MONTANA’S LIBRARIES: GOOD NEIGHBORS

A pre-planning document and white paper[1]: A case study in rural libraries

Bruce Newell, Director

MontanaLibrary Network, MontanaStateLibrary

1,000 WORD SUMMARY

Montana is a rural state. While our 745 libraries’ needs are similar to those of larger urban libraries’, it is our distances between libraries that presents a constraint and challenge and which sets us apart.

Montana’s librarians work together to an astounding degree. We may not be rich but we are willing to roll up our sleeves and help each other build barns and mend fences. Most Montana librarians realize that we truly are all in this together.“We are only as strong as our weakest library[2].” Librarians reap rewards by working together, and our customers are best served by a library community that works cooperatively.

Tax dollars and tuition payments flow from paychecks to schools and colleges. College grads settle down and have children, who in turn become students. Students use their school, community, and (if one’s available) local college libraries. Businesses are incubated in Montana libraries, and when successful, pay taxes and salaries.Parents-to-be learn about raising kids, and aging baby boomers learn about the aches of growing older. There is an ecology of libraries and library services linking Glendive to Troy, and Missoula to Plentywood. Montana libraries are like a big sticky bowl of spaghetti; no single noodle can be extracted without wiggling all others. Our libraries are bound together by shared missions, tools and processes, and especially by our users. Just like there are no throw-away Montana communities, there are no throw-away Montana libraries.

Montana libraries work together:

  • Participating in a statewide contract with OCLC for cataloging and resource sharing services, and have done so since 2000
  • Sharing a Montana union catalog, a statewide listing of materials in our libraries, using OCLC’s FirstSearch group catalog product
  • Encouraging in-state resource sharing with interlibrary loan reimbursement
  • 134 libraries share six group catalogs, many spanning the state
  • Sharing users; a growing list of libraries share the Montana Shared Catalog and treat each-others’ customers as their own
  • Twenty-six libraries work cooperatively to provide online reference services
  • Planning together, often led by the multi-type Montana State LibraryNetworking Task Force
  • Working together as the Montana Library Network in its various guises

We live in an era of change. We believe our communities’ vitality depends upon the local availability of quality library materials and services, but realize our relevance to our customers is increasingly questioned in light of Google, Yahoo, and the Web in general.

Our larger communities are, by in large, holding their own or thriving, while our smaller communities are often shrinking. Montana libraries are often severely under-funded, ranking 45th nationally for per capita public library expenditures. Our librarians have big hearts and work incredibly hard, but as a group fall short on formal training; our public libraries rank 49th nationally for librarians holding a Masters degree.

Many Montana libraries live with significant threats to our continued existence, while enjoying incredible and profuse opportunities to provide our users with the libraries they want and need. To stay relevant we must adopt a customer-centric values system that measures our successes against our customers’ successes, not astatic model of ‘good’ librarianship.

While good library services begin at home, libraries work most effectively and efficiently when they work together towards customer-centric goals. Few libraries have all the stuff and staff they need to keep their customers satisfied. With the Internet, collaboration isn’t dependent upon physical proximity; rather it’s sustained by perceived mutual benefit and a growing collaborative ethos.

Here are some of our opportunities, individually and collaboratively, to further improve library services in Montana:

  • Plan to put our customers first
  • Provide our customers with convenient access to quality library content and services
  • Add value to data and information for our users by turning it into knowledge
  • Increasingly provide every library user with personalized service
  • Manage our libraries for individual users, more like a subscription service than like a warehouse
  • Share customers; treat all Montanans as if they are our own customers
  • Look outside our library world for promising technologies and practices
  • Offer customers the option of self-service
  • Rethink how our customers get e-content and materials
  • Weave the Web into our libraries and our libraries into the Web
  • Implement standards-based solutions
  • Build local infrastructure
  • Communicate clearly and effectively
  • With our users, among our staff, and with our other-library colleagues and partners
  • Celebrate our and our partners’ triumphs
  • Rethink our workflows for both cost and efficiency
  • Measure our effectiveness in light of how we serve our customers’ needs
  • Hire and retain trained and qualified staffs
  • Ensure Montana librarians have ample opportunities for quality, relevant learning
  • Fund libraries adequately
  • Money alone won’t solve our problems, but we can’t move forward without it

This paper reflects how I think about rural libraries. I didn’t come to these conclusions on my own. I thank my colleagues both here and beyond Montana’s borders for sharing their thoughts with me. In particular I thank my co-workers at the Montana State Library, the Networking Task Force, and Alane Wilson and Pam Bailey from OCLC for their insights. For all my colleagues efforts to set me straight, these opinions are mine, as are any errors.

Under all these words are four basic thoughts:

  • Libraries are successful to the extent our customers are successful
  • Libraries must collaborate
  • Libraries, if successful, will cost their communities more, not less; but will increase their value
  • Our users are worth it

Let’s talk about what our customers want their libraries to become, come to an agreement about how we’re going to get from here to there, and then, working together, realize our customers’ dreams.
INTRODUCTION: WHAT SMALL, RURAL, WESTERN LIBRARIANS WANT

Montana’s librarians want what all librarians want[3] —

We want to be valued by our users, for who we are and why we are. We want to be our community’s center, be this community a school, university, business, government agency, non-profit organization, or a town. We want to valued by our user community, seen as a premier source for quality knowledge content and services. We want to be almost too busy, highly in demand, just on the bright side of hectic without feeling stretched beyond our breaking points.

We want our collections (print and electronic) to mirror and meet our community’s needs. We want our services to be timely, relevant, efficiently provided, and effective. Judge us by outcomes—do we connect users to content and services in a fashion that they find beneficial and essential?

We want to be extraordinarily good at what we do, judged by how much good we do for our users. We want to thrive on change, to be able to adapt to change gracefully and on time. We want lauds when we do something especially wonderful. We want, day by day, to work alongside other amazing librarians.

Finally, we want to work cheek-to-jowl with other libraries and other partners, satisfying our communities’ needs. We want collaboration to be the tide that raises all our libraries and their users.

Changing Values

The May 2005 Fast Company magazine’s cover story is “Change or Die”. The article relates that nine out of ten heart-bypass patients, given the choice of changing life-styles or risking imminent death, are unable to change. The article continues, “No wonder changing people’s behavior is the toughest challenge in business.” John Kotter is quoted on staying relevant and competitive: “The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people… Behavior change happens mostly by speaking to people’s feelings.”

Alan Deutschman, the article’s author, disputes five myths about changing behavior. He suggests that :

  • Crisis is not the most powerful impetus for change
  • Change is not motivated by fear; it is brought about by positive visions of the future
  • Facts don’t encourage change and change is not totally rational; an emotional appeal and changing our view of the world better encourages change
  • Radical, not gradual, change is often easier, because it often brings with it immediate benefits
  • Old dogs can learn new tricks; humans come ‘pre-wired’ to change and adapt

Like it or not, for our users, convenience almost always trumps quality; our job is to make quality convenient. Libraries are usually not the first place their users’ look for information; we’re way down the list for most of our communities. We need to become more user-centric, service-oriented, more efficient, and we must re-imagine ourselves as one player among many in the information ecology. Libraries need to fundamentally change our value systems to reflect current realities. Can we change, or will we die?

Our rural libraries face the same realities as do their urban cousins. The world has changed around us all. We are part of this changing world, caught up in change just like everyone and everything else. The Coalition for Networked Information’s Clifford Lynch writes[4]

“…libraries exist within [not separate from, rather part of] a complex and continuously-evolving knowledge ecosystem that encompasses the lifecycle of information and knowledge from creation through dissemination and curation to use.”

The Web has tied our libraries' fates together and has placed our users squarely in the driver's seat. Libraries are not the first place many of our users turn for ‘good stuff’. Our users value convenience over quality—lusting after the storied single click which effortlessly accesses everything. We scoff at their naiveté but secretly share their desire. Meanwhile Google adds another room to their growing content castle.

Google by itself has (arguably) changed libraries’ world as much as ever did Melville Dewey. Our customers look first to the Web for ready reference and content. Libraries are no longer #1 on the ready reference charts for most of our users. There is an increasing amount of library-like quality (or at least convenient) content and services on the Web.

At our heart, libraries are educational institutions, connecting users with knowledge objects and services. We are distinct enterprises—different from newspapers, bookstores, publishers, or market-research firms, distinguished by this connection process. It is noteworthy that most of our customers turn to a library only after they've looked elsewhere for information.

Rural Western libraries, in particular smaller libraries in Montana, have two aspects that make them different from rural libraries in more densely populated regions:

  • Many small rural libraries serve communities with economies and populations either stagnant or in decline. Libraries from these communities are often impoverished, and can only offer their customers a relatively limited set of materials and services.
  • The communities they serve are often quite isolated. Among other things, this means that the librarians in small rural western libraries work alone, without co-workers. Their colleagues are often miles away. Rural librarians in the US Midwest, for instance, can drive less than a half an hour to share a cup of coffee with their colleagues. In Montana and much of the rural West, a shared cup of joe comes only after an hour or hour-and-a-half drive.

Montana in a nutshell[5]

“We the people of Montana grateful to God for the quiet beauty of our state, the grandeur of our mountains, the vastness of our rolling plains, and desiring to improve the quality of life, equality of opportunity and to secure the blessings of liberty for this and future generations do ordain and establish this constitution.”

Preamble to Montana’s Constitution, amended in 1972

Montana is a big, wide-open state; only Alaska, California, and Texas have more square miles. West of the Rockies is forested and mountainous, beribboned with fast-flowing rivers and crashing cascadescoursing toward the Columbia. Central Montana boasts proud mountain ranges, wide valleys, sprawling plains, and rivers flowing leisurely into the Missouri. Eastern Montana features the Northern Plains, punctuated by rumpled coulees, hills, badlands, and at night, a rich blanket of stars.

Montana is the home of the Blackfeet, Crow, Salish, Kootenai, Gros Ventre, Assiniboine, Sioux, Little Shell Chippewa, Northern Cheyenne, and the Chippewa-Cree. Montana is almost 90% white, but includes 6% American Indian residents. In Montana, Sitting Bull and Chief Joseph were running circles around the U.S. Calvary less than 130 years ago[6]. Montana tribal members now live on seven Indian Nation reservations as well as throughout Montana. Homesteaders were still putting the prairie to the plow in the early twentieth century. Montana became the 41st state on November 8, 1889.

Montana is suffering a widening gap between have and have-not communities; some towns are growing while others are shrinking. This is reflected in our communities’ libraries as well. Typically, libraries in our larger or growing communities are doing better than those in our smaller or shrinking communities. An April 15, 2005 article in the Helena Independent Record spoke about…

… The gradual exodus of people continues from Montana's eastern prairies and north-central wheat country, while robust growth in more urban areas scattered across western and south-central Montana shows little sign of slowing, new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show…

[Citing Jim Sylvester, an economist specializing in demographic analysis at the Montana Bureau of Business and Economic Research] … The most rapidly shrinking populations cover all of rural eastern Montana with the exception of Roosevelt and Big Horn counties… [Homes of the FortPeck, Crow, and Northern Cheyenne Indian reservations]

Sylvester said the trend of rising urban populations at the expense of rural areas has been under way since about 1970 when the baby boomers began moving away from home, looking for what they consider bigger and better places to live…

The decreasing populations in rural areas will continue, with some communities eventually disappearing entirely, he said. But many cities like Havre, Lewistown and Glendive have enough residents and are located far enough from other cities that they will always have a population requiring a core of services like hospitals and government agencies, he added…

Helena Independent Record, Bob Anez - Associated Press

Small communities are shrinking, while a few areas, Bozeman, the Bitterroot, and the Flathead, are now studded with million-dollar trophy homes and housing projects, and these scenic once rural areas are building-up like weeds.

We’re relatively poor with a gross state product ranking 48th and state and local expenditures per capita ranking 29th. Our average annual pay is dismally 50th, with librarians’ salaries reflecting this dismal trend. Our cost of living is about average, save our cost of housing which varies wildly from about the national average in our larger communities, to way below average in smaller towns.

We get by, with average household consumer expenditures of $21,747, just about half the US average of $41,554. Most of us grudgingly but willingly pay what we ironically call “the wilderness tax”, that is, the difference in Montana’s salaries for those paid in similar jobs elsewhere. We don’t get the big bucks but we get Glacier and Yellowstone national parks, great fishing, and our justly famous Big Sky.

In a burst of civic silliness we deregulated our consumer energy industries several legislatures ago, and the ‘good deal’ we used to enjoy for heat and light has disappeared (with gas bills doubling for many of us in the relatively mild 2004--2005 winter).

What’s contributed to the decline of our most rural isolated communities?

  • Agricultural slump
  • Lumber industry cycles
  • Energy industry boom and bust
  • Environmental degradation
  • Aging population
  • Economic capability

Agricultural slump—A long term dip in grain and beef prices, a ten-year drought, the growth of agribusiness with resulting consolidation of ownership and a decreasing need for ranch hands, and changed business models for storing and transporting grain and meat to market; all have conspired to decrease the economic vitality of our farm- and ranch-based rural communities.

Lumber industry cycles—Forests are logged in cycles. It takes 50 to 80 years after cutting a Montana forest for it to get big enough to log again. We have cut most of our easy-to-get-at timber, and now wait for stumps to be replaced by marketable standing timber. This, in combination with a changing global market for softwoods, has left most of Montana’s lumber-oriented communities in decline.