Selling the Library | Peer to Peer Review
Thinking about the limits of customer service Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Feb 10, 2011| Photo by Debora Miller |
I was just at a small informal gathering of academic library directors who were discussing a variety of things, including who was doing what about discovery layers, whether we need to revisit shared collection development, and what was going on at our libraries in the areas of information literacy and faculty development. In the course of our discussion, someone said "what's the best way to get librarians out of the library?"
What, they bring their pillows and bed down for the night? Are they staging a sit-in? No, apparently directors worried that librarians who do most of their work in the library building might not be aware of what's going on in academic departments and that, in turn, faculty whose research needs are often answered by electronic resources might have little idea what librarians do for a living—or what we could be doing to help them.
On my campus, this isn't a problem. We have full faculty status and are active both on faculty committees and in the faculty-owned faculty development program. We all collaborate with faculty on course-related instruction and contribute courses to interdisciplinary programs (which usually means teaching in other academic buildings, so we know which classrooms have the worst technology and the nicest views). We're active scholars, and our research shows up in the usual places where faculty scholarship is publicized. It's a small enough college in a small enough town that you would have to polish your hermit skills to not chat with faculty in other departments when you see them at the food coop.
But even so, librarians know from the most recent Ithaka faculty survey that the library is seen increasingly not as an important cultural institution, but rather as the place with the people who hold open the gates that stand between research material and scholars; we're the people who negotiate licenses and pay the bills without making a fuss. If you were to take a census of who is actually in the library, it's likely to be students, but even they are puzzled about our purpose. According to Project Information Literacy's landmark study, Truth Be Told: How College Students Evaluate and Use Information in the Digital Age, most students use library resources, particularly to find articles in licensed databases, but few turn to librarians for help as they do their research. They come for the stuff; who needs a librarian?
Making connections, making a case
Would getting out of the library change this impression? Anecdotally, simply relocating passive library service points to other locations has not met with universal success. Students who are not inclined to ask a librarian for help in the library are not much more likely to approach them in the campus cafeteria, other than to satisfy their curiosity. ("Man, what happened? Layoffs at the library?") A busy professor may wonder why a librarian is reading email on a laptop while seated in the humanities building common area, but may not want to intrude.
The trick is to connect on a personal level so that we understand people's needs without expecting them to ask for our help. Recently, Jessamyn West quoted Allen Smith, a legendary Simmons LIS professor:
"Show me a town that denies funding to a library, and I'll show you a librarian who stays in the office. Show me a town that funds its library, and I'll show you a librarian who takes donuts down to the fire department. Who goes down to the city hall and goes into offices asking if they need anything. You have to be proactive. It might come as a shock to some of you, but a large part of the success of that library is your personality and the way you treat people."
It's not really about donuts, though I'm sure they wouldn't go amiss. It's about having confidence that what we do is really useful, even vital to our communities, and in the case of academic libraries, to the educational mission of our institutions. It's believing that libraries are for more than providing stuff to complete assignments and pad CVs. And, it's about telling our stories.
I am not convinced that this is a marketing issue, that we need to work harder at selling ourselves. In fact, we're far too focused on selling. We're doing our best to become an aggregator of publishers' wares, a web presence with an invisible shopping cart that conceals the cost and redirects the bill. No, this is a matter of defining our professional identity—not our brand, but our actual selves—and establishing the understanding that libraries are not just another kind of shopping mall but an essential common ground for our institutions and the world of learning they represent. We need people to know that librarians have their backs when it comes to the rights we consider essential for the furtherance of knowledge and the freedom to inquire. We need to make it clear that we are committed to helping our students learn how to become contributing members of the ongoing conversations that create knowledge.
Finding the right "we're not a business" model
And here, it seems to me, is where our expertise and our defense of the people's right to information is currently at risk. When we become too closely identified with vendors and publishers, we may think we're just providing service, but we risk erasing our identity and the fundamental freedoms we used to defend.
At a recent event in New York, heart of the traditional trade book industry, publishers expressed puzzlement and caution when asked to consider the role of libraries in the digital future. Macmillan's CEO, Brian Napack, seemed to think there might be one, maybe, but not until he could find the right business model, until we were ready to do it on his terms only.
This reminded me of that weird weekend just about a year ago when Macmillan and Amazon had a fight and Amazon made all of the buy buttons for Macmillan's books disappear. It turns out those two Goliaths of the book world have more in common than they thought. They both think libraries are a threat to their business, so they're disabling our "borrow" buttons. This isn't about meeting the need of customers, this isn't anything to do with growing the market for books or reading, this is nothing but locking in a technology to sell more product. And the product isn't a book to own, it's an opportunity to read a book the company owns.
At the American Library Association's midwinter meeting, another panel considered how libraries should deal with ebooks, and the speaker most concerned with defending the role of libraries was Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. He thinks libraries should be bold in defending what they do. Otherwise what does the future hold? Kahle predicts that librarians may become "customer service departments for a few major corporations."
Some days that already seems to be my job description as I try to coax EBSCO database to play better to Zotero or figure out how to convince students to use yet another redesigned interface that doesn't actually work or when I sign those staggering invoices for another year's limited access to a database that would do a vanishing trick if I don't sign the invoice.
It takes up a lot of my time, but I'm not in sales and service. Maybe I need to get out more so that I can remember that, dang it, I'm a librarian.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books.
