Super excited to be blogging for ACRL Tech Connect. I just had my first post published– “Lazy Consensus and Libraries“, which was inspired by Bethany Nowviskie’s closing keynote at Code4Lib.
Give it a read; I’d love to hear about how you could see this concept fitting in at your library.
Librarians, as a rule, don’t tolerate anarchy well. They like things to be organized and to follow processes. But when it comes to emerging technologies, too much reliance on planning and committees can stifle creativity and delay adoption. The open source software community can offer librarians models for how to make progress on big projects with minimal oversight.
“Lazy consensus” is one such model from which librarians can learn a lot. At the Code4Lib conference in February 2012, Bethany Nowviskie of the University of Virginia Scholar’s Lab encouraged library development teams to embrace this concept in order to create more innovative libraries. (I encourage you to watch a video or read the text of her keynote.) This goes for all sizes and types of academic libraries, whether they have a development staff or just staff with enthusiasm for learning about emerging technologies.
What is lazy consensus?
According to the Apache software foundation:
Lazy Consensus means that when you are convinced that you know what the community would like to see happen you can simply assume that you already have consensus and get on with the work. You don’t have to insist people discuss and/or approve your plan, and you certainly don’t need to call a vote to get approval. You just assume you have the community’s support unless someone says otherwise.
(quote from http://incubator.apache.org/odftoolkit/docs/governance/lazyConsensus.html)
Nowviskie suggests lazy consensus as a way to cope with an institutional culture where “no” is too often the default answer, since in lazy consensus the default answer is “yes.” If someone doesn’t agree with a proposal, he or she must present and defend an alternative within a reasonable amount of time (usually 72 hours). This ensures that the people who really care about a project have a chance to speak up and make sure the project is going in the right direction. By changing the default answer to YES, we make it easier to move forward on the things we really care about.
When you care about delivering the best possible experience and set of services for your library patrons, you should advocate for ways to make that happen and spend your time thinking about how to make that happen. Nowviskie points out the kinds of environments in which this is likely to thrive. Developers and technologists need time for research and development, “20% time” projects, and freedom to explore new possibilities. Even at small libraries without any development staff, librarians need time to research and understand issues of technology in libraries to make better decisions about the adoption of emerging technologies.
Implementing lazy consensus
Implementing lazy consensus in your library must be done with care. First and foremost, you must be aware of the culture you are in and be respectful of it even as you see room for change and improvement. Coming in the first day at a new job is not the moment to implement this process across the board, but in your own work or your department’s work you can set an example and a precedent. Nowviskie provides a few guidelines for healthy lazy consensus. Emphasize working hard and with integrity while being open and friendly. Keep everyone informed about what you are working on, and keep your mission in mind as the centerpiece of your work. In libraries, this means you must keep public services involved in any project from the earliest possible stages, and always maintain a commitment to maintaining the best possible user experience. When you or your team reliably deliver good results you will show the value in the process.
While default negativity can certainly stifle creativity, default positivity for all ideas can be equally stifling. Jonah Lehrer wrote in a recent New Yorker article article that the evidence shows that traditional brainstorming, where all ideas are presented to a group without criticism, doesn’t work. Creating better ideas requires critiquing wrong assumptions, which in turn helps us examine our own assumptions. In adopting lazy consensus, make sure there is authentic room for debate. Responding to a disagreement about a course of action with reasoned critique and alternate paths is more likely to result in creative ideas, and brings the discussion forward rather than ending it with a “no.”
Librarians know a lot about information and people. The open source software community knows a lot about how to run flexible and transparent organizations. Combining the two can create wonderful experiences for our users.
As a way to relax and unwind during a stressful work week, I decided to do some arts and crafts with electronic resources. I wanted to make the simplest interface the database would allow. The purpose was twofold: I had to straighten out messy EBSCO research database profiles, but I also wanted to play around with EBSCO’s customization features since I knew they were more thorough than other vendors.
For those of you who aren’t aware of what the back end of a research database looks like for the administrator (and I am just fine with not knowing what the back end looks like for the developer, thanks), it’s a lot of options that make the database work properly with your A-Z list of journals, OpenURL resolver, proxy server, catalog, authentication, and branding, among other things. A lot of that stuff you set up at the beginning when you first acquire the database, and what’s possible to customize completely varies by vendor. For instance, some vendors don’t let you change any of that–you faxyour IP addresses and proxy server address, and then if you have to make any changes, you call or sometimes fax again to do so. Some vendors are much more lenient, even letting you remove their big branding from the top of the page and put in yours. Most are somewhere in between. Maintaining all these various options and tuning them up from time to time is what’s called electronic resource management, which also encompasses many other tasks. In case you are one of my non-librarian friends and wondered what I am talking about when I say that.
So back to EBSCO. They are one of those vendors which allow you a lot of freedom in changing every aspect of the search experience down to an extremely granular level. A level to which I do not have time to go, in fact, but certainly there was a lot of tune-up that needed to happen. The reason is that as of late 2011 they acquired H.W. Wilson and all of their databases. By about early February all those databases were incorporated into EBSCOHost research databases, and thus a lot of the search options needed a bit of refinement. But I was also interested in what I could take away and still leave a useable product. Enter: the Google-y EBSCOHost.
“Why can’t this work like Google?” is a question a lot of people, librarians and students alike, ask fairly often. If you’ve read Alan Jacobs’ recent piece on the Atlantic website you’ll see some good arguments for why it’s important to work on library research interfaces. I remember Aaron Schmidt declaring in a talk “Patrons shouldn’t see the word Boolean!” to resounding applause. While I don’t fully agree with either statement, I think it’s worth seeing what happens when you do try to make things more simple. In designing this profile, I took away as much as possible. The search options are not as visible, but still there (Google making advanced search and verbatim search as hard to find as they have recently annoys me no end, though this is apparently only annoying to nerds). The top bar is black like the ubiquitous Google bar. And the branding is for Dominican University (the size kind of sucks currently, that’s something to work on). Behind the scenes, Boolean searching is turned off completely. Just like our friend Google and their no more + operators except in verbatim search. But now patrons never see the word Boolean. The results page still has a lot on it, but it’s only two columns, like Google, with the results in the middle part of the grid and the options on the left bar.
I haven’t used this much yet, but I hope to show it in instruction sessions for students to demonstrate as something along the lines of training wheels for novice researchers. But I don’t think it’s an appropriate interface for in-depth research, because I know what options I took away from the user. Some of them make good research better for experienced searchers even if they make them more confusing for the novice. This is the advantage to having these different profiles available, and why it’s worth spending some time really understanding what your options are.