Introduction

Food has become an important issue on our campus recently. We have students who struggle to pay for rent, transportation and food before considering paying for textbooks, school supplies, fees and tuition. Our college’s charitable foundation has emergency scholarships to help students out of tight spots. For these reasons, faculty and staff have started to talk about food and nutrition for students as a matter of supporting them in their education.

For many years, our faculty has held an annual food drive and our library has held an annual “food for fines” program where patrons can donate food in place of paying an overdue fine, but several faculty members have started to discuss taking these initiatives a step further by creating a food pantry on our campus to support students. These faculty members told me about a service learning class project they were developing which focused on food services and food pantries. I thought these were great projects and that the library should offer support.

I asked one of our librarians to write some posts to one of our blogs. She did great work writing about food pantries on other campuses, food and sustainability, urban agriculture and volunteer organizations in our community that focus on food. These posts were thoughtful and well researched. We sent them to the faculty, and they, in turn, shared them with students. These posts did not invent a food pantry or cause one to appear magically on campus; neither did they feed hungry students. Nevertheless, these posts did achieve some important things. First, they offered important moral support to faculty members and students who were trying to move a big project forward. Second, they offered ideas and information as context around the topic. Finally, they linked to resources within the library’s collections, on the web, and in the community.

Connecting with our community didn’t take monumental resources or effort. After a semester of planning, the faculty member who initially discussed the food pantry idea announced that they would indeed open a food pantry on campus and that they were initiating a large food drive. The librarian who posted about food was a voice offering support and ideas. We plan to continue.

Through efforts like this, I want our librarians to be leaders in advancing ideas on campus. Our library should be the intellectual hub of the campus. We should be the place where ideas blossom, whether the ideas are online or in our physical space. My library’s blogs are not writing tools or social media tools; rather, they are leadership tools. They are places where we capture ideas and make them shareable. When our librarian wrote about food, we didn’t just hope that these blog posts would serendipitously find their way to the right people. We purposefully emailed them to the right people. We told this faculty member and their students that we had written these posts for them and that we hoped that their project would succeed. Of course, the fact that other people around the world can find these blog posts is a fringe benefit for us. In fact, through Twitter we have seen our posts shared by local food activists.

If social media are to be leadership tools, then librarians need to frame them around leadership. Leadership gurus Kouzes and Posner (2007) define five practices of leaders. Managers and leaders must keep these practices in mind as they give their staff and community a voice around social media:

When it comes to managing social media, leadership is essential. I started this book with the notion that managing social media does not revolve around technological questions. The challenges in managing social media come from human challenges such as defining responsibilities, organizing workflows, establishing goals and creating a shared vision. All of these challenges hinge on leadership.

New librarianship

I also started this book with the two questions that I believe organizations must address in using social media: how will a particular tool be useful and what information will the organization choose to share? Answering these questions requires an understanding of an organization’s goals and community. Answering them effectively as a functional organization requires structure built around coordination tools and systems that enhance the loosely-coupled nature of libraries. Social media enable librarians to capture the knowledge created everyday within the community, and to play an integral role in information distribution and creation within the community. However, librarians face a challenge to be more than just distribution networks.

In his groundbreaking book, The Atlas of New Librarianship, R. David Lankes challenges us to rethink our view of libraries and librarians:

Libraries are not caretakers of artifacts. Librarians are not finders of things. Librarians are much more profoundly useful and powerful. Librarians are in the knowledge business. They—you—facilitate the creation of knowledge, and by doing so you improve society. Rather than building book museums, we—you and I—must build edifices of bricks and code to promote knowledge. Where once Carnegie built temples to books, we shall build workshops of the mind. (Lankes, 2011: 63)

Lankes presents a vision for librarians to build upon what we have been and engage our communities to become something new. Lankes outlines how librarians facilitate knowledge creation. He defines four pieces:

These four pieces interact to create a people-powered, people-focused, physical and virtual organization that generates knowledge through community conversation and interaction. I am especially intrigued by Lankes’ idea of a curriculum for a library, which he sees as the learning needs of the community. Librarians enact their curriculum by putting services in place to meet these needs. Librarians already do this to some degree, but Lankes’ discussion suggests making learning goals more apparent and better defined. Some academic and school libraries have done this around information literacy and the formal school curriculum. But Lankes is suggesting something beyond this traditional approach within education. He is suggesting that librarians in all types of libraries move beyond simply organizing and acquiring resources so that other people can create knowledge. He is suggesting that libraries create a plan that ties together resources, events, space, workshops and other services aimed at learning. This is a more targeted and richer approach than simply thinking about service populations. This is thinking about the goals held by members of these populations.

Lankes’ visionary definition of “new librarianship” puts the librarian at the center of libraries. It is not about collections, buildings or online tools. It is about what librarians do—and librarians do many things. While not all of their jobs require social media, it is clear that social media have an important role to play in Lankes’ vision. Social media represent not only a way to connect, but a way to enact the library’s curriculum. Social media tools can become learning environments that build knowledge, enable idea sharing and allow community members to advance their goals. Thus, when librarians ask themselves what information will the organization choose to share with social media, they should consider how this information advances knowledge creation and their curricular goals.

No one can predict the future

Leaders must work with staff to create a vision for the future, but they should never go so far as to believe that they can predict the future. When managers get overconfident and lock themselves into a particular vision of what is coming down the road, they limit their ability to react to new changes. This is why Lankes’ emphasis on librarians over libraries is important. People can shift and change to meet evolving needs. Collections, buildings and online resources do not really do much without people. They surely do not change.

Leaders know that the next big social media application is just over the horizon. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest may be hot now, but they could be yesterday’s news overnight. When managers and leaders think about social media, they should think about people. They should consider ways that staff members come together to enable knowledge creation in their community. Managing social media is about managing the structures, connections and workflows between people (Figure 7.1).

Prognosticators abound within librarianship and the blogosphere. They offer advice and direction about the unfolding impact of technology on what we do. But as Nassim Taleb outlines in The Black Swan, prediction carries an inherent problem:

If librarians could have recognized the impact of Google, then librarians would have invented it. When Google was being invented, librarians were busily indexing the internet by hand and talking about the poor search results on Alta Vista. After Google arrived, searching for information was never the same.

Predicting the future

When people hear the word “library,” they think of books (De Rosa et al., 2011). There is no way around the fact that the library brand remains closely tied to books. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to know that times are changing quickly. Books are not what they used to be. As a profession, librarians offer so many valuable skills beyond just delivering books, and many librarians are working to break out of traditional stereotypes. In some ways, I am trying to do this with this book. But, regardless of these efforts, the future of libraries and librarians is still tied to books, at least for the short term. The ways that books evolve will influence the ways that libraries evolve. Libraries and publishers are feeling the shockwaves caused by the move from physical books to ebooks. Much has been and will continue to be written on this shift. I do not intend to offer a comprehensive view of this change. Nevertheless, some changes are noteworthy in the context of social media and libraries.

One of the important lessons of the digital shift is that books were used in the past to store information because books were all that society had. Many texts function better in an alternative format. The reality that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is no longer available in print is a testament to this (BBC News, 201). Next to the digital format, the printed encyclopedia makes little sense. The only value of alphabetizing entries is in terms of searching. The “A” volume communicates where a particular entry will be found. Locating “alligator” in the same text as “Azerbaijan” offers no value to the content of the text. The encyclopedia functions much better online where entries can be linked together, organized into larger categories and searched more easily.

Just as the encyclopedia makes no sense as a book, so there are other types of traditionally book-based content, texts and information tools that can break out of the medium. Innovations editor for Futurist magazine, Thomas Fry (2012), offers the following list of media replacing books:

Fry’s goal here is to demonstrate the diversification of information options before us. Some of the forms on this list have been around for a long time, and at first glance, it may not be clear how they may be replacing books. For instance, “music” has been around for quite a long time. How can it be replacing books? The big change around music has been the ease of listening. Throughout the twentieth century, access to music and ease of listening improved from phonographs, to LPs, to cassette tapes, and to CDs. Now, the shift to online has made it possible to carry hours and hours of music and to incorporate music into home entertainment systems and automobiles. Now that music can be transported and accessed so easily it is encroaching into leisure time that was once dedicated to reading. Many of the above examples represent a battle for time that for decades had been dominated by books. The ease of access associated with the online world has made it much easier to exchange ideas. All of these cut into roles that books played in the past.

For instance in 2011, economist Tyler Cowen chose to forgo the traditional publishing route for his book, The Great Stagnation, instead releasing it as a 15 000-word ebook that can be downloaded as a PDF. Noting that his book is similar in length to the economics pamphlets published in the seventeenth century, Cowen claimed to be aiming for those readers whom he terms “infovores,” that is, individuals that absorb a great deal of content outside of the general reading public (Leonhardt, 2011). The Great Stagnation represents a diversity in publishing that has only recently become possible.

This diversity is removing barriers to access for information distribution. In the past, only a few people were able to publish information. Books, magazines, newspapers, music and film required a great deal of training, the ability to manage large organizations, a touch of luck, and the ability to create a profitable product to get information to the public in a significant way. Small-scale newsletters and self- published books existed, but had marginal impact and held a negative connotation. The digital shift is opening up access to the publication of all types of media as never before. Thanks to social media, self-publication has become the standard. The book publishing industry has realized that self-publication is a great way to discover new writers. Today, the nice neat information world of the past is a memory. In some ways, it was never nice and neat, but digital information has messed it all up forever more. Everyone can publish, create videos, write music and blog.

Identity crisis

In the past, libraries dealt in books because that was the primary means of sharing information. Now, libraries face an identity crisis. Librarians and regular library users know that library services are much broader than just books. As loosely-coupled systems, libraries have the potential to adapt to community needs. Structurally, libraries can grow and morph. They can create and share innovations across the organization. Their primary limitation is the creativity of their people. The ways that libraries answer the question facing them about identity will be up to the people who work within them and how they engage with their communities in knowledge creation.

This book is my argument for social media’s role in that redefinition. Social media represent not only a tool for communication, but also a tool for knowledge creation and learning. Social media can also be a tool for leadership. Libraries have experimented with social media tools. Increasingly, they understand the technology, but how have they connected the tools with their core missions?

As library leaders and managers work within their organizations to create a new vision for the future, they should remember these two pieces of advice from Kouzas and Posner:

The library’s mission as knowledge creation centers for their communities must remain at the center of what they do. This is the vision that helps library staff to make sense of their work. This is what provides purpose and understanding around these tools.