Every 6 weeks, I schedule a 4-day weekend for myself to help decompress, detach, and destress from work. This long weekend will be busier than I’d prefer, but I’m still planning to get some me-time in. On the might-do list:

  • 💇 get a haircut
  • 🍜 treat myself to lunch
  • 📖 go to the park and read a book
  • 💉 take me and my kids to get our flu vax and covid boosters
  • 🧘 yoga
  • 🪴 gardening (including weeding, pulling out last of summer crops, and mulching)
  • 🎧 catch up on podcasts
  • 🎄 design the family holiday card
  • 🪱 watch Dune
  • 🎵 listen to Sufjan Stevens’s latest album
  • 🍪 make snickerdoodle cookies

text on a magnetic board that reads "whisper in the library not today"

It’s a common misconception that word of mouth is “organic”: that it just happens; but this belief negates the agency required for word of mouth (WOM) to be successful. WOM requires antecedents: specifically, customer commitment, trust, and customer satisfaction, according to one meta-analysis of 60 years of WOM research (Lang and Hyde 2013). These positive traits need to exist prior to WOM marketing efforts, which can be either direct or indirect and produce both positive and negative affective, cognitive, and behavioral effects on customers.

It is the role of the outreach librarian to play three leadership roles vis-a-vis WOM marketing: building the foundation; indirectly managing WOM; and directly managing WOM.

Building the foundation requires working with all units within the library to ensure high-quality service, collections, and programs, and then aligning external messaging with that expectation of quality. Indirect WOM management involves much of the usual promotional work that raises awareness of the library (e.g., videos, blog posts, and testimonials), but also includes work that encourages student-staff relationships (e.g., student engagement activities, meet-and-greet events, student advisory boards). Direct WOM management involves far more targeted work, including paid testimonials, viral marketing, rewards for sharing library content, and student ambassador programs.

I would hazard to guess that outreach librarians spend most of their time on indirect WOM management, not enough time on building the foundation, and almost no time on direct WOM management (the latter for lack of funds no doubt). 

We are at a distinct advantage being on a college campus. While colleges are not completely closed information systems (cf. Chatman’s seminal work on information sharing in prisons), messages can get trapped within the system even when the nodes (i.e. students) swap out every four years. Like any pseudo-insular organization, ideas that develop on campus can linger long after their initial spark. This is word of mouth. Moreover, we have a captive audience. So while our ideas have to compete with many other units on campus, we are somewhat shielded by the marketing influences of the off-campus world. 

So when something spreads “word of mouth” on a campus, don’t be too quick to attribute it to the innate qualities of the message or the nature of the service, collection, or program you’re promoting. Instead, consider the foundation that has already been established and how you might continue to actively maintain that foundation into the future. This is the work of the outreach librarian.

References

Chatman, E. A. (1999). A theory of life in the round. Journal of the American Society for information Science, 50(3), 207-217.

Lang, B., & Hyde, K. F. (2013). Word of mouth: what we know and what we have yet to learn. Journal of Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction and Complaining Behavior, 26, 1-18.

image credit: Charles Hackley Agency on Flickr, cc-by 2.0

burning star in space

It’s a mad world. Mad as Bedlam.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Trifles make the sum of life.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

I don’t run the social media account for my university, but I do oversee the accounts hosted by the library. As Head of Outreach and Engagement, managing the various external (i.e., campus facing) channels is part of my portfolio. This is of course in addition to research and service, collection development, faculty liaison work, leading a department, and all the other “normal” academic librarian duties. Social media is only a tiny fraction of how I spend my time. 

That said, a recent article by the Chronicle, “This is One of the Loneliest Jobs on Campus” by Megan Zahneis made me feel seen. But before I get into it: have you said thank you to your social media manager yet today? Have you told them how much you respect and appreciate their work? Have you given them a bottle of wine? Go do that first. I’ll wait.

Drink bleach and die

“To manage an institution’s social-media accounts is to act as its voice to hundreds of thousands of people, and to take in those people’s thoughts, questions, and complaints in real time.”

When things are going well, you can feel like you’re on fire. The excitement of developing new content (yarr!), seeing people fall in love with it, watching engagement numbers rise… all of that can be thrilling. But just as quickly it can turn sour. I once posted an image of a new book from our popular reading collection that was about Trump’s legal troubles: I immediately found myself the target of MAGA trolls. They were not even our students! That didn’t make it any easier to read. I’ve internalized negative reviews of my organization, even though I know that’s absurd. When you’re the one creating and pushing out all the messaging, it’s difficult not to take it personally. 

Keys to the brand

“[Social media accounts are] the keys to your brand. Surprisingly often, those keys are held by a single person.”

In one survey cited, 48 percent of respondents were the sole individuals running social media accounts for their uni. Another 35 percents were on teams of two. While the article didn’t mention it, I would bet those 35% are much happier and well-adjusted than the other 48%. There’s solidarity in teams, not to mention the comfort in knowing that it’s not all on you to figure out. Creating content daily that is engaging, unique, up-to-date, and useful is … painfully difficult work. I’ve been doing this type of work for almost a decade, but even I have days where I’m at a complete loss for ideas. More often, though, it’s the lack of time that’s the killer.

I have been advocating for an assistant to my position for years, specifically someone with a few years experience creating content for the web. As the article notes, most of the people doing this work [well] are not 18-year olds and interns: they are professionals who have been working in higher ed social for years. Understanding internet culture, knowing how to critically follow and examine trends, being able to create content that matches the platform and algorithm you’re posting to, and being able to do all that within the limits of your institution’s mission and branding guidelines: that takes skills, knowledge, and experience. In an academic library setting, moreover, you also need to juggle the overlapping context of our own professional standards/expectations for how libraries “do” social media. 

“[Social media managers] are the Swiss Army knives of a college’s public-outreach apparatus, often incorporating copywriting, photography and videography, graphic design, marketing, and public relations into a day’s work.”

Collaborating from Day 1

“Our team — including social media — is involved at the outset of any planning, including the strategy for releasing those plans,” [Wilson] wrote.

I cannot count the number of times colleagues have come to me and said “Hey, we’ve just [done this thing]. Can you get the word out on social?” As if taking a photo and writing some copy is all you need to “get the word out.” Sure, I can do that, but it’s a waste of my time and won’t get you the outcome you think it will. Instead, as the person quoted above notes, loop in your social media leads from the start. Include them in the initial planning meetings. For most projects, if I’m involved from the beginning, I can develop a much more robust and interesting promotional campaign.

Or I can just Tweet about it.

image credit: European Space Agency on Flickr, cc-by 2.0

There comes a time in every librarian’s life when your library decides to migrate the catalog. No matter what role you play in the organization, you’re gonna feel it. This past year, MPOW moved from Sierra to Alma, the first such migration in 30 years. As the head of outreach and engagement, I would be responsible for overseeing campus messaging. 

In September 2022, I drafted the initial communications plan. This included key messages and their explanation, a list of target audiences (both primary and secondary), communications channels, deliverables and assets to be created, a production and implementation timeline, and a matrix of responsibility that listed who was responsible for creating what and when. I presented this draft to our ILS Migration Steering Committee, the library’s leadership council, and various stakeholders. Six iterations later I had a completed plan. 

Along the way, I asked for buy-in from each and every stakeholder. I recorded the changes to the plan in a change log, and noted the date of each stakeholder approval. A created lists of every action item and recorded who was responsible for every asset and its deadline. I created a list of check-in dates—three for every stakeholder—by which I would touch base about various aspects of the plan.

It was a robust plan. The most robust plan I’ve ever created. And while I cannot prove that it was foolproof, the library successfully migrated its catalog with no campus outcry. Certainly, there were some complaints: many of the functions previously available are currently still in production as we slowly check off all our post-migration to-dos. But not a single person has said they were unaware of the change. In fact, many faculty and staff have made comments to the effect of “oh, I heard your have a big systems change happening…”

Now, one could read this as indifference, but as a the person who oversees communications, I read this as success. “So, you’ve heard of me, then.”

What I’m reading

In this essay I will: On distraction by David Schurman Wallace

“A common idea of distraction presupposes that you’re turning away from something more important that you ought to be paying attention to instead. And you ought to be working all the time.”

LeVar Burton Wants You to Read Banned Books by Heven Haile

“I think, in truth, the effect of book bans has been limited. What happens, though, is people who engage in this kind of censorship self-identify as folks you need to keep your eye on. And for me, that’s gold, because now I see you.”

Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible by Gabe Bullard

“Recognizing that social media is not a key to clicks seems like a correction to years of chasing traffic through outside platforms.”

Links to the past

  • 1 year ago: Service work is broken. Relying on committees to accomplish work that is operationally necessary to the library, while also expecting (read: allowing) those committee seats to be filled by “volunteers” is a recipe for failure.
  • 6 years ago: Subtle nudges in library programming. How we at MPOW try to subtly remind our guests about future events (other attempts are not so subtle).
  • 10 years ago: When parenting was easy. It’s been mostly downhill since then.

Overheard online

Correspondence disclaimers through history

1660: I have written you a long letter because I did not have time to write a short one.
1950: Dictated but not read
2010: Sent from my phone, please excuse typos
2030: Composed by AI

overholt on Mastodon

I haven’t been this excited about a new Broadway cast recording since Wicked. The teasers started dropping on TikTok a couple months ago and I immediately set up an alert on Spotify.

Listening notes

  • Did the show always start with an organ solo? I love this.
  • The diction on “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd” is ::chef’s kiss::
  • The orchestra has got main character energy!
  • Jordan Fisher has a lovely voice, but it’s too “Disney prince” for my taste
  • Analeigh Ashford’s voice, on the other hand, will transport you to another plane of existence. It’s a universe of its own.
  • I love how gentle Groban is on “My Friends”. My ears are being caressed.
  • “Epiphany” lives in my head… rent. free.
  • The fervent chaos of “God, That’s Good” … what a dervish!
  • “Johanna (Act 2 Sequence)” is like a liquid sound bath
  • With apologies to my actual children, give me a child like Gaten Matarazzo in “Not While I’m Around”

I keep joking (half joking?) to my wife that I might fly to New York for 48 hours just to see this show.

“I am just going outside and may be some time.”

Lawrence Oates, qtd. in Robert Falcon Scott, Diary, 16-17 May 1912.

When Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram launched, I was an early adopter. I remember when Facebook was limited to .edu email addresses, when Twitter mobile meant SMS, and when Instagram felt like weak-sauce Flickr.

Since the meteoric rise of the Big 3, I’ve been reluctant to get involved in other platforms. I’ve stepped back from social media more generally over the past few years, even before the towers of Twitter began to crumble. By 2019, I had deleted all my Facebook content and de-activated my Instagram account; and while I had set my tweets to auto-delete, I was still actively engaging with my Twitter community. The Elon take-, make-, and break- over pushed me over the edge and I stopped posting completely last spring. Many of my connections left the platform. Some are still there, but the exodus of so many is hard to ignore.

I am still debating whether to get back involved with Twitter, now that some of the dust has settled and those who stuck around are tweeting regularly again. In the meantime, I’ve joined Mastodon. I’m happy to be on a server hosted for library and museum folk. It’s definitely quieter. I’m still not sure I’m doing it right. I do love the content warnings. Even if it’s for things I’m OK with (e,g., politics), it makes it easier to skip over if I’m not in the mood. 

In any case, you can find me glammr.us/@johnxlibris. See you there!

Garden updates

The winter garden is in! I have carrots, golden beets, celery, Tokyo bekana, onions, garlic, cabbage, spinach, and potatoes. The okra, peppers, and watermelon are still trucking along as well (such is garden life in a coastal zone 10b). In planter trays I have fledgling cauliflower and Brussel sprouts, but they are slow-going and I’m starting to suspect I’ll need transplants.

What I’m reading

We are not supposed to live like this by Erin Remblance

“How can we care about species loss when we cannot name the species that live in our own community?”

My Saturday self versus my Sunday self by Tom Ellison

“…with the tail of Godzilla, the tentacles of Cthulhu, and the politics of Elon Musk.”

xQc is stealing content by LegalEagle

This is a fascinating rumination on the possible legal outcomes for YouTube reaction videos.

Links to the past

  • 1 year ago: On arm twisting and outreach work. I”t’s like that meme about everyone’s reaction when the social media person shows up to your office: Shit. Shit. Shit.” 
  • 6 years ago: Learning to live with it. An important life lesson was learned that day.
  • 10 years ago: Did I mention… It’s been a decade since I started my first “capital L” librarian job!

Overhead online

“my perpetual advice to new university students: go the fuck to class and go the fuck to bed. almost all student crises stem from not doing those two things”

abadidea on Mastodon

decanter and wine glass next to bottle of zolo mablec

Sometimes you just need something simple, fun, and easy-going. This wine is joyous. If it were at a party, they wouldn’t be the star of the show, but they would be the person you never tire of having around you. “Hey, here comes Zolo! What’s happening, Zolo!” This wine is fruit through and through. On the nose, I get squashed blueberries (with a few stems and leaves left in). On the mouth, tight medium tannins, a hint of black pepper and loads of black cherry. The finish is gentle, with a lingering taste of watermelon jolly rancher.

“As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.”

Josh Billings, quoted in Evan Esar, The Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (1949)

One of the most successful actions I’ve taken as a supervisor is to regularly ask my employees for feedback on my performance in robust and meaningful ways. In 2022, I enrolled in a leadership course at MPOW that required my direct reports, peers, and supervisor to assess my leadership skills. The results provided me with invaluable information about where I needed to improve as a manager, but also where I could successfully lean into certain aptitudes for leadership. I am incredibly grateful to have had that experience and for the time my colleagues took to answer the survey questions.

Prior to that, I had already implemented an internal mechanism for upward feedback. In 2020, I wanted to ask my team to evaluate my performance. However, I knew two things to be true: (1) It would be impossible for me not to know who submitted feedback (my team is only three people in addition to myself); and (2) not every person on my team had had the same experience with me as a manager. Even the most honest of my employees would likely hold some things back. And I don’t blame them: managers have direct influence over their employees’ work-life and salary. But my team all agreed that some mechanism for upward feedback was necessary, provided it offered a space for honest discussion and psychological safety.

To tackle both these issues, I developed a simple system for upward feedback that provided me with the information I needed about my performance, while still allowing my employees to maintain their anonymity. It also had the added benefit of being a team-building exercise, since they could compare notes on their different experiences of me as a manager. As one of my employees noted, “We were able to ‘norm’ our experiences of you as a manager against our own biases, experiences, and preferences.” The end results was an action plan for my performance (which I tasked myself with responding to and further developing), in much the same way that I do for them during annual reviews each year. 

I’ve posted the entire tool below. You are welcome to use and adapt! (CC-BY-SA)


My department’s upward feedback tool 2020

We all have blind spots that we are not aware of. We all make mistakes. The primary purpose of this exercise is to help me identify my blind spots as a supervisor/manager and address them proactively. Additionally, this exercise will help me identify what you think works well so I can continue to enhance those actions.

As the lead for our department, I want us to be effective, both individually and (more importantly) collectively. This means we need to be more than just a group of coordinated parts. We have to be an integrated, mutually beneficial team. It takes effort to be a team: we share the best and worst of each of us. So it takes some amount of consensus about our shared goals and experiences in order to keep moving forward.

To that end, I’d like to hear feedback from you, whether it be about my managerial skills or work in general. This is meant to be both an assessment mechanism and a team-building activity.

What I will do

Once you provide me with feedback, I will provide you with a written response to each point raised and, where possible, I will tell you what actions I will take to address your recommendations. If I am not able to take action, I will provide an explanation for that.

What you will do

You will work together to draft a single assessment document, no more than 3 pages if possible. It should be authored collectively and anonymously. Any recommendations or comments should be agreed upon by the entire group. Strive for 100% consensus.

In that way, (1) I will not be able to assign any comments to a single person and (2) you can find common ground among your colleagues both in your assessment of me and your recommendations for future actions.

Here are the questions you should try to answer:

  1. What do you see as your supervisor’s greatest strengths?
  2. What area(s) do you think your supervisor should develop in order to be more effective?
  3. Are there other comments about your supervisor that you would like to share?

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask me.


What I’m reading

100 things I know by Mari Andrew

I especially like #20. I’ve stopped trying to kill spiders in the house and instead try to help them find their way out. I also say “good morning” and “excuse me, friends” to the bees each day when I water my garden. There’s something profound in acknowledging you’re not the most important creature in the room. 

Proof You Can Do Hard Things by Nat Eliason

“The ability to do hard things is perhaps the most useful ability you can foster in yourself or your children. And proof that you are someone who can do them is one of the most useful assets you can have on your life resume.”

Reading Well by Simon Sarris

“Reading is letting someone else model the world for you.”

Garden update

This is the last of the summer harvest. My tomatoes, beans, and corn have mostly dried up or gone to seed. There are still peppers and butternut squash that could outlast the month. Even one of my watermelon vines is making a Hail Mary effort to survive. But now is the time to start planting winter crops. I already have cauliflower, broccoli, Brussel sprouts, and celery seeds in starter pots.

Links to the past

Overheard online

“I love public libraries not just because of what they’ve done for me personally, but because they are little socialist oases in the capitalist desert hellscape of twenty-first century America.”

Karawynn Long on “The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries

panorama photo of sunrise over the crater at Haleakala

“Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie.”

Pierre de Ronsard (Sonnets pour Hélène bk. 1 no .43, 1578)

I just returned from a weeklong vacation. Not a staycation. Not a planned adventure. A real do-nothing, plan-nothing, expect-nothing vacation where, with the exception of one personal excursion and two family dinner reservations, I had no plans each day other than to “figure it out when I wake up.” It’s the first such vacation I’ve taken in… well, ever. Every extended trip in the past decade has been planned to the bone: London, Northern California, Prague, France. Each of these had a detailed itinerary; and gods damn it everyone was going to follow it!

Not this time.

This time I went to Maui. And I did nothing. I did nothing for days. With the exception of the aforementioned excursion (to see the sun rise over Haleakalā) and the two family dinners (made at others’ requests), each day was its own discovery. 

Coming back from a vacation of this magnitude (in detachment, not length) would take some getting used to. I deleted Teams from my phone before I left. I’ve never had email on my phone so that connection was already severed. I didn’t bring a laptop or tablet device. I told my team they could contact me, but only if it was worth a phone call (which was essentially the same as saying don’t). So I knew when I returned I would be coming back as if I had completely jumped off the prime timeline.

I’ve long exorcised the Sunday scaries from my life (with the help of a therapist), but I had the Sunday scaries this time. It took an inordinent amount of willpower not to start “cleaning up my email” the day before. I had to remind myself that work never ends, and that “getting a head start” isn’t possible when there is no finish line. I let it go. So here is some additional advice on how I managed to successfully re-enter the office after an extended vacation.

  1. Create a buffer. Before you leave, block off the day you return to the office on your calendar. Don’t schedule or plan any meetings. Make sure your shared calendar shows you as “busy” so folks don’t put a meeting there while you’re away.
  2. Manage expectations. While you’re at it, set an away message that essentially says “Don’t email me now.” My message this time was as follows: “I am out of the office on holiday until Tuesday, July 18. If you need a response from me, please email me after that date. (I will not have access to email while I’m away and I will not be able to “catch up” on email when I return.) For general library inquiries, you can contact…” (One day, I hope it becomes company policy/culture to block emails when someone is on vacation).
  3. Ask a friend. Before jumping into email, ask your team “What did I miss that I should pay attention to first?” Your colleagues, especially if you have a good rapport, will know what matters most to you.
  4. Speed clean. Once you do start processing things, process all the easy messages first: the ones that don’t require a response, the junk mail, the requests you will pretend you never saw. Get those out of the way if for anything to reduce the unread count on your inbox folder.
  5. Be kind to yourself. Take frequent breaks throughout the day. Take a walk around the office. Try to find at least one thing that’s changed since you left.
  6. Monotask. For the stickier action items, tackle them one at a time. Some of your responses may be “I’ll get back to you on this” and that still counts.
  7. Don’t apologize. Don’t say sorry for being away or not replying sooner. You don’t owe someone who ignored your away message (see #2) an apology.

Your mileage may vary, but by the end of the week I was fully back on track. No more Sunday scaries.

What I’m reading

Who Killed Google Reader by David Pierce

“Reader was probably never going to become the world-conquering beast Facebook eventually became, but the team felt it had figured out some things about how people actually want to connect.” 

You Are Not the Answer by Benjamin at Thinkings Space

“Simply put, the modern workplace is not structured to value or respect individuals. Individuals are useful to a company only to a point.”

Life Before Cellphones by Dan Lois

“The very idea that, once work hours were over, no one could get hold of you—via email, text, Slack, whatever—is completely alien to contemporary young people, who never let their cellphones leave their hands. Yes, it’s because they’re addicted, but it’s also because we’re all expected by bosses, co-workers, and friends to be online and available pretty much every time of day.” 

News from the garden

rat carrying an apple up a wooden pole

My daughter sent me this photo during work. After a three year hiatus, the fruit rats are back. This one managed to eventually carry the apple over the fence into the neighboring yard. Enjoy, my friend. But you better stay away from my corn.

Links to the past

Overheard online

“Librarians are on the front lines, fighting every day to make the widest possible range of viewpoints, opinions, and ideas available to everyone.”

President Barack Obama on Twitter.