Conversants

In most of my presentations I'm normally talking to a room full of folks. In these kind of addresses I tend to get pretty animated and put on my Baptist preacher. The problem is that such grandiose gestures are normally lost in translating them to a computer screen. Big rooms don't open themselves to the intimacies of this more "one on one" feeling interaction. So instead of talking to all of you, let me simply just talk to you.

This presentation is for you. It seeks to bolster you if you are defiant and stand bravely before the crushing weight of the status quo. It also seeks to give hope to you if you've been silenced by the chorus of the mediocre and resistant to change. It seeks to show the way forward for you and for all librarians in a time of great challenge, change, and opportunity. It is also a statement that you are not alone, you are not crazy, you are right: librarianship is not about cataloging, or books, or buildings, or committees it is about learning, knowledge and making the world better.

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Imagine if I asked you to sketch out for me a picture, or map of librarianship. You might come up with something like this.

Can you guess where I have been staying in Chicago by the way?

Right, so we have libraries and we break them down into technical services and public services, and from there down to cataloging and reference, and so on. Maybe you might start by dividing the world into different library types first, but in any case, it might not look too different from this.

And you would not be alone.

If you look at the majority of books on librarianship and libraries, or LIS school curricula, or even the Wikipedia entry on librarians, you'll see this way of characterizing libraries by their functions what they do. Certainly that is loud and clear behind last year's Core Competency document put out by ALA.

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It reads like a list of "thou shalts," as in "thou shalt know cataloging," and "thou shalt know technology." And that's fineso long as you understand WHY thou shalt want to do anything. Have you ever asked why? Not just why so many start with functions, but why we even do these functions?

I know, I know, this sounds like an introductory class in library school, but give me a minute. You see, there are some real problems with taking a functional view of librarianship or any profession really.

Let me just list two:

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The first is False Equivalencies.

Look, we as a species are wired to look for patterns and familiar analogs. When we encounter something new, we try and see how it is like something old. We use the functions we already know to predict how new things are going to work and behave. That's why the first cars were called horseless carriages, and we still dial telephones even though there hasn't been a functional rotary dial telephone produced in this country in the past 20 years that wasn't made as a novelty item.

Well, fields do this as well. We do it.

Are you really part of a conference right now? Or are you part of something very new that we've wrapped schedules, speakers and sessions around? How many times have you run into folks who want your library's website to look more like Google with a single search box, because after all- they both search for stuff? Or look like Amazon, because we do books too. Never mind that Google's attempt to search bibliographic data has been shown to be less than optimal with their work with Open Worldcat, or that Amazon also sells garden rakes.

The second problem with functional approaches is that doing something really well, doesn't necessarily tell you what you should be doing next. In fact, if you get REALLY good at something, you have a REALLY hard time of thinking about what should replace what it is you are doing.

Have you ever been in a conversation about how to protect the library's investment in bibliographic data? Meaning, I just spent a lot on all of these MARC records, I don't want to waste that by doing something else. It certainly has been argued that the current state of the US automotive companies has something to with them being really good at building large cars and trucks while the markets have moved to fuel efficiency and a premium on design. Let me show you these two effects in action and their consequences. The first example is Wikipedia compared to Microsoft Encarta.

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Put yourself in 2004. Both Wikipedia and Encarta are encyclopediasone might (and did) argue that they were serving the same function. With hindsight we can see they were trying to do this task explaining the world's subjects -very differently, but in 2004 who would you have bet on to succeed? Microsoft with it's billions of dollars, paid experts, a huge marketing budget and an installed base of Encarta users from their CD-ROM products? Or Wikipedia, a bunch of amateurs with a WIKI? Now look what happened over time in terms of market share.

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In fact as of October, Encarta ceases to exist.

Once again in hindsight we can see that the model of anyone adding content was a significantly different way of doing things, but that is more about the philosophy of encyclopedias than the functions. After all, both had articles and editors, but Wikipedia did things to allow anyone to play (why they used a WIKI), while Encarta was based in an existing strategy of encyclopedias at the time namely, expertise counts. Britannica is now seeing that and adding Wiki like functions, but is it too late? Why did they resist for so long? One could hardly argue it was because Britannica didn't succeed in the past.

The bottom line is that Wikipedia and Encarta were not TRULY functionally equivalent one was really a broadcast platform, while the other was a social platform. And, Encarta based on its previous success didn't know how to respond. We could do this all day with other examples like...

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Geocities vs MySpace. Supposedly both are about the same function: building personal webpages. And yet, over time, we can see Geocities stagnating while MySapce takes off. Why? Well, Geocities is based on the premise that you are building a personal web page to broadcast out, while MySapce is about having a place on the web to hang out and invite other folks in. Similar functions, but radically difference approaches.

This also talks of a growing pressure for participation, but we'll come back to that. In case after case of encyclopedias, or personal web spaces or search engines like Google vs Alta Vista, and so on, we see false functional equivalences, and a failure to be strategic. There are also plenty of non-digital examples like the Dewey Decimal system vs Raganathan's faceted classifications. The point is we need a way of looking at librarianship that doesn't simply collect all our current activities, bundle them together and then try to tweak around the edges. What we really need is a much more fundamental understanding of librarianship that both honors our success of the past, but charts the way towards an even greater future. That's what the Conversants conference, and the whole participatory librarianship movement has been about a new librarianship.

Let me draw a new picture, and rather than starting with a set of functions, lets start with a purpose a mission.

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The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities.

I want you to note a few things about this mission statement. The first is that it is just as much about why we do something (to improve society) as how (through facilitating knowledge creation). The second is that it is a mission of librarians, not libraries. Libraries are buildings and organizations.they can't do anything. It takes people, dedicated, skilled people to make things happen. By making the mission about libraries it both makes the acts and responsibilities abstract. The mission of the new librarian is very personal. You have the responsibility to improve society. You are both important and accountable. What do you call a building full of books? A Warehouse. What do you call an empty room with a librarian in it? A library.

But this is not really a picture or map. It is a quest and extremely vague. What do I mean by facilitate? Or knowledge for that matter? And improve society? Really? Little old me? Well yes, but we'll get there.

What we need to do is ground this mission in the specifics of "why", and "how," even "where." Let's start by taking the major parts of the mission and mapping them.

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What do we mean by a mission, and where did this mission come from anyway? OK, lots of people are into knowledge creation and improving things, what makes librarians special or unique?

Define improve please and give some examples.

Facilitating is a pretty vague term isn't, how do I do this?

Knowledge? I thought we were in the information business?

Communities? Isn't that for public libraries only?

Now I'm not going to keep you here for the next week walking you through this whole exercise, so let me hit some highlights, and we'll start with the knowledge thing. It is really the basis for this whole new approach. You see, I don't think that libraries are in the information business. We're in the knowledge business. The difference? We actually care that people benefit from the information we give them. In essence we have a service orientation and principles that care about the people who are using the information. This is very different than, say, Bing, who cares that people come back to the site so they can see advertisementsit just so happens that useful information in the product keeps people getting back.

OK, so is this a distinction without a difference? Nope. I can prove it. I give you a rock.

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OK, not just any rock, but a rock outside of Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's camp in Arizona. Now I look at it and I see a rock, but a geologist might see a particular kind of rock. He or she could determine the type of rock, how it was formed, where it came from and even how old it is. An archeologist might note the ideograms scratched into the surface and understand the significance of this rock to a native American culture.

My point is that that knowledge of composition, type, age, or cultural significance is not in the rockit is brought to the rock from the geologist or archeologist. In fact when I see this rock I think about my trip to Scottsdale with my wife.

Well, what's true for the rock is true for books. There is no such thing as "recorded knowledge" because knowledge is resident in humans, not in inanimate objects.

And how did that knowledge become resident in the person (or group, or society)? Well, for that we turn to something called Conversation Theory that tells us knowledge is created through conversation.

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Conversation theory was developed by Gordon Pask in the 70's as he tried to teach machines to learn. He figured he would start with how people do it. What he found was that they do this by engage in conversations. These conversations can be with librarians and teachers, friends, and experts. However, most of the conversations are with themselves. The instructional librarians and school librarians have most likely heard of this as critical thinking or metacognition. I won't go into too much detail, but it is a back and forth between two or more conversants seeking agreements. Agreements might be facts, or opinions, or simply an agreement not to agree. The whole of these agreements determine what we know, and how we react.

For those keeping track you may remember me saying that people look for patterns and figure out new things by seeing how they are similar to old things? All of these agreements constitute what we already know. What's important is that all of these agreements don't just sit in nice discreet buckets in our head, but rather they are related together. Want an example? I'm going to give you a word and you think about what it means.

Ready? Light.

You might have thought about "not heavy," or "illumination." But what about "set ablaze?" It makes sense right? What if I showed you this picture:

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Now what if I give you a term like "OMG?" I'm guessing you didn't think "Omni Media Group" or "Object Management Group." I can almost guarantee that you thought "Oh My God!" What's going on here? Well, you understand concepts like light and OMG. But with light, there are a huge number of combinations, so your brain just picks one, sort of arbitrarily. All of the others make sense, and when I show the picture, your brain can rapidly narrow the possible meanings. With OMG not only do you have very few relationships, but the one that exists is VERY strong.

My point with all of this is that knowledge is about conversations. So if libraries are in the knowledge business, they are in the conversation business.

This also loops back to the question of why we do things and how. Why are libraries going from quiet buildings with loud rooms to loud buildings with quiet rooms? Could it be that people need to talk? Why? Oh that's how they build knowledge. Makes sense for things like information commons, and providing meeting rooms, and even for providing spaces to build knowledge, not simply read.

It also shows us a way forward in things like cataloging. It turns out that how items are related together is more important than the items themselves. It also turns out that how one person or group relates ideas, or books, or web pages, is not going to be universally understood by other people or groups. This was and is a real problem when you could only put a physical object in one place, but with digital information, even metadata about a physical object, we can allow users to collocate and relate anything, and not have this interfere with others.

It also talks to making libraries of all types more social. I call this the pressure for participation. If knowledge is both a set of interactivities conversations, and a very personal thing building my set of relationships then it pushes me as the learner to actively shape not only the conversations, but the settings of those conversations. If I am in charge of my learning, I need to also have some say in the spaces (physical and virtual) in which I do it. So I come to Wikipedia. I don't see my topic, I can add it. I see a topic I don't agree with it, I can edit. In essence, I can shape this space to meet my learning needs. I come to Encarta? I'm out of luck. Is the rise of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace a matter of vanity or a technology that allows me to shape the systems to reflect how I see the world (my friends, my wall, my applications). I would argue these sites are driven by a very selfish need to learn, not a quest to give. Why do I create, because that's what knowledge is an act of creation, not simply a mindless absorption. We see this happening in physical spaces with meeting rooms, coffee bars, and comfy couches, but what about online? How do people get together and have conversations through the libraries web site? Or, more importantly, how can they have these conversations with library resources and services in their own spaces like Facebook? Note that this is NOT a functional discussion of things like blogs and social networks what they do, how to do a blog, but we now have some guidance as to WHY to do these things (or not).

For example, in a set of focus groups a public library asked teens what they wanted from a library website. The answer surprised the librarians. The teens wanted librarians to blog. The librarians through further investigation found that teens were looking for reader's advisory services, but they didn't want some anonymous list of good books. Rather they wanted to know the librarian, their personality, their tastes, and so on, before they knew if they could trust their recommendations. In essence, the teens needed a way to engage the librarians in a conversation so they could come to an agreement about the usefulness of their reading recommendations. This is very different than saying libraries should blog, or talking about how to blog, or even presenting a bunch of examples where blogging has worked. It explains why it works and in what circumstances. If the librarians had started a blog and simply put on a list of books to be read without any personal information or critique, the teens would not have cared and blogging would be determined to be a failure. WHY trumps HOW.

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So we can add conversation theory and these concepts to our map of librarianship. And we can do this with all the threads off of our Mission. In fact, that's just what we've done. Here is a little thread on knowledge

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And we can keep going and defining and breaking down until we can draw a map of the entire field of librarianship.

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And an amazing thing happens when you do this. You begin to get a feel for where to gofor example, music reading rooms looking much less like stacks and CDs and much more like two pianos on a stage.

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This came out of work at the Philadelphia Free Library. We talked with the musical community and asked them what they would want in a public library. They said two grand pianos on a stage. When musicians talk to themselves and each other, they often use music as a language. An environment without instruments leaves them with an impoverished conversation. They also validate their work through performance. If it has been performed, it has more value. And in downtown Philly, there simply were not enough venues. I'm talking with a brilliant librarian Meg Backus about having the library work with the manufacturing sector in her area to build a workspace. Now instead of reading about carpentry, or prototype development, you can do it. The collections of this library are band saws and expert craftsmen. By mapping the field we also get a sense that information discovery systems look much more like threads than catalogs.

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These figures were created in thinking about what an electronic reserves system might look like for an academic library. What was (well, is) happening was that a professor would hand in his syllabus, the library would make a list of all of the readings, and then toss the syllabus. The thing is, the syllabus is more than a list, it is a conversation starter, or more precisely, the representation of the professors conversation about a given topic, or class. It doesn't simply list readings, but gives them context, and sequence, and relates them to student work through assignments. Imagine pulling up a syllabus, and wandering through the readings into student portfoliosimagine using this kind of system for accreditation visits where folks want to know what outcomes has the library affected and in what ways.

But more than these directions, by mapping the field, you see librarianship as coherent, and more important than ever. Rather than being pulled from trend to trend, or chasing ".com's," you see that libraries serve a vital, noble and extremely relevant function in today's society. You see the importance of trusted spaces, physical and virtual, in furthering communities like cities, colleges, business, and governments. You see a powerful agent for positive social change. You see a locus of innovation.

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When you see the whole of the field and break through the crust of functions, and policies, and standards, seeing librarians stripped to their intentions? You see a noble and vital vocation. You see a future of librarianship honoring its past while inventing its own future. We stand at a point in time of our own choosing, and our own creation and we must now decide. We must decide between preserving functions and reifying the current, or shaping the future. We YOU and I- we are the future of libraries. It rests in our hands. I have no doubt that you and I together can ensure the golden days of librarians are ahead of us.

Thank you.