>>TREVOR: So, huge thanks to everyone again for joining us and those on the webcast as
well. I'm excited to just turn things over here to John Palfrey. He's going to moderate
a panel focusing on sort of education, training, professional development and building capacity
to work with all these sorts of things we've been talking about today. So, I'm going to
turn it over, and he's sort of queue things up and introduce the panel.
>>JOHN PALFREY: Trevor, thank you so much, and thank you to Maura Marx for inviting me
and all of us here. This panel is called cultivating digital library professionals. I think it's
Maura's idea of a joke to have a non library professional to moderate, thank you, but I'm
delighted to be here and spend time with this fabulous panel. We are going to have introductory
statements by each of the four panelists, and then we will have some hopefully discussion
among the panelists and open it up to all of you, so get your ideas ready. I think it
makes sense for me just to introduce the group very quickly and then turn it right over to
you guys. Andromeda Yelton is the owner of Small Beautiful Useful LLC which is one of
the best names of a company ever heard, and I can't wait to hear more about it. Bethany
Nowviskie is the director of the digital library federation, which everyone knows is affiliated
with the council library and information resources. Kim Schroeder is lecturer is at Wayne State
University in the school of library and information science, and Margo Padilla joins us as well
and she is the strategic, programs manager from the metropolitan New York library council.
And we will go down the row this way, ending with Margo in the clean up spot, and we will
start with Andromeda. Over to you. >> ANDROMEDA YELTON: Thank you, John. I was
going to talk today about why ongoing tech training is hard, the nuts and bolts of pedagogy
and what you can do to help. Maybe I still will in Q & A, but right now, 40 miles north
of us, Baltimore is burning or maybe it isn't. It is 10,000 people protesting peacefully
against many years of secret violence, violence kept secret with habitual gag orders with
national media drawn like moths to the handful of flames. the stories I hear on Twitter are
not the same as the stories on CNN, and we as cultural heritage institutions are about
our communities and their stories and about which stories are told, which are made canon
and how and why. So, I want to talk about how technology training and digital platforms
can either support or threaten our communities and their ability to tell their stories and
to have their stories reflected and the canonical story that we build when we build a national
platform I want to make it explicit that what we are doing in this room today is about deciding
whose stories get told, by whom and how. Whose are valid, and whose are not. Whose get to
reach our corridors of power only through protests and fire. I was reminded this morning
of an article co authored by Myrna Moralis who was researching the young Lord's party,
which is a political organization in her native Puerto Rico, and she was looking through library
controlled vocabulary, and she couldn't find any literature about it, and a sinking feeling,
she thought maybe she should check the header for gangs, and that was where she found information
on this group, and I was reminded of a thing I did at a Harvard library cloud hack a thon
earlier, intersectional library cloud, where I looked at the most popular elements circulated
in Harvard, using the stack score and their API, and I looked at whether they also had
subject headers that reflected women's studies or LGBT studies or African American studies,
using code and meta data as a way to surface what people learn matters when they're doing
scholarship and learning at one of the most famous institutions on earth. TLDR, it didn't
really turn out to matter. They're not reading about stuff like that when they're reading
the things that they mostly read at Harvard. So, the way that we structure our meta data,
the content we seek, the tools we give people for interrogating the platform, whom we empower
to use these tools and add this content and teach about these tools and construct them,
how many they are, how diverse they are have these profound effects on which stories that
we advance and we say matter as cultural heritage institutions, which in turn, shapes the present
and the future. I've said before that libraries are about
transforming people through access to information and each other, and that's true, but today,
I'm thinking more about what we can do to let more people transform libraries and how
libraries and our content and API's and platforms can be tools for more people to transform
each other, how the meta data that courses through digital platforms is the frame we
have to tell and interpret stories, and how, therefore, as meta data creators, we must
be consciously inclusive, and how, when we train librarians to use and create national
digital platforms, we can train them to use these skills in a contextually aware way,
not just to understand technology and use it, but to interrogate it and construct it
from a critical perspective, to see how technology interacts with our communities and our stories
and where those gaps are and how we can be part of bridging them, because here we are,
comfortable and safe, mostly white, talking about how millions of dollars should be spent,
and Baltimore is covulsed by its history and by the blind eye so many of us have turned
to it. >>BETHANY NOWVISKIE: Wow. That was fantastic.
My message is going to be pretty simple, and I think it will inevitably, in the last panel
of the day, reinforce some points we've already talked about today. I also think it still
dove tails with her sort of welcomed intervention, because what I'm talking about too is community,
and the message is this, that we need to put as much energy into connecting and building
up groups of people into developing and supporting the motivated skilled, diverse and intersecting
communities of practitioners that we have as we do in connecting the services, the systems
and the other pillars of the national digital platform. So, the first thing that should
come into many institutions is not another technology component that you have to support,
but rather a functioning social conduit to a broader culture that understands digital
library workers and that values the various communities that they inhabit and intersect
with and are inspired by. So, I see the continuous renewal and expansion of expert practitioner
communities as our most fundamental sustainability issue. It's the one on which all the others
depends, and I'm consciously using the word community here rather than calling this our
digital library workforce or similar, even though I know there's such danger that such
a happy sounding word could make us elide difficult often gendered labor issues in the
discussions, but I do it for two reasons, and the first is it helps us scale up a conversation
that is too often about local and individual professional development, and also because
of how it plays on individuals as a concept. So, understanding that you are part of a community
changes your ethical orientation toward your colleagues, your users, your shared work.
Most of all, it sharpens your sense of futurity, your inclination to look beyond immediate
horizons and to consider the much longer term. Communities, as we just heard, have prospect
and retrospect, futures and histories. They're predicated on mutual support and common fate,
and they have the capacity to draw together people at different career stages or with
diverse professional identities and personal orientations towards user groups.. Communities
themselves set intellectual direction in ways that bear watching.
So, this is why funding programs that support projects at national scale need, at the very
least, to stay plugged into the conversations of practitioner in communities as those communities
develop in their self conception, and as we hope they continue to develop demographically
to better represent American society. Now, the first law for a funder in relation to
this evolution may be do no harm, and this is perhaps to return to some of the concerns
that we heard right off the bat this morning about these programs maybe inadvertently reinforcing
a kind of totalizing homogeneity. At best though, being aware of how our various practioner
communities are evolving and where they may be stagnating could help agencies like IMLS
make enabling investments at crucial moments. On the other hand, the trick for funders is
how to support developer communities through programs that are necessarily and fruitfully
user and project oriented. So, a lot of what I've been talking about sounds like the Laura
Bush 21st century librarian grants, which is a wonderful framework for supporting practitioners
as individuals as individuals and cohorts, but how you tie programs like this to the
infrastructure building that we're talking about today with this IMLS priority may not
be immediately obvious. We know it's necessary, that's clear, because the best professional
development and frankly the only meaningful community development comes through project
based learning involving real world situations and collaborations. So one possibility is
to infuse the spirit of those LB21 grants throughout IMLS that is to require more strongly
that professional development outcomes for grant participants and for their larger communities
of practice be formally addressed in all IMLS programs. So if we agree that this is a crucial
part of increasing our national capacity, it should be taken seriously in all of our
grant applications and in all of our reports of outcomes. We know that much of the value
of a funded project comes in around the edges of the core deliverable, and a requirement
like this becomes a tool for individual staff members, for middle managers to use to create
healthy local institutional cultures. So want a grant? Show that not only can you get a
worthwhile project done, but that the experience of working on it in community will positively
impact the careers and the potential of your staff for years to come. Show awareness of
how your people fit into and interface with and help advance expert communities of national
and global scope. >>KIM SCHROEDER: So being the last panelist
of the day I am throwing out my presentation entirely, but in digging around (inaudible)
last night, I was looking at early models for library and archival education, and they
pretty much followed a model we are familiar with which is lecture and practice. And as
far as we take our new skills to educate our students now which will be your employees
soon, it has been the challenge, so we know there has to be some kind of hybrid between
lecture and practice. How much practice? How much practice, do they need to know to be
able to come in and be viable employees without extensive training. How much professional
development will they need ongoing. how are you going to manage this. How many volunteer
projects can students handle in the midst of getting a graduate education. So, these
are all things that we are really struggling with in our field and we have great discussions
at the faculty meetings about this. So, my proposal really is that none of our traditional
skills can slide and we're adding new skills, I would just propose that we double curriculum.
That's pretty much it. It was a joke. Obviously, financially, we can't do that to the students,
so trying to figure out how to teach them to really execute the research methods in
a lab is really vital for feasibility for us to be able to understand interoperability,
to understand how to patch together various systems to allow your meta data to stream
through, how to build digital preservation into the management of your assets. It's really
a humongous challenge, and I think that we definitely need more insight into discussions
like this, but also the library schools archival institutions and allied educational organizations
need to discuss further what we need, not that we're going to have a great standardization,
but we need to better understand what we're providing our students and what they come
to a potential job able to do so we need to speak to students, we need to speak to employers
and among ourselves in education we need to do more talking. And if I could just for a
minute, I will repeat this into the microphone, I would be very interested to know what type
of skills you would like a new employee have when they walk into your institution. A fact
of purpose. Anybody else? Willingness to learn with whoever you are helping. An entrepreneurial
spirit definitely something we like to garner. Curious? Okay. Solid communication skills.
Margo said lift 45 pounds. What about (laughing.) What about project management or managing
technology? I mean, that's something that we're very interested in. I like fearless.
I'm teaching a class this summer where we're going to really take apart a Lenix server
and work at installing a lot of different pieces that have been mentioned today and
have them understand what that entails and that it's not, that you still have a do over
if it doesn't work the first time, because I think there's a lot of intimidation. So,
those kinds of new skills, understanding linked data, I have students come to me all the time
and say, well, which programming language should I take? I obviously cannot answer that
question for them, it depends what they want to do with their career, but the bottom line
as far as teaching some of this technology is that the students have to be able to demonstrate
to you that they can learn technologies, and so that's, from the education standpoint,
what we're trying to build within our students, that they can learn the technologies, because
as you all know, it's unlikely you will find one person with every single technology skill
and traditional skill in a job posting, but if they have an allied skill and allied competency
in another technology, you know they're trainable and that they will be able to pick that up
and be effective with it. So, we have a lot of challenges, and I really think we need
to do larger surveys with employers and students and the educational community to understand
what it is, what our end goal is. >>MARGO PADILLA: So, I'm the program director
for the national digital stewardship residency in New York, and I'm here to talk about the
program, which I think attempts to address some of the issues that have already been
brought up. The program was developed to cultivate the next generation of digital stewards by
placing recent master's degree recipients in host institutions and having them work
on a significant digital stewardship project. The program is currently being implemented
in Washington, DC, Boston, New York. It will soon be a virtual program administered by
WGBH and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The program is still fairly new. We have 20
residents that have so far gone through the program, so we're still learning what some
of the issues are, but we have accomplished many of our goals. The goals of the program
is to act as a bridge for students coming out of graduate programs to further equip
them with the skills they need not only to be competitive in the job market but also
to have a meaningful impact on digital stewardship, but to also become leaders in the field. The
program also strives to place residents in organizations where they can really boost
the entire program and to get the organization to get to the next level in its digital preservation
long term goals. For projects we tend to look for intellectual engagement for the resident,
but also lots of hands on work. We really want them to get their hands dirty. We also
look for projects that address issues faced by organizations nationwide, so for example,
in the current round in New York we are dealing with providing access to born digital records,
long term preservation of scientific data, and quality assurance measures for web archiving.
So when the residents arrive, we have two to three days of initial instruction, and
we do digital preservation basics to make sure everyone is on the same page, and we
also work on their project management skills. After that we have one to two workshops per
month and those are really hands on and immersive. During this time the residents are regularly
presenting on their work locally, regionally, and nationally, and we are actively participating
in the digital community stewardship, established by the program and by the host institution.
So, every host institution commits at least one mentor to the resident, and this may be
mentored who may or may not have a strong digital preservation background, but we really
like to have someone in the resident's corner who can help them navigate the ins and outs
of the institution. A lot of times these residents are implementing new procedures and policies,
and they need to be mentored to help them sort of navigate the waters. The mentor is
also there to help guide the resident through experimentation, through pitfalls, helping
them expand the skills that they bring to the residency and acquire those that they
still need. One of the strongest elements of the program
is the cohort model. So, the cohorts come to work off of each other's skills and connections,
and we really aim to have past, present and future cohorts networked and talking and exchanging
ideas, and this is sort of where we start to think about scaling up the NDSR program.
NDSR has the potential to become a collection of these one off projects, so we are trying
to stay focused on the big picture. How does NDSR leverage funding that goes to a particular
iteration of the program towards building a national capacity. So, one of the small
steps we've taken in that direction is requiring the residents to create reports and documentation
of their process and what worked and what didn't so that other organizations that are
addressing these issues can replicate it for themselves. Another way is, again, focusing
on the residents. They gather for their time in the program and then proceed to get jobs
throughout the country. By keeping all the cohorts networked, they become this incredibly
skilled and community, helping each other with problems, helping each other identify
opportunities and sometimes just offering words of encouragement Establishing a community
for recent graduates can help us retain some of the talent that might otherwise leave our
field by making them feel invested and committed and even special. When so many jobs are short
term or temporary, NDSR can help anchor new professionals. The program continues to evolve,
and we will be welcoming new cohorts this year. We look forward to integrating a lot
of what has been brought up today. >>JOHN PALFREY: Thank you guys very much.
This is a terrific range of view points on this broad and important question. I have
two things that I wanted to ask, but I see that Mike has got his hand up right now, so
I'm going to defer to Mike and fold in my questions as we go. Jump right in.
>> SPEAKER IN AUDIENCE: I'm going to
confess a personal bias, a person who has spent six wonderful years working in a library
and does not have a library degree, and I often wonder if I need to go back and get
one to ever be a legitimate library worker, and I can say, as someone who is not a librarian,
that's a caveat on every idea I have. I guess my question is, you know, I think that it's
right, part of the problem of professional development is clearly about expanding the
set of skills that you impart to library school grads. Another question and idea is what about
imparting some basic concept of libraries to grads from law school, business school,
design school, you know, computer programming grads, so just one example of the kind of
thing. I don't have a business degree, but I worked at McKenzie for four years, and they
have this thing called a mini MBA, which is three weeks and is supposed to give you the
highlights of what you would have gotten had you gone 2 years to business school. A little
insulting to anyone who went to business school. I wonder about, you know, a mini LLM or a
mini library degree for people who bring something valuable from another discipline but want
to know more about library school and what they would have learned there but aren't quite
willing to go back to night school for three years to do it. Do you have thoughts on how
you can embrace more deeply other than librarians and archivists as legitimate and contributing
library workers? >>KIM SCHROEDER: Well, one of the things that
we are all, you know, in recognition of is that everything we do is collaborative, and,
so, we need people with various perspectives. So, I don't have any urge for a very homogeneous
discipline or execution of our projects, I don't think that would be the best use of
our time. I, being an educator, yes, I would love for you to come get your MLAS, that would
be great, but I also understand finances and time and once you already have a career out
there, there's a lot of other things to do with your time, but I think that you can get
at some of that through the collaborations that you do, and certainly, I don't have a
technology degree, but I spend a lot of time with tech people trying to absorb as much
as I can, so I don't feel bad that I don't have a tech degree, and I hope they don't
feel bad they don't have an MLAS, so I just think we learn from each other.
>> JOHN PALFREY: Kim, could you imagine a mini three week intensive, you know, MLAS
sort of thing, and do you do anything that is distance learning? So could Micah from
New York be at Wayne State in any way to get his mini degree?
>>KIM SCHROEDER: I could envision that, actually, and we have a very entrepreneurial management
there, so I will take that back and ask them about it, honestly, and we do have an online
program for digital curation folks, not yet for archives, so there are definitely things
that you can do online. >>JOHN PALFREY: A short while into my time
as a library director without a library degree, I found myself in Jim Neal's office at Columbia,
and he taught me the term feral, I was a feral librarian, a feral profession, and it was
fine and not to worry too much about it, but I do think that you might find that Micah's
idea would both be a business opportunity for some leading "I" schools and library schools,
and but also something that would actually meet a need that's slightly different than
somebody going back for two or three year to do a full on degree; it might expand upon
the number of people who might get involved. >> SPEAKER FROM AUDIENCE: I'm Deanna Bell.
I'm assuming that I'm here as a past president of the Society of American Archivists and
not because I work at the Library of Congress. One, I do want to mention that the society
of American archivists does offer a digital archivist certification program to become
a digital archive specialist, nine courses and then you take a test, so that would be
an option. If we're looking at professional development, it sounded very much as if some
of the presentations that were being discussed were for new professionals, not for those
of us who have years in the profession. Second, to respond to the idea of a course that mentored
could take and become mentored with a degree, well, be the equivalent of mentored with an
MLIS or, you know, get those activities, for a long time, the national archives and records
administration offered a two week program called the modern archives institute where
you learned the basic skills so that you were prepared. There are other versions of it known
as the western archives institute, there's one that's done in the south, so there are
those options out there that are available. I do want to go back to something that happened
earlier this morning about how you can reach the users. I primarily work with teachers,
and they're the ones who, we discovered when we put out American Memory, our number one
user group was teachers. We're not talking to the teachers, we're not talking to the
folklorist who is reaching out into the communities, and we should be doing that as well, and the
last thing, I do want to respond to Andromeda and something that she said. How many of you
have family members that are in Baltimore? I do. I spent a lot of time talking to my
mom last night, who lives about 20 minutes away from where all this was happening, and
I'm feeling a little bit of frustration towards some of what Andromeda was saying, because,
yeah, Baltimore was burning, but I think there's some reasons why beyond just the anger and
frustration of a person being involved in police custody.
>>JOHN PALFREY: Do you want to say more on that topic since it's the issue of the day
for all of us? >> SPEAKER FROM AUDIENCE: I will be honest,
I am not conservative, my mom is, but the thing that frustrates me about some of this
is that the African American community is destroying its own community. They're not
going and storming city hall, they're not going and doing things like that, they burned
down a senior center that was being built to support the seniors in the community, they
went in and looted the CVS that everyone was talking about before they burned it down.
They're destroying their own communities, they're not saying, hey, come and help us.
It's happened, it happened in Los Angeles, it happened with the riots after Martin Luther
King was assassinated, and my concern is that, all right, yeah, there are problems in the
African American community, there's been anywhere from 50 to 80 percent unemployment for African
American males, there was an article in the New York Times about the disappearing African
American male and that more and more and more African American males are either incarcerated
or dying but the community that is out there is destroying itself. Not just the majority
community destroying the African American community, so I have major fears when my 81
year old mother, I am calling her and going do I need to come up and get you because you
are ten minutes away from where everything is burning down, and you live in the roughest
part of Baltimore city, on with one of the highest crime rates and the largest drug communities,
so my concern is if we are talking about how we are supporting the community, we need to
be looking at the libraries. In Ferguson when they opened their libraries, the two libraries
I went to as a kid are closed. The branches in my community are shuttered, and I am sure
the other one is too. That is ten minutes from where my mom lives and where the burning
is taking place. >>JOHN PALFREY: I saw a few hands, but Andromeda,
did you want to say.. >>ANDROMEDA YELTAN: I don't think I can add
anything to the voice of someone who has lived in the city. I haven't.
>>SPEAKER FROM AUDIENCE: Librarianship is one of the few professions that does not require
any continuing education or certification of its members. There are exceptions, health
sciences, law, but for the most part, we do not have that requirement, we might have that
expectation. Can you speak to that as whether we need to start to work on as a community.
>>BETHANY NOWVISKIE; I think there would be advantages and severe disadvantages to instituting
ongoing certification. The advantages would be scale and scope. You reach everybody, it
is part of the culture, it is part of what is done and there is no chance of remaining
working in libraries without keeping your skills up, without but there are other factors
to taking care of that problem. When I think of that I think of teachers re-upping their
certifications. It is not a sort of nimble system. It's not a system that is very easy
to sort of intervene in, to advance. The very often big sort of slow moving system like
that reifies a decade ago's, you know, cutting edge. So, do we want to setup a sort of formal
re upping of certification or do we want to depend on the kind of user communities and
sort of practitioner communities that I'm talking about to be a little narrower, to
be a little more specific and to be a lot more sort of current in what it is that they're
teaching each other? That's probably where I would invest rather than in something more
formal. >> JOHN PALFREY: Bethany, you talked in an
eloquent way about the notion of project based learning as something that would be helpful
in the context of learning library skills. Could you imagine marrying that idea to Jim's
in some fashion to come up with a series of projects that need working on that would,
in essence, be something somebody might do in regards to ongoing training in some fashion?
>>BETHANY NOWVISKIE: Absolutely. I'm pretty new to the federal library association, I've
been there a week and a half, but before that, I spent 20 years at the University of Virginia
working in the digital humanities community, and most recently, directing the scholars
lab and its graduate fellows programs, which over the years have evolved from solo fellowships
for graduate students working in the digital humanities to team based and project based
fellowships, and we watched, because the scholars lab as a digital humanities center is administratively
embedded in a library, all along, we were thinking and talking with librarians about
how do you move that outward, how do you apply that kind of interdisciplinary cohort based
learning that happens around a real world project, so these are fellowships that graduate
students get to join a cohort of five other grad students, all from different disciplines,
to conceive of, prototype, launch and assess a software project in the course of a year,
so they really are thrown into the deep end. It's been really neat to see that concept
spread out to other libraries. So, Columbia's developing a librarian program, UVA is exploring
a praxis for librarians. So, just that model as our graduate students finished up and moved
on into libraries and cultural heritage institutions rather than into the professoriate, taking
that kind of concept with them, so I think that's a professional development model that
has legs, and it also can get things done. >>JOHN PALFREY: Kim or Margo, do you want
to respond to Jim's question? >>MARGO PADILLA: Yeah, just, I'm not ready
yet to throw in the towel on the library schools. I think there's still ways to sort of develop
what they're doing there, maybe through cohorts or through specialized tracks before you start
requiring additional education, once you've already invested in the IMLS.
>>JOHN PALFREY: Yes, please? >> SPEAKER: This is Trevor Munoz. I am curious,
I would like the panel to reflect a little bit more on working on thinking about library
museum leadership, so who they see as possible cohorts, opportunities for further development.
I'm interested as to who you see as part of these people, because I think some of the
leadership of these organizations sees certain parts of their staff as maybe more ready or
more able to go out and be part of something that, say, the DLF would do and are maybe
not looking at their cataloging department with the same kind of eyes, and I wonder if
you could sort of talk about that challenge, about helping these institutions re imagine
with their staff who are there, who might not be as comfortable self identifying and
self promoting about being ready for change but who are ready for change.
>>BETHANY NOWVISKIE: If I might jump in to say that subject librarians are another one
of those cohorts that often don't get that kind of attention or aren't assumed to want
to leap in, and that's why I'm attracted to this model of sort of investing in expert
practitioner communities and really letting them define intellectual direction and help
us see what they see as their user communities and what they see as their sort of, their
communities, right, because that often will include people from other sectors of the library,
people in scholarly communities that use these resources or help build these tools and wanted
to find them, so that's my sort of off the cuff response, is that I think we don't ask
those smaller groups that we very often target for this kind of, you know, praxis program
like experience. We don't often ask them in setting something like that up, who do you
want to pull in, who do you need, this is not going to work unless you bring in who?
Tell us. >>KIM SCHROEDER: On a smaller scale, we have
a digital media projects lab at our school, and we use it to outreach to our community,
so we have, you know, a real to real audio conversion system, lots of audio, lots of
other video formats, and when we work with smaller museums and other cultural institutions,
they pretty much let us lead everything because they're so understaffed, so, you know, we've
been talking about the big scale, but on the smaller scale, they're so grateful for a graduate
student, the equipment, all of that to be dispensed, they often don't know what to ask
for, so they don't realize they need a digital preservation plan, they just know they needed
something digitized. So, we try to use that as a teaching moment to sort of ratchet up
and educate them about managing their digital and how they're creating access and long term
preservation. >>JOHN PALFREY: I wonder if I could take an
example from the previous panel and then put it back to you guys as a specific, which was
I was struck by Trevor describing the idea of meta data mobs and why we didn't necessarily
have more people in that kind of mode working on collaborative projects. If you were to
compare, for instance, what happens to Wikipedia, the notion of Wikimania, the number of people
who contribute to that, the idea that you have a bunch of people coming together, geeking
out, improving articles and meeting on an annual basis, in the context of DPLA, and
we've tried to do a version of that, but it's definitely not, you know, thousands of librarians
rolling up their sleeves and adding meta data, which I think it could be, and if you think
about how many potential people could participate in this, whether it is library students, actual
librarians, retired librarians, why don't we have meta data mobs, and if that actually
is potentially something that we would want, and I embrace Trevor's suggestion, I think
it's a great one, what's between here and there, and is it that we need to change the
culture of the community, to take your term, Bethany, is it that there's more we could
do in library schools or in programs like the one that Margo's running? Does professional
development need to be more? What's standing between us and really, really productive meta
data mobs and coding groups developing? Why haven't those things happened in the library
community? Maybe a better way, how do we get to the place where they are, assuming that's
a good thing? >>KIM SCHROEDER: Well, we have 120 years of
library education behind us, and these are paradigm shifts, and we have to do more talking,
we have to do needs assessment, we have to do structure in order to gather the information,
we have to, again, survey the population, whether they're users, employers, students,
etc., so there's a lot of work to be done, much as we talked about earlier today. So,
I don't think there's a lack of will, I think that most institutions are just trying to
survive in their world, and it comes back to an earlier point, which is that there's
not been national drive to fix this typically as there is within your own institution.
>>JOHN PALFREY: As someone who right now runs a 237 year old school, I often think about
this problem, which is how hard is it to change something that's been doing really well for
a long time, and I would say, in libraries, it's been a success story, but I do think
it's something that needs to be changed, so I am taking your point that 120 years is a
challenge as much as it is a positive in this context.
>>ANDROMEDA YELTON: I think there are three things that immediately spring to mind. One
is that if you propose some kind of service or activity in libraries, there's a lot of
people who will instantly ask what's your plan for making it sustainable for all of
time. Not everything has to be, and you'll never do a meta data mob if you have to have
a plan to do it every week for all of time. Another reason, or something that I think
does a good job of dealing with that mindset is the 4th floor in the Chattanooga Public
Library, which is constructed very intentionally as a space for prototyping new services, and
it's okay for things to happen there once and fail and not move on, but it's also okay
for things to be found useful there and to spread out throughout the system. So, I think
sometimes, you have to be really explicit about creating a space and things can fail.
Another reason is things like meta data mobs and text sprints and stuff are really high
touch. It's not, you're not going to get them if you just wait for a bunch of people to
self organize and need people setting priorities and providing resources. Gross Stuff is an
open source project that does a great job of organizing sprints in atomic ways that
allows people to show up for a weekend and do stuff. But they work at it. The other issue
is workplace time and support. I just came out with a technology report on librarians
who write code at work. You can download it for free, and I asked them, it's at journals.ala.org,
and I asked librarians, did you get support from your workplace in learning how to code
and I asked what form did that support take, and they said, basically, they didn't actively
stop me from doing it. I'm like your bar is set a little low, right? So, if we're talking
about people learning to use and employing tech skills in a way that it's like, go to
your full time job where there is no time to do these things, come home, make dinner,
put your kids to bed, do your chores, it is 9 pm, now you can learn to code! This is made
to fail. >>JOHN PALFREY: After library school, right?
>>ANDROMEDA YELTON: Yeah, after that too. So, I think this is a thing where a place
like (inaudible) has a real advantage because it has a name
and resources to convince people to spend time at work on work things involving change.
>> SPEAKER: Andromeda, You had jumped into some of this, and I wanted to thank you for
your sort of diversion to take us through the Baltimore considerations, but I also wanted
to make sure that you had time to share of the other issues that you started to jump
into, but I think part of this gets at a real challenge around how we change the conception
of what labor is in this environment, and I think the trick, like, funding projects
is one thing, but in another environment, there's sort of a culture shift about what
being a professional means in terms of having that time and that space as part of your job
to say that, you know, I need to be learning, as an example, when one of the developers
working on Zooterra decided he needed to use a different framework, he said I need to take
three weeks to learn it before I'm going to implement it, and everyone said, of course,
that's what you do as a developer. So, I'm curious for the group's thoughts about how
sort of cultural professional sort of labor issues, what needs to happen there and how
do we get there. >>JOHN PALFREY: Margo, you have first crack
at it, if you're interested. >>MARGO PADILLA: I don't have thoughts at
this moment. >>JOHN PALFREY: Fair enough. Passing is absolutely
accepted. >>BETHANY NOWVISKIE: So, it made all the difference
in the world, I think, for the scholars lab as a library and that kind of R and D space
when I really instituted and started to protect 20 percent R and D time on the old Google
model for all staff, and that was all staff across the board, it didn't matter what projects
you were working on, the departmental assistant had the ability to call on this time. Now,
we had to do, there were rules that came with that kind of exploratory freedom. The idea
was for everybody to be able to take a half step back from all of the demands being placed
on them, for working with faculty on projects, for working on internal infrastructure projects,
for all of the data migrations and sort of moving content forward that we had inherited
from decades of digital work at UVA, take a step back to be able to, A, breathe, and
B, look at the commonalities among these requests and maybe invent something that addressed
more than what they were being asked for and solved some problems, so that was the concept.
Some of the ground rules that I sort of set around this included that anybody who was
taking advantage of R and D time needed to be able, at the drop of a hat, to say what
it is that they're working on and make a kind of compelling case for how it met the mission
in some loose way of the scholars lab, of the library, of the University of Virginia,
so you had to connect it and be able to speak compellingly about it, and really, the other
sort of base requirement was that there be some visible outcomes so that you were publishing,
whatever that meant for the project you were working on. Sometimes, your vector was get
hub, sometimes, your vector would be a conference presentation, there were books that came out
of this, there were lots of different kinds of sort of published formal accessible outcomes,
and what we found were the projects that emerged did meet broad needs. So, things like black
light came from scholars lab R and D time, so, you know, take a break and tinker around
with this and think about it, you know, that was the seed of some projects that really
radically changed the way our library operates, that opened up possibilities for collaboration
with other groups, and the neat line project was another one of those that was an R and
D project. So, and that's kind of an answer to the previous question too, is it's just
time, right? It's time, and we kind of get ourselves into the mindset that we need to
fill every possible moment and don't give your staff enough time to sort of breathe
and be creative and really exercise those entrepreneurial skills that we've been talking
about and put things that they've learned to use.
>>JOHN PALFREY: I'm often struck by the fact that there are 125,000 or more libraries,
and if you just thought about that, there would be a huge amount of person power to
put to bear out there. Please. >> SPEAKER FROM AUDIENCE: Yeah, I want to
say I love the idea you just threw out, John, but I also want to go back to some of the
things that we were talking about on the panel earlier today, on the gaps panel, and specifically
rewinding back to two questions, which continue to come to me as I'm hearing you guys talk.
We've got this kind of identity crisis that I think is going on, it's been going on for
a long time, which makes it more important now, and I think that same identity crisis
that's there in libraries, archives and museums themselves is also there in the I-schools
and the few museum school programs that are there, and until we figure out how we're going
to define what our mission is, it becomes really, really hard to teach people to go
in that direction, and so I want to challenge us to walk back a few steps, and I know ALA
is working on some master language right now around what libraries are and what we're supposed
to be doing, you know, one of the problems in our field is that there aren't clear hierarchies
that can tell us what these things are, so we have to figure out way to facilitate voices
from the community and synthesize them up and then act on it, and so I want to start
there, just as a, you know, who are we and how does that impact what answers we can give
to where education needs to go. >>JOHN PALFREY: So we'll definitely come back
to that. Keep going. >> SPEAKER FROM AUDIENCE: Okay, and then the
second piece is the who is collaborating. So, again, coming back to the second thing
that I introduced on the gaps, where are the bridges and where are the bridges missing,
and right now, one of the critical bridges that I see missing, not just as the Executive
director of Educopia, in a course that I teach, one of the things I've been able to do is,
you know, tell my students, go out and do a digital preservation plan, and I've done
this assignment for about five years, and it's something that I came up with because
I'm a practitioner who then came in. I wasn't trained in library science, that was not my
background. I was practitioner and I came into the classroom and I brought into the
classroom practice and said, all right, you can partner with anybody, you can partner
with a construction company, museum, aquarium, whatever, and my students have done all of
those and more, they've had these incredible experiences, and, so, when I heard you guys
talking about how do you start a meta data mob, I think one of the pieces that's broken
is the piece between the I-schools and the practitioners, often in the same institution.
So just in those academic settings alone, we've got some repair work that I think we
need to do and some bridges that need to be built. Sorry to go on for a long time.
>> SPEAKER: Two fantastic questions/comments. Let's start with Katherine's first question,
which is a fundamental question then we'll come to the who is collaborating question.
So, let's start with the fundamental and then we'll go to the secondary.
>>KIM SCHROEDER: As far as collaboration >> JOHN PALFREY: You're going to the second
one first? That's fine. Go for it. >>KIM SCHROEDER: Well, Katherine, you and
I are of like minds. So, I have always, in every class I've ever taught, introduced a
hands on project. I don't care if it was an introduction class, because I think that it
gives students more confidence in interviewing, it adds to their resume, it helps them with
their people skills and their professionalism, so that's something that we're very adamant
about, and when I took over the archival administration program, that came with it, the practicums
in both digital content management and archives, so we have that piece, but I also manage the
digital media projects lab, which means I'm working with organizations like our contemporary
arts museum, etc. in the area and Detroit Sound Conservancy to provide help to them
and also skills for the students, and they get a lot more out of that than just specific
hard skills, and it gives them something more to talk about and research in the classroom
as well. We've also got the alternate spring break, where they often travel to the national
archives or presidential library, etc., for a week of intensive. So, I'm really adamant
about the experiential training, and my issue, which I mentioned a little bit earlier, is
I'm not sure even where to cut it off. I have some students that will just, whatever I post
I need a volunteer for, they're there, but, you know, how far do you go, but it's really
critical. Those are the students that get the jobs as soon as they graduate. I have
a colleague at the Library of Congress who said there is no other science where you don't
experiment hands on to add to your education, so I think that's absolutely critical. From
a collaborative standpoint, we are working, I am making as many connections as I can for
my students, and we have some that have gone through the NDSR program, which is a fabulous
program, and it's really important, but everything we do is collaborative, and at the NDSA meeting
a few years ago, they were talking about the blurring lines between librarianship, archives
and museum administration, and I think that's okay. I'm sorry, but because of the digital
tools, the way we do our jobs is different, and that's okay, and every team I'm on for
a large scale project has archivists, librarians and technologists and maybe museum curators.
Everything I do is that way, and we do come at things a little differently, but we have
some overlap in our skills that allows us to successfully institute projects, and I
just think that's the way it's going to be, and I think if we're too territorial, that's
going to prevent us from success. >> SPEAKER FROM AUDIENCE: You are the exception,
and, so, the question of collaboration at Wayne State is a different question from the
question of collaboration when you're not at Wayne State, and I really do, I mean that
both as a compliment and also a challenge to all of us, you know, field wide, how do
we turn that around, how do we build things that are more practicum oriented, like what
Bethany was talking about, like what Clear has done with the fellows program, you know,
there are lots of examples of this now both in an internship and residency kind of space,
but not so much in the classroom space, and so thinking about how to forge those connections
not just in the one off spaces, but in the system.
>>JOHN PALFREY: You're welcome to treat that as a rhetorical question.
>> KIM SCHROEDER: I'm just going to say, earlier, an answer to a question was narcissism. My
facetious answer right now is peer pressure, maybe. I just think these discussions are
the way to go, and I think when you have so many student successes in also doing the hands
on, that that will get through to people, and it also means the students will choose
where they go. >> JOHN PALFREY: Kim, Your point earlier,
that many of your students are not going into the professoriate is an interesting thing,
if you are seeking to have more professors it would be interesting to have some combo,
or maybe there's a root back in some way to help populate the professoriate as well.
>> SPEAKER FROM AUDIENCE: Todd Carpenter with NYSO. Something that's been bouncing around
on Twitter, in result to the 20 percent, Google's 20 percent thing, it was actually 120 percent,
and this actually leads to my question. How do we as a community foster a culture that
is professional development is part of the 100 percent that you give, not the 125 percent
that you give, that it's part of your job to improve your skills and that the staff
and the institution should benefit from you gaining more skills and it's on you personally
to do that little bit of extra to learn how to code using an Mook at 2:00 o'clock in the
morning after you put the kids to bed. >>BETHANY NOWVISKIE: Yeah, so I'll tell you
what I did. I think we're about to see whether it works or not since I left the institution,
but what I did as a manager was I wrote it into people's job descriptions, you know,
if I got hit by a falling piano or whatever, there would be a way for each individual staff
member to go back and say, no, this is my job, R and D for at least 20 percent of my
time in my 40 hours a week is my job, and then what we did in terms of day to day practice
was I never took it myself, I went around fending off demands to try to make it possible
for people to really take advantage of it, and, you know, people did that to greater
and lesser degrees, but it did help mitigate that risk that it could be, you know, we're
asking people to perform what is beyond humanly possible to do.
>> JOHB PALFREY: It is fundamentally taking something from a peripheral activity to a
core activity. We did something very similar, and I think it's just about making administrative
choices, right? I think we joked about those things. I guess it was Kim saying that those
skills that we no longer have to train for, but, really, we do have to take stuff out.
>> SPEAKER: The important thing is it becomes part of the culture, not just the job. It
becomes part of the mindset, and that became something that attracted people to the group
and something that helped retain them. >>MARGO PADILLA: I think, also, professional
development is something that's not lost on new professionals. Like I said, so many of
the jobs that new professionals take are temporary, and so you're constantly training for your
next job, but if you're talking about professional development being part of the culture, it's
definitely part of the culture of being a new professional. You can't stop.
>>ANDROMED YELTON: It's not like you can't demonstrate concrete value for these skills
if you're in a context where you really need to do that. The people who are writing the
scripts in my report, Becky wrote something that saved one to two weeks of cataloger time
per year, so if you gave her a couple weeks to learn that skill, it paid off within a
couple of years Eric wrote a thing that helped them deliver better reference statistics,
and so they could go to their broader institution and say we know that you did not know this
and did not believe us, but now we can show you that half of our questions in the beginning
of the semester are on tech support, and we need to staff and resource that because we
are where your students learn to use their computers. People do really amazing things
that make life better in concrete ways if they have the skills to do it.
>> SPEAKER FROM AUDIENCE: Michael Edson again. A couple things. One is I think we can't neglect
the fact that we need to train managers, train management, train leaders on change. This
is going to be the accelerating pace of cultural and technological change is going to be with
us for a really long time, and as a community, I think we suck at it, and other industries
are running circles around us. I've gotten to the point where you can kind of see the
habits and you can see if the vocabulary is there or not, and sometimes, you just have
to fold up your laptop and listen. This is a huge issue. We need to train our top leaders
how to change. The other thing is, I think it's really great to be talking about optimizing
training and professional development for professionals, but I think we need to think
more expansively about who we want as library practitioners in the same way that the web
has opened up new kinds of curation, new people who can participate in the creation of knowledge
and the curation of knowledge, we can have an existing cadre of library professionals
who are better than the ones we have now through training. Don't we also want, you know, 10
million citizen librarians from 200 countries also doing that work. I suspect they are already
doing that work. You can turn them into a movement. You can help them be successful
in their own communities. That's probably a really great outcome for society, and I
don't want this project to lose sight of that. >>JOHN PALFREY: Excellent. I take that to
be a statement and not a question. We have 2 minutes until we will turn it over to the
archivists of the United States. >> BETHANY NOWVISKIE: We left one question
hanging out there, and it's been bugging me. >> JOHN PALFREY: Hang on one second, Bethany.
There's one more comment, it sounds like, from the crew, and then you'll each have a
chance to do a 30 second clean up. >> SPEAKER FROM AUDIENCE: Allen from ALA.
So, going back to the national digital platform, since that implies a very different kind of
orientation, developing, you know, systems or applications that will be useful throughout
the country as opposed to focusing on what's useful for your own library, does the panel
have any thoughts in terms of what that means for what kind of education we'll need for
professionals going forward? The other quick comment is, in my work, we also focus on national
policy advocates, so people who could testify at Congress, or as Micah mentioned, people
who might negotiate licenses with publishers at a national scale, and going forward, I
think we're going to need just more people like that to engage with the world beyond
libraries, and, so, any thoughts? Just putting that on the table in terms of education training
we'll need going forward. >> JOHN PALFREY: Thanks Allen. So, in roughly
a tweet or two length, do you guys want to give last comments? We'll go Margo and end
with Andromeda. And Bethany you can hit on anything else you want on the way back.
>> MARGO PADILLA: I think just for the last two comments, one of the most significant
investments we can make is in developing new professionals, higher them permanently and
training them to become managers, and as far as schools go, training them not on a specific
programming language or something that is sort of, will disappear, but on how to think
about these problems, you know, developing a digital preservation plan will never get
old, so thinking, not necessarily always hands on skills, but how to think through problems,
that's a skill that will last throughout one's career.
>>KIM SCHROEDER: I would definitely have to agree. Having a business background, I use
those skills constantly in managing these large projects and assembling volunteers,
and just knowing how to do a budget, project management and needs assessment, all of those
skills are really important, and they're going to continue to be really important for what
we're doing because we are looking at larger scales, more integration, and more globality
in what we do and how we share information. >>BETHANY NOWVISKIE: So, I wanted to address
the identity crisis question. It kind of bugged me then too. The question is how do we define
what our mission is, how do we make it compelling, how do we attract new practitioners. I want
to resist a single answer to that. I think what makes a message about libraries compelling
is that it speaks to peoples' own experiences and to their personal missions, and because
we are many, what we want to do is create frameworks that help us voice those to different
practitioner communities and user groups. >>JOHN PALFREY: Excellent.
>>ANDROMEDA YELTON: I guess my two tweet summary is that supporting professional development
has a multiplier effect on the value of all the platforms that you invest in, and enabling
the people who create and use and teach your platforms to think critically about the intersection
of society and technology makes the technology more inclusive and valuable.
>> JOHN PALFREY: One can tell that Andromeda is a true tweeter. I hope you'll join me in
thanking this panel for a great time. Thank you.
(Applause.)