1. Introduction
Until last week, I had never been to a major library conference1. However, I’ve been to plenty of small conferences, and I imagined ALA to just be a scaled-up version of one of these: interesting but slightly irrelevant. A nice break from the usual routine. I was prepared to be served severely overcooked green beans on more than one occasion.
What I found was nothing like that - the amount of things to do and see was overwhelming. What follows is an attempt to synthesize several days in one of the most input-heavy environments I’ve ever found myself in.
2. Las Vegas
I love to travel. However, at the risk of overgeneralizing, there is no major city on planet Earth that I would rather visit less than Las Vegas. If you made a shopping mall into a city, it would be Las Vegas. If you designed a city for maximum wastefulness, it would be Las Vegas. If you did your level best to create an experience that was so over-the-top, so overstimulating, and yet completely devoid of any redeeming culture, like the world’s loudest party that you aren’t allowed to leave, it would be Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a cultural Potemkin village. The whole city smells like cheap perfume and old pennies.
Or at least, that’s the Las Vegas that presents itself to the tourist. I’m sure there are many parts of Las Vegas, somewhere between the gargantuan casinos and the foreclosure-riddled suburbs, that are quite nice. You just can’t get to them on the monorail.
In a way though, it’s the most honest town in the United States. It’s not trading on a pretense, it tells you exactly what you’re going to get: a dirty city that revolves around poorly spent money2.
3. Sessions
This being my first ALA, I was very much looking forward to the conference sessions. I was eager to hear what the rest of the country was up to and to steal it for my library. A brief summary follows of each session I attended.
PLAmetrics User Group - We have recently purchased a subscription to this product, and I thought it might be a good idea if I figured out how to use it. I was right! This is a very powerful (and cheap) tool that gives us access to a lot of great data. For example, I was quickly and easily able to create a search that showed me every library in the United States that had an annual circulation number within 10% of my own, and then compare the group across multiple categories like population, budget, FTE, or basically any other statistic I could think of. For a manager responsible for allocating resources and justifying expenditures and the like, data like this is solid gold because it allows you to demonstrate your successes. Fun fact: e-book circulation was .44/capita nationwide in 2012. CD/DVD circ was 3.07/capita, which sounds high but is down from 5.07/capita in 2010. Still, people are still checking out six times as many CD/DVDs as they are e-books (or they were in 2012 anyway). NOTE TO PRESENTERS: only Dennis Franz is allowed to wear ties with short sleeves.
Intellectual Freedom Workshop - This was an extremely interesting session. Did you know that the Library Bill of Rights turned 75 this year? Or that people trying to ban The Grapes of Wrath was the inspiration to start the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 1967? Or that less than 20% of challenges to library materials are ever reported to the OIF? I didn’t know any of these things! The presenter also asked if we as librarians would never say “this book sucks” to a patron, why do we let patrons write reviews of things on our catalogs? Does it affect the choices a person makes if they see reviews in the social catalog? Well hopefully, I guess, because otherwise it would be pointless to include them. But is allowing anyone with a library card to pass public judgment a positive or negative thing? Food for thought. Also at one point a bird got loose in the room somehow and it became increasingly difficult to concentrate3.
3D Printers and Library Policies - Since we are scaling up our MakerSpace area at Central, I thought it might be a good idea to see if there are any best practices out there we could adopt into our policy. Short answer: not yet. There are not a lot of libraries who have 3D printers, and there are even fewer that have bothered to write a policy about them. Most policies are tied to the general Acceptable Use policies for Internet and/or public computing, and generally restrict things like time, place, and manner of use to ensure equitable access. Chicago Public Library, apparently, has no policy whatsoever. In Ottawa, they have tied use of the 3D printer to their code of conduct. One point that is generally not addressed in library policies is copyright and intellectual property rights. What obligations does a library have, for example, to protect patents that could be violated through use of a 3D printer? If someone accesses “trade secrets” and prints out a prototype of a product that violates the patent/copyright/intellectual property of something that’s already on the market, what kind of liability does the library have? All of these are open questions that are not addressed by any body of law, because the law has not caught up to the technology. Chattanooga, which has four 3D printers, charges for consumables and also differentiates between printers for kids and adults. Kids have a 40 minute time limit, but if that’s not enough they are eligible to use the adult machine (the designations aren’t restrictive, just intended to maximize access). ALA hopes to have a working model policy by Midwinter this year.
Data Driven Marketing - Data! Marketing! The vast majority of librarians want to run fast and far from both of these words, and that is a huge mistake. Telling people about the awesome things that we do is absolutely vital, and using data to do it is efficient and effective. In this session I learned that it’s pretty rare for libraries to have marketing departments, so I feel pretty fortunate that we’ve got such a good one. One panelist, from the Vancouver public library, noted that someone from her marketing department sat on every committee/team that was working on a strategic goal. That way, the Marketing department could be sure that they were devoting resources to the things that had been identified as truly strategic. I picked up a couple of other ideas and practices that I wouldn’t mind adopting in this session. One is the consideration of the cost of acquiring a new customer. In business terms, if it costs you more money to identify a customer and sell them a product than the profit you make on the sale, you need to start over. As a librarian with an extremely soft spot for outreach, I could probably stand to keep this in mind more often. Finally, a point about data. One of the panelists, who has an accountant background, said that “a good accountant can make the same numbers look like a million dollar profit or a million dollar loss.” In other words, you have to be careful the conclusions that you draw from numbers - they are not as cut and dry as they sometimes appear to be.
Evaluation Crash Course - Are you sensing a pattern here? I was extremely drawn to the sessions that talked about data, evaluation, and how to use both of them to make sure that my library is doing as good of a job as I think it is (or proving it). This session discussed best practices for down-and-dirty program evaluations. For example, how to structure a survey or a focus group to make sure that you ask the right questions in the right way, and thereby get feedback that is both usable and useful. In short, you need to ask narrow questions, set targets, and then communicate the results. The presenters pointed out that the main resource you will be expending in any data-gathering process is time, and you should make sure that the data you gather is worth the massive amount of time you will spend gathering it. They recommended only asking questions you truly needed to have answered, and to avoid collecting data for data’s sake.
4. Mustache
At the risk of revealing my narcissism, I want to pause here for a moment and talk about my mustache.
Now, I knew when I grew this thing that it was fairly unique. For some reason, mustaches have been relegated into a few equally gross categories, with which I am sure you are familiar: The Ironic, The Sleazy, The Anachronistic, and The Not Very Good4. I have done my best to grow a mustache that falls into none of these categories. Mine is bold, serious, and firmly rooted in the present. You can call me a hipster if you want (many have gone before you) but I am comfortable with the look I have created for myself.
It is also quite the conversation starter. When I went to the Kentucky Derby a few months ago, I was stopped a couple dozen times by people who felt compelled to talk to me about my mustache. I hesitate to use the word “compliment” because even though I am being completely unironic, the intentions of other human beings are notoriously difficult to truly divine. How many of the seemingly endless parade of drunk bros in polo shirts and wraparound shades and backward Titleist hats were serious and how many were secretly laughing at me? I don’t know. Maybe they don’t even know. For a certain type of person, Postmodernism has made it basically impossible to truly mean anything anymore and it’s a distinct possibility that they were just responding to some irresistible inner need to call attention to something different, and their reaction would be based on mine, or their friend’s, or the nearest pretty girl’s. Or maybe they were just being nice.
I was in Las Vegas for four complete (non-travel) days, and every single one of them somebody wanted to talk about my mustache. I had been off the plane for not even ten minutes when a dude walked up to me and said “I mustache you a question.” I didn’t get it at first, so he repeated it. One guy at the conference found me on two different days, and on the second day said to me “Hey man, I know I told you this yesterday, but that’s a great stache, those are great glasses, and you’re a really good looking guy.” I was sitting by myself in the crowded food court of my hotel, grabbing a quick sandwich before I caught the bus, when a dude in a group of dudes walked in, pointed at me from across the room, and not-quite-shouted “my boy’s got a REAL MUSTACHE!” I gave him a little wave. There were others, but these were the creative ones.
A quick disclaimer before we get back to business: I am not complaining about this. I think it’s awesome. I like it for the same reason I like birdwatching - you never know when something is going to flitter out of nowhere and alight on you for a second, then flitter away again. It’s a random event that is almost always funny.
5. Networking
This is the true point of going to ALA, in my opinion (aside from showing off one’s mustache to a brand new city). ALA is basically an endless parade of people you’ve never met before who are doing things differently than you do them. You should get to know as many of these people as possible, or at least take the opportunity to use their wisdom to sharpen a small portion of your own. You should also take advantage of the exhibit hall to put as many vendors on the spot as possible. In their natural environment (which is in your office, where you cannot escape) vendors are slick and wily, in the exhibit hall you can walk away from them at a moment’s notice and they know it. They will hurry to get to the point and tell you how their product will solve your problems, because competition for your attention is high. In this sense, they are not unlike the people on the Las Vegas Strip wearing t-shirts that say “ORGASM CLINIC” and who constantly try to hand you little cards with pictures of women on them (thank you Johnson County Taxpayers for sending me here!).
Baker and Taylor - On Friday night, I went out to dinner with a group of folks from B&T and other libraries who use their services. Since I am basically brand new to the tech services world, it was really great to be able to talk to other folks who do things more or less like we do, and ask them questions that I am too embarrassed to ask Jason Barnes. I met folks from Boston Public Library, Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library, and Vancouver Public Library. I discovered that our B&T tech services rep lives in Noblesville, IN, which is close enough to where I grew up that I remember being obliterated by their soccer team in high school. I also had a long conversation with Joel Jones from the Kansas City Public Library about Brainfuse, a vendor we had both seen that day and how we could think about cooperative purchasing in the future. Dinner was on the top floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, which overlooks the entire Las Vegas strip, and we had the distinguished company of not one but THREE bachelorette parties.
Bibliocmmons reception - Again, this was a great place to meet people who use a product that we use and compare notes. I met folks from Seattle, Fort Vancouver, and Brooklyn Public Libraries, as well as several people from Bibliocommons. The children’s librarian from Brooklyn, whose name I failed to record, runs the branch on Cortelyou Road, which is about a five minute walk from where I used to live in Brooklyn on East 16th Street. I asked her if she remembered my favorite shop in the neighborhood, which was called GIANT BAGEL (emphasis theirs) and whose Russian proprietor won my heart forever when I discovered that although he was selling my roommate stale donuts, he would always tell Lyndsey and me which ones were the good ones. It made me feel like a true member of the neighborhood. Sadly, my new friend had no idea what I was talking about. Wither GIANT BAGEL? I wandered off not knowing.
D-Tech - Perhaps you have heard, we are purchasing a very large piece of machinery to install in the western Shawnee area for people to check out books. We are purchasing this machine from a company called D-Tech, and I was very interested to meet the people with whom I have been talking on the phone and exchanging emails for months. They did not disappoint. They (for some reason) booked an Elvis impersonator to hang around their booth and make people feel weird. Mission accomplished! Well done, everybody.
Indiana University Alumni Reception - On Sunday night I met an old mentor of mine, Sara Laughlin, the director of the Monroe County Public Library in Bloomington, IN. We caught up for a bit and she filled me in on a bit of the old Bloomington gossip (THERE ARE PARKING METERS DOWNTOWN NOW YOU GUYS) and also on the Bloomfield gossip (their new library director, a position I once held, sounds like a great fit). After a bit, we went upstairs to the IU reception and I got to meet the new Dean of the School of Informatics and Computing, which recently combined with the School of Library and Information Science to become the School of Informatics and Computing (there are no typos in that sentence). He was a very nice guy.
Central Heads Lunch - On Monday, I had lunch with a group of administrators (not all of them were heads of a central branch) from all over the country - Queens, Brooklyn, San Antonio, Houston, Cincinatti, Des Moines, Santa Clara, and Kansas City, if my notes are complete. It was a super interesting conversation, although it centered on a lot of “urban” problems that we don’t experience a lot of. Some takeaways though: San Antonio has partnered with their Parks department to install an on-site playground as part of an “exercise your body, exercise your mind” type of initiative. They have experienced a sharp increase in circ at this branch. Queens is working on getting a full-on pre-K program up and running in their system, completely run by the library. They will hire teachers, not outsource. It’s part of a mandate by the Education Department of the City (or whatever) and they recommend taking pre-K into account when planning for new construction. Brooklyn and Queens have begun issuing government IDs, and San Antonio has begun issuing birth certificates. Urban libraries sound crazier, and I kind of miss it.
6. The World Cup
Sprinkled across my entire conference trip was the World Cup. I love the World Cup. I love the high stakes, I love the competition, I love the intrigue, and I love soccer5. I was afraid that because ALA and the World Cup lined up so cleanly that I would have to miss a significant portion of one or the other. Not so! In between the two main conference halls happened to be a food court with (rough estimation) a hundred televisions. I was also pleasantly surprised at how many fellow conference goers were not only interested in the matches, but vocally so. There were several games, like Mexico/Holland, where the entire food court was packed, and when Sneijder fired his laser shot in the final minutes to send the game into overtime, the place practically erupted. Even during sessions, I could hear people whispering score updates back and forth. I love the World Cup!
7. Conclusions
ALA was a very educational, informative, constructive, exhausting experience. I hope I never have to go back to Las Vegas.
Footnotes
1. Or a major American library conference, anyway. When I was in Helsinki I went to an international conference where they had headphones you wore to listen to live translations of the speakers, who were people from various Departments and Ministries and things. At one point I was on a library tour and I realized that everyone was speaking English specifically for my benefit as I was the only member of the group that didn’t speak either Finnish, Swedish, or Russian. Because I only spoke English, they assumed I was from “Bulgaria or somewhere” as one attendee put it.
2. I am, of course, exaggerating here for comedic effect. Every human being I met was extremely nice and very helpful. They have also decided, apparently as a city, that the universal parting phrase should be “good luck,” which I think is great, if unintentionally fatalistic.
3. It was also hard to concentrate because these poor presenters kept saying unintentionally hilarious things. At one point they put up a slide advertising a movie about intellectual freedom, and they were noting the discounted ticket prices for library school students, which they abbreviated in their PowerPoint like this: “$10 FOR STUDS.” They also kept putting up the Intellectual Freedom Round Table acronym, which is IFRT. This is funny to me because I have a friend who as a child would enter the initials FRT whenever he would set a high score on a video game, which was HILARIOUS because FRT looks kind of like the word “fart.”
4. A truly solid mustache, unlike a beard, cannot be faked well. If your beard is patchy or thin, you can power through and grow something that will eventually improve the way you look (or at least be, in economic terms, revenue neutral). A mustache, however, does not follow the same rules. If it isn’t going to happen, it isn’t going to happen, and there is no amount of time you can invest in it to make it happen. Cut your losses and shave it, no one will think less of you.
5. I freely admit to being a selective fan though; I couldn’t name you a single player on Sporting KC (except Graham Zusi, who I learned a week or so ago when everyone in the bar I was in began to shout his name all at once, like this: “ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOS”). Global soccer is so much more interesting than club soccer, in the same way that just because I love A Moveable Feast means I want to read every subpar knockoff that comes down the pike. Who’s got time for that?
No comments:
Post a Comment