Canadian author/storyteller Ivan Coyote recently published an article about the importance of respecting people’s preferred names and pronouns. The article opens with the following anecdote:

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from a young woman, a college student, who claimed that her professor had assigned her entire class a special little assignment, for extra credits, for students who could track down my legal name and bring it to class. This young woman had tried and tried, she said, to find it online, but couldn’t, and she really wanted those extra marks. Would I be so kind as to just tell her?

I took a deep breath. I was flabbergasted, skin crawling with chill fingers at how totally creepy this felt, an entire college English or writing or queer studies or whatever class assigned the task of violating my privacy for extra credit at school.

Go read the article, really. It’s good. But not what this post is about.

This post is about another article, “Teaching Students to be Rude,” that was written in reaction to Coyote’s column. In this response article, journalist Bert Archer does two noteworthy things that we need to discuss.

1. Asserts that fact-checking (or, in LIS-speak, information seeking) is a nearly “ethics-free zone” and certainly impolite and invasive
2. Argues that librarians are very useful because we can and will find anything

You may be wondering what the connection is between librarians and some alleged college student trying to find out Ivan Coyote’s birth name. The connection is Bert Archer’s mind. Although Coyote doesn’t say that the student was a library student (and, in fact, implies the contrary, as library science is a grad degree in North America), Archer assumes it.

Why would Archer assume that it was a library student doing this invasive information-seeking? Because, in Archer’s words,

“I think this sort of assignment is exactly what I expect from librarians.”

Think about that for a minute. Let it sink in. Teaching students to dig up people’s private personal information is “exactly what I expect from librarians.”

Scary.  

We may need some librarian PR here. But not the usual kind. Archer got the “not everything is on the Internet” memo. His experience as a journalist has taught him to value the information retrieval expertise of librarians. He knows that, even in the era of Google and Wikipedia, “Unsearchables remain.” He writes,

“Reporters at the Toronto Star, for instance, know how useful librarians can be. They can ask their in-house librarians anything, and get an answer back quick.”

I am flattered by Archer’s (only nearly true) assertion that librarians can find anything. However, librarians also have ethics and are both students and creators of information policy. Library associations have taken more than one major professional stand in favour of protecting personal privacy.

Skill without ethics is not my librarianship.

It’s not the American Library Association’s librarianship, either. Yes, “Access” is the first of the ALA’s listed Core Values of Librarianship, but it’s immediately followed by “Confidentiality/Privacy.” Also among the core values on the list are diversity, the public good and social responsibility – all items that might give pause to an information professional digging up the birth name of a gender variant individual just to feed the public’s curiosity. The Code of Professional Ethics for Librarians is also offered for guidance when values – e.g., the free flow of information and patron privacy – may conflict with each other.

Archer implies that, were he writing a biographical dictionary entry on Coyote, he could ask a librarian to find out Coyote’s birth name. Honestly, many librarians (especially given a decent research budget) probably could obtain nearly anyone’s birth name, medical histories, library borrowing history, and various other bits of private information. However, would we provide that information to be published? I’d like to think that most of us would not. I would sincerely hope that if Archer asked his librarian to find Ivan’s birth name to publish, the librarian would contact Ivan and subsequently let Archer know that it was inappropriate to include such information in the entry.

Digging up and/or publishing someone’s private personal information isn’t, as Archer states, “Rude.” It’s a violation of privacy. Rude is interrupting someone, or not saying “excuse me” after you belch. Librarians are not known for being rude. They’re particularly not known for violating people’s privacy. And I think it’s a matter of concern that Bert Archer, and now perhaps many people who read his column, think they may no longer be able to trust their librarian with that potentially-embarrassing health or legal question they have.

Let me set the record straight here. Dear world: If you disclose to your librarian, in her/his professional capacity, something private about yourself, we are duty-bound to keep your confidence. Even if you are a public figure, famous author or movie star.

Not because it would be “rude” not to. Because we have professional ethics.

I understand that I will likely differ from Archer on many questions of ethics, as he also thinks it’s just fine and part of the job for a journalist (or, presumably, a librarian) to “ask a heaving mother for a picture of her just raped and murdered child.”

I hope I don’t differ from the majority of librarians on such questions, though.

 -Greyson

Disclosure: Ivan Coyote is an acquaintance of mine. Don’t know if having met in person, or having overlapping social circles, makes a difference here, but there it is in case it does. 

The two questions asked were:

1. How do you, from your personal perspective, value the situation of the public library in your country, and

2. Would you say that the support of public libraries is strong among the people/in your community/society?

There were a number of responses from the following countries, including (All hyperlinked):

Canada (Pilar Martinez and Ken Williment)

Austria (Nikolaus Hamann)

Germany (Frauke Mahrt-Thomsen)

United Kingdom (John Pateman and John Vincent)

The editor of Bis would like to put out a call for librarians from other countries to contribute to this discussion.

If you are interested, Lennart’s contact information can be found at:

http://foreningenbis.com/foreningenbis/styrelse/

~Ken

I will not even pretend to be an expert on this issue, but I would like to share some links which have been floating around some social media circles regarding the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

 Michael Geist is sounding alarm bells regarding the proposed act.  The vote has been delayed until January.

This is a good, fairly neutral video which will provide an overview of the effect of the bills application will have on websites which are targeted.

Finally, 439 major corporations/organizations are in support of the legislation.  Find out who they are here.

~Ken

The first point is probably the hardest thing to digest – to a certain extent it doesn’t matter what we think – what matters is what others think of us.  As libraries move to re-invent ourselves, which I would say we are doing at a relatively more rapid pace than we have in decades, stop any person walking on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word library.  I will put my money on one of the following three responses – books, fines or librarians shushing.

This provides us with what at times feels like an insurmountable set of issues to overcome.  Not only do libraries need to re-invent themselves, we also need to do it while conveying the message externally (in a way that addresses some of the traditional perceptions of libraries the community has come to know – an institution where people still experience barriers to accessing information or having social exchanges).

For this post – I want to write a few thoughts about how to influence change within libraries.  I think it is important to identify the types of attributes the ‘ideal’ staff member would have to possess in order to be able to work within an environment where change is occurring, to address and influence the above issues….

• A person who sees the need for change and innovation, not only from the perspective of staff but through the lens of library users and non-users. Now it is important to acknowledge that there is a clear delineation between innovators and leaders verses managers.  Innovators and effective leaders who can drive a change process can come from anywhere within an organizations structure.  The issues is, do we allow that to occur – or do we limit it to the detriment of libraries?  Lets use private industry as a case study – if someone on staff within a large corporation has a great idea – would they stifle it because of the ‘level’ the person is within the organization?  For profit industries have a motivation (money and profit) which drives improvement.  Public service organizations also have a motivating factor – better customer experiences.
• A person who is able to be humble and move beyond their role as ‘expert’.  Becoming an expert in engaging, finding the appropriate role for facilitating the link between people and information (or maybe even people and people), and linking and visualizing the role in which libraries can play in community, is a different kind of expertise that being a spokesperson who informs people of information or existing programs.
• Someone who can move beyond the perceived barriers to community led work (resources, role of services, the unknown), and not allow these barriers to stop them from trying it.
• A willingness to seriously accept trial and error – and report on the learnings that occurred when trying new and innovative approaches to working with community.  Anyone who says they ‘have got it’ to working with community – needs to re-evaluate.  When one person has always ‘got’ the answer for community – they need to review the concepts behind the engagement process.
• A willingness to shift library based responses from ‘no’ it does not fit within our mandate – to how can we work with the community based information needs to make it (or them) fit within the libraries mandate.  If community members are expressing that they see a link between the library and their need, we should be encouraging staff to find the linkage – otherwise it is another lost opportunity for library service development.
• An acknowledgement that the penalization of community and the concept of librarians as stewards (keepers and holders of information) is outdated.  Libraries once possessed warehouses of information – which community members can now find on the click of an iPad or laptop.  We are no longer entitled to creating barriers to large numbers of potential library users – especially when we should be trying to entice them to use library services, rather than limiting community use.
• It is important for the ‘ideal’ community based library staff member who wants to be innovative to think about our role in the information exchange and how we engage with community outside the confines of the physical library branch.

This is only a starting point – and is internally focused…. Next we need to convince the really important people, community members, about the changing nature of libraries and our continuing relevance in their lives.

If they still only view libraries simply as a ware house of books, of late fines and fees or shushing when people talk in the library…….  then we have a future..

~Ken

I thought it would be good to follow on from Ken’s posting about the role of librarians in a world of austerity by looking briefly at some issues here in the UK.

As you’ll know, August saw riots across the UK, and, whilst the analysis of the reasons rolls on (with many a political twist!), a number of issues is coming to the fore, including:

• The growth in inequality – according to The Equality Trust: “UK income inequality increased by 32% between 1960 and 2005. During the same period, it increased by 23% in the USA, and in Sweden decreased by 12%.”
• The reality of life for some young people at ‘street-level’ where, according to Camila Batmanghelidjh, “large groups of young adults [are] creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules”

As managers within library systems, we have the opportunity to be involved in the development of strategic objectives – and hence – the actions needed by staff to complete these objectives.  Service planning is an important part of this process.  As you have probably read from previous postings (e.g. see posting) there are various techniques which  can be applied ‘on the ground’ to actively engage with community – in order to ensure that the services developed by public libraries truly reflect the needs of community, and not just staff perception of community based information needs.

So, how can a library system involve community in the development of regional plans?  This is a good question, and there is no ‘one’ answer, since each library system will develop plans differently.  However, there are some steps which will be important to consider if you want to ensure your library system is developing programs and services with community.

As library staff begin to work with the newly targeted community, it is beneficial to create a plan which is multiphased – so community input and involvement can continuously have impacts.  Predetermined outputs, outcomes, and impacts, which are based on library management perceptions at the beginning of a service planning process – implies library led, not community led.

In order to ensure that service planning is completed from a community-led approach, each of the following steps can be part of the service planning process.  They include:

Segment

Determine which community you are writing a service plan for (e.g., Immigrants, Older Adults, People with Varying abilities, Teens etc.).  You can’t write an effective service plan for the entire community.

Determine Baseline

Internally – What resources/strengths/relationships does the library currently have to work with targeted community (e.g. – existing knowledge of community (gathering locations inside the library system or in the community, cultural norms, etc…), relationships with individuals from the community, collections, other existing services …

Externally – Who are the key individuals or organizations which should be contacted, in order to begin building external relationships with the targeted community?  Remember, the intent of community led services is not to have organizational representatives or community spokespersons identify community need; however, they can provide a wealth of information which will guide the service planning process – and provide the library with access to individual community members.  As relationships are built, start to document what you are hearing from the community (what is their perception of need, asset, role for the library etc.)

Analyze – Analyze what you/staff are hearing from the community and go back to the targeted community and verify… is what we are hearing correct?  Start exploring or at a minimum, thinking about potential service responses.

ENGAGE: Build Staff Capacity/ Engage Individuals in the Community

If a library system is going to work closely with a targeted community, it is essential that library staff are given the opportunity to know about the targeted community (what has been learned to this point from relationships which have been built) and community led approaches.  If branch or public service staff who will be working with the community are not provided with upfront training, it highly increases the danger of failure.

While service providers have provided a glimpse of the individual life circumstances of the targeted group – only by directly engaging (not solely observing) and developing relationships with individuals, will library staff be able to start hearing about community needs.

Systemic Change / Branch Based Change

Build in mechanisms which allow for community involvement in impacting the development of program and service responses either across the system or in a specific community/library branch.  Many times a change in one branch can be expanded to have a regional impact.  If the change only occurs in one branch, community members will be disappointed if they visit another branch which has not implemented the change….

Communicate and Evaluate!

Since this process moves service development from an internal process, to both an internal and external process – it is important to clearly communicate both internally and externally.  Make sure others are kept in ‘the know’.  It is important to explain the implications of what you are hearing from your target group to internal and external stakeholders.  The advantage of constantly communicating with community members, is it also provides an opportunity to evaluate.

~Ken

• Curent unemployment rate in the US % 9.1, Canada 7.2%, England 7.6% (this does not include underemployment – which is reflected below in US Department of Labor stats)

• Global inequality is on the rise (and Canadians are beginning to outpace Americans!)
• Austerity is kicking in across Europe and may be coming to a community near you soon.

And in response to the last fact, I recently read a newspaper article based out rural Manitoba (where I grew up) which literally scared the cr@p out of me.  Why you may ask yourself?  Well feel free to give it a read.  Although this is just a letter to the editor, this should really send off some alarm bells.  There are people who are raising similar justifications for the current economic conditions in the United States, England, and I would presume – we will soon be hearing voices like this attacking the diverse people of Canada.

I think of youth in my home town who may read a piece of information like this and the impact the information can have on their belief system.  I remember how much of a sponge I was as a youth, and without someone else providing alternative narratives through other sources of information, this could have formed the ‘truths’ for myself and many other youth as they develop into adulthood.

As providers of information how should librarians [yes both those socially conscious and other librarians] respond?

So librarians, are we non-biased providers of information?  Do we passively respond by providing the general public with access to ‘well balanced’ information sources?

Are we agents of social change?  Are there certain social truths and absolutes which librarians are willing to take a stand for?

I personally think that avoiding issues and not taking a stance (complicit as it is) is also a stance.
_______________________________________________________________

Whatever the possibilities of freedom we may have, they cannot be realized if we continue to assume that the ‘OKAY WORLD’ of reality is the only world there is. Society provides us with warm, reasonably comfortable caves, in which we can huddle with our fellows, beating on the drums that drown out the howling hyenas of the surrounding darkness. ‘ECTASY’ is the act of stepping outside the caves, alone, to face the night” Peter Berger (149-150)

OCLC and Library Journal Bring You:

Putting the Public Back in Public Libraries: Community-Led Libraries

Full Description here 

Archive of full Webinar can be found here

Monday, September 26, 2011 ♦ 1 pm Eastern / 10 am Pacific ♦ 60 min.

While public libraries are generally viewed as inclusive spaces, there are large segments of community that do not use them. Beginning in 2004, four large urban library systems from across Canada – Vancouver, Toronto, Regina and Halifax Public Libraries – spent four years working in socially excluded communities, to determine how to make public library services relevant to the needs of underserved communities. As a result, it was discovered that when communities are involved in the identification, development and delivery of library services, there can be an exhilarating effect. Since the conclusion of the highly successful Working Together Project (2004-2008), public libraries from across Canada have integrated community-led approaches and techniques. This webinar, brought to you in collaboration with Library Journal, will discuss the major outcomes of the project and provide examples of how the bringing this approach into library service planning makes libraries even more relevant to local needs.

Presenters: Tracey Jones-Grant, manager of ELL, Literacy and Diversity Services, Halifax Public Libraries; Ken Williment, community development manager for Halifax Public Libraries; and Randy Gatley, community librarian, Vancouver Public Library.

To register go to:

http://www.webjunction.org/events/webinars#sept26

~Ken

Using statistics makes sense for libraries.  Statistics provide our funders, boards, and senior administrators with a snapshot of the inputs and outputs occurring in libraries.  I hope to write a future posting which talks about the importance of using the narrative to ensure we are also capturing the impacts and outcomes of library services.

I hope this makes sense.. but here it goes.

Librarians, like most other professionals, have traditionally collected numbers, especially descriptive statistics, as a primary means of measurement, evaluation, and to justify or change current or proposed operations.  While quantitative statistics have served a valuable function within the traditional library environment, there are many drawbacks to using numbers to represent the attitudes and behaviours of patrons.

Using Quantitative Measures

While the collection of numbers is usually viewed as a non-biased methodology for collecting information, numeric indicators have a number of drawbacks.  Quantitative methodology is a deductive approach, where the researcher acts:

• as the expert who determines the questions used to collect information or data, and
• questions are usually generated by referring to other library studies (conducting a literature review), or by relying on their own expertise, to determine the concepts to measure.

When this occurs, we as library staff, define the concepts are important to measure. Staff also decide:

• what questions to ask,
• how to ask them, and
• how to measure them.

This process should, but does not always involve, clearly pre-determining the concepts to measure.  This can provide a one time snapshot, or a more long term picture of a social phenomena.

Numbers permits us to test hypotheses, predictions, and causal connections between the measured concepts.  Under specific circumstances the use of statistical procedures allows for sample (e.g. small number of old age library users) findings to be inferred to populations (e.g. all old age users in the library system).

Issue I.

Ultimately, the numeric basis of quantitative research is one of its major weaknesses.  While concepts are asked and defined by library staff, so they can measure them, the use of common terminology is not always consistent.

(Example #1 – After a program library staff may ask the participants what they thought of it through the use of a five point scale: 1=Very bad / 2=Bad / 3=Neutral / 4=Good / 5=Very Good.  One person may have had a horrible time, but only interpret the experience as “bad”, while another might have been mildly annoyed by the person sitting beside them and then indicate their experience was “very bad”.  Therefore, the response depends on the definition the individual places on the concept created by the survey constructor – not how the survey constructor defined the concept).

(Example #2 – The number of library users in one library system can be defined as the number of people that check out books, while another system may measure the same concept based on the number of people who enter their buildings.   Therefore, when numeric data is collected and compared, between branches and other systems, it is very important that library staff constantly ensure that apples are being compared with apples – not oranges.)

Issue II.

By pre-determining the concepts to measure and compare, the librarian is viewed as the expert who knows, prior to data collection, which concepts or variables are important.  This process is very inflexible, and does not provide members of the community the opportunity to provide information about how they see the world, outside the prescribed measurement tool created by the librarian.

Issue III.

By far the most dangerous consequences of the improper use of quantitative statistics occurs when people collecting and interpreting data conclude that the findings are causal or predictive.  With quantitative statistics, the type of number used (nominal, ordinal, interval-ratio) determines which research questions can be asked, what questions can be answered, and what types of analysis can be performed.  For example, people may talk about the “correlation” between concepts, although correlation does not show causality – it is a measure of association – and is much more accurate when occurring between concepts measured at the interval-ratio level (not nominal level data (frequencies or whole numbers) which are primarily collected in libraries).

In addition, small samples should only be generalized to large scale populations, when library staff can tell the sample drawn  is representative of the entire library system (e.g. remember the old age user example discussed above. Survey results of a sample of old aged users can only be generalized to a population of old aged users, if the sample is reflective of the population).    If sample characteristics do not reflect the population, there is a danger of introducing bias into the results, and interpretations – which drive library policy (e.g. only older library users who are highly mobile filled out the survey, since the survey was conducted in winter and those with mobility issues could not come to the branch because of all the snow).  This is a real threat to library systems if done incorrectly, since a small innocent survey – which was improperly interpreted, is relied upon to direct future library services and policies.

~ Ken

I am based in the UK, and have been involved in libraries’ work towards social justice for a long time. I have worked in public library services in SE England and Londonsince the 1960s, and now coordinate The Network.

“The Network – tackling social exclusion in libraries, museums, archives and galleries”, to give it its full title, is a network of organisations and individuals working towards social justice. We started in 1999 as one of the positive outcomes of a major research project into public library policy and social exclusion (published as Open to all? in 2000).

Our major activities include the provision of:

• information on initiatives that tackle social exclusion, contribute to community engagement and social/community cohesion, including publishing a monthly newsletter and a regular ebulletin
• training and other opportunities for the cultural sector and related local services to explore, develop and promote their role in this field
• a forum to advocate for partnership approaches to tackling social exclusion and contributing to the wider social agenda.

Although we received a small amount of development funding early on (at allow us to develop our work with museums and archives), we do not receive any external funding – our funding comes from an annual subscription for Network members and income from courses and project work.

If you are interested in finding out more about our work, please visit our website or email me.

As well as the broader social justice area (and how libraries can strengthen their links and deliver provision with other agencies), I am also interested particularly in how we can deepen our understanding of our communities – and hope to reflect some of these interests in my contributions to the blog, especially around working with LGBT people, new arrivals, children & young people in the public care system.

I very much look forward to starting a lot of dialogues!