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I just came out of a meeting with our Tech Department Director and am finished with my victory lap around the library. I thought it might make a good blog to mention a small success (that's taken 3 years) for the library's web presence. I mentioned before that the attitude from IT in the recent past has been "it's just a government website" and that we were limited by incredibly strict formatting templates.
Well, today I learned that we can move forward with the revised version of our web page and that (and this is the clincher) there were always 3 templates available for us, one of which would have saved me much frustration and annoyance over the past 3 years as it is a relatively open format. Why did it take so long for all of the involved parties to arrive at the same conclusion, i.e., our web page needs to be dynamic as it more and more becomes the means by which we provide access for our patrons?
I've broken the answer down into the most simplistic terms I can think of for the sake of clarity:
(1) Training
(2) Communication
(3) Teamwork
How does this play out for my library with our local government? Well you might ask. We have a webmaster tasked not only with training county staff to manage content on their web pages but also with heading a committee on how the web page should look. This is a typical scenario for many of us: Wearing multiple hats. But, in this instance, the hats just didn't fit. Just because someone can code doesn't mean they have any talent in (A) training others, or (B) design, or (C) managing a committee, areas requiring special skill sets. Regarding teamwork, I believe that our webmaster is considered a team player within his department, but had not been encouraged to think beyond this cocoon to apply the concept to the entire county. I believe today's meeting will take us a long way in remedying this situation.
I also took the opportunity during this meeting to toss out the growing importance of e-government for all county departments’ web pages (just another example of a librarian working hard to make our world a better place for cyber-kind.) BTW, don't look at our web page now, give us another month or two to get the new and improved version up and running, or look but with the caveat that it's all soon undergoing a major overhaul.
This post probably doesn't have much meaning for those of you in larger libraries, who have your own IT staff, or in smaller libraries who are tasked with doing it all yourself. I'd very much like to hear how you have incorporated training, design, communication, and teamwork into presenting your online public face. I wlll be attending Web Page Committee meetings and would love to share some of your success stories. Please chime in!
Loren MccRory, Director
Yuba County Library
Marysville, CA
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Trust, Communication
Congratulations! I wouldn't call this a small success at all. It sounds like you've gotten past the dip.
And you're asking the right question. How can we speed up the communication and trust-building process? I wonder how many mid-sized cities and counties have cross-departmental learning opportunities that focus on technology. For example, there could be brown bag lunches that feature a short presentation followed by an hour of conversation and networking. The speakers could be drawn from the city/county IT department, the library, local businesses, and local user groups (e.g. the Linux Users group, or some other tech association). Speaking of which, librarians should drop in on these user group meetings from time to time, especially if the county techs hang out there. I think that a few hours of casual networking can have more impact in breaking down barriers than years of formal communication.
If the hat fits, or not...
Thanks for commenting Chris, and for the ideas to share with our County IT. I can't pretend that I have an answer to your rhetorical question of specialist vs generalist. And I TOTALLY agree about communication, barriers as well as breakdowns and breaking down barriers. As the population raised on technology continues to enter the work force, I anticipate an about face in our approach to the question. It won't be whether or not you're talking to a techie. It will be whether or not you're an active participant in 21st century society. Those who have made no attempt to stay informed about technology, generally speaking not necessarily on a specialist level, will be like 3rd world tribal cultures when trying to communicate with industrialized nations. It won't just be a matter of communication styles or language spoken, it will be a more along the lines of a gestalt experience. Quite possibly the 4th world will be made up of "have-nots" and/or the technophobes.
I believe that most librarians entering the profession these days are aware of the "great divide" and "computer literacy" has become a common turn of phrase; and yet our budgets have difficulty stretching to include the new without short-sheeting the old. At some point, "something's gotta give."
I am embracing technology as the future of libraries partly because I find it exciting, personally, but also because, on the professional level, in the library where I work we are faced with one or the other; there aren't funds to do justice to both. Collection development in Yuba County is practically non-existent. Not that we don't have books, we have a collection of over 150,000, and not because we don't buy books, though they are mostly high interest titles: manga for the teens, bestsellers for the adults and supporting the school curriculum with award winning titles thrown in for good measure.
Anyway! Didn't intend to go on this long but I'm very interested in the bigger questions, such as the one you raise about generalist vs specialist. In some ways it is something that the library world faced many years ago when the question was MLS degreed (specialist) or generalist (a BA/BS or MA/MS of some flavor, though I think many more of us were humanities majors than science types.) Maybe those with technical degrees (BS of some sort) are just beginning to get the reaction I first received when I made the foolish mistake of entering the work world with an MA in literature only to find that potential employers' skill assessments began with "can you type" and ended with "can you sell." Language skills, as well as people skills, have traditionally been more associated with the humanities than the sciences. Quite possibly today's techie is going to find themselves back in school attending literature, history or philosophy classes the same way many of us have had to go back to school to get the technical skills we need to do our jobs. (I think that we have all found that neither of us can simply rely on an MBA or management classes to bridge the gap.)
Public libraries by their nature are generalist havens, though in the 21st century, most certainly we will all have to be techno-savvy generalists.
Gestalt
Loren,
I like the way you've framed this issue. I've been writing about "talking to your techies" as if the techies were members of a minority culture. But sooner or later, the tech-savvy people will be the majority. And the idea of gestalt is also fascinating. Is this shift so profound that communicating across the digital divide will get harder and harder, until at some point only trained anthropologists will have the necessary translation skills? Check out this article in Wired about tribes in the Amazon using GPS devices to map and monitor their territory. I think it speaks to your metaphor.
I also agree that getting a broad education in "hard" and "soft" subjects is the best thing you can do for yourself, your future customers and your future co-workers. If you can switch mental models on the fly, discussing business one minute, then technology, then creative subjects, you'll be much better prepared for the changes coming down the pike.
IT Specialization
Lorene, your story also relates to another subject I've been thinking about for the past few days, since hearing Alan Cooper speak earlier this week (he's famous in the software industry as "the father of Visual Basic"). He pointed out that IT is at least as complex as law or medicine or any other traditional profession. However, those fields have so many well defined specializations, whereas IT has about fourteen commonly-used job titles, and no one knows what they mean. Of course, even if you can define your job roles, specialists cost much more in terms of salary and training, and organizations are afraid of losing skilled employees after investing in their development. This is doubly true in libraries and cash-strapped local governments. So do we need more IT specialists (e.g. a trainer, a coder, a facilitator, a designer) or do we need better IT generalists? I'm not sure, but one way or another you have to invest in developing the IT department's soft skills.