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1991-2013 Living on the Dark Side
SmellyYellowLiquid
OrSex
Appeal?
The Complex Value Proposition
Nouns
Quantitative Focus
Books, eBooks
Magazines
Websites
Buildings, Branches
Rooms
Desks
Programs
Nouns can be warehoused and ‘cut’
Qualitative Focus
Serve and Change
Answer and Decide
Engage and Discuss
Link and Learn
Entertain and Play
Tell a story
Do
Action verbs imply dynamism and impact
Verbs
Are you locked into an old library mindset?
A Verb . . . an Experience, enlivened for an Audience
A Noun . . . A foundation but not sufficient without professional animation
Grocery Stores
Cookbooks, Chefs . . .
Cookbooks, Chefs . . .
Meals
So What Should Our Library
Priorities Be?Remaining Relevant and Having a Positive
Impact
Some Insights into Publishing
and Vendors
Positives and Negatives Some of you will likely hear only one side
Employment in Vendor Land
Thomson Electronic Publishing
Thomson (TPP, etc.)
Micromedia
IHS
ProQuest
SirsiDynix
Gale
Cengage Learning
Librarians in Vendors
Sales
Marketing
Training
Product Development
Testing
Executive including CEO
Editorial
R&D
Etc.
Ownership in Vendor Land
Business Cycle
Business Models (free and fee)
Private Companies
Public Companies
Quasi-Public Companies
Going Public
Mergers & Acquisitions
Equity Capital
Venture Capital
Challenges in Vendor Land
Copyright
Ethics
Licenses and contracts
Case Law
Lawsuits NatGeo, Tasini, etc. vs. ALA JSTOR, HathiTrust, Georgia, Aaron
Swartz lawsuits Edward Mellen Press vs. Dale Askey,
Scholarly Kitchen, etc. Threats
Research in Vendor Land
Making the Wager:
Intense technology monitoring
User experience, usability by end user vs. librarian (e.g. scholars, lawyers, etc. vs. Librarians)
Focus groups, tracking data
Market analyses (demographics, Millennials, Boomers, etc.)
Trends and directions (Mobile, Cloud, etc.)
Financial tracking (e.g. tax bases, enrolment, population changes, global opportunities, …)
Are librarians different? YES Have to pay attention to cost in order to unfetter
information … issue of value
Pagination, known item retrieval, title counts, print/e-copies rationalization of serials moving to books)
More transactional than transformational
Book output vs. scrolling
Print vs. e-delivery
Less workflow orientation (e.g. e-learning, PURLs, stored search, citations, etc.)
Alignment (e.g. curriculum standards or readability) differs
Generationally (aging, poor uptake of new professionals)
Differences in the Private and Public Sector Approaches to Development
Private Sector
q Competitive advantage is the ideal but cooperate on structural issues like standards
q Innovation is key to long-term existence
q Focus on clients and marketshare
q Business strategies
q Responsibility to shareholders or owner/investors
q Increasing revenue
q Risk oriented
q Economic success is a prime personal motivator
q Competitors, partners and allies
q e-Business is the challenge
q Focus on “results”
Public Sector
q Collaborative advantage is the ideal but still compete
q Good service is the key to long-term existence
q Focus on citizens and social contract
q Political agendas and government imperatives
q Responsibility to funder and to citizens
q Wise use of tax dollars
q Risk averse
q Making a positive impact on society is a strong motivator
q Other departments, levels of government, unions
q e-Government is the challenge
q Focus on “process”
Vendor Culture Timelines and milestones
Agile and Scrum, staying on the curve for device, browser, mobile, expectations
Continuous learning and staff investment
15% time
Free vs. fee, competitive threats
Quality, experience, relationships
Volume, Quantity sometimes vs. comprehensiveness
Rights are everything, layering, exclusives
Quarterly and Annual results
Architecture
Agile and Scrum
SGML and XML
Big Databases (really big)
Big Data (Google and FB vs. library vendors)
SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.
Standards Community
Licensing (consortia, state, local)
Ownership, Lease, Rental channels
User experience vs. usability
Professional Development
Myers-Briggs, Teambuilding
Executive testing (and health)
Crucial Conversations
Performance planning and contracting
Targeted technology training
Supportive self-learning
Town Halls (monthly)
Yammer style continuous conversations
Frustrations from Other Side
Poor evaluation procedures, group think
Poor trials (often singletons)
Too weak partnerships and sharing
Too little cooperation, consortia, (territoriality and competitiveness) RFP ridiculousness, combative negotiation
Little deep understanding of learning and knowledge acquisition
Often see themselves as target user
Often expect training to work
Imperfect of the shift that is happening and the clear threats to academic business models
Key Current Issues
“Be more like Google” LMAO, “Don’t change”, Change . . .
Discovery vs. Native search
Strategic budgeting, risk avoidance
Passive Aggressiveness
ROI, ROE, valuing staff time at zero$
Group Think
Example: dysfunctional view of privacy…
Taking Responsibility for Output (grads, published research, patents, commercialization, etc.)
Great Things
OCLC LinkedData
OCLC WorldShare
Open API and vendor APIs
DPLA
EveryLibrary PAC, LibraryRenewal
Repository mess, dark information
Discovery Services (Summon, EDS…)
Open Access and Open Source muting their religion and taking a better place
Are you on the ‘hits’ train?
Big Shifts
Journal runs to electronic
Series to article targets
Books to chapters and paragraphs
DVD/CD to streaming media
3D databases
Text search to audio/graphic search
Lists to visualization
Massive reinvention of the textbook
Course sites to e-learning objects & MOOCs
BIGDATA
Risk
QUALITATIVE INFORMATION
QUANTITATIVE DATA
versus
STATISTICS
MEASUREMENTS
versus
What do we do when
buyers are asking for data that does not align with
their goals?
Have Journal Prices Really Increased Much in the Digital Age? (Scholarly Kitchen blog) http://bit.ly/11b3hP2
Excellent Metaphor
“What if the only measurement of energy costs you followed was the price of oil, while everyone was shifting to cheaper and more efficient alternatives? And what if you completely ignored the fact that everything around you was using more and more power — your lights, your phone, your car, your heat, your media center? You might come to believe that energy is getting more expensive, when actually, it’s price is rising relatively slowly while your usage is what is skyrocketing.
The same thing might be happening with print journal prices and digital journal licenses…
Good Questions
What if prices of the predominant journal form have actually been falling?
What if we’ve been measuring the wrong things, or measuring insufficiently?
And what if the growth in expenses are not the result of price increases but a result of the growth in science?”
The Real Digital Story Print subscription prices are a misleading
and inaccurate method for tracking library serials spending
“. . . libraries’ spending on periodicals has increased three-fold while their collections have tripled in size”
“Spending three times as much to get three times as much tells a very different story from the “price increases” story. . . .”
Published article output has grown 3.5% to 4% per year since 1990
Growth in research spending has been increasing by 3-4% per year
In the US, spending on scientific research has more than doubled since 1990 (from $150.2 billion to $400.5 billion in 2010, in current dollars)
Numbers versus ROI
“In the midst of all this growth, prices have risen modestly. Gantz notes that while the economy in the US from 1990 to 2010 grew at a compounded rate of 66.8% due to inflation, the effective price of an average journal is only 9% higher over the same time period. In the UK, prices have actually gone down by 11% since 2004.”
“Price increases have been caused by more science, more papers, and more journals, not by price increases in licenses. In fact, per-journal prices seem to have peaked around 2000, and steadily declined from there, as shown by the black line in the chart below.”
What do we count and share?
Titles
Clicks
Downloads
Sessions
Session length
COUNTER, (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources)
SUSHI, Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative
etc.
Or should we measure?
Was there improved customer satisfaction?
Do librarians or types of end users have different values and behaviours?
Did learning happen?
Was there an impact on research or strategic outcomes?
Did the patient live, improve, survive, thrive?
Was the decision improved?
Was the work product better. . .?
Algorithms
Search differentiator
Commercial algorithms versus those based on big data
Measuring end user success versus known item retrieval…
“Romeo and Juliet”
Problems with the unmonitored trial Wrong tests Poor sampling Mindset issues
Sharing Learning and Research
Usability versus User Experience
End users versus librarians
Known item retrieval (favourite test) versus immersion research
Lists versus Discovery
Scrolling versus pagination
Devices and browsers and agnosticism
Satisfaction and change
Individual research experience vs. impacts on e-courses, LibGuides, training materials, etc.
Real Analytics
Focus and Understand on the Whole Experience
Inside Lego™ Pieces
Foresee satisfaction and demographic data
Impact studies or Counting Opinions
Counter & Sushi data
Database usage (unique user, session, length of session, hits, downloads, etc.)
Google Analytics
Search Samples
ILS Data
Geo-IP data
What kind of librarian are you? Critical thinker or Criticizer?What is your library culture around change or innovation?
Being More Open to Change
Be the Change We Want to See
The Library as Sandbox
‘New’ Library CulturesSupport Your Team
Be the Change We Want to See
Being More Flexible
Be the Change We Want to See
Being More Open to Risk
Be the Change We Want to See
Being Open to a Mosaic of
Solutions
Be the Change We Want to See
Are you more like a laboratory or a museum? A retailer or a
carnival? A party of a morgue?What scale works?
Being Open to Ambiguity
Be the Change We Want to See
BeMoreOpen
to SocialTechnologies
and Unintended
Consequences
Be the Change We Want to See
Being Comfortable with Speed
Be the Change We Want to See
Being Open to New Ideas
Be the Change We Want to See
Let Go of Control
Be the Change We Want to See
Be Inspirational
Be the Change We Want to See
Know What Makes Us Different
Be the Change We Want to See
Tell Your Story: Until lions learn to write their own story,
the story will always be from the perspective of the hunter not the hunted.
Stephen Abram, MLS, FSLAConsultant, Dysart & Jones/Lighthouse Partners
Cel: [email protected]’s Lighthouse Blog
http://stephenslighthouse.comFacebook, Pinterest, Tumblr: Stephen Abram
LinkedIn / Plaxo: Stephen AbramTwitter: @sabram
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