He went on to say that these collections create a platform that supports not only the collection itself but also other connections.  He quoted Roy Rosenzweig, founder of the Center for History and New Media, who believed in creating ” a generative platform for undefined future uses”.  Such platforms must be open and support APIs. They must also be able to disclose their metadata as another means of exploring the collection that can “enable or disable” forms of inquiry.

These observations certainly ring true with CDL’s experience in aggregating collections and supporting platforms for their use, such as for eScholarship or Calisphere.  While these services may have once been focused on becoming portals, now they are more aligned with being platforms supporting a range of uses.  We know that most users arrive not through the front door but from a referral in another source or from a web search engine.  Objects need to be able to stand on their own rather than relying on an organized pathway to their place in the collection.  They must provide context to reveal the larger collection or their related associates within it.  But there is more to be done to enable those “undefined future uses” if we think about how the text (in the case of eScholarship) and the metadata could be mined, or how to take advantage of commentary and corrections from users.  We should focus on other ways to make these services function “at the network level” or to think about the web first, something Cohen noted as a principle when designing new services.  The problem to solve these days is not discovery but how to provide context and the means to select and filter, either within the service itself or to allow others to do so.  Search facets have been used for this purpose, but there are other methods to reveal the peaks and valleys within a collection and to enable deeper exploration.  Part of our curatorial role is to analyze collections and be open to having others analyze them, to help shape them for future scholarship.

The DataUp Project. The University of California Curation Center at the California Digital Library continued to produce useful tools and services in support of digital preservation with DataUp, “an open source tool helping researchers document, manage, and archive their tabular data… within the scientist’s workflow.”

End of Term Web Archive. The End of Term 2012 project got underway to capture U.S. Government websites between the first and second administration of President Barack Obama. Project partners include the California Digital Library, Internet Archive, Library of Congress, University of North Texas Libraries and the U.S. Government Printing Office.

We have also been participating through meetings and briefings in the development of another project on the list, the Digital Preservation Network.

The rest of this “Top Ten” list is equally impressive and it is heartening to realize that so much has been accomplished in the area of digital preservation in our community. Yet I can’t help but note that it can still be a hard sell to administrators to justify new or increased expenditures for something that seems abstract, unpredictable and never ending. This challenge was magnified for me recently when I presented a paper in December, 2012 at the 3rd conference on Cultural Heritage online – Trusted Digital Repositories & Trusted Professionals in Florence, Italy.

The conference began with a parade of local officials and cultural heritage ministers from the city and region, all extolling the importance of preserving cultural heritage in the digital age. Indeed, the commitment to preservation is everywhere in this city that was the heart of the Renaissance, its museums and public places overflowing with the riches of the past. I was particularly struck by the exhibits at the Galileo Museum

Sundials, Galileo Museum, Florence

where the artifacts and experimental documentation of not only Galileo but also his contemporaries were showcased in spectacular fashion. Even with all of the support given to cultural heritage, the Italians at the conference still feel they need to shore up digital preservation, but they were focusing on standards and compliance more than on basic funding.

My presentation, on the other hand, was about how we have shifted from talking about preservation as an ultimate and costly activity to curation as part of the ongoing process of creating and managing digital content. We must be aware of incentives—such as mandates from funders and publishers rather than government initiatives–for our researchers to practice good stewardship of their research output. Thus we have invested in tools such as the DataUP mentioned by LC as well as the Data Management Planning Tool (DMPTool which made the 2011 Top Ten list), EZID (which won the DataCite 2012 Gold Award for assigning more than 250,000 DOIs (digital object identifiers) in one year), and the Web Archiving Service to make it digital content easier to manage when it comes time to preserve it for the future. After all, today’s research can become tomorrow’s cultural heritage and think what we would be missing if we weren’t able to see what Galileo was up to.

I don’t work in a public library; I work in an academic library, and specifically, an academic digital library. In recent years academic libraries have been grappling with the social and economic changes arising from a new and ever-changing technological environment. If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s the power of libraries getting together and collaborating. In the case of the University of California, my employer, collaboration has enabled us to do more with less: very large scale digitization, providing wide access to library materials, getting better deals from content vendors, creating a community around open scholarship, and tapping into a richer variety of funding opportunities.

Like academic libraries, public libraries already have collaborative networks and organizations in place, and some public libraries are in and of themselves large consortia, so what role can the Digital Public Library of America fill? Although the DPLA initiative is being spearheaded by an academic institution, an ideal outcome would be for it to be an additional means for public libraries to come together to articulate and advocate for their users’ digital needs, and for shared technology to extend public libraries’ capability to serve library users. I’d like to see DPLA as a space for public libraries to collectively work out how to leverage technology to remain as vital anchors in the physical (non digital!) community as well as providing access to the digital.

I attended the recent DPLA West meeting, and from the discussion there, here’s what I see, from where I sit, as spaces for collective action by public libraries:

• Create best practices for public libraries to extend and leverage shared digital services while continuing to offer a rich combination of local print and digital services
• Establish shared pools of resources to help with digitization, and to develop access mechanisms for digitized materials.
• Network across libraries to provide local and regional digital content to users of all public libraries (here especially is where shared technical infrastructure could play a role).
• Work together on new mechanisms for direct community and user engagement with digital content.
• Continue to advocate for the digital rights of library users, especially for the rights of “have nots” and those who cannot pay.
• Continue to be champions for digital access to current materials for library users.
• Involve the larger library community wherever and whenever possible, as content contributors, as technology collaborators, and as policy partners, leveraging existing relationships and forging new ones.

A shared infrastructure–both technical and social/organizational–could play a role in all of the above. DPLA has already generated the very beginnings of such an infrastructure, and there is a great deal of digital library expertise (including from academic libraries) with much potential.

As someone who is a higher-education librarian but a public library user, I would like to see DPLA be primarily about public libraries serving their constituencies by building on their many strengths; local collections, an active user base, a community presence, and librarians who connect directly with the public. DPLA should be about knitting together digital services with all the other services our wonderful public libraries already provide. The DPLA initiative, to its credit, has started the wheels turning.

As I read the Court’s opinion, Judge Chin’s decision appears to turn on four main elements:

1. Inadequate representation of the class members: The large number and variety of objections to the Settlement by proposed class members (authors and publishers), combined with what the judge characterized as a large number of opt-outs (6800 rights holders had opted out of the Settlement before it was approved), led Judge Chin to conclude that the interests of rights holders were not adequately represented.  UC faculty were among the objectors cited in Judge Chin’s opinion;
2. Forward-looking business models: Commercial exploitation of the scanned corpus through the creation of a set of ‘forward-looking’ business models – i.e. an Institutional Subscription and consumer sales of individual ebooks – went too far beyond the scope of the original complaint.  Without using the language of the Department of Justice’s brief, the judge agreed with its assessment that these arrangements were indeed “a bridge too far;”
3. Copyright concerns: Judge Chin’s ruling articulated two sets of copyright-related concerns:  that the opt-out structure of the proposed Settlement services pre-empted the exclusive rights of copyright owners, and that it would have created a private solution to complex issues of copyright law, such as access to orphan works and the relationship to international copyright treaties, that are the appropriate domain of Congress;
4. Monopoly concerns: Allowing Google to profit from services built on orphan and out-of-print works scanned in violation of copyright law would give Google a monopoly advantage in the marketplace and arguably enhance its de-facto search monopoly as well.  The Settlements restriction against allowing other commercial entities to crawl and index the Google Books corpus also weighed as a factor in the court’s judgment that the Settlement would have the effect of “further entrenching Google’s market power.”

Judge Chin went on to suggest that he would consider approving the Settlement if it were changed to an ‘opt-in’ rather than an ‘opt-out’ regime, removing the above objections, and he encouraged the parties to revise the Settlement accordingly in order to preserve what he also acknowledged as the Google books project’s many benefits.  (The Association of Research Libraries has also prepared a usefully concise summary.)

What path things will take next, no one yet knows.  The publisher plaintiffs have issued a statement indicating that they are prepared to modify the Settlement to satisfy the Court;  the Authors’ Guild has also indicated its interest in a revised agreement that can breathe new commercial life into out-of-print works.  Google has yet to weigh in definitively, saying thus far only that it is disappointed in the ruling and is studying its options.  A status conference before the Court is scheduled for April 25^th, approximately one month from now.

Meanwhile, many of Google’s major research library partners in the U.S., including the University of California, have voiced their unwavering commitment to the digitization of their collections both for preservation purposes and for the advancement of teaching, scholarship, and the public’s access to information.  You can read here the statements from UC, Stanford, and Michigan.  These and many other Google library partners are also members of HathiTrust, a shared preservation and access repository for the digitized book collections of its now more than 50 member libraries (8.4 million volumes and growing, 2.2 million of which are in the public domain).  HathiTrust has issued its own statement affirming its commitment to a shared digital future enabled by largescale digitization of member library collections.  More discussions among all of these players will surely take place over the next days and weeks.  And digitization continues.

What do I think about all of this?   Although I’m certainly no legal scholar, I share the view expressed by many other knowledgeable commentators that Judge Chin’s analysis was probably correct and possibly unavoidable.  (Two of the most cogent legal commentaries can be found in this post from New York Law School’s James Grimmelmann and in a Chronicle of Higher Education interview with UC Berkeley’s Pamela Samuelson.) Nonetheless, it’s also the case that the legislative process has thus far been unable to produce the critical reforms needed to admit orphan and other long out-of-print works into the digital ecosystem.  The Settlement was an opportunity to advance such reforms—through private action, true, but with many safeguards in place for rights holders, and the strong possibility of follow-on legislation to generalize an approach to orphan works.  If the parties agree to an opt-in regime, the value an institutional library subscription will be significantly diminished, and Google’s competitors may be less motivated to join libraries in pressing for orphan works legislation than they might otherwise have been.

There are two potential silver linings in a possible opt-in future.  Rights holders, their prerogative no longer questioned, may suddenly find themselves flocking to be let in rather than left out, leading to the inclusion of more recent works in the Settlement services than might otherwise have been the case (including perhaps, if non-U.S. works are reintroduced into the Settlement, some foreign works that now make up the lion’s share of the mass digitized corpus). This could produce a more tightly-scoped Institutional Subscription providing full-view access to a set of relatively recent works that would otherwise be unlikely to enter the digital domain in the near term, with appropriate compensation to rights holders.  Second, excluding orphan works from the Settlement will give libraries a freer hand in making determinations about appropriate fair use of this material.  If orphan works legislation succeeds, the benefits to and constraints on libraries are likely to be significant improvements over the Settlement’s terms.

By the Numbers

A recent analysis of the HathiTrust corpus by John Wilkin of the University of Michigan Library attempts to put some numbers to these categories.  Part informed analysis and part guesswork, Wilkin’s estimates, largely intended to inform the orphan works debate, suggest that as many as 50% of the books held in U.S. research libraries may be orphan works, a third of them published in the U.S.  For the 5 million titles in the HathiTrust corpus, this translates to 800,000 U.S. orphans and 2.5 million orphans overall. The total numbers in GBS would of course be larger, perhaps two times as large or more.  (A separate analysis by industry expert Michael Cairns estimated the number of orphan works at roughly 580,000.  Cairns analysis draws a distinction between ‘titles’ and ‘works;’ the former are much larger than the latter, since the same work can appear in many variant editions and formats.)

What about the potential opt-ins?  Wilkin’s analysis suggests that in-copyright books in HathiTrust eligible for opt-in treatment (i.e. with known rights holders) comprise on the order of 22% of the total. In HathiTrust terms, this would still equate to something approaching 1 million titles if both U.S. and non-U.S. works were included, but fewer than 300,000 if the Settlement remains restricted to (or attracts) U.S. rights holders only.  These figures also include many works still in print, leaving the number of out-of-print books eligible for inclusion in an Institutional Subscription still smaller (some estimates put the number of in-print works at about 5%).  Again, these figures would be larger for the Google Books corpus overall, perhaps by a factor of two.   This is a best case scenario, since requiring rights holders to opt in would be a labor-intensive and years-long process.  Whether the swiss cheese of an opt-in regime excluding orphan works will provide a sufficient financial incentive for Google and the plaintiffs to go forward is something we’re about to learn in the coming weeks.

A Change in the Weather

In the meantime, the world has changed greatly since the Google Settlement was first announced in 2008, and new avenues for surfacing the world’s books are emerging.  In my earlier blog piece, I argued for approval of the Settlement, but I also asserted that its rejection would not be a make or break event for libraries.  I still hold that view.  In the long interval between the original Settlement proposal and now, many leading actors have developed alternative visions for a future universal digital library.  HathiTrust has emerged to assert its stewardship over partner library collections, at a scale that rivals Google’s.  Many libraries in Europe and elsewhere around the globe have been motivated to invest in largescale digitization of their own national literatures—tellingly, not a few of these in partnership with Google.  Robert Darnton at Harvard has exhorted us to set our sights on a national digital public library free of commercial entanglement and has galvanized a vibrant community around that vision.  The Internet Archive has recently launched a promising digital lending library partnership.  And legal scholars such as UC’s own Pamela Samuelson have begun crafting proposals for copyright and orphan works reform that may further unlock the doors to our cultural heritage.  A redoubling of legislative effort toward this end is, in my view, the most important action we ought to pursue; and the timing couldn’t be better.

Finally (for now)…

Whichever path one favors on the next leg of this journey, Google’s enterprising vision has been and remains a key animating force behind all of these initiatives. As the Ice Road Trucker fan whose 2008 Congressional testimony appears in my GBS clip at the head of this article said:  “…if we look back through history, we can see various spurts of innovation to try to address things that affect both supply and demand in the marketplace[.]”  Even some of Google’s staunchest critics have acknowledged that Google’s contributions in this arena have been an important gift, seeding further innovation (see for example Peter Brantley’s comments in the last paragraph of this article).  Without GBS, the digital books ferment all around us would assuredly look very different than it does today.

Digital ferment?  I’m going to need a new metaphor…

That said, so much of the change underway is happening outside of these organizations, at an individual level, and is so diffuse and fast-paced… it’s really quite stunning.   How do you create an archival record of these social movements?   Not so long ago some people were scratching their heads, wondering what on earth the Library of Congress is going to do with a Twitter Archive.  But the seeds of recent uprisings may very well be found there as much as they’re found in more carefully curated archives.

The incident today that reminded me how strange this can get is the Ian’s Pizza trend.  Just one of those things that flashes up on the web, involving people from all over the globe in an otherwise very local activity.  In support of the Wisconsin labor protests, people from far and wide have been ordering pizzas to be delivered to the protestors.  Suddenly this small business is inundated with delivery orders; they’re keeping a running tally of nations/states on a chalkboard, then posting photos to Facebook.  No amount of expertise in labor history is going to tell you that one fairly active source for international opinion is going to be the Facebook page for a pizzeria.   That impossible-to-predict quality is very cool, and it’s exasperating.

Media/technologies involved in creating this object:
telephone, Twitter, internet, chalk, chalkboard, digital camera, Facebook, and pizza.

Sometimes our post will arise from a skill we already have and want to share; sometimes it’s from a wish to learn something new so you can learn it too. Often, we’re inspired by talented bloggers who generously share their ideas and their uplifting spirits. We want to highlight a few of our favorites in this post — and what more appropriate time to show our gratitude than the week of Thanksgiving?

3 Blogs That Inspire Us

1. Speaking About Presenting: Lena and I presented a workshop at a conference last month. We started our rehearsal by checking out Olivia Mitchell’s great advice on effective presentations. (A “hat tip” to our colleague Joan Starr for introducing us to this blog). This is a rich resource of public speaking skills that new and experienced presenters can both utilize. We happily absorbed her confidence-building advice about How to Look Authoritative When You Feel Anything But.

2. Innovate on Purpose by Jeffrey Phillips is dedicated to ideas, conversations and approaches for sustainable, repeatable workplace innovation. His advice is eminently practical in its focus on creating a culture of innovation over the long term. We were particularly struck by his recent post explaining the importance of finding the right people to innovate and getting them into the right roles.

3. Pick the Brain is a blog about self-improvement — personal productivity, motivation, and self-education. A small team of experts provides advice that is great for the workplace but also works well in many facets of our lives. Lori Taylor’s recent advice about How To Stop Focusing On People & Focus On Issues (It’s Easy If You Do This) gave me a path forward in a sticky situation.

Now It’s Your Turn

What blogs do you follow (besides this one, of course)? Share your inspirations in the comment section below!

For more about what inspires us to blog and how we choose our topics, see our interview in University of California’s LINK newsletter.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

A post-mortem is generally conducted at the end of the entire project, but it is also useful at the end of each phase of a multi-phase project. The agile development method uses a brief post-mortem at the end of each short phase or “sprint” to improve the success of the next sprint.

An honest post-mortem takes a certain amount of trust among the project team members, so you’ll want to work throughout the project to ensure that people’s concerns are heard and they feel they are owners of the project success.

9 Steps for Holding a Successful Post-Mortem

1. Ensure the project post-mortem is listed as a task on your project plan. When you review the project plan with the team at the beginning of the project, explain the concept so everyone knows what to expect at the end.
2. Think about the outcomes of a successful post-mortem and work backwards to plan the meeting. Who should be invited? What are the “rules of engagement?” How will the results be used?
3. Develop a set of possible questions as a guideline. These questions might refer to different phases of the project or different topic areas such as communication, planning, vendor management, or user feedback. Reading these questions gives participants a structure to help them think through the issues they want to bring up, so no key project areas are missed. See these Project Post-Mortem Review Questions.
4. Engage a facilitator and a scribe if possible. Especially for a large project, this provides a neutral presence so that everyone is on equal footing and in the same role as a participant.
5. Invite the participants. Remind them of the purpose of the post-mortem and send the questions in advance. The goal is to make everyone feel comfortable, so provide enough information beforehand so participants know what to expect.
6. State the “rules of engagement” either in your invitation or at the outset of the meeting. The goal is to maintain trust throughout the exercise; you may want to change these guidelines based on how well the team has worked together throughout the project. Sample guidelines:

• We all understand that the goal is improving the next project, so we’ll try to be as honest as we can.
• Everyone gets a chance to talk and all perceptions are equally valuable.
• Respectful listening is key. This is not the place for rebuttal or push-back.
• We’ll start each discussion section with “what went well” before we analyze what we could do better next time.

7. Conduct the post-mortem. Make sure the room is comfortable and that participants won’t be disturbed. If possible, ask them not to multi-task or use laptops during the process, so everyone is equally engaged. Make sure you have flip charts and pens (or the high tech equivalent) to record key concepts.
8. Compile the report. It’s helpful to have a summary section where you discuss the process, share major findings, and list the lessons the team can apply to the next project. In the appendix, you can share the details. Be sure to send all the participants a draft of the report to make sure their ideas were heard. Once the report is final, store it in a place that is easily accessible to everyone.
9. Share the “lessons learned” with your organization. This kind of sharing helps all the project teams to do a better job — to learn from your successes and avoid some of your missteps.

“A project is complete when it starts working for you, rather than you working for it.” — Scott Allen

Now It’s Your Turn

1. Read more about conducting a successful post-mortem:

• Conducting Effective Post-Mortem Meetings (Part 1 of 2)
• Conducting Effective Post-Mortem Meetings (Part 2 of 2)
• Looking Back, Looking Ahead (The Project Retrospective)

2. Ensure you’ve included a post-mortem in your current project plan.

3. Go back to the notes from your last project. What were the lessons learned? What can you apply to your next project? This is particularly valuable for software upgrades, since the lessons from the last upgrade may be directly applicable to the next upgrade.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

But there is another key question that lingers for me. Who is the user community or audience?

Most national libraries are mandated to be the library of record for their country’s cultural and intellectual output. The audience is the citizenry, and in most cases also the government. In that sense, it is easier for other countries to develop the digital equivalent of a national library. In fact, CDL exchanges solutions with many national libraries on the problems of capturing web-based publications which have been used in the Web Archiving Service and other digital library tools. The challenge for these libraries to collect their national output, while daunting, at least has a defined limit. In the U.S., for better or worse, no institution has the cultural or organizational authority to create a national library. Instead, our output resides in a large network populated by all types of libraries, each serving a targeted user community.

For research libraries, the answer to the audience question is “scholars”, whether they are students seeking knowledge or the faculty creating new scholarship. Faculty members have worldwide interests, colleagues and connections; their research clearly doesn’t stop at their own campus or even at the wider borders of UC. Universities inherently are about going beyond national and cultural boundaries.

Part of CDL’s vision is to “elevate the digital library to become expansively global” to stay in alignment with the needs of its primary audience. We seek to fulfill this vision in numerous ways such as the Next Generation Melvyl pilot which aims to expand the library catalog for our scholars from the 33 million items in the current version of Melvyl to 210 million items from 72,000 libraries worldwide.

The other side of this global reach is the desire by our faculty to communicate their work to the world. Recently we conducted a survey of scholars using eScholarship, which provides open access publishing services for UC. The main reasons scholars cited for using the services were to achieve broader dissemination of their work—individually and for academic research in general, and to others in their field as well as those in developing countries and even to non-academic practitioners.

CDL also participates in international conversations and organizations such as DataCite in order to support scholarly needs that may differ by discipline but share commonalities across countries. And our participation in the NSF funded DataOne brings us into contact with scientists who aim to “ensure the preservation and access to multi-scale, multi-discipline, and multi-national science data” related to the environment.

Another initiative, HathiTrust began with common goals and audience—to serve the needs of scholars in creating a shared digital library. Now with more than 50 libraries in the U.S. and one international partner, HathiTrust brings an unparalleled opportunity to move beyond a national view. As Paul Courant notes, “Libraries, to the extent that their collection efforts are purposeful—and mostly they are—acquire what is intellectually and culturally important, and what is wanted or needed by their clients. This is reflected in the fact that more than 50 percent of the content in the HathiTrust Digital Library—whose partners as of this writing all reside in the United States—is written in a language other than English.” With the extension to international libraries, the breadth and depth of this library will only grow. Yet without an audience focus, even one as expansive as the interests of scholars, it is difficult to be all things to all people.

Even more so than for the content itself, the demands of the primary audience will shape the services surrounding it. Scholars care about the particular, the unique, and the unusual as much as they seek patterns, repetition and form. They seek the long tail and long time horizons. They value complete and accurate metadata and tools to delve deeply into the content of the texts. Many of the services to support their desires would be difficult for single institutions to justify or sustain, yet a collaborative approach already has yielded impressive results and promises even more if the new partners are willing to contribute.

Is it better to look to a coalition of like-minded institutions focused on the expansive possibilities of scholarly research than to start with a national view? Could we imagine a public library of similar proportions or does the audience for public library services demand a more deeply local perspective? Could we have the best of all worlds with something like Europeana to unite various digital libraries, regardless of their audience allegiance? Darnton acknowledges that existing digital libraries could be “useful and instructive” in creating a national digital library: “Think of HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, the Knowledge Commons Initiative, the California Digital Library, the Digital Library Federation, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, and other nonprofit enterprises”. Perhaps we already have the makings of an enterprise that allows each component to do what it does best for its own audience. Could we agree on a vision to unite them virtually for a common purpose, not merely to define a national boundary, but to create the basis for a truly global digital library?

This was an epiphany to me. Everyone on the team needs to understand the goal of the project in simple terms so they can care and be energized. Until this time, I had always insisted on stating clear goals for projects, but I hadn’t gone this extra step and distilled the goal to its essence for the benefit of the team.

A project objective statement should be:

• SMART (specific, measurable, agreed-upon, realistic, time-based)
• Short (25 words or less)
• Energizing (simple, easy to remember)

Here’s an example of a good project objective statement:

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.“— President Kennedy, May 25, 1961

The goal (highlighted in bold text) is nineteen words. It’s memorable and audacious, and it inspired a nation.

On the other hand, here’s an example of a weak project objective statement:

“We will demonstrate the viability of the test system to produce increased outputs with minimal effort, thus reducing our dependency on the existing system.”

The goal is vague and overly complex. Are you inspired — or asleep? This is a bit of an exaggeration, but unfortunately many project goals read like this. The only thing this goal has going for it is it’s fewer than twenty-five words. Worse yet, it would likely be the preamble of a much lengthier and arcane goal statement.

Don’t let this happen to your project. Whether you are the project manager or a team member, insist on a brief energizing goal for your next project.

photo credit: NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

Last week, Leslie outlined the basics on managing meetings in her post on How to Host an Effective Virtual Meeting. This week, we’ll narrow our focus to a few easy ways to capture what really matters in your meetings — critical decisions, actions, and next steps. If you absolutely need a literal record of who said what, consider doing a voice recording or video of your meeting. (Most conferencing software products offer recordings as an option at a small additional fee.)

Try one or more of these tips for your own note taking:

3 Tips for Taking Simple & Effective Notes at Meetings

1. Type the notes during the the meeting. It takes a little practice, but it’s much more efficient. Use a numbered agenda as the starting point and capture action items and brief notes under each numbered agenda item. The benefit is combining the agenda and notes in a single document (that’s one less document to keep track of), and best of all, your note-taking duties are done when the meeting’s done.
2. Keep the notes as brief as possible. Only capture what’s most critical. Too much typing can be distracting. Record decisions and actions. Avoid statements like “discussed [fill in the blank] topic.” This is not informative. Was a decision made? What action will be taken? What was the upshot of the discussion?
3. Save the meeting notes in a shared space like a wiki page or a shared document in Google Docs for easy access and editing.  In the past, you had to distribute the notes to meeting participants and then collate everyone’s changes. This was time-consuming and a poor use of everyone’s time. Today, you can have participants edit directly in a shared document (and one that will even show you the revision history.)

Example of An Agenda and Notes

This approach may sound simplistic, yet it’s effective and fast. With the time you save, you can devote your energy to making sure meeting participants know what they have agreed to do and what their deadlines are.  A simple way to do this is to create a table at the top of your meeting notes that pulls out this important information.  Here are the essentials to track:

• Who is responsible.
• What is the action.
• When is it due.
• It’s useful to have a general Notes column for brief comments or status updates.

Example of An Action Table

Your action table might look something like this:

Be sure to get your team’s agreement in advance before trying these methods. Find out how much context you are expected to record about decisions, actions, issue background, etc. For example, do you need a record of whose idea it was and what the alternative ideas were, or is it sufficient to simply record the final decision? Talk with your team and manager beforehand.

“A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours wasted.” – James T. Kirk (12 Leadership Lessons From the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise)

Now, It’s Your Turn

1. Briefly skim these articles:

How to Record Useful Meeting Minutes

4 Top Tips on How to Take Meeting Minutes

2. Read our previous post How to Embrace Innovation for why it’s good to share meeting notes on a screen during the meeting (see “Start with a Simple Innovation”).

What Method Works for You?

Do you have a favorite method for taking notes or tips you’d like to share? We’d love to hear them. Send an email to us at yourlifeatwork@gmail.com or comment below.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.