of money, so that wasn’t happening.

We were basically held hostage to the vendor for a feature that we absolutely need.

So I sat down and did some research. How did that patron's name appear on the screen? Where did it come from? Could I snag it and use it? Is there any way I could get that name to, say, print out on a receipt printer? As you can see, research means a lot of questions. When you get some answers, you're halfway there.

I'm not a programmer. I can write code. I can also sing in Japanese. That doesn't mean I should be allowed to do either. Still, desperate times and all that. Besides, singing a Chage & Aska ballad wasn't going to help us. So I hauled out my bag of tricks, which involved a small bag of coding which held an even smaller bag of Visual Basic 6. Using my research as a guide, I developed a tiny app that did one thing – grab that patron's name and send it to a receipt printer.

So it was that, my library, then other branches, and eventually other libraries soon had an app that printed hold pick up slips months before it was implemented into the ILS itself. I don't know if I saved anyone any money and I don't care. All I know is that we went from processing requests all day to getting them done in around four hours.

Libraries need their own R&D Departments. We have Circulation, Reference, Information Technology, and so on. We are sorely lacking in R&D. Think how much we could gain by such a thing. Think about approaching a vendor and saying “Hey, we need your widget to do X,” and when the vendor says that they can't do that, or that they could do it for a fat sack of cash, we could just shrug and say “Fine, we'll make it work on our own.”

There are experts all over your library system and I bet they are sadly under-utilized. Those experts could make one heck of an R&D division because they know more about something than anyone else working for system. But does anyone know about them, and are they ever approached for help? In any moderately sized library system or larger, I will bet money that there’s:

• an architectural expert who doesn't work in facilities development.
• a really good computer programmer who doesn't work in IT.
• a workflow efficiency expert who doesn't work in operations.
• a logistics guru who doesn't work for administration.
• a master carpenter/plumber/builder who doesn't work for facilities maintenance.
• a mathematician or financial expert who doesn't work for finance.
• a master negotiator who doesn't work with vendors.

What if they got the support and encouragement to use their expertise to make a job easier, or save the library some money, or create a new service, or enhance an existing one?

Isn't that worth something?

Daniel Messer is a public library circulation supervisor, at Queen Creek Branch Library, who specializes in customer service and library technology and automation. He blogs at Not All Bits. This is his second guest post for this blog. His previous piece is "Managing Change."