What’s more, we’re also friends. Most of us, anyway. There are a few people I don’t really know or understand over there and I’m sure the same is true when they think of us. But really, I’m going to movie night at one of their houses tonight and another one and I have swapped books and another and I meet to knit together nearly every Saturday morning. We confide in each other. We’re friends.

So yes, things are good. But as with any relationship, things are also complex.

We had a joint retreat recently, and one of the questions several of us raised in our breakout groups — the question that’s kicked around in my head since then — is how to have a truly collaborative relationship when the library is about 90% customer of IT and 10% collaborator with IT. We have complex systems that they support. We have weird old fashioned printers (i.e. label printers) that we really need but that don’t work most of the time. Our web presence is complicated. Our need for public technology infrastructure (and bandwidth) just keeps increasing. Some of us want to tinker with all kinds of geeky stuff, and some of us need help copying and pasting. I don’t know if we’re their most complicated customers on campus, but we’re probably right up there.

So there’s a weird power dynamic there, and potential for either side to get resentful: us if we think they’re not helping us enough and them if they think we’re demanding too much time or resources. And we wondered how to even out that power differential a bit in hopes of keeping a good thing going and making it even better and more sustainable. What is it that we offer them?

Currently, we’re one of the best places on campus to test equipment and software. We’re a high traffic building and one of the few on campus that’s frequented by faculty, staff, and students. And we’re also pretty good at soliciting and communicating feedback. So when the college was deciding on a campus-wide printer/scanner/copier model, we were the main test site. When they institute new software or interfaces, we can usually tell them how it’s being received by our students.

We also offer a space where IT can have direct contact with students who are in the midst of doing their work. The main lab in the library is the reference room, with the joint Research/IT service desk and the two busiest printers on campus. One thing that our IT department doesn’t have much of right now is very direct connections to the curriculum and student engagement with their academic work on campus, and since that’s really the core of the campus’ mission and ethos, figuring out how to engage with that enterprise would be a great step. (There is a group of academic technologists that consults with faculty and students about curricular matters, but for the most part they are separate from the main help desk.)

Right now, they’ve come through several years of several iterations of major reorganizations, so I suppose we can offer a sense of stability if we’re in collaborations with them and other departments or individuals.

But what else? Surely there are ways to offer more tangible support for colleagues that we value and that make our work possible. What are some of the things that you offer your IT departments?

Harvard Library Reading Room

Libraries have always been many things, but one thing they’ve generally focused on is providing materials and places to read and engage with those materials. Shelves and desks.

With more and more of our collections moving online, an internet connection is now the equivalent of a shelf for our electronic collections, browsers and computer desktops are now the places to read and engage with those materials.

This hit home for us in a big way when our wifi infrastructure crumbled under the ever-increasing demands on its resources (thank heavens for smart and dedicated IT folks!) and when “use one of the library computers” wasn’t an alternative any more because they were all in use. All three labs of them.

I used to think of wifi and computer access in libraries more as amenities. People come here to do their academic work, so isn’t it great that they can stay here and actually do their work. But over the last few years I’ve decided that our collections and the assignments that our faculty require have evolved such that it’s no longer useful to think of these and things like them as “extras.” These are our shelves. These are our desks. These are part of our core mission. We provide materials and ways of engaging with those materials, just as we have always done.

• 944 Mac OS X
• 915 Apple iPod, iPhone or iPad
• 640 Microsoft Windows Vista/7 or Server 2008
• 340 Mac OS X Lion
• 133 Generic Android
• 69 Microsoft Windows XP
• 26 OEMed Wireless Router
• 11 Slingbox
• 11 DD-WRT Router
• 9 Ubuntu 11.04
• 9 HP Printer
• 8 LaCie NAS
• 7 Samsung Android
• 7 Playstation 2
• 5 Nokia Internet Tablet (udhcpc client)
• 5 Android Tablet
• 3 Ubuntu/Debian 5/Knoppix 6
• 3 Motorola Android
• 3 Debian-based Linux
• 2 Xbox 360
• 2 OS/2 Warp (actually BlackBerry, I think)
• 2 Microsoft Windows 8
• 2 Gentoo Linux
• 2 Epson Projectors
• 1 Symbian OS
• 1 Fedora 15 or 16 based distro
• 1 Chrome OS
• 1 Brother Printer

Coming after the recent Chronicle of Higher Ed article on how Tablet Ownership Triples Among College Students (apologies for the pay wall), it’s very interesting to see iOS connections outnumber all Windows connections.

The first method was the easiest: I had two passwords, an easy one and a complicated one. If the site was important I used the complicated one. If the site wasn’t important I used the easy one. Well… that started to seem like less and less of a good idea pretty much as soon as I started online banking and getting work passwords that mattered and stuff. So.

The second method worked for a long time: I had several passwords written down in a fairly secure online place that was itself password protected, and then I had an easy password that I used for all my “I wonder what del.icio.us is” experimentation online. That started seeming less and less good after several of the sites with the easy password got hacked multiple times and the hackers stole their databases of user passwords. Multiple times. And then I’d have to go through these millions of little sites changing a bunch of passwords all day. That got to be a less and less appealing way of spending a few hours. So.

Now I’m using an encrypted password manager. Here’s the setup. KeePassX (the Mac version of KeePass) on each of my computers and KyPass installed on my iPod Touch, each of these is directed to look at the KeePass database that’s stored in Dropbox (and the file made available offline on my iPod Touch).

Hopefully this solution lasts me for a while.

What I find fascinating is that the design changes that keep catching my eyes off guard seem to be more than updates to look and feel. They seem to embody a shifting focus or philosophy on Google’s part.

The new designs seem just enough divorced from any 3D metaphors to leave me feeling unanchored. I no longer look through digital windows or at pages on a digital desk. There aren’t enough edges for those things to exist any more, and what edges there are on the page are flat and insubstantial enough that my eye can’t interpret them as edges. They’re just lines. Even suggestions of the existence of friction (like the bumpy edges of messages that you could “grab” to drag) are gone.

What’s left is a denial of the physical. We’re not in Kansas any more. We’re not even “navigating” the digital world any more. Little by little, Google has stopped shipping information down to our world. Little by little, Google has started asking us to give up on gravity and friction and join it in the ever-shifting, edgeless, 2D existence of the digital cloud.

1. Access NML through your library’s subscription on a desktop/laptop computer
2. Select the playlists tab near the top of the page
3. Select “sign up” near the upper right corner and follow the sign-up directions
4. A confirmation email will be sent, with a link to activate the account.
5. Log in to the desktop interface and create playlists
6. Download the NML for iPhone App and log in using the same account information.
7. Accessed your playlists via the app.

Basically, the music you want to hear on an iThing will have to be put into a playlist first, and the playlist is what’s available via the app.

1. Initial controversial statement (This is usually something that can be interpreted as “You and everything you value? It all sucks.”)
2. Initial “Hey, who do you think you are anyway? And by the way, you suck” response.
3. Mass internet pile on
4. Later, in no particular order
   • Sporadic “That controversial statement wasn’t controversial. It’s been said/done/thought since the beginning of time” interjections
   • Sporadic “That initial statement was spot on” interjections (mostly ignored or decried)
   • Summary blog posts for newcomers to the argument
   • Meta blog posts talking about the experience of the argument (ahem, You Are Here)
5. Argument is named something catchy (usually a catchy acronym or some reference to Watergate)
6. People wax nostalgic about the argument, getting all heated up about it in short bursts
7. Argument becomes point of comparison in the next mass internet argument

On this, your 5th birthday, I’d like to thank you for introducing me to some of the people who are now my best friends in the world, for never backfiring on me too badly when I stuck my toes in the crazy, for never attracting the real crazy that exists out there on the internet, for helping me learn to be a librarian, and for helping me learn to be an adult. I started you on a whim and on another platform. I’ve fallen out of love with you and then realized that it wasn’t you, it was me, and this realization led me back to appreciating you again. And through it all, you’re still here, bursting with drafts that I may never flesh out, but here nonetheless. Happy birthday.

Yours,
Iris

I’ve talked before about how learning goals keep me focused and keep me from burning out on instruction, but it occurred to me in what felt like new says how the framework of learning goals could solve a lot of problems for me in ways that their less actionable cousins (like “best practices” or “standards” or even phrases like “user centered”) couldn’t.

Here’s what I mean in three examples:

• In my own teaching, there are usually 15 or 20 Very Important things that I wish I could teach my students in any given session. Using learning goals helps me prioritize from among the very important things, feel less guilty about letting some very important things fall by the wayside, remember to think about what they’re learning rather than what I’m teaching, and feel connected to the broader, more interesting issues of information literacy.
• In selecting a discovery tool, there are long, long lists of features and functions that user-centered design relies on. No interface has each specific feature, so how do we choose? How do we prioritize the list of very important features? What if we developed learning goals for our discovery system? What if these goals were something like being able to learn the differences between kinds of sources, be able to pick out important terms for the topic and field, and see where to go from here (different searches, different databases, different people). Maybe one system doesn’t have faceting but does have something else that reveals terms and directions. Maybe our usability tests could be more a long the lines of assessment of what the students learned by interacting with the system. Maybe this would all help us prioritize from the long list of important things to choose a system that functions in service of the mission of our library.
• In first year seminars (the context in which the original phrase came up), focusing on programmatic learning goals could help prioritize from the long list of things it’d be nice if all first year students knew. Maybe it would help guard against creating impossibly long check lists of things students should be exposed to, and therefore guard against treating first year seminars as massive inoculations that transform high school students into college students. Maybe it would also grant the teaching faculty the freedom to explore interesting topics in interesting ways while having similar learning outcomes.

Or maybe I’m just creating my own buzz phrase. Or maybe everyone else already knew this.

But for me, at my institution, expanding this framework beyond my direct teaching or my department’s strategic planning is helping me make those hard decisions that crop up all over the place and to make them with more confidence.

What we didn’t realize is that we’re not players in the discovery game — we’re pawns. The players strategizing and moving the chess pieces are the EBSCOs and ProQuests of the world, and sometimes sacrificing a pawn or three is the only way to win that game. It’s not personal.

Here’s how the game, the real game, is played.

A couple of weeks ago a ripple of outrage spread around the library community when Ex Libris sent out a letter explaining that EBSCO had removed its content from Primo’s central database.² Did EBSCO realize that they’d be hurting their click-through rates with this move, we asked. How could they be so selfish, we wondered. Don’t they realize they need us, we raged.

These were the questions of people who thought they were players in the game. In reality, though, EBSCO needs us like a chess master needs pawns. Which is to say, they need us quite a bit, but not that much and not as full partners. What they really need is to act on opportunities to profit and to ward off their opponent’s attempts to profit more.

Matt Andros, Vice President of Field Sales at EBSCO, was kind enough to help me understand things from EBSCO’s point of view, first through an email³ and then through a phone conversation (1/19/2011). The email was helpful; the phone conversation was enlightening. Apparently, participating in 3rd party discovery tools is not an opportunity for them to gain market share, and since the other big players aren’t participating either it could even open EBSCO up to loss. He told me in our phone conversation that 90% of academic libraries already have the major aggregator databases (like Academic Search Premier), so their goal is not primarily to increase the number of subscriptions there. And the metadata associated with their more specialized databases, the databases holding those exclusively licensed journals, isn’t itself exclusively licensed, so it could land in the discovery tool from any other company without harming EBSCO’s market. After all, what we’re after is the full text, and we can get to that easily via a link resolver. It’s just not in their interest to share metadata unless they’ll be getting something in return.

On the other hand, they do have to play the discovery game. “Discovery is hot,” Matt said to me yesterday. All the big players are playing it, so it’s not very strategic to fall behind in this market while ProQuest cashes the discovery checks. It is much more strategic to beat the competition at its own game by doing the same thing, only with (hopefully) better content.

As strange as it may sound, the future is not in unified databases powering discovery tools, Matt told me yesterday. He can’t foresee a time when the major database vendors will find it profitable to combine their metadata for our benefit. Instead, the future is in hybrid systems that combine discovery and federation. As I see it, libraries will have to decide if they care whether their EBSCO products or their ProQuest products are seamlessly integrated, choose the discovery layer that matches the company of their choice, and then federate in the content from the other database providers. Federated search is dead; long live federated search. And I’m sure the thinking at EBSCO is that we’ll be paying someone for a discovery tool, and that someone should be them.

So where’s our leverage in all of this? Competition in the free market is the force looking out for library interests, Matt said, and laughed with me as I pointed out that this was hollow comfort given the shrinking number of competitors out there.

After we hung up, I wondered if this whole game was short-sighted or the best long-range plan I’d ever heard. What happens when they drain us dry and their beautifully cultivated market withers on the vine? If we were their only revenue source, this might be a point of leverage, but we aren’t. They also own companies that deal in office supplies and companies that manufacture outdoor goods like fishing lures and hunting decoys.⁴ EBSCO is “one of the largest private companies in the US” according to Datamonitor’s company profile, so even if they are a little worried about library budget cuts, they can also move with confidence through the strategies that matter to them — the strategies that focus on their true competition.⁵

And that, my friends, is how the real game is played. Focus clearly on your opponent’s king and position yourself so that you don’t have to worry too much about your pawns, however useful and important those pawns may be to your strategy.

(Many thanks to Steve Lawson for helping me think through these and many related issues as I prepared this post. And many thanks to Matt Andros for his generosity in helping me rethink my assumptions.)