Going Viral

Well, that was rather unexpected.

A blog post that did something I didn’t think possible: it went VIRAL.

It all started with the work space-themed Christmas party which I went to as Obi-Wan Kenobi (pictured left – where I was relieved to be considered to be closer to Ewan McGregor than Alec Guinness – however people had been drinking). I had to look after the lightsaber as it was destined to be one of my son’s Christmas presents. Star Wars mania subsequently gripped the Priestner household and The Clone Wars cartoon series became a must see on Cartoon Network. And then on 31st December I saw the episode Holocron Heist for the first time and THAT librarian and THAT library…

I am a modern librarian – customer-focused and technically able who spends his working life delivering a largely electronic and remotely accessible service to demanding high-fee paying users. And I am on a permanent mission to try to get my customers and other people in my life to understand the value and place of modern librarianship in today’s fast moving world – how it’s about information, knowledge and people rather than books. For this reason I just couldn’t let Jocasta Nu and her archaic space-age library pass without comment. However, I never could have guessed what would happen next.

I got into work on my first day back – 4th January to be greeted by a tweet from a fellow business school staff member advising me to buy a copy of the Cambridge News. My first thought was that this was a tiny piece on my publishing sideline (Classic TV Press) so tweeted back to say I’d check it out later. He replied to say that he thought I’d really want to look at it now as I had pretty much all of Page 3! I dashed out and bought a copy and was amazed to see it was about my Star Wars blogpost and titled: ‘Expert aims his light sabre (sic) at Star Wars library policy’ with a photo of me to boot. I was pleased, nay amazed, to see that the majority of my points were intact and that out-of-date representations of librarians and libraries was considered to be ‘news’. The online version of the article is pictured below:

Well this was good stuff I thought especially as the article linked to my blog. I was pleased that it would get me a few more visitors, but I never could have guessed just HOW many. I usually get a relatively healthy 30-50 views a day, largely fellow librarians (and therefore I’m preaching to the converted – not to say I blog to preach, rather I blog to help me process the work I do and to share ideas and thoughts). Before now my most viewed blog post, which attacked a Harvard Business School Publishing scheme to rip librarians off, had a total of 800 views. Well I soon realised that stats-wise this was going to be a whole new experience…

Day 1: 219 visitors, Day 2: 484 visitors and then, Thursday 6th January came around, by which time that Cambridge News story had got around, USA Today, Forbes, Dallas News and Facebook to name a few,  and when I went to check my stats that evening I was greeted by a figure of almost 3000 visitors! And more unbelievable still, for a while, every time I clicked refresh, ten more visitors were immediately added to the total. Clicking refresh got quite addictive I can tell you! By the end of the day 3961 visitors had checked in and my site stats chart looked quite different to normal. A fifth of the total visitors to my blog since its inception in May 2009 had visited on a single day. Below: my current site stats with the 6th January spike. It’s worth mentioning that I did have visitors in December but the scale the graph is now on makes them all but invisible to the human eye!

Although it was great to get this many visitors and generate this much interest not just in the library community but beyond, and hopefully challenging some stereotypes along the way, my favourite piece of mini-fame was being featured as the lead story on the Official Star Wars blog (below). I’m not a Star Wars nut (it had taken me two years to watch The Clone Wars) but this felt kind of special.

My favourite website headline was unquestionably ‘Cambridge’s head librarian (wow quite a promotion!) smacks down Star Wars Jedi archives’ (below) and my favourite part of any follow-up article came in response to my comment that Jocasta Nu had it coming for being such a rubbish librarian:  “we don’t really think Mr Priestner is condoning murder”.

And it was just great to be categorised on ‘neatorama’ in ‘Viral and Trending’ (below). Who’da thunk it!

By now, some 7182 people have read my Jedi Librarian blog post and aside from entertaining them I do hope that  it has caused at least some of them to think again about libraries and librarians. We don’t all have buns, we’re not all elderly women, we’re not all determined to catalogue and classify everything within an inch of its life, and we’re not hell bent on restricting access to materials. Today’s librarians want library users to access printed and electronic materials in a way that suits them, when they need it. Today’s librarians are itching to help you search and research better. Today’s librarians are about so much more than stamping, shelving and shushing. So, TV and film makers can you try a bit harder in future please?

And finally, just to prove I gave up the lightsaber, our over-excited son, John, on Christmas morning:

But is it art?

To counter my serious stats post earlier in the week I thought I’d share a much less serious observation which followed a check of my monthly blog stats yesterday.  The stats form a picture that looked too familiar to pass without comment. Surely Oxford University’s dreaming spires skyline? My former stamping ground.

Thank you to everyone who visited my blog in the last few weeks and made this piece of spooky ‘blog stats art’ possible. I know the third tower is a bit big (and wonky) but you can’t have everything! 

Has anyone else got any blog stats art to share? Or more cleverly is anyone trying to create a blog stats art image by blogging in a particular way to ensure the appropriate high and lows of readership? Or am I just thinking about this far too much?! Yes I know.

Open All Hours

In February of this year, Judge Business School Library service went over to 24/7 opening, with members having access outside of staffed hours via swipecard. We decided to try this out for a number of reasons:

• To finally succumb to demand. This had been requested by students for many years via  the staff-student committee and the annual library survey. In fact, in the 2008 survey it was the most requested improvement, cited by 29%  of respondents.
• Because as a business school that considers itself to be world-class, arguably we could no longer justify the limited opening hours  of 9am to 7pm.
• In order to provide a more flexible and customer-focused service to our users.

The main argments against the move to 24/7 were as follows:

• the security of the staff area (specifically the lack of lockable cupboards and shelving at the open Library Desk)
• the fact that we only had a self-issue terminal so users couldn’t return books after hours
• the fear that materials would be removed from the Library without being loaned
• and finally, the possibility of more food and drink debris and the related need for more cleaners

Thankfully the first two points could be easily remedied with a bit of cash injection for furniture modification and a self-return module for our existing 3M terminal, while the second two were always going to be more ‘suck it and see’.

As far as I was concerned, and as I repeated at length to nay-sayers, if a few books did go missing, then in the grand scheme of things that wasn’t too important. What was much more significant was that the overall service would be vastly improved and expectations (particularly of our North American students) would be met. I also wasn’t too interested in exactly how many people would use the library after staffed hours, as the willingness to go 24/7 and the message that would sent about our service was far more important than the reality of use.

So 4 months down the line how has it gone? Well I’m pleased to say that very few books have gone missing, the Library is no dirtier than before and usage has been higher than I imagined, especially between 7 and 9pm and during the pre-lecture 7am-9am slot. As for the praise we’ve received, well, quite frankly its been embarrassingly good. In the annual Library survey, students variously described the new 24/7 opening as fantastic, excellent and even ‘heaven-sent’. To say that 24/7 has proved popular is something of an understatement.

All that and not one mention of Arkwright, Granville and Nurse Gladys Emmanuel. So to put that right:
     Granville: I’ve got the blood of poets and lovers in my veins.
     Arkwright: [as Granville leaves] Yes. And at least one electrician.

Andy

The average academic business librarian

I’ve recently updated and sent out a benchmarking survey to British Business Schools Librarians Group (BBSLG) member institutions with a view to gathering key information on their library services and the roles of the individual librarians that run them. The survey was first distributed in 2007 so it should prove very interesting to see how much has changed since then. The most easily digestible results of the survey will be a picture of the average BBSLG institution and the average BBSLG librarian.

Looking specifically at the latter, last time around the average BBSLG librarian:

• Was a chartered member of CILIP
• Had 23 years experience in libraries
• Has been in their current post for 7.6 years
• Spent most of their time answring ad hoc enquiries, developing and delivering training sessions and producing user support materials
• Spent almost as much time acquiring electronic resources as printed
• Managed and negotiated a budget
• Represented the library on a teaching committee
• Enjoyed a flexible policy when it came to accessing CPD
• Was involved in markting and PR activities
• And earned between 27,000 and 32,000 pa

Whereas the average BBSLG instiution:

• supported 278 MBAs, 1720 undergrads, 66 PhDs and 103 academic staff
• provided access to 32,000 business and management books
• provided access to 212 printed journals
• had 3.5 FTE full-time library staff
• had a ratio of 1 FTE library staff member to 29 academics/79 MBAs
• were either testing or using the following ‘new’ technology the most: blogs, openURLresolvers, fed search
• were giving more standalone lectures or tutorials than ones integrated into the curriculum
• spent most of their budget on databases
• formed the business section of an integrated University Library, rather than being a standalone library within a larger University libary service

The main additions to this year’s survey are some more social media options, as this has moved on a touch in the last 2 years (!), to find out how business librarians are using Facebook, Twitter and blogs and specifically the ratio of professional and social use. In addition there’s a new a section on how motivated individuals feel, the level of support they feel they receive from their institution and how challenging their post is.

The aim of the survey is to gauge the temperature of business librarianship as a whole as well as to assemble some hard data.

I’ll be posting top level (but non-confidential) results here in mid-July. The full report will be available to BBSLG members via the website.

Andy

Every way that we can

It’s probably the most difficult problem that librarians around the world are currently facing : how to get the instiutions in which we are based to understand what it is we actually do and moreover to recognise our value and relevance. I realise I’m not saying anything new or groundbreaking here, but I honestly believe that if we don’t start addressing this issue of issues more comprehensively and conclusively, and soon, then in this leaner and less forgiving age, we may genuinely run out of time to get this message across. Earlier this month, this fact zoomed even more inexorably into focus for me, after hearing about sweeping staff cuts to a library service that I’d always regarded to be as safe as houses.

So where are we going wrong? Well for one thing I’m convinced we’re still not being bold enough about communicating the value we bring to our organisations, and for another that we’re still assuming that stakeholders have a better understanding of the myriad complexities of librarianship than they do. Yes we all have our champions and supporters, but they are far outnumbered by those who, if pushed for a description of what it is we do, would inexplicably trot out the old ‘stamp, shelve and shush’ cliches. We can no longer afford to be complacent or assume that our services will be eternally funded. Going back to an earlier post, like Bertrand Russell’s Christmas turkey, sooner or later we may stop being fed and suddenly find that we have no future.

So what can we do about it? Plenty. Its no accident that I spend so much of my time marketing my own library service through newsletters, plasma screen adverts, boomarks, online and printed guides, Youtube videos, consultation exercises, focus groups, teaching and training, our portal, emails, Twitter, surveys, Facebook, inductions, social bookmarking and internal committees. Rather it’s in recognition of the fact that I’m more convinced than ever that the services we offer need to be communicated and promoted in every way that we can, and that all the avenues that are open to us must be fully explored and utilised. I see accountability and statistics as equally key, so that we can incontrovertibly prove that our services and resources are sufficiently used, that our staffing levels are appropriate, and that our contribution to teaching and research is both tangible and vital. Of course, statistics do not constitute a cast-iron guarantee, but they’re incredibly useful safeguards against uninformed assumption.

Can we market ourselves too much? Can we spend too much time seeking to prove our worth? I don’t think we can. In a world where the activity of an information search has been popularly distilled into sticking a word a Google and hitting return, we cannot assume that our incalulably more complex raft of services will be understood, never mind embraced. And I suggest that this should be our other primary objective going forward: to simplify our services and to explain ourselves in as straightforward a manner as possible. This should lead to better  understanding of, and more importantly, sufficient buy-in to, our services and in turn to some much-needed professional security.

Enquire within?

Various experiences during my career (mainly negative ones it has to be said) have led me to take stats on almost every aspect of the library service I currently run. One such statistic that is an abolsoute bind to keep, but which is nevertheless hugely significant, is a tally of enquiries received by myself and my team. As of this academic year, beginning September 2008, we have all diligently kept records of each enquiry and specified whether it was received in person, by email or by phone.

Personally I have not found these stats surprising, but it is entirely possible that other stakeholders within the business school might. This is because they clearly point to the fact that library staff at Judge field only 40% of enquiries in person and that the remainder are received via email or phone. Apart from anything else this data supports my efforts over the past 18 months  to shift the emphasis from a rather blinkered focus on physical users of the library (our more obvious clientele, simply because they’re right in front of us) to a more balanced service that equally supports those users who do not regularly, or in some cases never, visit the physical library and choose to communicate with us remotely instead.

What is more, the ‘in person’ stats include 9% that are received within the School but outside the Library itself – in the Common Room, corridors or staff offices. I am passionate about bringing the library to its users and this stat reflects this activity.

What does this mean for the library service going forward? Well it doesn’t mean I’m after getting rid of the physical library (as some of my colleagues in the business school who regularly make jokey references to Farenheit 451 might suspect, because they know I’m essentially an e-librarian), especially as gate totals are actually on the rise, but rather increased recognition that usage is changing and that we cannot and should not be defined by our physical confines any longer.

The validity of this new wider definition of the library service will be neatly and practically demonstrated by our forthcoming support for Judge’s new Executive MBA programme, which we will primarily be supporting remotely, a fact that has led me to plan a summer training day for my team to ensure the provision of truly excellent and professional remote support to these new library users.

It will be fascinating to see this time next year how much further the ‘in person’ enquiries stat has fallen, as fall it will.

Andy