Part of the Solution

Due to a confluence of events, I’ve come to realize that I have become part of the problem, at my library, when I initially set out to be part of the solution. That’s a short, trite, and unfair characterization of what’s going on, but that’s why I’m blogging about this, instead of trying to share it via Twitter–it bears exploring and explaining. (Also, in case it isn’t clear, this is a navel-gazing kind of post. I’m not out to solve the world’s problems, just mine. If you want to skip to my plan of action, I bolded my action items within the text. If you want to skip the post entirely, I’ll be back tomorrow or Wednesday with what I like to call “a real post.”)

First, I have been in a slump

I’m self-aware enough to realize when I’m in a low ebb, in any given part of my life, and I definitely have been in a low ebb with work, in part due to external stressors and in part due to a buildup of factors within my workplace. That has been a large part of this confluence: my realization that I’m very, very down right now. I’ve found myself drained of energy at the end of every workday–and that’s been the best case. I keep wondering “Why didn’t I stay at the library assistant level? Why did I want to be a librarian?” Some days, I spend the whole day staring at my monitor, working on little niggling details, and feeling simultaneously like I don’t care and, conversely, totally disempowered and angry about it. Obviously, neither is the truth: I wouldn’t be angry if I didn’t care, and I am not actually disempowered. Technically, I have a tremendous amount of power: I can change our website and pretty much all of the web-based services we subscribe to, and most of my coworkers can’t. But, since everyone uses the website, everyone has opinions about it, many of them very strongly held. So I find that there are many [cranky Coral wants to add the word “artificial” here] limitations to that power, and while I can change it all as much as I want, there would be really negative repercussions if I did so without going through the proper channels.

So, my job is this constant balancing act. If any one person can be said to be responsible for our web presence, it’s me. If any one group in the library can be held responsible for our web presence, it’s either the (somewhat misnamed*) Web Development Team, which is led by me, or Systems, which is my department (though that, at least, has a Head who is not me :)). In reality, no one person or group can really be “held responsible,” as I so negatively put it: the big decisions are generally made with the input of the entire library. For every decision I make about the web site–and every change I want to make–I have to figure out who is the appropriate entity to work with. Some very minor things, I can do on my own, without consulting anyone. For some things, I need to work with the Web Team–either checking in with them before making the change or for approval of the change, after the change is made. And for some things, the input of some other group–Instruction & Reference, Liaisons, Department Heads, or an open meeting with the whole staff and faculty invited–is needed; in those cases, it tends to be after I’ve built a test page but before I’ve rolled it for the public. So I’m sort of supposed to lead and to provide a vision and all of that, and, when I am at my best, I would say I do that relatively well–I’ve had some successes, definitely, in improving our front page. But, of course, my leadership/vision/test pages/ideas are never in line with everyone else’s opinions. (Not to say everyone else agrees with one another and it’s just me out there in the cold–first off, if a proposal is made it to the library at large, then at least the Web Team is behind me on it; second, beyond maybe a vague sense that things are fine as they are, there’s no overriding vision coming from anywhere else. But it seems like there are always people who disagree with me, some of them vehemently.) Sometimes, disagreement is expressed constructively. Sometimes… not. And that can leave me feeling pretty beaten down, in the short term, and has, in the long run, sapped a lot of the enthusiasm I started with—this post, I hurry to add, is being written not as an epitaph for that enthusiasm, but as a description of how I intend to recapture it.

Someone with a good head on their shoulders might find themselves thinking, at this point, that ideas are meant to be challenged, and how can I possibly grow if my leadership isn’t put to the test? This I know, and I totally agree. I really like the idea of a collaborative environment, where we all have input on various things going on within the library (though, to add to my frustration, I do find that sometimes other departments make changes or put out ads for new positions or do other things I have opinions about, without asking for input, when they seem to want input on everything I do–petty of me to notice, perhaps, but there it is). I truly don’t aim to make the librarians unhappy, when I try to change the website (though librarians like very different interfaces than undergraduates like–for instance, I’m still outnumbered, by lots, on my desire to switch to simple search as the default view for every database, which is backed up by every study of undergraduates ever, but which goes against the librarians’ instincts). I want us to have a website we all like. So I am trying to back up and look at even the angry feedback as something that can help me, that I can think about and use to craft better explanations, better webpages, or better … whatever the perceived lack is, at any given time. But, to be totally honest, I didn’t have the sense of perspective, coming into this job, to be able to take the kind of unfiltered feedback I was given. Some of it was phrased personally, though it probably wasn’t meant that way, and even when it wasn’t phrased that way, I look back and realize I took much of people’s negativity personally–and that’s poisoned my outlook a little bit. Enough that I still find myself thinking of the vitriol as nearly-universal, when, if I really reflect, I realize only a few people have actually been truly negative, rather than cautious/constructive/questioning; overall, it hasn’t been that bad, and I realize that I have allowed a few people’s bad behavior to affect my entire outlook. I have been defaulting to a defensive posture, after some bad experiences, which has not helped things at all. So, now that I am identifying all of this and working through it in writing, I think I will be able to filter out the poison and work through it all, to come out a better person, professional, librarian, and web designer. I think. :)

A different problem: sometimes I struggle with my sense of ownership of the website–I mean, I’m the Web Librarian, and I’m in it to make the site as usable as possible for our students. I feel personally responsible/guilty when I know we’re violating basic UX principles, when I know there are too many links or too much text or whatever. On top of that, I also feel like I am judged based on the quality of our site; so, if people from the university at large (or from the library world!) don’t like it, they probably blame me because it’s my site. That’s hard for me, even though [or perhaps especially because] I’m not empowered to unilaterally make those changes. (For instance, again, the search screens on our databases. I can change them all over–I’ve got the passwords and the knowhow–but there would be fallout. I even think it’s appropriate that there’d be fallout: unilateral change is just not how we roll. We make decisions more collaboratively than that–at least, we do when we’re at our best.) Instead, I must cajole and reason with and explain to and convince the entire library that certain things need to change–which is appropriate and reasonable. But I have to figure out how to let go of this crushing sense of responsibility and/or guilt. My attempts to tell myself I don’t actually care have not been successful–and I do need to care, just with a little more distance. I can’t let the site’s imperfections, whether due to too much committee thinking or to misjudgments of my own, get me down. Students navigate worse sites–heck, if they’re registered for classes, they’ve been through worse–and surely my peers from other libraries have their own committees and such; no web librarian is an island, right? But I don’t have a complete answer, as far as how to let all of that go. I’m working on it.

And now for a bit of repair work on the perspective I may be giving you: my library usually functions very well. It is, overall, a very collegial and collaborative environment. We don’t have the weird competitiveness or backbiting that I hear some academic libraries have. Many of my colleagues would be shocked to hear about my experience as a new web librarian, or at least to realize how bad it all seemed and how deeply I’ve been affected. Which makes sense: emotions don’t usually run so high about other things, and I think the folks who have been here longer–and have therefore spent more time with the poorly-behaved few–have the perspective not to take things personally and may not realize that I don’t. I’m still working on it. I know, at least intellectually, that someone else’s bad behavior is their problem, not mine. And even if some of the feedback is personal, that doesn’t have to be my problem, either; how many people are liked by all of their colleagues? More: how many web programmers are liked by everyone in their entire organizations, right? ;) … In all seriousness, though, I’m not out to make anyone angry, but I do need to learn how to stand my ground, as well. And I need to consciously focus on the positive interactions, learn what I can from the negative ones, and then let those go.

As far as the cajoling, etc., it’s not going to be enough for me to read up on usability; I must also make sure that everything I read gets passed on to the rest of the library, going forward. I know that, and I am trying to be more mindful about sharing what I read.

*I’m the only one who does Development; therefore, usually I just call it the “Web Team.” I’d like to empower the group to do more actual development; I think we’re just one CMS upgrade and a whole slew of at-least-verbally-agreed-upon policies away from that being a reality. … Also, I don’t think I made it clear in this post, but I really value the Web Team’s input on things. I think I may have made them sound like a hamper to my progress, but they are usually the opposite. Web Team meetings are a good place to bounce ideas around, a good sanity check on things I want to do, and a good mechanism for staying in better contact with the library at large, since nearly every department is represented on the team. We work together pretty well, as a rule, and disagreements in Web Team are always civil and usually productive. I have real affection for the group.

Second, Seth Godin

Back to the confluence of events, though: I found Seth Godin’s Warning Signs of Defending the Status Quo this morning, and it struck a chord. I have actually killed ideas within the Web Team–not even bad ideas–by declaring “That won’t fly around here.” And that isn’t my job. My job is to try to figure out how to make things fly! Or at least to explore them to see if they’re worth trying. I need to sit back and let people talk ideas out and decide as a group. We already have people standing at the ready to shoot things down; I don’t need to be one of them. I shouldn’t be ruled by my fear.

So I hung his list on my door, as a reminder to myself. And, to be honest, also as a war cry: the university is going to be doing a lot of “belt tightening” over the next few years, and the library needs to be more agile and full of ideas, not less so. As our youngest librarian (the first digit of my age is a 3, by the way), I sort of feel like it’s my job to actively seek out, or at least encourage, change. I’m not declaring our librarians with higher first digits to be incapable of that–not by a long shot! we have some great change agents!–but I think it would be extra inappropriate for me to act as a knee-jerk status quo defender.

Third, books

I have also been, while in the process of moving, gathering books that need to go sit on my work bookshelf, rather than the one at [new] home. Mostly, they’re tech books or books I was assigned during library school. (I even read a couple of them all the way through. ;)) I finally brought the box in yesterday and put them on my shelf this morning. And as I was doing so, I decided that I am going to spend my lunch times reading/re-reading those books, to try to get back some of the idealism I had when I came into this library. And when I finish those, I’ll get others–though they’ll probably be digital, not physical.

Again, it’s about perspective. When I interviewed here, my department head asked about my five year goals, and one of them was to be a Famous Library Blogger–which is a pretty loosely defined group, admittedly, and an absurdly lofty goal. But I had a pretty good blog, back then; I even got linked by Techdirt. (Then I went and changed my name… and domain name.) But since starting work, I have slowly have allowed myself to get swallowed up by the day-to-day work. I’ve lost a lot of the perspective I came in with. And a lot of the passion. I don’t take the time to investigate things and write about them like I used to. I miss that. Not that reading these books will automatically fix that, but they’ll at least get me thinking again and remind me why I wanted to be a librarian. And I think taking the time in the middle of the day for that could help me maintain a better perspective throughout the day–though we’ll see.

Fin

So, that’s my run-down of the all-consuming funk I’ve been in, at work, and what I plan to do about it. It only took me 2500 words.

Shorter, more world-relevant post coming up soon! Promise!