Achieving Alignment With Our Users; or, How Do You Spell Synergy?
Michael Fox
August 1, 2008
The punch line goes like this. "There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who believe that there are two kinds of people in this world and those who don't."
There are lumpers and splitters. If you are arranging a disordered manuscript collection, the ability to differentiate and consolidate is useful. Or watching Sesame Street. You know- one of these things is not like the others. As archivists, we have divided ourselves into multiple subspecies. We have often dismissed librarians and museum curators as having concerns and practices that are different from and incompatible in significant ways with our own. Before I briefly describe how my institution has worked to break down those barriers, I first want to offer a short and unscientific analysis of the ways in which we have created these silos and a rationale for minimizing such divisions.
The conventional wisdom has been this. Our three professions deal with different types of collections with distinct needs that have resulted in separate practices within our individual domains. The reality is more complex and does not fully support that simple explanation. There clearly are differences among libraries, museums, and archives. But at least with respect to collections, they are neither inevitable nor immutable. They certainly do not fall neatly into categories by type of institution. Rather, they are clearly understood only with reference to a given organization's specific clientele and its institutional context (that is, mission, funding, placement of the program within a larger organization such as a government or university), as well as the nature and specific requirements of its holdings. Ultimately, these matters of clientele, context, and collections are all external to staff. It's not really about us after all.
Let's consider some specific arguments I've heard, with a few illustrative anecdotes, for the differences in the work of these three professions.
We are distinctive on the basis of what we collect and preserve.
While this is true to an extent, too often there has been an exaggerated emphasis on the differences rather than the commonalities in the materials we collect as the justification for particular practices.
As a graduate student, I was exposed to the distinction that real archivists, those working with public records, made between themselves and those other, not-really-archivist people, who deal with historical manuscripts. I encountered it first in Schellenberg's Modern Archives with his characterization of modern manuscripts as distinct from real archives since they are created in a "haphazard manner." Personal papers seen as defective public records.
It works the other way too. In library school, I encountered a profession that divided collections into books and non-books. And my friend Steve Hensen often refers to library cataloging rules that treat manuscripts as a form of defective book.
But even where differences do exist, their uniqueness is minimized by the reality that each of these three types of institutions often finds itself managing materials more commonly identified with the other two. Martha Yee's film and television archives at UCLA is an extreme example but only as to the scale of the overlap in physical formats within a single archives and not as to their existence.
There are differences in collections that justify different professional techniques.
Yes and no. Certainly there are distinct issues in the handling of published and unpublished texts, films and still images, three-dimensional objects, etc. But librarians and archivists have found many of each other's practices to be useful and not the exclusive provenance of either.
I remember standing in line waiting to be seated for breakfast during the SAA conference in St. Louis and having to hold my tongue as two senior members of the profession bemoaned the appearance of the MARC-AMC format. It was a disaster for the profession because it was making archivists too much like librarians. Horresco referens. I shudder at the telling, as Vergil would say.
Actually, I was not surprised as I had previously heard one of these gentlemen inveigh against "subject oriented bibliographers." From his remarks I deduced that he was outraged by two aspects of recent developments. The first revealed itself in his disdain for content analysis. Perhaps he adhered to the "classical" belief that knowledge of the provenance of records is all one needs to discover relevant materials in an archives. Was it possible that he had never actually done reference work where having multiple points of access to materials was useful?
His second concern was the idea of item level description. Indeed, I have heard it said on many occasions that collective arrangement and description are the hallmarks of the archival profession, techniques that separate us from the lower orders, the hoi polloi of librarians and curators. Sheer nonsense. We have merely transformed a practical solution to the problem of quantity into a tenant of faith. We have forgotten that historically the description of manuscripts was based on item level calendars. In records management and archives systems in Europe and Australia, materials have always been controlled at the document level. And if you've scanned collections, you know that you have entered the world of item-level, nay page-level, control.
Can we think of other practices that need reconsideration? I bet you have your own list.
Why are these differentiations problematic? Have we launched into a course of action as a solution without first identifying the problem? The other panelists will explain their motivations but for us in Minnesota the situation was obvious. As we planned for a new facility in 1986, it was apparent how our five separate reading rooms and seven different collections catalogs, all constructed according to different principles, were impeding the research process. For the past 22 years, we have pursued a user-centric concept we've referred to as central reference, one-stop shopping for the researcher.
But why do I focus so much on the importance of customer preferences? Aren't our professional experiences and traditions relevant and significant? Are we throwing the baby out with the bath water?
I believe that the answer to those questions lies in the social imperative to create value. For better or worse, we live in a market economy. We are rewarded, more or less perfectly, both individually and collectively, to the extent to which we create value that is rewarded in the marketplace. In a for-profit environment, value becomes apparent in individual transactions. I sell and you buy. In the public, educational, and non-profit sectors where most of us work, the idea of creating public value is more complex because it is less apparent who gets to determine what constitutes worth. Customers are more diffuse and the measurements of success less readily apparent. We create value downstream for our individual patrons and upstream for the governments, universities, and other sponsoring institutions that expect more general benefits from us such as the diffusion of information and knowledge, the training of scholars, or the formation of civically engaged individuals. For some of you, the upstream customer may be regents or the provost or a chancellor. For me, it is our board of directors and a host of private and public stakeholders.
The second rationale for removing barriers is efficiency. In addition to satisfied customers, we can also create public value by operating more efficiently. Our institutions function more effectively when there are shared values and practices.
How does one begin to implement this new perspective? Again, others on this panel will have their stories. Based on our experience, I suggest approaching the challenge strategically and tactically.
Strategy
The steps for any change management, whether it is precipitated by external forces or internal strategic planning, are well known.
1. The first is always a public commitment to the new direction.
2. The second is audience definition, remembering to look both ways- up and down the stream. A useful exercise early in this phase might be to consider the words you use to describe those whom you serve. The choices may be illuminating. Are they
audience- a marketing relationship
patrons- sponsors, supporters
clients- a professional association
customers- a commercial transaction
users- those who consume or absorb
I often discern subtle nuances in attitudes in how institutions and colleagues use these terms, revealing specific attitudes and sometimes tensions. Service is good. Commerce may leave us uncomfortable.
3. With an emphasis on meeting user needs, an assessment of their expectations and their perception of our utility in that process is mandatory. How do they value us? We may be the sellers, but in the marketplace it is the buyer who ultimately sets the price. Even for gasoline. Surveys and focus groups are useful instruments for data gathering but helpful information can be gleaned from emails and reference questions. It requires no great insight to conclude that we produce more discernable public value when our collections are more readily and easily accessible.
Conversely, barriers to collection access, including those that result from the detritus of our professional traditions, reduce the value of our work, diminish the level of public value we create, and make us less meritorious of support. The truth is that the public does not care a rip about our divisions and boundaries and differentiations. Unhappy customers have a tendency to take their business elsewhere. When that happens, we loose support and cannot sustain our mission.
4. Finally, the commitment to action must be realized through an iterative process of setting goals, creating performance measures, and assessing results.
Tactics
Several things have worked for us.
1. We began by defining tangible goals. Central reference would involve a single, integrated research facility, a consolidated reference staff, and what we then described as a common catalog of all our holdings. Today we talk about a federated search of various access tools and electronic resources: databases, indexes, finding aids, and yes, the good old MARC catalog. Soon the museum collection management system will be added as the last major component in our integrated resource access system. We are already moving on to the next phase- integrating into that search engine access to information from other institutions. Initially, it will come from partner historical organizations and libraries in Minnesota and North and South Dakota.
2. We did not assume that all questions could be resolved in advance so instead we created an organizational framework in which those conversations could occur. We began consolidating departments in 1987 with a merger of the library and archives functions. The museum joined the fold in 2004 when the collecting of manuscripts, library, and three-dimensional materials, and the state archives acquisitions function were melded into a single collections department.
It has not always been easy over those 20 years. Several forces have contributed to the success we have achieved: the maturation of our professions, the emergence of new technologies, the passage of time, persistence, and, speaking frankly, key retirements.
3. The third tactic has been to approach the situation incrementally and opportunistically. Just centralizing the reference staff involved significant cross-training. Long-time employees who were experts suddenly found themselves functioning as novices, answering questions in areas outside their former specializations. That's hard.
4. The final tactic has been psychological. When change occurs, there is a human tendency to look back, to dwell on what is no longer happening, to value old ways. We found it useful to look at the other end of the horse, to focus attention instead on the value of the new services we were providing. We emphasized benefits to our users as a non-partisan value that everyone could embrace. It was surprising how that simple shift in focus- toward the customer and away from the past- has helped staff move forward. Tasks that are now of lower priority slip aside and some of the old baggage gets dropped along the way.
Is this a revolution? To be honest, revolution is too heady a word for me. But incremental change can be useful, and necessary. An expanding user base brings expectations that we must embrace, not merely respond to.
The working title of this paper, as found in the program, focused on synergy, the power that comes through working with others. But this presentation obviously has morphed into a discussion of internal and external alignment with our customers. It is that shared emphasis that creates a synergistic movement towards fulfillment of our institutional mission in Minnesota: to help people create a personal connection with history so that they "may draw strength and perspective from the past and find purpose for the future."
Thank you.
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