1. Understanding
the
Dark
Side
Stephen Abram, MLS
Stephen.abram@gmail.com
stephenslighthouse.com
California State University

2. 1991-2013 Living on the Dark Side

4. The Complex Value Proposition
Smelly Or
Yellow Sex
Liquid Appeal?

5. Nouns
 Quantitative Focus  Qualitative Focus
 Books, eBooks  Serve and Change
 Magazines  Answer and Decide
 Websites  Engage and Discuss
 Buildings, Branches  Link and Learn
 Rooms  Entertain and Play
 Desks  Tell a story
 Programs  Do
 Nouns can be warehoused and  Action verbs imply dynamism
‘cut’ and impact

6. Are you locked into an old library mindset?

7. A Verb . . . an Experience, enlivened for an Audience

8. A Noun . . . A foundation but not sufficient
without professional animation

9. Grocery Stores

10. Cookbooks, Chefs . . .

11. Cookbooks, Chefs . . .

12. Meals

13. So What Should
Our Library
Priorities Be?
Remaining Relevant and Having a Positive Impact

14. Some Insights into
Publishing and
Vendors
Positives and Negatives
Some of you will likely hear only one side

15. Employment in Vendor Land
 Thomson Electronic Publishing
 Thomson (TPP, etc.)
 Micromedia
 IHS
 ProQuest
 SirsiDynix
 Gale
 Cengage Learning

16. Librarians in Vendors
 Sales
 Marketing
 Training
 Product Development
 Testing
 Executive including CEO
 Editorial
 R&D
 Etc.

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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, …)

20. 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)

22. Differences in the Private and Public Sector
Approaches to Development
Private Sector Public Sector
 Competitive advantage is the ideal but cooperate  Collaborative advantage is the ideal but still
on structural issues like standards compete
 Innovation is key to long-term existence  Good service is the key to long-term existence
 Focus on clients and marketshare
 Focus on citizens and social contract
 Business strategies
 Political agendas and government imperatives
 Responsibility to shareholders or owner/investors
 Responsibility to funder and to citizens
 Increasing revenue
 Wise use of tax dollars
 Risk oriented
 Economic success is a prime personal motivator  Risk averse
 Competitors, partners and allies  Making a positive impact on society is a strong
motivator
 e-Business is the challenge
 Other departments, levels of government, unions
 Focus on “results”
 e-Government is the challenge
 Focus on “process”

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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

27. 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.)

28. 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

30. Are you on the „hits‟ train?

31. 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

32. DATA
Risk

33. QUALITATIVE INFORMATION
versus
QUANTITATIVE DATA

34. STATISTICS
versus
MEASUREMENTS

35. What do we do
when buyers
are asking for
data that does
not align with
their goals?

36. Have Journal Prices Really Increased Much in the Digital Age?
(Scholarly Kitchen blog) http://bit.ly/11b3hP2

37. 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…

38. 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?”

39. 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)

40. 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.”

42. 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.

43. 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. . .?

44. 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

45. 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.

46. Real Analytics

47. Focus and Understand on the Whole Experience

48. 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

55. What kind of librarian are you? Critical thinker or Criticizer?
What is your library culture around change or innovation?

56. Being More Open to Change
Be the Change We Want to See

57. The Library as Sandbox

58. „New‟ Library Cultures
Support Your Team
Be the Change We Want to See

59. Being More Flexible
Be the Change We Want to See

60. Being More Open to Risk
Be the Change We Want to See

61. Being Open to
a Mosaic of
Solutions
Are you more like a laboratory
or a museum? A retailer or a
carnival? A party of a morgue?
What scale works?
Be the Change We Want to See

62. Being Open to Ambiguity
Be the Change We Want to See

63. Be
More
Open
to Social
Technologies
and
Unintended
Consequences
Be the Change We Want to See

64. Being Comfortable with Speed
Be the Change We Want to See

65. Being Open to New Ideas
Be the Change We Want to See

66. Let Go of Control
Be the Change We Want to See

67. Be Inspirational
Be the Change We Want to See

68. Know What Makes Us Different
Be the Change We Want to See

69. 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.

70. Stephen Abram, MLS, FSLA
Consultant, Dysart & Jones/Lighthouse Partners
Cel: 416-669-4855
stephen.abram@gmail.com
Stephen’s Lighthouse Blog
http://stephenslighthouse.com
Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr: Stephen Abram
LinkedIn / Plaxo: Stephen Abram
Twitter: @sabram
SlideShare: StephenAbram1