Professional identity outside the library

When I started this blog, I chose the name "outside libraries" because of a feeling I had and still have about working in information: that it is really difficult to maintain an identity as an information professional when you're not working in a library. I've put off writing about this in favour of sharing my experience of web content management. But as I am now on the CILIP blog landscape, the criteria for which include that my blog "demonstrate an awareness of wider professional issues", it seems a good time to write about the issue I named the blog after.

I got into librarianship through a part-time job in one of the libraries at my University, which hired students to supervise the library out of office hours. Although I liked reading and, by extension, going to libraries, I wasn't then considering a career in the profession. And I might never have, except that I was offered a shift managing the counter during office hours to replace a member of staff one day a week. Once I started hanging out with librarians, I got a sense of the profession which went beyond - far beyond - the (frankly boring) tasks that it was my job to do. Librarians were not just expert cataloguers; they were advocates, helpers, educators. They stood for something, with a quiet determination that soon convinced me librarians were AWESOME and I wanted to be one.

Fast forward four years: I am in my second professional post, managing information in a university Careers Service. It's not a library, and at first I can't put my finger on the difference. Books? Check. Website? Check. Enquiries desk? Check. Cataloguing and classification? Check. I'm still using the same information management skills that I've been using all along. What I've lost is the sense that I stand for something and that people around me respect me for that. "Information", where I work, is something that you file and tidy - an admin task. Though I do my job well and am respected for doing so, it is respect for the person in the role, not for the role itself.

Forward another two years to my current post as a web content manager. In contrast to my previous workplace, my colleagues recognise the need for professional skills in my post. But the skills they think I am using are "web skills", a mix of technical savvy, fearlessness in the face of HTML, and expertise in tools such as Facebook. The content management side - which is the bulk of my work, and which uses the professional skills I have built up as a librarian - is barely noticed.

In my roles outside libraries, I have felt forced to choose between being a professional and being an information expert (aka librarian). Using my librarian skills meant I was classed and treated as admin; to be considered a professional, I have had to take a role where my information skills are overlooked. Though I still take personal pride in myself and my chosen profession - I still introduce myself to people as a librarian - it's difficult to maintain a sense that, as a member of that profession, I stand for something outside my immediate role.

I don't know how much of this stems from my job being an isolated information role, how much from the profession's focus on libraries as the place to manage information, how much on my personality and how much on the poor understanding the world has of information roles. I'd be interested to hear from others who work in information outside libraries.

Twitter - better than a conference

Along with @nearly_everyone_else, I have spent most of today glued to my monitor, following the #cilip2 tag on Twitter. In case you're not in the know, the key facts:

1. Twitter is a service that allows you to post your thoughts (a.k.a. "tweets") to the world, as long as you can get them into 140 characters.
2. Text in the format #keyword is used in tweets to tag them. There are a number of services that allow you to see all the tweets that have a specific tag.
   
3. CILIP is the library and information professional organisation.
4. Someone important at CILIP made the mistake of dismissing web 2.0, the whole profession went into uproar, CILIP have now got Phil Bradley and Brian Kelly a.k.a. important internet and information/library types to lead a discussion today on CILIP and web 2.0.
5. This discussion has the tag #cilip2 since the full stop in #cilip2.0 makes Twitter cry.
   

So what is Twitter doing for me in this context?

Firstly, I am able to follow the talks at CILIP 2.0, without an expensive trip down to London. A number of people who are actually there are tweeting as Phil and Brian speak, so I can get the main points of what is being said in real time. And because I am still able to do some work, and am not spending money on travel, my workplace fusses a lot less about my participation.

Secondly - in case you were wondering why video/audio isn't a better solution - I can discuss what is said with other participants, also in real time: if an interesting comment comes up, the discussion can start amongst us virtual participants in a way that it simply can't amongst real-life ones. I've heard it said, often, that the best bit of a conference is the bit where you end up talking to other participants in the hallway. Following #cilip2 on Twitter has had the feel of that.

Thirdly, and this is something that Twitter does exceptionally well, I can easily connect with any of the people talking about CILIP 2.0. It's as if, at a real-life conference, you could monitor all the conversations, decide which people you found most interesting, approach them without feeling you're interrupting something, have a chat, and then continue having those chats regularly when you are back in the workplace. I know it can happen, but, at least to me, rarely with more than one or two people per conference. Today, I think I've expanded my professional network by about 25%. And, granted, the ties aren't all that binding - but I now have a way of keeping an eye on what they're talking about, and engaging them when I feel I have something to add. It's a great starting point for building a more solid professional relationship.

Website and online - not the same thing

I've heard quite a few service managers where I work say that they see the website as "a way of delivering our service 24/7 at any location". I don't think that can happen, because our website is a collection of static information, and the service that we deliver is an advice service with live advisers. The managers believe it can happen because they think that "the website" and "online" are the same thing.

Two points here. Firstly, a static information-based website will not allow you to deliver what your real-life staffed advice service does. Sure, if your staff are spending a lot of time answering questions like "what are your opening hours?" then a website will take some of the load off. But there are situations where people will want to talk to a real person, because they want the human contact.

And a good adviser can answer almost any question, even the subtle and complicated ones. The website shouldn't even be trying to do that. The most effective websites are geared towards top questions and tasks, and refer people with more particular needs to - you guessed it - a real person.

Secondly, "online" doesn't always mean the website. Facebook and Twitter are online. Skype's online. Instant messaging services are online. Our Virtual Learning Environment is online, as is the information portal that many students use to get to e-mail. E-mail's online, too. Delivering your service online should mean a lot more than adding content to your website.

You can deliver, online, a service that is very similar to your in-person staffed service. Catch is, you'll need to think about and staff the online service. You'll need to put someone on e-mail, or IM, or Facebook, or whatever means you are using to talk to people one-on-one. You can't just upload a bunch of information onto the website and hope it will be as good as an adviser.

On the bright side, using online tools - not just the website - you truly can begin to offer a service 24/7 and at a distance. And wasn't that what you wanted?

It's a website, not a place

Most managers where I work believe that our website's purpose is to be a online copy of their physical service. This is, to me, a fundamental misunderstanding of what the web is for; and one which has wide-reaching consequences.

The prevailing metaphor at work is that of the website as, literally, a site: an extra location in which a service is delivered. Both managers and clients would expect a service to be the same whatever physical site it's delivered at; managers would also expect to have a large measure of control over the behaviour of users at a physical location. These expectations carry over to the web.

To ensure consistency of service across the "sites", any object that is present at a physical site must be put online; any information that would be given out by a staff member, likewise. When the department creates a poster, it's put online as a pdf: it's on the wall at a physical location, so must be "on the wall" at the online "location". Staff members may direct clients to other online resources; endless "our favourite links" pages are born so that the same resources may be ignored by legions of online users.

And managers expect users to be under their control online in the same way that they are at a physical location. A member of staff can direct a user to read information in a specific order, or to explore options other than the one they have set their mind on. On the web, this expectation results in paths through content that reflect the service's idea of how the information "should" be used, and in a tendency to put barriers in the way of users getting what they came for (I should stress that this is done with the best possible intentions).

My advice to managers: the website is not another location. It does not follow the same rules as physical locations. You can't control users in the same way, nor does it help you to try. Most importantly, people come to a website for very different reasons from those that send them to talk to a staff member. If you think of the website as just another location, you miss the key point: that websites are there to complement, not replace, your existing staffed services.

Books on my desk #1 - The elements of style

Title: The elements of style (illustrated 4th edition)
Author: Strunk, White and Kalman (illustrations)

Description: Style guide originally written to encourage good essay-writing in American university students. Contains reminders of good grammar and usage (for American English), guidelines for good form in writing, and a section on developing style.

Review: Packs more punch in a smaller space than any writing guide I've read - and entertaining too. Sample gems:

"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."

"Rather, very, little, pretty - these are the leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words."

This has been my desk-top writing guide for years; it stays fresh and relevant even after being re-read till the spine breaks. The illustrations are slightly odd - pretty pastel colours which lull you into believing the book to be similarly wishy-washy. It's anything but.

Why it's on my desk: It's not specifically aimed at web writing, but it turns out that web writing and clear, high-quality essay writing have a lot in common. "Avoid fancy words", "Be clear!", "Put yourself in the background": all of these and more apply to writing for the web just as much as they do to writing an essay.

Things I've learned that make life easier #3: Work with people, not computers

It's very tempting as a web-person to get caught up in the minutiae of coding. Even if you are, like me, a web content manager, whose job only tangentially has anything at all to do with code, you're still likely to spend a lot of your day working on behind-the-scenes aspects of the site such as navigation tweaks and new features.

This is possibly the comfort zone for you, and it's definitely the comfort zone for your managers. They hired you because they didn't feel up to taking on the web and, more often than should happen, this is because they equate "web" with "computer code stuff" and "computer code" with "scary". So they want to see you at your computer screen, solving all the computer-based "stuff" they hired you to deal with.

If you let the computer be the main place you are, you lose three things:

1. You lose control of strategy
   If you sit at a computer doing techie things, everyone assumes you're a techie. And while there's absolutely no shame in being a techie, the sad fact is that they're the kind of people that people only consult when they run into problems. In other words, if you want to take part in the talks that go on *before* problems arise - i.e. the more strategy-related discussions - you need to get away from the computer.
   
   
2. You lose sight of your site's users
   Everyone knows that the only way to get your site right is to involve users. Whether you do this by proper full-on usability testing, focus groups to gather requirements, informal chats, or all of the above, you're going to need to leave the computer to do it. And since user testing is best done often, you're going to spend significant time away from the screen to do it effectively.
   
   
3. You lose the chance to advocate
   Almost without a doubt you know more about proper web content management than your managers - that's why they hired you after all. If nothing else, you're going to have a pretty clear set of ideas about how you want to see the site developing. What better way to make sure your message spreads than to tell people face-to-face? Time away from the computer works doubly well in this case: it gives you time to be with people, and also means you're not irrevocably associated in their minds with scary computer stuff.
   

What is it for?

A few brief thoughts - and I claim no generic rightness or indeed completeness for them - on what I thinks some of the web 2.0 things I'm familiar with are and are not for.

Facebook
For:

• Finding out what people are doing when you haven't seen them for years and don't actually ever want to see them in real life again;
• Keeping abreast of what people are doing in their day-to-day lives, and commenting on it;
• Creating an online image of yourself, whether you are an individual or an organisation - the groups you belong to, the apps that you add all serve as badges;
• Setting up and promoting events.
  

Not for:

• Group discussions. Even though it has forum-style functionalities, it's amazing to me how comparatively few group discussions happen on Facebook. I reckon it's because of the third point above - belonging to a group on Facebook is more about wearing a badge than being part of a community.

Blogs
For:

• Getting your opinion out there - either as a post, or as a comment on someone else's post;
  
• Writing about stuff you're genuinely interested in;
• Discussion with other people who are interested in the same stuff - as you gain audience and people start interacting with you and each other on the blog, you'll end up with at least some community discussion.

Not for:

• Promoting your organisation generically - people look for a more genuine, personal view on a blog;
  

Twitter
For:

• Alerting people to stuff - events, news, a new blog post;
• Finding out what people are saying about you/your organisation;
• Keeping people abreast of your current thoughts/interests/ideas - Twitter seems to be a more ideas-sharing community than Facebook, search me why;
  
• Getting to know new people.

Not for:

• Actually I'm not sure about this one, it seems to do everything :-). I guess it's not for anything you can't say in 140 words.
  

Wikis
For:

• Projects you have in common with a group of people, where everyone has a contribution to make and everyone is happy with the idea of editing a common document to achieve this;
  
• Projects where you want to tap into "common wisdom" and, crucially, have given others the motivation, tools, understanding and structure to contribute.
  

Not for:

• Making your department look cool because they have a wiki;
• Putting some pages up and hoping someone else will do the work of sorting them out for you. You'd be surprised how unlikely it is that another user will even correct a typo on your page unless they know why they're helping you out.
  

I think I'm running out of ideas here, but I'd welcome further thoughts/comments.