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?

So why does it fail much of the time? And what can we do to make it work? To get some new perspective, I turned to the web for answers – and I’m happy to share what I learned, because it gave me a path forward as a project manager and member of a group. Much of it hinges on whether you are currently a work group or a team, and if you should become something else.

What’s the Definition of a Team?

This definition of a team comes from a heavily-quoted book on team-building, The Wisdom of Teams (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993): “A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, a set of performance goals, and a common approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”

What does that really mean? Consultant Sharon Feltham breaks it down this way:

6 Success Factors that Define a Team

1. Small number of people: There are fewer than 12 members (sometimes much fewer)
2. Complementary skills: The team identifies and uses the different perspectives, knowledge, skills and strengths of each member.
3. Performance goals: The team has clearly defined objectives for which members are individually and collectively accountable.
4. Common approach: There is a sense of shared purpose, with a clear understanding of the team’s mission and vision.
5. Mutually accountable: The results come from a collective effort rather than just the sum of individual efforts. People are accountable not only for their own efforts but those of others.
6. Leadership: Instead of having a strong solo leader, the team rotates leadership.

What’s the Definition of a Work Group?

Consultant Marie J. Kane [PDF article] notes that in a work group, there is “no significant incremental performance need or opportunity that would require it to become a team.” So the members may come together to share ideas or help each other make decisions in their own areas of responsibility, but mutual accountability is lacking — there is no common objective.

Deborah Mackin, an author of several team-building books, points to a fundamental difference: “a small group of people with complementary skills and abilities who are committed to a leader’s goal and approach and are willing to be held accountable to the leader.” In other words, the group accepts the goals they are given, the members report to the leader, and individual performance is generally evaluated by that leader.

Should a Group Always Try to Become a Team?

Look around your organization. There are probably few genuine teams, and you can spot them immediately because their work is stellar. Everyone talks about them and admires their efforts. These teams perform well for two key reasons: the six success factors noted above are all present; and the members have put a tremendous amount of time, effort, and emotional capital into forming a high-performance team.

4 Questions to Determine if You Need a Team

1. Is there a genuine need for change?
2. Will there be a return on investment?
3. Is there support from senior management?
4. Is there enough potential for better performance from the individuals in the group?

What’s The Path Forward?

I said at the beginning of this post that I saw the way forward, so here it is: my group is genuinely a work group and should remain so. We are large. We don’t all do the same work — in fact some of us have never worked together on a project or service. But that’s not to say we’ve given up on the idea of teams.

Instead, we’ve started focusing on building small high-performance teams within our group –- even two people can constitute a high performance team. Being on a high performance team makes me feel like I’m really making a difference, and it gives me a chance to stretch my wings and improve my skills. In time we hope to see more small teams working together to create change.

And of course Lena and I hope our readers see us as a team — we have worked hard to fulfill all the criteria of a genuine team and it’s made our work together very satisfying.

What’s happening in your area? Should you be a team or a group? Maybe it’s time to make a conscious choice!

Coming together is a beginning.
Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success.
– Henry Ford

Now It’s Your Turn

1. Learn more about the differences between teams and work groups by reading the articles linked above.

2. Talk to your work group about whether change is needed and whether they can make a commitment to changing the way they work.

3. Before you move forward, be sure to read The Wisdom of Teams (Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, 1993). It’s a wealth of information, advice, and practical steps that will help your team to achieve its goals.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

DataCite Member Countries

Our task has been to complete the work on a Metadata Kernel document to prepare it for community comment in August and early September.

Fortunately for me, I have the able assistance of a Swiss DataCite member librarian. She and I meet weekly on Thursdays. It’s late afternoon for her and very early in the morning for me. We use Adobe Connect, a service hosted by the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) on behalf of DataCite. Most of the time, this works really well for us, although I have been known to appear inadvertently as an alien avatar from time to time.

In order to move the work along, I split the Metadata Kernel document into pieces and turned these into wiki-based documents, so that they could be worked on asynchronously. Meanwhile, I encouraged the members of the Working Group to form subgroups and “adopt” a portion of the document for authoring or revision. I did this because I felt that our efforts to coordinate large group teleconferences had not been very successful prior to the Hannover meeting. I had hoped that smaller teams with less of a geographic stretch might succeed in a shorter time-frame.

The heightened schedule was formed by a start date beginning in mid-June, and something my Swiss colleague warned me about when we returned from Hannover: virtually all the Europeans (herself excepted) would be going on vacation for the month of August.

Here are a few things I’ve picked up as the weeks have zoomed by:

• Information exchanges between California and Continental Europe have a one-way trip of one day, meaning that joint decisions take at least two days.
• It’s helpful to watch all the wiki pages. It gives me an idea about which sub-groups are active or inactive, and that lets me know when to send reminders and encouragements.
• I asked the TIB to install a group calendar plug-in, and then I asked the members to indicate planned absences of longer than one week. This has helped me keep those long upcoming vacations in mind as I choreograph the due dates of various pieces of work.

I’m certain I have more to learn about this process, and I have the best teachers: my colleagues on the DataCite Metadata Working Group.

Image courtesy of Keystone-Mast Collection, UCR/California Museum of Photography, University of California at Riverside.

This is not a trivial debate, because even the academic world is increasingly driven by the speed to market of downloadable apps for laptops and mobile devices. In the agile world…or at least, among the managers of (and consultants to) the tech folks in the agile world…there is some discussion of what is called “management agility.” This heady stuff actually appears to be a code word for infusing business decision-making with just-in-time statistics. The truly agile will adopt decentralized decision-making models, putting the power to make or break the business into the hands of the people who are closest to the work itself.

Running counter to this model is the great momentum toward building services at the network level. In order to do this, CDL–a collaboration itself–has joined with other universities and research institutions in several major network-level super-collaborations, you might call them.

So, this means that we, and our partners, have super-sized collaborative decision-making structures and super-sized strategic planning structures. Sounds more like a recipe for atherosclerosis than agility, doesn’t it?

We don’t have any choice but to face this challenge. We must join together in these network-level initiatives in order to achieve both the economies of scale and the breadth of coverage and vision they afford us. Therefore, we have to seek every opportunity to streamline our collective processes so that we don’t come so late to the party, we’re only in time to pick up the recycling.

Here are some of the things that this means in practice:

• We are working to infuse our collective decision-making with statistics, so that we can make more informed (and, we hope, better) decisions. An example of this is the value-based strategy developed for journal renewal assessment.
• In our network level collaborations, we work to fashion organizations that have mechanisms both for long-range thinking, such as strategic planning, and also short time-frame operational decision-making. An example of this is the governance of HathiTrust.
• And, as we work with these and other efforts, we are now consciously asking ourselves, is there a quicker way to do this? Can a smaller group be deputized to make this decision? Can we fast-tract this inquiry, process, or project?

These are works in progress, and we move forward and then take steps backwards. Sometimes communications break down, or decision-making bogs down. But it is critically important that we are on this path, along with our partners. What other ideas do you have?

So the big question we have for you, our readers: How are we doing? First, a bit of history:

Why We Did It

We (Leslie Wolf and Lena Zentall) started Your Life@Work to give something back to the community: sharing hard-earned wisdom from our varied careers; exploring answers to the problems we now struggle with at work; and providing a forum for dialog and connections. We wanted to expand our own horizons, meeting like-minded people within and outside academia. And of course, we wanted to challenge ourselves to do something meaningful to bolster our spirits during the 12-month furlough period at the University of California. Read our first post, Looking for Some Inspiration in Your Career? for more about our objectives.

How We Did It

We spent a great deal of time thinking about who our audience might be. We decided it’s anyone who believes they have a career instead of a job — or who wants to have a career instead of a job! We looked at other blogs for inspiration and read extensively to find best practices, tips and tricks from the blogging experts. We worked to create an engaging format: first person stories, ideas from experts, links to helpful blogs, appealing images, inspiring quotes, and a call to action (“Now It’s Your Turn”).

We wanted to distill our experience and the wisdom of the blogosphere in one place so you don’t have to hunt everywhere for advice. Our biggest goal is not to waste your time (and ours). We laid out a schedule of topics that could easily stretch beyond 2011 and used Google Docs to track our progress, draft our posts, and build plans to increase our community over the next several months.

At the end of March we started publishing, and found to our delight that we fell into an easy rhythm. We’ve learned a lot, finding our writing skills getting stronger as we work to produce thoughtful, polished mini-essays. We’ve taken turns writing about the issues we care most about and have found that our styles blended early on to create a shared “voice.”  We appreciate each other and the insights, experience, and skills we each bring to the partnership. Our collaboration is stronger than ever.

What We’ve Learned

1. There’s never enough time in the day. While it’s time-consuming to post every week in the mini-essay format we described above, refining our process over the past dozen posts has helped.
2. Blogging is addictive. We have experienced the powerful allure of blogging; it’s gratifying to share career development resources with our readers and to learn from you in turn.
3. Commenting is essential to blogging. We’re thrilled with the comments we’ve received — thank you! In fact, reading the thoughts and experiences you share with us is our favorite part of blogging. It tells us you are interested in what we write about and it gives us the opportunity to learn things from you. Then it occurred to us that we weren’t actively commenting on our favorite blogs. D’oh! We have vowed to show our appreciation and engagement to the bloggers we regularly follow by commenting on their blogs.
4. You are what you write. We’ve enjoyed discovering what we really care about as we choose the topics and shape our posts. We hope our readers will find at least one thing that speaks to them — a gold nugget — in each post.
5. Spontaneity is a challenge. While we’ve discovered a good formula for delivering our blog posts on a regular schedule, our blog’s consistent structure with its many “includements” (lists of tips, images, quotes, things for you to try) has prevented us from being more spontaneous. We also blame our perfectionism. We know you are concerned with perfectionism too, since The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good has been our most discussed post to date.

What’s in the Works

• Guest bloggers. We’re inviting our co-workers to write on their areas of expertise and interest. Stay tuned!
• Video. We actually made a video to introduce our blog and then realized it was just not that interesting. We’re looking for better ways to use video — for things that are hard to describe in writing and for live interviews.
• New formats. Three areas we’d like to try: 1) brief, single-thought posts in a social media forum like Twitter or Facebook — especially for current events; 2) posts that bring together the “best of” on a topic; 3) a short list of useful links on a single topic in lieu of a longer post.

Whatever we do, we’ll strive to make it truly useful and not just more social media “noise.”

“Don’t focus on having a great blog. Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.” — Brian Clark

Now It’s Your Turn

Did you know you can subscribe to the RSS feed for Your Life@Work and get our weekly posts sent to you?  Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to the Your Life@Work home page
2. Click on the orange RSS icon in the top right corner: 
3. Indicate how you want to subscribe (via e-mail, Google Reader , etc.)

More about RSS: What the heck is RSS? And why should I care?

Did you miss some posts? Check out all previous Your Life@Work posts.

Help us plan for upcoming posts!

We’re looking for your ideas on what’s working and what’s not working. You can comment below or e-mail us at yourlifeatwork@gmail.com (Leslie and Lena’s joint e-mail account).

• Do you have any special topics you would like us to cover?
• Would you be interested in other topics like marketing or strategic planning?
• Did any of our posts inspire you to action? If so, we’d love to hear about it.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

I saw this for myself when I sat down at a table in Hannover, Germany, for the first summer meeting of DataCite. I was leading a discussion of the Working Group on Metadata. Included in the discussions with me were representatives from these organizations:

• ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)
• GESIS (German Social Science Infrastructure Services)
• DTU (Technical University of Denmark)
  
• British Library
• Purdue University Libraries
• TIB (German National Library of Science and Technology)/DataCite
• ANDS (Australian National Data Service)
• CISTI (Canada Institute for Science and Technical Information)
• SNDS (Swedish National Data Service)

Before I left home, I had received some advice from a veteran of metadata standards work, John Kunze. He wrote, “In my extensive experience with metadata standardization, the biggest threat to that process in our community (not the private sector) is non-convergent discussion.  One approach to use…is the “desert island” question: if you know you’d be stranded by yourself on an island for five years and you could only bring 7 books with you, which would you bring?”

Up to this point, the metadata group had met virtually a few times, which is a greater than usual challenge with members spread from Europe all the way to Australia. So our face-to-face time was especially valuable. I took John’s advice and proposed that we focus our attention and efforts on achieving consensus on a core set of required elements. My colleagues readily agreed to this strategy.

We worked for 3 hours and, in the end, settled on 6 required elements. We also achieved a greater understanding of the differences between our various organizations, and that became apparent as we made the case for one metadata element or another. This makes for a better end product, because a standard that can accommodate a wide range of use cases and users is more successful than one that is more narrowly defined. When our discussions bumped into the edges of disagreement, we were able to uncover assumptions, clearing up misconceptions.

The Working Group on Metadata has more work to do, of course. We still have the optional elements to discuss. We must coordinate our work with other standards groups. And, now, we are back to functioning on a virtual basis. But, I think that we head into these remaining tasks with new strength both from our modest successes, and also from the experience of overcoming differences to achieve them.

Courtesy of Pomona Public Library

You are probably in good company. I suspect there are lots of Service Level Agreement (SLA) templates available online for the very reason that many people prefer to relegate this work to the back burner. And, to be fair, there certainly is a category of SLA that can be treated as “repeat business,”  with little customization needing to be done for each new iteration.

If you feel this way about SLAs, I’d like to try to convince you otherwise–that the SLA is, in fact, a unique opportunity for one or more very interesting conversations.  I hold this view for several reasons. Many technology groups in Library Land are only now beginning to develop an understanding of what it takes to provide a genuine production-level service to their end users. This means that prior to negotiating an agreement about what production services might entail, managers and the technology staff must do some thinking, planning and discussing among themselves. They may even need to put some infrastructural changes in place.

So, the first interesting conversations are the ones you have even before you talk to those you serve. You have to answer questions like:

• What kind of services are we ready to provide, under what circumstances?
• When we say “available,” what do we mean?
• How do end users report problems, and how does problem escalation work?
• Where will we test fixes and enhancements while production services continue to run?

Courtesy of Oxnard Public Library

If you are in a co-development arrangement with a partner, the SLA may become one of the key frameworks for working out the nuts and bolts of that relationship. The SLA can actually open up into something more like a hybrid SLA-collaborative work agreement, where you have an opportunity to document the understandings you have with one another about code ownership, location of the code repository, tool and documentation conventions, and so forth. This can also be a place to document any processes or structures you want to introduce for joint change management.

So, take a new look at SLAs. As the record of a conversation, they can be a very useful tool for you.

When we learned last summer about the mandatory twelve-month furlough and salary reduction at the University of California, Leslie and I went through the five stages of grief — both for our bank accounts and for the forward momentum of our careers. But we realized that if our behavior continued, we’d end up at the end of the year weaker than when we started, with nothing to show for our angst. We asked ourselves these questions:

To get inspired, we considered these Big 5 Mid-Year Game-Changing Questions posed by the author Pamela Slim: 

1. What are you going to focus on? You cannot focus on everything and make progress.

2. What are you going to improve? You cannot grow at a sustained level without making some major system improvements. Sooner or later, you will start to lose ground in the areas that have been natural strengths.

3. What are you going to grow? You have tons of knowledge/material which just needs to be refined in order to deliver powerful benefits to the world.

4. What are you going to leave behind? If you are taking on new challenges, you will have to give some things up. And those should be the ineffective/self-sabotaging parts of your life or business that hold you back from growth.  

5. What are you going to learn? We stay fresh and creative by learning new things. What topic or field lights you up that you haven’t devoted time to learn about?

Our Professional Fitness Plan

Here’s a sample of our goals from September to November 2009:

The FUN part: we treat ourselves to lunch each month and talk about our progress. In reality, our lunch meeting forces us to look at our goals and take action at least once a month. We discuss whether we’re on track or if we encountered any roadblocks. Sometimes, we’ll re-commit to a missed goal, or change the goal entirely. Every so often, we admit that we’ll never do a particular goal, so we drop it. Whatever happens, it’s a chance to offer each other advice and encouragement.

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” – Lewis Carroll

 

 Now It’s Your Turn

Make a 12-month professional fitness plan. You don’t have to start in January — any time is a good time to get working on your career.

1. Set one or more goals each month.
2. Find a commitment partner to help you stay on track. (Read our previous post 5 Tips for Successful Collaboration.)
3. Set a meeting once a month with your partner to check on each others’ progress.

Share Your Experience

Have you found ways to stay professionally fit in spite of diminished professional development resources this past year? What have you done that’s helped your professional development? Tell us about it in Comments below or e-mail us at yourlifeatwork@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you.

Read more posts from Your Life@Work.

In my view, this is happy path thinking. You may be able to skimp on the requirements documentation and do just a few use cases as long as you are working in close proximity to one another, with all the advantages that co-location provides. It can also work fairly well if you have a user representative participating in the service development with you. It also helps tremendously, of course, if you have a boss, or project sponsor, who never wavers in her or his support.

But let me introduce one variable into this happy world that changes everything: collaboration. That one factor actually brings with it a cascade of implications: distance (and time lags), virtual team members, more stakeholders, different work habits, organizational culture variations, and so on. So now, getting things down starts to take on an entirely new level of importance. Let me explain my thinking.

Collaborations vary, of course. Certainly one important decision is whether to divide up responsibilities or to try for a more integrated approach. Either way, the chances are very good that you will end up with some interdependencies. Interdependencies need to be made explicit in project planning in order to avoid nasty surprises. You do this by documenting the major milestones, the inputs, the outputs, the resource constraints, and so forth–essentially whatever it takes to expose the relationship between the parts to everyone’s satisfaction.

Equally, when you want to build or provide something together, you are faced with the challenge of how to reveal what is in your head to your partners. I suppose the first challenge, perhaps, is with yourself: will you reveal what is in your head? How much do you want to share with your new partner(s)? This is a question about the collaboration itself, isn’t it?

Let’s assume, though, that you believe in the big picture, the vision of how working together can change the landscape. Here is where writing things down really plays a crucial role. If you keep things undocumented, your partners have to interrogate you, have to seek each bit of information from you. You become, in other words, an information bottleneck.

Sure, it’s a pain in the neck to stop what you’re doing in order to describe what you have already done. But, remember that big picture? This is a good time to take a look at it. It turns out that sharing your ideas and your work by writing them down is between here and there. In the case of collaboration, the case for documentation comes down to that.