Image by peregrinari on Flickr

I’ve noticed in meetings, whether on committees or campus meetings or pretty much any type of meeting, a concern that comes up is uncertainty. How do we know that people will use this service? Will this initiative work? What if we fail? But people aren’t only worried about failure. They’re worried about success too. What if too many people come? What if too many people use this service and it is unsustainable? What if we have too much success?

But uncertainty is the nature of innovation. You can’t possibly know all the consequences of a particular service, initiative, project, etc. In addition, often the unintended consequences are some of the most fruitful. All the planning and studies in the world will never tell you exactly what is going to happen.

While it’s important to plan and anticipate challenges it can also be a hindrance to action. Endless surveys, needs assessments and studying of the situation can bring ideas to a standstill.

If the initiative is something small a good question to ask is “why don’t we try it and see what happens?” If the project is something larger some study is likely necessary, but don’t let it bog you down. Instead of doing everything right the first time make an effort to iterate. Put something out and then change it based on what happens. Host an event and improve on it the next time. Put up the site and alter it based on feedback. Start the new service and then change it after interacting with users.

Get rid of the idea of always getting it right the first time. Do it the first time and then do it better the second time.

One book I’ve begun reading is Stephen Covey’s classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I originally picked it up because I remembered (and highly agree with) habit 5 “Seek first to understand, then be understood.” I think this one is key to getting along with colleagues, managers, doing reference, etc.

But now that I am actually reading the book, what I have been thinking a lot about is the third habit: “Put first things first.” Most librarians I talk to are generally very busy people. We have a lot of ideas, initiatives, and commitments. I know I wish that I had more time, and I really want to work on managing my time better. Covey puts forth a simple framework for thinking about time and projects that was really illuminating for me. He breaks activities down into a matrix of urgent/not urgent and important/not-important:

Covey says that the most impact comes when you focus on Quadrant II (important and not-urgent). These are things that you know are important and you know that they would make a big difference, but you “just don’t have the time.” In reality this is the work we should be focusing on and it would do the most to improve our work and our libraries. Clearly working on things like long-term planning, redesigning the website, or figuring out a coherent approach to ebooks, would be much more beneficial than, say cleaning up email or another meeting.

Of course meetings and email are necessary, but it’s easy to get caught up thinking that you have to go to every meeting or that all the emails in your inbox demand your attention. By carving out time specifically for Quadrant II tasks, those important things that keep getting kicked down the road actually start coming to fruition. This type of work is also much more fulfilling. It feels great to finish that article you keep putting off or finally get that annual report done.

Time management is something that I know I need work on and this framework is really helpful to me. Do other people find this helpful or have other useful ways of thinking about managing their time?

Advertising takes a lot of thought beforehand in order for your ads to be successful. Here are a few tips that I learned while I was creating an advertising campaign:

• Keep it simple (people have little time to read a bunch of text)
• Make it catchy (have something that gets the intended audiences attention)
• Keep your audience in mind
• Advertise where your audience is going to be (e.g. for students, put ads in common areas)

A good place to begin online with library advertising is Library Media and PR. They have a number of free logos and excellent tips to get your message out there.

The system is actually already being used.  We have probably gotten around five or six genuine questions through IM since the start of the semester last week.  A couple were missed, but by implementing a louder ringing sound for a notification I believe that most of the missed IMs will be solved.  I received my first question on Monday and it was pretty exciting.  It was an actual reference question about where were good places to find literary criticism.  I was able to help the patron and it probably took only about 2-3 minutes.  I am glad to see that this system will be successful and even more glad that it will be useful to patrons.

We may have to re-evaluate how we staff the service because one of the librarians was getting a bit overwhelmed while having to help two patrons at once (cyber-patron and meat-patron).  My plan is to have a meeting in a couple of weeks to ask how the librarians are adjusting to the service and to ask for any suggestions or concerns.  After that we can go fully live and publicize the snot out of it.  But I believe that regular reference meetings are going to be necessary to evaluate the IM service and what could be done to improve it.

I directed a staff training session today to familiarize everyone with IM-ing, buddy lists, and away messages. I had everyone sign up for Meebo accounts, add each other to their buddy lists, and then start chatting with one another. It worked well because people could joke about IM lingo and emoticons, but they also asked a number of good questions. By having them jump right into an IM setting and trying it out with each other they actually learned much more quickly than if I was simply up there lecturing. They quickly got the hang of buddies and how to send and receive messages. I recommend this form of training for anyone who is teaching others to IM. It gets results.

At the actual reference desk we will be using the IM client Pidgin because it has better alerts and is more customizable than the web-based Meebo.  So, I also plan on sending them some practice reference questions before the semester starts so they can become used to the Pidgin client. But they have the basics of IM down which was what I was trying to accomplish.

The training was not as easy to develop until I met with my “Library Instruction” practicum adviser earlier in the week.  Among other things, we eventually discussed “learning outcomes” which I had never heard of before. They are basically what you want your learners to be able to accomplish once they leave the classroom. This then made it much easier to design my training session. I simply took what I wanted the library staff to be able to do and then built my course around those goals. It sounds obvious but I hadn’t looked at it that way before.

After the training session our web librarian posted our Ask A Librarian page that we had worked on (mostly him) and our IM service was finally up and running. The web librarian and I posted our new status on the liswiki and the libsuccess wiki to include our names among the other distinguished virtual reference libraries. I am excited to see what kind of response we get. I will continue posting on how it works out.

I sounded surprisingly knowledgeable up there for one simple reason: I was knowledgeable. Jonathan and I had been working on this for about two months. He asked questions on some listservs and I scoured the web and library blogs for people that had done this before and tried to learn from their experiences. The sources I kept going back to and adapting to my own needs were: a PowerPoint slideshow called “How do you IM?” on the LibrarianInBlack blog, “IM me” by Aaron Schmidt and Michael Stephens, and the Online Reference Best Practices Wiki. They all were very helpful in getting me started. I find it is very useful to use other people’s knowledge. It saves you a lot of the leg work and allows you appear smart even though you are leeching off of these other people’s wisdom.

I demonstrated what the Pidgin software would look like as well as the Meebo chat window, and then we allayed any concerns and answered all the questions that came up. We helped the staff understand what we were actually going to be doing it and why. But I tried never to say that “this is how it is going to be.” I kept telling the staff that their input was needed . I do not want them to think they are getting this imposed on them. I would like to have them all contribute and share their opinions so it can be an effective service.

The meeting went very well, and I even got applause for my presentation. The next step will be staff training. This will begin after winter break since it is always hectic at the end of the semester. I might have to do a little research on how best to go about training staff and getting them comfortable with IM. This is going to be fun.

This is what took up a great deal of my time when I started to implement IM reference at Edgewood. If one thinks only about the new technology and how cool it is, the project will fall flat. Something will be overlooked and you’ll be scrambling to fix it, or you’ll quickly turn patrons or staff off of the new technology.

The first thing I did was a Google search for literature about IM in libraries. I found a number of good resources that got me thinking including: IM Me, How do you IM?, Library Success, and the RUSA Virtual Reference Guide. I always find it helpful reviewing literature or blogs on a topic, because a lot of other people have done this already and have had some of the same problems you will have. You might as well benefit from other people’s knowledge and experience on the subject to make your own life easier.

Next, Jonathan and I started playing with the technology. I find it is always helpful to simply jump into the technology and start playing with it. Once you get in and mess around it is a lot easier to understand.

After we had a better understanding of what we were dealing with we gave our proposal to the head of reference. It gave some reasons about why we should do it, backed up with statistics. Then it addressed how the service would work including: technolgy, staffing, policies, training, promotion, and evaluation.

I also wrote up a draft that had some preliminary policies and best practices when IMing. We will be having a reference meeting on December 5th, and Jonathan and I will demonstrate it to the staff. We’ll do some training over winter break and roll out the pilot project starting in the spring semester.