WHAT SHOULD WE LEARN IN LIBRARY SCHOOL
This is the question I posed to you last week, one I think is easily good for a whole series of articles. I did not phrase the question in terms of specific courses -- I can't imagine not learning cataloging and basic reference -- but rather what it is librarians need to know and know how to do. It is these attitudes, skills, and habits of mind, I believe, that are the basics from which curriculum should follow.
My colleague Pat suggests LISTENING. Think about it -- how often do we rush in and hand a book to our patron before we finished hearing the question? Worse, how often do we not pay attention to them after we have handed them the book and checked off a reference question on our statistics sheet? Those of us doing reference are involved in a complex act of translation, and we need to pay attention to all the nuances of language, including our patrons' facial expressions and body language.
My friend Cathy also recommends people skills. Certainly listening, but perhaps also an ability to put people at ease and make them feel that we respect both them and their need to know. She thinks it's also important that we are flexible, adaptable and ready to change -- important both because of the wide range of people and questions we will serve, but also because our resources keep changing on us. Just because we know a database now doesn't mean we will know it next week when the vendors change the interface or search engine. We have to be not just prepared for, but eager for, lifelong learning.
One of our system librarians says we all should know more about management skills than library school usually teaches us. Who knows when we may become head of technical services, or library director, and have to know about hiring and firing and goal-setting and performance evaluation?
My former boss (yep, July 1 was my first day of retirement) says "The ability to convince, persuade, or in some way influence a group of people in a short time is essential to the successful librarian." Of course he's in charge of an academic library, and our job is to teach resources and research methods to our students and faculty. But we also have to keep explaining and promoting our services to our public, our boards, and even the press. I've talked before about the kind of public relations problems we all can have when a local newspaper reporter has a horror story about the library and has decided in advance what the plot is, and who the heroes and villains are. We all could stand to know how to handle public relations skillfully.
My own answer to the question is that the most important skill we can have is to see ourselves as our users see us -- and if we don't like the way we come across, change what we're doing.
You notice that the common theme here is how we deal with people. Does this not suggest that we might improve these specific professional skills by lots more extensive observation of other librarians at work? And that role-playing, and using scenarios like Library Journal's "How Do You Manage" series might be effective teaching tools?
Of course all the librarians I've heard from so far have been in public services. As we know, technical services librarians have different, but equally valuable, contributions to make, and their issues and goals may be different. As I said, I think this should be a continuing discussion. I'd be interested in hearing what you think.
WE'VE GOT TO STOP MEETING THIS WAY
We all probably have our own personal visions of hell. One of mine is: I am in a meeting I cannot possibly get out of, that has been going on for an hour already. I desperately need to go to the bathroom, and I have no idea what the purpose or agenda of the meeting is, and therefore no idea how close we are to achieving it. The person in charge of the meeting has posited some vast philosophical issue, and we are all contributing ideas, but there is no policy to be voted on, and no hint that anything is going to be resolved.
That's why I think one of the skills it would be nice for us to learn in library school is how to handle a meeting.
There are, of course, different kinds of meetings. There's the one-way meeting, in which the person in charge outlines decisions that have been made. Since decisions are always carried out better by people who understand why they were made and how they will contribute to the well-being of the organization, I think it is important in these cases to explain the goals and rationales behind the decisions thoroughly, and to suggest how important all the listeners are in making those goals work.
That autocratic style of decision-making is not my preferred way of doing things, of course, partly because the people at the top rarely know as much about how things actually work as the people on the front lines do. We have valuable information and ideas to contribute. When we have to change hours, we need to ask the people who work the circulation and information desks about traffic patterns past and present. When we're considering a new software system or interface, we should give the people who will have to use it a chance to try it out and comment on it.
Which is not to say what we want is a free-for-all. Even collaborative meetings should have structure, because busy people need to know when the meeting will be over and what is to be accomplished during it.
People who conduct this kind of meeting have to be skillful jugglers. Since a collaborative meeting is a great opportunity for team-building, they need to allow some latitude for joking around. At the same time, they need to be able to encourage comment from everybody, keep the comments relevant to the policy or decision under discussion, and move the discussion toward a vote or consensus.
Or so I think anyway. I've been through bad meetings and good meetings, and at the good ones, people come up with ideas, bounce them off each other to create even better ideas. Out of our good meetings have come the plans for our new library, the plan for the three solid weeks of work involved in making the move, the plan for conducting a complete inventory, and any number of other really good ideas.
Rock fan though I am, it's Kenny Rogers I find myself quoting: "You gotta know how to hold them, know how to fold them."
You suppose they could teach that in library school?
