HOW ABOUT IGNORANCE MANAGEMENT?
by Marylaine Block
When Peter Drucker was interviewed for the January 12 issue of Fortune, he was asked what he regretted NOT having done. He said, "My best book would have been one titled Managing Ignorance, and I'm very sorry that I didn't write it."
That struck a nerve with me, because, however complex an endeavor knowledge management is, ignorance management is even more difficult -- and maybe even more essential to the survival of libraries.
What kinds of ignorance? Our own ignorance, when we fail to keep up with new ideas and technologies, or fail to think deeply about the ones we've already embraced. And the ignorance, of our users and non-users alike, of the full range of resources and services the library offers, and how those services enrich the community or organization it serves.
We need to address the second problem with good customer-centered marketing. There are librarians who believe that libraries don't need to be marketed because they're a universally-acknowledged social good, but that's a dangerous mindset that can keep them from noticing how many businesses would be happy to make a profit by serving our users better than we are. Those businesses are often better than we are at thinking like a customer; the fact that Amazon's catalog is so much better than ours is just one proof of this.
Thinking like our customers means examining the information needs and information-seeking habits of both our library users and our non-users. What are they looking for? How and where are they looking for it? How much do they care about getting good quality information? What frustrates them about searching for information in general, and about using our systems to do so? What are we doing right? Which of our services do they like, and why?
How could the services we are already offering meet those needs? How is the competition meeting those needs? What services are we not offering that could meet those needs even better? How can we do a better job promoting the services that really are serving the community well? What can we do to prove and publicize our economic and educational value? Our value as a community center, and as a promoter of citizenship and democratic values?
Can we answer those questions? What kinds of data do we already have about our users and the community we're serving, and how can we apply that data? What do we not know, and how can we collect that information?
Fortunately, there are easily available resources to help us deal with those questions. For starters, I would recommend Judith Siess' book, The Visible Librarian: Asserting Your Value with Marketing and Advocacy [ALA, 2003], and The Library's Contribution to Your Community: a Resource Manual for Librarians To Document Their Social and Economic Contribution to the Local Community, published by Southern Ontario Library Services; the web site for this manual, <http://www.sols.org/publications/LCTYC/index.html>, includes a number of online case studies. WebJunction also has a new resource called the Demonstrating Impact Roadmap <http://webjunction.org/do/DisplayContent?id=1004470>
In some ways, the purely internal problem of managing our own professional ignorance is even more challenging, partly because the current economic crisis and staff reductions have reduced the time available for professional training, or even professional reading. I have never yet offered a workshop in which everybody who paid in advance for it actually attended -- they couldn't because their library was short-staffed that day, or they got bogged down solving a technical glitch, or a teacher showed up unannounced with his entire class, demanding a demonstration of library databases.
And that's even assuming the library has a budget for professional training; not all of them do, and most of them don't provide enough travel money for all their librarians to attend out of state professional conferences or participate in committee work in their professional organizations. (My own feeling is that, if there's only enough money to send one librarian to one national conference in any given year, the librarians should take turns going, and then report back to the rest of the staff on what they learned.)
In a time of tight budgets, it's probably a little idealistic of me to urge library directors to support James B. Casey's proposal to commit 1.6% of the library budget to professional training [see his article in American Libraries, April, 2002, 85-86]. But there are some things we could do, that involve relatively little expense.
One is ordering multiple subscriptions to professional journals, so librarians could read them while they're still current, instead of waiting six months for them to be routed through one overcrowded inbox after another.
Another is mentoring, both formal and informal. Directors could assign librarians with differing expertise to work together in pairs, with specific goals for what knowledge each should teach the other. Technically skilled librarians who don't do much public service, for instance, could be paired with technically-challenged reference librarians, to teach each other some of their specialized skills. If children's librarians and gov docs librarians were paired with reference staff, all of them would learn about resources they either didn't know about or forgot about because they were in separate departments.
Regular staff meetings could be expanded to include a training component. Librarians could take turns at those meetings, sharing some of their specialized knowledge or concerns: new databases, perhaps, or recent additions to the library's web site, new technologies that might have some useful applications in libraries, recent demographic shifts in the population the library serves, new user needs, etc. Library directors could even assign staff to read articles and discuss them.
Another thing librarians can do is create internal weblogs to share knowledge among all library staff (and don't forget that support staff have useful things to teach librarians, particularly about our users' interests, and their complaints about our services and technologies). Staff could use it to alert each other to new reference materials on the shelves or online, special projects they're working on, recent problems that might require new library policies, special resources for recent assignments students are asking about. And since it can be hard to get all the librarians together in one place for a discussion, the shared blog could be the place where librarians talk to each other about issues and ideas.
And we could do what I suggested a while back, catalog our local expertise [see http://marylaine.com/exlibris/xlib195.html], the special knowledge each staff member has because of their previous work or education or professional or personal interests. That way, staff members would know who they could approach for advice on particular topics.
Above all, I think that continuously developing professional competence should be part of the job description. Library directors conducting annual performance reviews could work with librarians to choose their learning goals for the coming year, figure out a plan for obtaining that knowledge, and make the necessary accommodations in money and/or released time. The directors could then include progress toward that goal in the next performance appraisal.
Of course it's all very well to say library directors should take responsibility for staff development. What if they don't?
Ultimately, I think, the responsibility is ours. It's our choice to make: grow or stagnate. Professionals do not profess. They practice, like classical pianists at the top of their profession who still spend hours each day trying to improve their technical and emotional skill. That's why I like John Hubbard's Library Link of the Day <http://www.tk421.net/librarylink/>, and Lynette Reville's weblog, One New Thing <http://nlrp.blogspot.com/>, which is dedicated to passing on the "one new thing" she's made a point of learning each day. We all have it in us to learn at least one new thing a day.
Managing ignorance isn't easy. But when it's our own, it's within our power.
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COOL QUOTE:
Today every searcher, be they expert or part-time, is expected to produce results at high speed with a high degree of accuracy. I believe that part of the role of the information professional is to ask this pertinent question: "Do you want an incorrect answer quickly or a correct one more slowly?" This is not a Luddite argument against technology—it is an argument for quality, in the full meaning of the word. There will be times when we need an answer, any answer, and serve our user communities best by providing an adequate response in a timely fashion. But equally, there will be times when important commercial consequences hang upon information provision, when we may serve our users better by maintaining professional standards and a rigorous approach to information retrieval. If this means that we have to ask them to wait while we check before delivering an answer, then so be it.
Stephen Adams. Information Quality, Liability, and Corrections." Information Today, Sept. 03, http://www.infotoday.com/online/sep03/adams.shtml
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