OK, it’s a new year. You’re probably having one of two reactions.

Either: “2006: Phooey! Gone! Good riddance!” or “Yay 2007!  Clean slate, new budget, new calendar.”

This time of year is often a time for reflection on our achievements and a time for looking forward to what we want to accomplish in our professional and personal lives. No doubt, the library world has gone through significant changes in the past year! And we’ve had our share of controversy and excitement. LIS News reports that the following (in Letterman style) are the top 10 library-related stories in 2006:

10. New UCLA slogan: "Get Tasered @ your library" and YouTube videos arrive in library land.

9.  ALA revitalization continues 2.0 . . . blogs, wikis, webcasts, podcasts, Jenny Levine, and more. Oh my!

8.  Library blog explosion, two-way conversations with users rule.

7.  EPA library closures:

Close libraries . . . Save thousands of dollars

Global warming . . . Kill millions

Protect the Oil Driven Economy . . . Priceless

6.  Library 2.0 meme, and people just doing it rather than talking about it. “Steal this Idea” meets “Management by Committee” in a cage match.

5.  More elephants in the room, with major acquisitions and mergers everywhere affecting us all.

4.  Censorship and MySpace, Penguins, OJ, Mohammad cartoons, and Harry Potter.

3.  “Net Neutrality” and the amazing creative power of laissez faire.

2.  Privacy along with USA Patriot Act renewal and our pride in our friends at The Library Connection, Inc. for their defense of constitutional protections.

1.  The James Frey fallout and other writer scandals, including such esteemed newspapers as The New York Times.

It has been the usual tough year for libraries and those who work in and love them. I have often felt like we are being barraged with challenges from all sides, and yet we are still having to keep up with changes in technology, evolution of the Web, multiple demographic challenges – not the least of which is a demanding Millennial generation, changing seniors, and challenged communities. It’s enough to make you want to hide in a cave. Is the Unabomber’s cabin still for rent?!

Anyway, that’s enough bad stuff.

I am often reminded of the Harvard Business Review classic: “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees” (HBR reprint 2003) by Frederick Herzberg. It is still HBR’s number one best seller, and has been for decades. It asserts, and to my mind and experience correctly so, that you can’t motivate employees. Rats, you say. What am I to do then? Herzberg maintains that you can only motivate yourself as an individual, and all employees are individuals.

You CAN create an environment for motivation. And there’s the rub. How do we create and sustain an environment for motivation to achieve our vision of improving the world? Read our mission and vision statement in libraries. We share some lofty goals!

We care about and value:

·         Success of our communities

·         Lifelong learning – from classroom through homework and research to adult learning

·         Reading – from story hours to book clubs

·         Research and discovery

·         Cultural activities and the preservation of our culture; and beyond

And we do it all in a quiet way that belies the actual fact that we continue to collaboratively run amazing operations that, combined:

·         Circulate more materials than FedEx and Amazon together (and we get them back!)

·         Have five times more people going to public libraries than attend major league sports games

·         Manage more locations than Starbucks

·         Are responsible for library cards that globally outnumber drivers’ licenses

We need to remind ourselves that we do an amazing job of running one of the most complex operations imaginable – and we make it look easy. Let’s be clear: it isn’t.

Imagine if the revered Starbucks had to know the identity of everyone they sold a Venti Latte to. Imagine if FedEx had to retrieve every parcel, limitless times. And imagine if Amazon had to deal with actual people in person. Imagine developing a drivers’ fine system that was measured in nickels instead of twenties! Life is messier and more complicated in libraries than for these esteemed companies, great as they may be. Hey, we don’t give ourselves enough credit. And now do it all on budgets where a simple thousand dollars makes a big difference.

So, what’s the point of this month’s article? Let’s create an environment in our libraries in 2007 where we call the Sad Sacks on their musings. Let’s commit to two things this year. First, let’s strive to remember how great we are, and remind ourselves – OUT LOUD - of the real effects of our work.

Let’s be relentlessly positive. Let’s also change our lens in how we view the “competition” out there for the time and hearts of our users.  So first I am going to take some time this month to list some of the things I find amazing about our efforts. Second, let’s commit to taking a few positive steps towards becoming an even more innovative and experimental culture in library land. I am not advocating throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I am encouraging us to pilot, experiment, try, share, steal good ideas, and take more risks. Here’s a stitch in time of nine key lens shifts.

Lens Shift #1

Some librarians view Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask as the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Hysteria ensues about user privacy, information literacy, quality judgment, and more. Really? With Google alone answering more questions in minutes than all libraries answer in years (with various degrees of success, I should add), we might have cause for worry. However, with this issue reframed, I look back on the early years of online and end-user searching when we spent as much time justifying the need for good information to underpin decisions as teaching the skills.

Now, we start our conversations on a different plane. Everyone values information more highly today than they did even 10 years ago. I choose to believe that they also learn greater respect for the skills we have. The democratization of information access has materially changed our world forever, and for the better. When we prepare ourselves with the right arguments, positions, and vision, we can achieve great things – and many states, systems, provinces, consortia, and librarians have made huge impacts as a result of this new dynamic. I have seen, in the past year alone, library issues get real attention at the cabinet level of governments around the world. This was not the norm scant years ago. We have new power, and that power comes from our roots in understanding learning, information, and community in the context of users and voters. Let’s build on this foundation.

Lens Shift #2

Lions and tigers and bears, Oh my! YouTube, Google Video, Blinkx, Oh my! Time magazine declared YouTube as the technology of the year. It has certainly changed the course of history for some politicians, taser wielders, and police officers. New stars have been created. It’s the beginning of the end for hard formats like videotape and DVD. What to do? Well, we can’t simply throw water on it! The proliferation of YouTube wannabees shows this gold rush still has a lot of life left in it. Those libraries like Vaughn Public Library in Ontario that are building a streaming media collection are pioneering the new media world that is coming fast. It’s so exciting. Several libraries are starting YouTube Film Fests and engaging their communities while teaching new skills. The front edge of user-generated content is as much about streaming media as it is about text.

Lens Shift #3

Wikipedia, wikis – What do they really mean? I don’t really know, but I do know that comparing Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica is asking the wrong, or at least an incomplete, question. We need to participate to understand what user-generated content really means in our culture – internationally. And user-generated content is potentially as valuable as our commercial collections. We need to keep an open mind.

Look at the enormous success and power of the Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. And, by the way, notice the site’s Library Website Hall of Fame. Included therein is recognition of Boston Public’s Web site – sporting its new Internet learning portal, SirsiDynix SchoolRooms™.

Look at those reference staff and helpdesk staff who have found wikis to be the best way to collect and update local knowledge. These are just two of the amazing experiments proving the exponential potential of this technology.

Lens Shift #4

A generation of users is addicted to Instant Messaging. Those who decry its efficient, but semantically creative, language underestimate the power of IM. We’re not talking here about text communication, and it’s not just fancy email. IM is an evolutionary successor to the telephone. You can use text, graphics, emoticons, voice, video, and more. You can talk one-on-one, one to many, and many to many. You can be synchronous or semi-synchronous. Try doing that with a standard phone. But like a phone, and better than email, you can have a real conversation, you can model standard give and take, and you can clarify your needs, questions, and opinions. Through personal experience, it allows for better tone and inflection than email. Reframing this technology, we see a foundational piece to next generation virtual reference work. And it aligns with user behaviors – and doesn’t insist users align their behaviors with our systems.

Lens Shift #5

Blogs, blogging, and the blogosphere. This is a transformational technology. Instead of calling blogs the next vast wasteland, understand them as conversations, understand them as online graffiti, and understand them as personal publishing. Tagging enlivens the space and makes it discoverable. New tools like LisZEN allow libraries to share their thoughts and continue conversations beyond seminars and conferences in a more sustainable and threaded way than discussion lists. Libraries are using blogs for promoting their event calendars, tracking and sharing results in new technology implementations, building construction, board and meeting notes, and more. Each advance in blogging brings us closer to each other and our users. It seems only limited by our imaginations.

Lens Shift #6

Second Life, Active Worlds, Gaming. The hype around these new innovations is reaching epic proportions. Everyone has an opinion – informed by research and experience, or not. The truth is that these are the harbingers of Web 3.0-type technology experiences. These are not so far off the regular track that those libraries who risk trying to invent libraries in these worlds, or to bring the gaming world into libraries, are learning faster than others and discovering the future through the glimpses they see in these virtual worlds. It’s exciting. It won’t be perfect and totally useful right away. However, this is one place where libraries can be sure they’re contributing at the ground floor of a major societal trend. For the voyeur, you can follow Second Life Library 2.0 at their blog or join us in the Second Life Library 2.0. Watch for SirsiDynix Institute events on Second Life Library 2.0.

Lens Shift #7

Flickr, Picasa, and the picture sharing sites. Libraries are about more than text. Pictures are a big part of our oeuvre. It’s so easy now to store and share pictures, post them to our blogs, create collections and tag them for discovery and collecting. It also brings people into our libraries, our programs, and our faces. It’s an exciting time, and it only requires the technologies we mostly have already.

Lens Shift #8

Social Networking: MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Academici, et al. The social networking sites are getting a ton of attention. And deservedly so, since, by some estimates, major cohorts in key library user markets are already in this space, and using it extensively. It’s an exciting time to be able to create social networks to communicate and network with our users and deal with them on their own terms in their preferred virtual world. Many libraries in all sectors are creating social sites and having great early success. It’s an exciting time to try these new technologies and learn by doing.

Lens Shift #9

Lordy, we can easily predict that 2007 will see the arrival of many more new technologies and applications that will excite some and scare others. We will also see more mergers, acquisitions, and new players. Let’s decide to think critically about each new innovation and feature we see, and then decide how, or if, it can be implemented in the service of our users. There aren’t enough hours in a day to do it all, but all of us can do some. And the sum of our efforts will be transformational in the world of libraries. In the end, our library ecology is our greatest strength, and with the Web, blogs, wikis, and more, we are infinitely more connected than ever to share, collaborate, and learn.

In short, we are working with some of the coolest stuff on the planet. We are engaging our users. We are animating the space between people and technology. And we are bridging the gap between haves and have not’s, just as we have always done. We rock!

Re-framing our connection with our users

So, as we try a bunch of these new (and not so new) technologies, and share our successes and failures widely, we will learn and develop and grow. That’s not enough if we don’t remember the following:

·         Kids don’t run squealing across the room to hug Google like they do children’s librarians!

·         Seniors don’t rate their day as improved for downloading a video, but do after having a friendly and neighborly chat with library staff when they check out their DVD and novel.

·         Users don’t stop Google like they do the town librarian in the grocery store asking for advice on what to read for their book club.

·         When school libraries are well run and funded properly, students succeed. As measured by standard test scores, there are 20 percent plus increases reported by dozens of studies and a five percent top up bonus when schools partner with public libraries.

·         Communities excel. The growing pile of studies showing that libraries have a high economic impact on their communities and return value on every dollar invested in them. Check out these – and there are more:

ü        Florida 

ü       South Carolina 

ü        Ohio 

ü        Buffalo and Erie County Public Library 

Our culture is saved in so many ways by the research and repositories developed by our institutional and academic libraries. Our leaders, researchers, and inventors of tomorrow are being created with the assistance and support of these great libraries, whether the students are aware of the chain of discovery or not.

There are thousands of moments of truth every day in every library – academic, college, public, special, and school. However, at the start of this new year, we can reflect that every audiobook, magazine, novel, or eBook sent to a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan by our military librarians does untold good for the men and women doing good work for us. It is money and effort well spent.

How is SirsiDynix going to contribute to your success?

First, watch for the second annual SirsiDynix Building Better Communities Awards. It’s meant to shine a spotlight on the greatest innovations in Library Land and to reward them with some of the richest cash awards in the library sector. Nominate your library or another. We need role models.

Watch for new transformational products from SirsiDynix, especially in portal technologies, CommunityRooms, SchoolRooms™, enhanced content, and advanced productivity solutions.

SirsiDynix Institute

I am very excited about what we have scheduled so far for the SirsiDynix Institute in 2007. We are focused this year on the new user experience, bringing in internationally famous speakers and crafting programs that enhance your learning and knowledge.

Here's the schedule for the first quarter of 2007, so that you can mark you calendars and call a few friends and colleagues to learn along together. More info is always at the SDI site .

And a reminder, all SirsiDynix Institute webcasts are FREE. Anyone can attend - not just SirsiDynix customers. And if you miss any, past sessions are archived on the Web site (slides and sound) and on iTunes.

January 9 – Learning 2.0 – Helene Blowers from the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenberg speaks on their pioneering 23 Things learning strategy.

January 16 – Gaming in the Library – Jennie Levine *SPECIAL EVENT* - The author of ALA TechSource's latest book and host of the Summer 2007 ALA Gaming Symposium shares her knowledge.

February 5 – Hopping into Library 2.0: Experiencing Lifelong Learning – Christine Mackenzie from Yarra Plenty Libraries in Australia shares their experiences with Learning 2.0 in our first international SDI webcast!

March 6 – Mashups – Darlene Fichter introduces this current programming trend in portal and Web site development.

Many more presentations are being scheduled for 2007 on topics ranging from Second Life to RSS Feeds to the Future of Librarians. 

Well, there you have it. Librarians and library staff are playing with, inventing, and working up some of the coolest stuff on the planet. Believe, Share, Imagine. We will be even greater in 2007 and beyond.

Happy New Year. I hope it’s a great 2007 for every one. May peace reign over us.

Stephen Abram, MLS, is vice president, Innovation, for SirsiDynix. He is the chief strategist for the SirsiDynix Institute (http://www.sirsidynixinstitute.com/ ). He is an SLA Fellow, president-elect of SLA, and the past president of the Ontario Library Association and the Canadian Library Association. Stephen would love to hear from you at stephen.abram@sirsidynix.com.