Introduction

Recently, our early-morning librarian told me that she has never met two of our evening librarians. One of our weekend librarians has worked for us for over two decades, and I am sure that many of our weekday librarians have never met her. We are an organization of people who are never all together. We do not work next to each other. We do not get face-to-face opportunities to solve problems together. If every librarian worked side-by-side, then librarians would observe each other and create shared experiences around services. Over time, this would create informal standards and approaches. Were change needed, managers could more easily take action. Alas, this is not how we operate. Instead, we rely on communication channels such as emails, policies and meeting notes to share information. Managers conduct evaluations and professional development for staff that (we hope) create a shared vision and approach to our work. We establish processes that allow us to share knowledge and review our work. When procedures change, managers must work to ensure that staff are aware and following the change. A great degree of coordination between staff members falls on the shoulders of managers. Obviously, this is the role of management, but lack of direct contact between organizational members exacerbates this challenge.

Over the years, I have worked with my library staff to implement a number of social media tools. In so doing, I have considered how tools complement our organization as a loosely-coupled system. Of course, what makes social media “social” is their ability to connect people. Their connections can take on many forms, but their essence is tying together people in online communication. This means connecting individuals inside and beyond library walls, connecting people to events and happenings, and connecting people to the organization. A useful internal/external divide exists in connecting organizational members to each other and to people outside of the organization. Internal needs are largely about communicating and capturing knowledge while external needs are largely about extending services.

Internal: capturing knowledge

Every day, librarians and staff members make discoveries. They find ways to be more efficient. They solve difficult issues for patrons. They fix, they find and they invent. Our staff members are truly interdisciplinary, naturally curious and amazingly creative. As much of the work we do is loosely coupled to the work of others, curiosity is often our true business. When we explore that unique reference question, we are required to be thoughtful and imaginative. Anyone who has worked at a reference desk is well aware that reference is not really about searching. It is often about defining the problem with users and considering the degree of credibility required to answer the question.

Social media have the potential to capture knowledge that does not get captured via formal means. This is the knowledge that we stumble upon when working side-by-side with someone. This is the knowledge that no one could possibly recognize as valuable. Staff members can post this information as a means of sharing. The key is not for staff members to guess what other people need. They should just share things that they think are worthy of note and let others utilize this knowledge.

The reference transaction is an obvious source of knowledge creation, but there are other service needs that result in discoveries. This could be the newly developed workaround for the “upgrade” to the library system, the use of a new process for withdrawing items from the collection, or the preference of one study room over another for group meetings.

Managers and leaders posses a particular ability to influence views of the organization held by staff members. The results we choose to communicate can orient staff members to act in different ways. Maybe our statistics are showing an increased use of the library website on Sundays. Communicating this to the reference staff may help them to staff online reference services appropriately over the weekends. Making staff members aware of this increase may cause other staff members to see opportunities unrecognized by managers. The increased use of the library site on Sundays may mean that announcements for upcoming events should be posted to the online events calendar on Sundays as opposed to Monday morning.

Libraries have been working at capturing knowledge and communicating it within the organization for decades. Many times this is done through informal, word-of-mouth channels. Sometimes we have tried the classic leave-a-note-book-at- the-reference-desk trick. Other times we have used the photocopier to run off the staff newsletter. These pre-web tools filtered information for organization members. Why do we care if technical services staff learn about the upcoming lecture series in the staff newsletter? Our egalitarian sentiments care because we know these staff members might want to attend the lectures. Our operations sentiments care because we hope that catalogers might recognize how items they are processing could complement the lectures and help connect the events to the resources.

Along these lines there are many news items within the organization that come up and go away before they can be communicated at formal meetings. This could be the need to alert staff members about the local VIP who just scheduled a visit to the library, the need for server maintenance over the weekend, or the temporarily amended scheduling to account for an individual who is sick. In all of these cases, the knowledge that is created either vanishes into the ether or risks being communicated unevenly across the organization.

Social media can act as real-time filters for information across the organization. They allow organizational members to capture ideas that flow past, sharing incidental knowledge as it comes up. This could be identifying immediate and obvious problems, such as “the exit to the back parking lot is closed today due to work being done on the doors.” Or it could be not-so-obvious notes, such as “I just helped two students who only wanted photocopies of articles from printed periodicals, not from online databases or subscriptions.” This may seem a bit out of the ordinary, but if three librarians each have students asking for the same thing, there is a reasonable chance that one of the teachers on campus is forbidding online sources. This might lead to contact from a librarian who might nicely ask the teacher to join the twenty-first century.

Social media make it possible to compensate for some of the looseness of the of library organization while highlighting its strength. As creative organizations, we need to have channels to capture our creativity and tighten up our lines of communication. Social media allow for the development of formal and informal sharing and documenting as never before.

Internal: collaboration

As loosely-coupled systems, library staff can organize and reorganize themselves to get work done. The marketing group meets, the social science bibliographers meet, and the cultural event planning group meets. When a new need arises, a new group can form to think about it. We want to be collaborative, and we want everyone have their input. Yet, sometimes we have the tendency to meet and meet and meet without actually getting any work done. We make the mistake in thinking that collaboration means talking and not working. A related problem is that collaboration essentially happens between people who actually work at the same time. Collaboration between the morning staff and the evening staff does not happen.

Social media may help to alter some of this. Social media may not be the only answer to some of these challenges but they can foster an environment that might overcome them. A personality trait shared by almost all librarians is the desire to learn, and many libraries act as learning communities with people sharing, debating and engaging in issues around them. Knowledge sharing within the organization can strengthen this community, while disconnections between people weaken it. The more managers build connections between people, the more likely collaboration will occur.

Social media tools can be used as collaboration tools. They can be online work spaces allowing staff members to come together virtually. This could be synchronously or asynchronously. When we think about social media and collaboration, we have this idea of everyone gathered around their computers and looking at Facebook or another site. However, the real collaborative value for social media tools comes from the times between meetings. Social media tools can be used for “to do” lists, meeting notes or virtual documents.

A significant part of to making collaboration work is connecting and coordinating work. Social media can help make this happen. They may not be able to help us resist the urge to constantly hold committee meetings, but maybe they can help us be more productive between these meetings.

External: marketing and outreach

When we think about social media today, we often think about marketing and outreach to people outside of the library walls. In the not-so-distant past, libraries had a handful of options to spread the word about activities and services. We instituted newsletters to the community, and in extreme cases, some public libraries even purchased advertising on television. Of course, our funding has never supported much advertising, and we were at the mercy of local news outlets.

Clearly, the web has expanded the options and allowed libraries to directly communicate to patrons. Websites, email and now social media tools make it a bit easier to get our message out. The growth of library websites since 2000 has been exponential. The moves from HTML editing, to WYSIWYG editing, to social media have reduced the barriers for staff participation in the web world.

This presents challenges in terms of marketing and messages. In the pre-web world, managers and leaders could focus messages more easily, mostly because there were few outlets. Now, the challenge is that every staff member can access outlets. As new social medial tools come online, staff members set up their own fiefdoms to represent the library. Even worse, different staff members may set up different fiefdoms within the same site. The great thing with social media is that everyone can participate and take up the library’s cause. The bad thing with social media is that everyone can participate and take up the library’s cause. Managers and leaders need to recognize how to ensure that the library’s message gets out in a somewhat coherent manner and that staff members are able to coordinate within and between particular tools.

Messaging is really one of the big challenges with marketing. It has been my experience that when libraries do communicate about new services, we are more likely just to report the existence of this service. We say things like, “hey, we have a new database.” But we do not talk about why anyone would care or what people would do with that database like, “we can make business research easier for you with our new database.” Social media tools do not make this challenge any easier. In fact, they may make it more difficult because all staff members must think from the user perspective.

As loosely-coupled systems, libraries benefit when more of their staff can easily participate in marketing and outreach. It can be tough for a single leader to identify the new and cool things happening within multiple departments. But marketing cannot be a free-for-all. There is a balance that needs to be achieved between the limits we felt pre-web and total anarchy.

Internal and external: giving your people a voice

Social media can give your people a voice, something that has internal and external implications. Social media can be a tool for empowerment by providing an avenue to shed light on unrecognized problems or by opening up conversations on issues in new ways. In 2006, Time magazine chose you—content creators on the web—for their annual person of the year issue (Grossman, 2006). They were making a statement about the distributed nature of the web in terms of content creation. In 2011, Time selected protesters as their person of the year, making a statement about the uprisings around the world, but also a statement about their tools (Anderson, 2011). The selection of you in 2006 seems a very muted and sedate contrast to protesters in 2011. 2006 makes me think about posting videos of cats to YouTube, while 2011 reminds me of revolutionaries in Tahrir Square in Egypt, rioting mobs in London, and the Occupy movement in the USA and elsewhere.

Obviously, protesting is not a new invention hatched by a web start-up out of somebody’s garage. Yet, there is a new connectivity to today’s protesters both within and beyond their movements. Social media tools have become coordination tools for these groups, helping them to arrange logistics. They have also become reporting tools, sending back immediate images and videos from the scene. Finally, they have also become advocacy tools for protestors to spread their message beyond the observers who happened to witness the protest and the journalists who decided to cover it, by connecting worldwide and giving justification and argument for their actions. In many ways, the physical protest has become an argument made to a virtual world. The face-to-face protest comes to an end, but its digital footprint goes forward.

Those of us within the library profession can easily forget that the concept of free information through a local library is a pretty radical concept and that individuals striving for social change use libraries or library-like approaches to hold up their efforts. For instance, the People’s Library (http://peopleslibrary.wordpress.com/) was at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street protests. As the occupiers formed their community, their library took shape to bring the community together, and when the New York Police Department evicted the protestors from Zuccotti Park, the library was destroyed (Moynihan, 2012). Another less extreme example is the Read/Write Library in Chicago. This is a community-based, non-profit library that has an open acquisition mission. It accepts all donated materials in an effort to preserve and promote voices within the community. It operates through volunteers and donations (Velez, 2011). The Halifax Public Library in Canada presents another example of integrating community into library operations. Halifax transformed its services through a community-led approach which opened up planning to all members of the community including underserved populations (Williment et al., 2011).

I bring this up not because I envision libraries as hubs of social unrest, even though I am sure that our profession had more than its fair share of people in the streets. Rather, this illustrates the power of connecting people advocating for change. Our communities are full of these people. They are in civic groups, religious organizations, schools, non-profit organizations and political groups. Librarians should be careful how they enter into this area, but there is no doubt that we offer services and resources that would add value to these communities. For instance, this might involve doing a little research and writing up a blog post to support a local food pantry or maybe a post supporting fundraising at a nearby school. Librarians are active in their communities and are often in a position to recognize need and engage the community.

Giving librarians a voice online means to let them be themselves. Let librarians talk about their interests and let users connect online with people who they meet face-to-face. It is about empowering librarians to be people and not neutral observers of the world. This benefits the library by expanding its external reach. This should not be confused with marketing efforts. Marketing efforts may connect to this and offer context, but giving librarians and other staff members a voice goes beyond marketing. It is about growing ideas and connecting as individuals. The idea of a protester armed with social media as their weapon for change should be a model for librarians armed with social media as their weapon for connection. The ability to photograph, video and comment on the world needs to become our standard. The subject of posts could be “typical” library-related posts like new resources and new library spaces as well as posts about the community, such as the opening of new businesses, fundraisers for local schools, or cultural events offered by art clubs.

Storytelling is a powerful tool, and social media represent a way to extend our own stories. It need not be, “here’s a photo of the pastries in our break room,” but it could be, “here’s a photo of the hardworking staff members who are processing new materials into our collection.” This could include documenting remodeling, acquisition of new devices, and visits by local dignitaries. It could be about new staff members and longtime staff members. Our voice can be about how we accomplish our mission and the challenges we face in doing this under tight budgets and growing demands.

Of course, our story must also include the stories of our users. This could be stories about children receiving their first library cards, students doing research, genealogists working on local history, and gamers who come in to play in our tournaments. Our story may include the stories of the groups who use our meeting spaces or of the new art displays in our galleries. Our stories are the stories of our communities. We connect to the ups and the downs of our neighborhoods and our cities.

Internally, giving our people a voice means to open new avenues of communication across layers of our organizations. This may sound dangerous to some. It may be disruptive to some organizations. But, there is the potential to increase transparency across departments and vertically through the management structure. This could be about expressing concerns through internal blogs or pointing out problems that need to be addressed. Connecting via social networks, initiating discussions on blogs, or documenting work on wikis can create new channels for communication.

Giving voice to our people is related to the idea of capturing organizational knowledge, but it goes a step further. The challenge with loosely-coupled systems is that all members of the organization can be in a difficult position for judging success. In tight systems—especially for-profit systems—the measures of success are clearer. The ability to gauge whether things are going well can be more clearly observed, e.g. how quickly a product is created or how much revenue is generated. As loose systems, we have trouble evaluating our successes. This is even more difficult for managers who may not work directly with users. There is a difficulty in being close to the work and there can be many filters through which organizational success must pass. When managers can connect with staff and hear from staff, then issues can be expressed in a timely way and successes can be more apparent. Social media have the potential to flatten out the organization and connect in ways that might not otherwise be possible.

Internal and external: connecting virtual and physical

To many people, the “library” is still a building. To others, the “library” is a website where they go to access research databases or online journal articles. Our goal should be that the virtual complements the physical and vice versa.

In 2004, the first photos of the horrific tsunami that struck in the Indian Ocean did not come from the AP or Reuters. They came from cell phones in the hands of tourists who had witnessed the horror. Mobile technology has transformed all of us into first-hand reporters. Protests across the Middle East in 2011 have been aided by the ability to report back quickly without the filter of the news agency. I sometimes wonder if there is anything more powerful than a person whose mobile device has a camera and an internet connection.

The modern journalist is no longer just a writer who gets stories to editors by deadline. The modern journalist is a multimedia professional who tweets story notes, captures images, shoots video, and still writes the story by deadline. Imagine what we could do if we empowered our librarians to be more active in reporting their world or at least their libraries.

When librarians become the connectors of the physical and virtual, we can enhance both. This may mean that the virtual provides support and connections outward to happenings in the library (Figure 3.1). This could be by pulling in links to video, articles and other sources that expand displays, lectures or art exhibits. It might mean capturing audio or video of story times or book discussions. It might mean interviews with local authors or local government officials.

Our libraries gain internal and external benefits from connecting the virtual to the physical. Externally, we can open up the library to many people who may never come through our doors. This may include people unable to come to the library or may include people who are not aware of what we offer. Internally, this spreads awareness of our activities to all of our staff by connecting staff members who are separated by time and space. It also allows our staff members to connect a string of events over time and to preserve some of our work for the future.

Disintermediation

All new information technologies have the potential to shift the existing order. Five hundred years ago, the translation of the Bible from Latin into other languages paired with the printing press caused conflict at the time of the Reformation. Were church leaders really upset at people reading scripture in other languages? Perhaps they were they concerned that the translator might make mistakes? Of course not. The conflict arose out of the perceived threat to church authority. It arose through removing the priest as an intermediary to practicing religion.

As media scholar Clay Shirky has noted when comparing social media with the disruption caused by printing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

Like printing, the rise of the internet has brought about different types of disintermediation. Postal services around the world struggle as revenues drop due to the replacement of letter writing with email (Rosenthal, 2011). The journalism industry has seen a significant reduction in force as budgets have crumbled due to the decline in advertising revenues and subscriptions (Hachten and Scotton, 2012). The music, publishing and film industries all feel their distribution and revenue streams shifting beneath them (Levine, 2011).

As librarians, we have felt this threat to our own existence as we are evolving our services from the print-based world to the fully-digital world. Even though librarians should be prepared to lead the way into disruptive technologies, many times they are not. It’s not just that we fear what the print- to-digital shift means for us in terms of collections and how we do our jobs. I believe that it is just as much, or even more so, a fear of disintermediation. It is more often the change in power dynamics that causes us to be afraid.

As we push social media forward and as we see these tools as a way to connect people and be more visible in our communities, managers and leaders need to consider how prepared we are for the disruptions that will arise. When we ask librarians to blog about what they are actually seeing in the library, are we prepared for what this means? Is that what we really want them to do? Academics and activists may push for the transparent, open library where our problems are honestly communicated and we advocate for the needs of our users. In the abstract, I find this to be a seductive idea. In practice, however, it frightens me. The staff member with a bone to pick with administrators and a worldwide, information distribution platform should concern all of us. Twenty librarians blogging about anything and everything may sound good on the inside, but from the outside it may look like multiple personality disorder. Even worse, it may appear that the library has lost sight of its mission as community members wonder why tax money is being spent for librarians to commentate on everything under the sun.

Don’t misunderstand. Libraries need to be more open and more engaged, but we also cannot afford to be naive. We have seen stories of universities suing students over blog posts and conflicts in the workplace arising from Facebook updates. Our libraries exist in the real world, which is a world impacted by social and political forces. Just as we can engage our communities in positive ways, we also can engage it in less fruitful ways. Disintermediation poses risks, so we must be prepared. If we expect librarians to really engage our community, we must create a context for this to happen in healthy ways that protect the organization and protect the individual.

We must also create a healthy context within the organization so that we do not distract ourselves from our goals. Internal conflicts can get in our way and undermine our efforts. Additionally, with limited time and resources, we can hardly afford to have our staff members stretched across platforms and working against each other. Disintermediation of one form or another is coming whether we like it or not. We must recognize the possibility that we might be the ones who get disintermediated if our libraries do not adapt and change in the evolving information world.

Leaders and managers must pull off a tricky balancing act. They need to work to tighten a loose system in order to capture knowledge and help draw connections between employees and departments. At the same time, they must avoid undermining the looseness that allows libraries to flex and change over time.