Changing Leadership Strategies for Libraries

Stephen Abram, MLSLighthouse Consulting, Dysart & JonesOLA Education InstituteWednesday, November 22, 2013

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Sooooo, what strategies do we need to change for changing times?

Leadership requires that we deal with ambiguity in times of continuous changeLet’s name just four big issues

1. Are our users aren’t finding the resources they need as successfully as they should and could. (Hint - they aren’t… )

2. Are we organized for the 21st Century?3. Are we engaging with our communities as effectively as we could?4. Are we using numbers strategically?

These are our issues to solve . . . And this is just a 60 minute overview!

And this requires us to apply our leadership skills…

Suffice it to say that we can’t solve any of these issues one library at a time. We need a sector wide, provincial or national strategy.

 1. Are Our Users Finding Our Online Reference Resources?

• Are we in the search business or the answer business?• Are we recognizing the split between answers and entertainment programming?• Are we co-creating the tools we need?• Where can we lead and how – management, marketing, partnerships?

Is digital more complicated than Print?

A. Understand the difference between Search and Find

• Roy Tennant and I have been saying for years: “Users want to find not search”. • Librarians enjoy the challenge of search and try to create mini-librarians.• Information literacy is different than contextual information fluency.• “Search” is not a single skill and Boolean is a crazy first step for the average end-user – the real competency being taught and hopefully learned here is learning, research and decision-making.

B. Understand the difference between the roles of discovery services and native search

• Search is the identification of potential objects to read or view in either a known item retrieval scenario or – more importantly – an immersion environment where choices are made.• Until recently, we handled immersion environments in the context of defined subsets of content (a single database or small group).• Discovery services are one step before search – the identification and discovery of the resources (databases) that are worth searching.

The Field Mapping Failure

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 -

200,000,000

400,000,000

600,000,000

800,000,000

1,000,000,000

1,200,000,000

Series1

Double a penny every day for a month =Over $1 billion in just 30 days

And the Algorithm Understanding Failure

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The power of algorithm is in the target user needs, the institutional needs, and the behavioral history

. . . Not the underlying content

Are there any real national initiatives to understand and differentiate library end user behaviors from Google commercial constructs? (yes but …)

LEAD: Differentiate libraries from the Google

C. Get the naming and labeling right

• Vendors must develop unique names and brands for their services to meet positioning, marketing and sales needs to you.• There is no need for you to fall in line and pass through these names – or worse try to train end users to know hundreds of them!• Can anyone defend using these titles to be the single most important label for end users? MLA, Scopus, Compendex, ABI/Inform . . .?• Honestly! The needs of trademark law don’t match the needs of users to identify resources.

LEAD: Make choices and brand our portfolios well

D. Stop trying to emulate Google – fer chrissakes

• Are you SEO, SMO, ad, geo-tag, and link bait focused? Do you want algorithms that display content based on commercial priorities? • Do you want your algorithm to display the paid-for term and questionable quality content spam?• Are your services (digital and personal) about Who, What, When and Where – ready reference? Or do you focus on Why and How – research impact?• Clearly know how you’re different not a pale copy.

LEAD: Use then tools but for social good.

2. Context and Culture rule

• Describe and map your user’s real workflows and not just our understanding of the small segment we see.• Seek to understand how learning, research and / or decision-making happen.• Finding the resource is insufficient – especially if I must print it, can’t easily cite it, have difficulty loading it agnostically on any device . . . etc.

 Are we organized for the 21st Century?

• When was your last reorganization that was planned around strategy and not staff turnover?• Was it predicated on relationships being more nimble, customer process-oriented, cross-functional and externally focused or was it just an org chart?• What are your investments in team work and management training (as compared to technology…?

 3. Are we engaging with our communities as effectively as we could?

• How well do you really understand your community?• If your public library still segments on kids, teens, adults, & seniors . . . Then . . .• If your academic library still segments on undergrads, grads and faculty . . . Then . . .• We’re doing it poorly. We need to move beyond shallow segmentation and work towards need-based behavioral segmentation for portfolio marketing.

Invest in persona development

• Segment by behaviour and goals . . .• Does anyone really prioritize content and answers by format? Then why are our offering so 1999?• Are we viewing the workflow or learning flow or life stages through a camera hole?

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/4/2010/02/walee.jpg

 4. Are we using numbers strategically?

Statistics versus measurementsSatisfaction and Impact Visual versus dataStories build on data springboards

Impact: Your Strategies and Priorities

What should libraries do?

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Modest technology leadership options

• Stop seeing ‘search’ as a single goal or solution• Put targeted content experiences in the path of the user, learner,

researcher… in learning management systems, social media, intranets, etc.

• Develop better and stronger partnerships with IT support and user group liaison

• Start a massive shift to the “Cloud” and not just software . . .• Build a library of shared APIs, frameworks and code and start to

integrate the ILS with fulltext, Google, DPLA, OCLC WorldShare and your own and other repositories as well as OpenURL and CCC FindIt

• Get better at shared analytics (including geo) to build experiences and algorithms

• STOP displaying digital resources based on the shelving and format needs of physical resources

• Build ‘real’ consortia that rise above buying clubs and really offer cost-effective, rugged platforms (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, with ILS/LMS) for success

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Modest people leadership options

• Organize on a matrix – a least two dimensions.• Develop real cross-functional teams• Meet more, communicate more, but do it in shorter bursts. Avoid

multiple agenda meetings. Build matrix communication tools across physical boundaries.

• Stay focused in meetings and separate the operational from the strategic.

• Adopt project management practices including Scrum and Agile methodologies and get faster sprints and iterative development with better understanding of milestones.

• Build solid trans-institutional cooperative frameworks – like OCUL.• Investment in persona development and targeting the end-user

experience in workflows and research flows and learning flows

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Stephen Abram, MLS, FSLAConsultant, Dysart & Jones/Lighthouse Consulting

Cel: 416-669-4855stephen.abram@gmail.comStephen’s Lighthouse Blog

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