Rachel said:

“So, yeah, when I hear all the stuff about trying to make our libraries more like businesses and trying to make our patrons more like customers it makes me despair.  Despair because, for one, if we seriously think we can compete with commercial booksellers at their game we’re seriously effing deluded but more importantly, I despair that we would even want to.”

I’ve had a crazy fortnight of grading (aside - love using the word “fortnight”) and have had these ideas buzzing in the back of my brain since Menucha, though they’ve been fed by some post-Menucha events, including Rachel’s Discouragement Series.  Still, 100 portfolios and 50 essays in two weeks and I haven’t had the chance to seriously sit down and think and make sense of any of these thoughts in the way that means they might make sense to others.

By now though, Rachel is no longer discouraged, and I am at risk of losing them altogether, so here we go.  Caveat emptor.  See what I did there?  Probably not.  But I did it because what started all of this thinking was Rachel taking on the idea that library service can equal, or should equal, customer service.

So at Menucha we were listening to people talk about the future of the catalog.  And in a situation that set this particular Menucha conference apart from many others, most of the speakers were from the cataloging or systems side of libraries.

And there were questions from the public services librarians to some of these catalogs and systems people about things like timing: how did your team time the roll out of a new system?  Did you wait until summer when it would be least disruptive?  There were little comments here and there about how the systems people just wanted to get better systems out there as soon as possible, regardless of what was going on at the reference desk and in the classroom — and the public services people might have been a little bit portrayed as barriers to that.  But not in any overt kind of way.

And then my colleague Terry Reese (the new Gray Family Chair for Innovative Library Services at OSU) talked about moving the ILS to the network level, and more than this, arguing that the discovery experience for users needs to move from the local catalog to the network level as well.  He argued that local holdings will become less important, that our users need to connect with the world of information that can spark their learning and their curiosity.  The reaction was spirited, digital holdings are clearly one thing, but Terry got a lot of pushback from (what I perceived to be) public services librarians who were convinced that local users still needed to be able to connect quickly and easily to local content, especially in the tangible world.

Things all really came to a head when the only joint public- and technical-services panel took place on Friday morning.  Librarians from the University of Washington came together to discuss that campus’ implementation of WorldCat Local.  Let’s just say that there were a lot of conversations that the different units at UW had not had before this panel, or at least before the drive down to give the panel, and there was much tension and strain in the resulting conversation.  But that’s really not what I want to talk about here.

Because I was really, really sympathetic to the public services librarians asked to make a big service change that didn’t really work that well to start - asked to walk into a classroom a students and demonstrate a tool that might or might not work as it was supposed to and that wasn’t even supposed to be able to do something of the things that your most demanding users would really need.  But even though my rooting interest was entirely on the side of the instruction librarians, I had a thought that wouldn’t go away - maybe we were thinking about this all wrong.

It was Rachel’s customer service post that made me figure out why.

It would be crazy insane for a business to show the world of possibilities to its customers if that business couldn’t quickly and easily deliver those possibilities to the customers, and take credit for it.   For a business to stay viable, they can only offer stuff when the path to that stuff is quick and reliable for the user.  And that’s how we public services librarians are thinking about things.

But is that enough?  For those of us in academic libraries, with our mission statements that are all about creating lifelong learners and productive citizens is it enough to produce users who can find enough stuff within our proprietary databases and our four walls to produce a reasonable paper or project that is due the next day?  If that’s what they can do — are they really information literate?  Really?  Truly?  Are they information literate in the way that they can do what they need to do when they leave the ivory tower?  Are they information literate in a way that means they will be informed citizens?

I keep thinking about this story from when I first started working in academic libraries.  I guess it was about eight years ago now.  I was working at a small school in a big consortium with a union catalog and automated borrowing.  The student government officers asked for a meeting with the head of access services to talk about library service.  They wanted the numbers on how many consortium requests were placed the previous year.  It was their belief that every one of those requests represented a library failure - we didn’t have it in our collection, so we’d failed and needed the consortium to bail us out.

The head of access services argued the opposite.  She said that a few years ago (so the mid-90’s)  academic libraries mostly showed their own holdings to their users.  Sure, you could do some fancy searching and find the other stuff, but the easy searching - the path of least resistance - was to find what your library had.

Now, she said, we show you the world.  And then we get it for you.  Each successful consortial request was a win for the library for being forward-thinking enough to realize that participation in this joint effort was a win for the users.   And our users do win when we collaborate this way.   Eight years later they still win when we collaborate this way.  They win when they can easily search elsewhere, and when they can get the stuff easily and quickly.

But I’m not sure, really, that those of us in public services really present it as a win.  Don’t we kind of teach the whole process, the workflow, as if it is a response to an initial failure on the part of the library?  First you check our stuff, and if we don’t have it you move on to Summit and if it’s not there there’s always ILL.   Don’t worry, we can get it for you even when our first two tries don’t work out.  How can our users not see it as “here’s what we do for you when the system breaks down”?

And here’s the thing — there’s always a thing — the thing is - we’re still presenting Orbis-Cascade as Plan B and at this point, in the real world of 2008, the real world of information literate lifelong learners, even Orbis-Cascade is research with training wheels.

That story happened long enough ago that we we were still talking about “the Internet” and “the library” as if they were two different things.   So “lots of libraries” was way more of “the world of information” than was our one library, but it was still kinda a different kind of information than “the Internet.”   Eight years later that distinction is just crazy talk.  The world of information is way bigger than our individual libraries and it is way bigger than Orbis-Cascade and what both of these systems have to offer is mainly the customer service thing - the quick and easy delivery of that inventory to the user.  But again, is that enough?

At that conference, as sympathetic as I was to the public services librarians and their concerns, I really started to see the vision of academic libraries that showed the REAL world of information to their users.  Some of it would be available right here right now because it’s our stuff and it’s in.  Some of it would be available right here right now because it’s digital and it’s accessible that way.  Some of it wouldn’t be available right here right now and that’s okay because you know what that’s how information works.

First in library school and then when I first started at OSU, not eight but five years ago now, we talked a lot about teaching concepts in information literacy classes instead of tools - about teaching about things like “the information cycle” or “the flow of information.”  The idea was that we would teach our students enough about how information works that they would know the kind of information they would need, what they could expect to find in a library, what they could expect to be free, what the government provides, what publishers publish and so on and so on and so on.  And we never figured out a way to present that stuff that didn’t feel abstract and artificial and boring, and the students didn’t respond.  And I think that might have been because while we knew that stuff was important, even for understanding what we had in our libraries, we didn’t teach them to research in that broader world.  We were trying to teach them about the big, bad real world while encouraging them to do their work in a sandbox.

I think we might be at a place now where the world of information, the real world of information, is where our students need to be.  We have an analogy to work with - that full-text only limiter in our databases.  We all tell our users not to use that.  “Don’t click the full-text ticky box,” we say, “you’ll be eliminating stuff from your search that might be really useful, and that we might have in print or in another database.”  Even though we know that getting to the text outside of the database might be clunky and messy and annoying, we still open our students up to that frustration because we think the payoff will be worth it.

To get to a place where our public services are in that world of information context beyond the full-text articles, where we teach that way, where we assume that our users’ discovery will happen on the network level, that’s going to require a change - away from thinking about what we do as customer service.  Because to take advantage of that level, our students can’t act like consumers.  They can’t demand it right here right now because information isn’t free and sometimes you just find the thing about the thing instead of the thing and that’s not just a library thing - it’s the way it is.  And they can still decide that right here right now is what they want but they would need to do that knowing full well there’s more and different stuff out there but the more and different might cost them some time.

I think that smaller libraries, especially smaller branch libraries within larger systems - like some of the WSU libraries  - are already teaching that way.  So much of “their” stuff is elsewhere that it only makes sense.  And I think the public libraries that are part of district or county systems have users who are used to the idea that what’s here and now today is not the world of what is possible.

Rachel says, “if we seriously think we can compete with commercial booksellers at their game we’re seriously effing deluded but more importantly, I despair that we would even want to” and I agree.  She’s talking about how we shouldn’t want to because our users are citizens not consumers, and I’m thinking about something related but not the same - our users in academic libraries also have a lot of pressure and encouragement to think about themselves as consumers.  But college is not the mall and an education isn’t something you can buy.

Yes, there will ALWAYS be the the students that wait until the night before and who just need enough stuff to get that paper done.  And if our systems don’t let us limit to what’s available in the here and now after the fact then we have a problem.  But can we stop demanding that we design all of our systems for that user?  I’ll admit it, I’m not looking forward to sitting at the reference desk in front of a frustrated and angry student who thinks that the library has on purpose decided not to buy all of the good stuff on his topic; that is not anyone’s idea of fun.  But can we at least acknowledge that requiring our systems to be useful to the lowest common denominator of student engagement and involvement in learning might in fact mean that those systems aren’t doing what is best for those who might really respond to authentic discovery experiences?