Collecting library users' stories to showcase the impact of libraries

It has become a habit for me to apologise for not updating my blog as often as I ought to. Further, such an apology is accompanied by an explanation as to the reason for my absence from contributing to the blogosphere. Well, if it is acceptable for my limited but regular readership, let such a protocol be deemed to be observed.

A matter at hand has been my observation of the collection of library users' stories to showcase the impact of libraries. Fay Durrant, Jamaican LIS professor in 2006 said and wrote these words:

There is an interesting study of the use of one of the telecentres of the Jamaica Sustainable Development Network. One fisherman who knew how to access the weather reports on the Internet would each day get the forecast and explain it the others so that they could use the information to prepare for their fishing expeditions.

That story has been written up as Islands caught up in the Web in the UNDP magazine Choices by Barbara Blake Hannah a journalist in Jamaica. I think that it would be very useful for us as Caribbean librarians to seek out these stories from our users as a means of determining the impact of information.

Durrant is not the only one to advocate that libraries collect stories of patrons to help us understand the impact of our services. A more relatively recent publication by Nyström and Sjögren (2012) also raised this idea (see previous blog post review of this).

However, today, I report on one such practical application of this by a public library. Recently, London Public Library in Ontario, Canada collected stories from its community via it's Website http://www.londonpubliclibrary.ca/node/17228 and presented them via the use of social media, (Facebook in particular). Sharma (2013) in one of London's community newspaper reports  Delilah Deane Cummings, co-ordinator of community outreach and program services at the London Public Library as saying:

“The library is filled with stories in all different forms whether it is books or movies or magazines or e-books and we are inviting Londoners to share their stories with us and with the community” 

Her quote summarises my own views that the library is indeed a collection of stories that transcend media formats. Her quote also captures my viewpoint that libraries need to collect and document blogs that tell personal stories to add to the wider collection of narratives and stories that are documented in other media formats.

In this particular case, the library used the post card memoir format for collecting community stories. The London public library permitted community members to submit drawings, illustrations or text of 150 words. According to Sharma (2013):

The project, Postcard Stories, was launched... and ... in part inspired by similar ideas like the Kingston Frontenac Public Library’s “Story Me”  — a blog-based project collecting the stories of everyday people and the everyday interactions library staff have with patrons.

These comments and practices get me wondering if the ideas that I think about for my thesis are being disseminated telepathically (or perhaps through my blog). I been blogging, thinking about and discussing these topics, issues and practices of collecting personal stories or personal memoirs about library use and impact for some time now (see: Article on storytelling for entrepreneurs and [possibly] for libraries and Corporate online storytelling: for libraries?). It is so good to see my thoughts and theoretical musings being manifested in reality.



References:

Durrant, F. (2006, November). The future of libraries and implications for the Caribbean. Address to the Library Association of Trinidad and Tobago (LATT) Ordinary General Meeting, National Library and Information System Authority (NALIS), Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, W. I. Retrieved from http://eprints.rclis.org/8861/1/DurrantFayThe_future_of_libraries_and_implications_for_the%E2%80%A6.pdf

Nyström, V., & Sjögren, L. (2012). An evaluation of the benefits and value of libraries. Oxford, U.K.: Chandos Publishing.

Sharma, S. (2013, Sep. 12). Your stories could be part of a new public library project. The Londoner. Retrieved from http://www.thelondoner.ca/2013/09/12/your-stories-could-be-part-of-a-new-public-library-project

Creating a good organizational story for preserving institutional memory

I have not blogged for a long time now about organizational or institutional storytelling. This has been due to the fact that while organizational storytelling is still one of my interests, it has moved to the periphery of my research at the moment. Currently, I have been thinking more about libraries, library education, library consultants and social media. However, on September 5, 2013, I got the opportunity to apply my interest in organizational storytelling at a meeting of a student club, of which I was one of the founding members, I was assigned the task to tell a newcomer about the student club. However, it was on the next day, after waking up in the quiet of the morning that I reflected on what I did and extracted these key principles.

Principles for creating an organizational story

1. Occasion for storytelling - Linde (2009) argues that for an institution to engage in organizational storytelling, it needs to create an occasion for storytelling. It is at an occasion for storytelling that we engage in what Boje (2008) dubs reflexivity (which in my words simply means reflecting on an organization's past or history). In my circumstance, the trigger for the occasion for organizational storytelling was the occasion of answering a newcomer's question about the organization, the student group. As we undertook the task of socializing the new member, we conveyed to the member the organization's history, something that we never had to do before seriously, on seeing that the club was only 2 years old.

2. Structure the narrative - From a summer course on storytelling I learned how to better create a story structure. One of the most popular means of doing so is by using a timeline. So for my student group, I created a timeline dating back to when we first began to the present. This involved dating the timeline based on the tenure of the leaders of the student club.

3. Identify the main characters or actors- According to Gabriel (2000), all good stories have characters that are portrayed in a particular light. As such, in creating a well-written or oral organizational story, one must always identify main characters. Many such characters end up being the leaders of organizations (Gabriel, 2000). Hence for my case, I identified the leaders of the student group as the main characters. As a group we began to characterise these leaders, developing descriptions of each leader to describe their personalities and idiosyncrasies that they brought to the group or organization, and how they impacted the group or organizational culture of the student club.

4. Identify key events - With the timeline and the leaders plugged into the timeline, the next aspect is to identify key events happening to the student club during the reign or tenure of each of our leaders. 

5. Provide a moral for the story -  This is where I extracted a piece of "wisdom" or advice about the organization based on its past. This "wisdom" is usually a summary in a sentence or few that gives meaning to the organization's past or puts the past in some perspective. Organizational storytelling experts like Gabriel (2000) and Linde (2009) discuss the fact that stories rarely just communicate dry facts, but also opinion or interpretation. From my interpretation and experience, the moral of these stories tend to provide for new members a perspective or lens for understanding the past events and viewing the events meaningfully as well as for use for future reference in interpreting the present and future reality.

This concludes my reflections of what I did as I facilitated the student club in creating and developing its organizational story. I am hoping though, that a year from now, I can use what I have learned to create a course on this topic. (See a previous blog posting about my ideas related to such a course in Corporate online storytelling: for libraries?).

References:

Boje, D. M. (2008). Storytelling organizations. Los Angeles: Sage. 

Gabriel, Y. (2000). Storytelling in organizations :Facts, fictions, and fantasies. Oxford ;; New York: Oxford University Press. 

Linde, C. (2009). Working the past :Narrative and institutional memory. Oxford ;; New York: Oxford University Press. 

When can regulating social media at work be a bad thing?

Once again I tackle the issue of social media policy by organizations. However this time in the context of research and readings that I have been doing.

Recently I read Gavett's (2013) blog post discussing the issues of employees airing criticisms of employer via social media and what's legal. I also read earlier an article by Feldman (2013) on the issue of government looking into company social media policies. Both articles reveal the issue of how employers have been able to take advantage of the lack of legal regulations pertaining to social media use by employees to dismiss workers. However, there are now legal loopholes that Gavett (2013) identifies in regards of workers coming together and organizing themselves similar to unions using social media. My own perspective on the matter is that companies are over-reacting to the negative consequences of social media use, and should adopt a more positive social media policy approach, which I hope to briefly outline here.

To begin the discussion, I would like to raise the issue of how people get work done in this new "knowledge or service economy". Orr (1996) showed us that part of workers' getting their job done is through forming communities in which they can discuss their work ideas and exchange solutions to problems, a practice commonly called forming communities of practice. Further, it has been suggested by researchers that such communities can be enriched innovatively when persons have electronic networks connecting to persons not only in their local geographical communities, but also persons outside of their organizations (Teigland & Wasko, 2005). Usually, top management ignores that the way that people get work done is not just individually sitting at their desk, but also through having ties or relationships with other persons that are able to help them solve problems (Brown & Duguid, 2000). When the work environment is unstable, workers tend to use and trust their online connection rather than their co-located relationships to get information that help them solve work problems (Hirsh & Dinkelacker, 2004). As such, management, by creating strict and stringent social media policies may be actually interfering with the electronic networks that their workers use to get information and communicate in order to solve work problems.

My recommendation is that rather than just specifying in one's policy how not to use social media and rather than attempting to limit or block social media use at work, management and organizations need to

1. discover how workers are actually using social media to do their work. This could be done by surveys or interviews. One such study that comes to mind is the one by Lampe, Vitak, Gray, and Ellison (2012) that studied university employees for how they use Facebook as an information source. While the study did not conclude whether Facebook was used only for work purposes, it did conclude that some of the employees surveyed preferred to ask questions via social media in order to get more tailored and trustworthy information (Lampe, Vitak, Gray & Ellison, 2012). This perspective of first, applying the Taylorist principle of studying workers before creating policies, can help inform management as to whether or not workers are actually getting information from social media that may be having an impact on the organization's productivity.
2. Elicit stories or incidents from workers where they were able to successful solve a problem at work because of social media. Having such stories can help management see directly how social media is being applied practically to solve work problems. These cases can also be shared with other employees as a form of knowledge sharing about how social media can be positively used at work. In  Lampe, Vitak, Gray, and Ellison's (2012) study, not all workers saw social media as a place to get answers to information queries. Hence, management can therefore use such success stories to train existing employees to see and recognise when they can exploit social media for work problem solving.

 With regard to point 2,  management may argue that workers may divulge proprietary information to outsiders through social media. My own take on the matter is that social media only documents what people do in everyday life. I am sure workers go to the bar or other unregulated spaces and from time to time share with other outsiders what they do at work. Yet, such sharing sometimes is more beneficial than harmful, as it leads them to find persons working on similar problems or having similar interests or even expertise that can be leveraged to help workers arrive at faster solutions to work problems.

In closing, I just want to argue that when an employer hires a worker, they are not just hiring one person, but they are also hiring that person's network of connections that the worker will turn to in order to get information in complex work problems that he or she cannot solve on his/her own. Hence, the informal networks and connections that a worker uses to get his or her work done is as important to the organisation as the worker's skills and knowledge, especially depending on the type of work being done and the tasks that are assigned. As such, when creating social media policies, companies must not only consider the PR nightmares and tragedies of other companies, but must also consider how social media may be positively used by its own workers to make the company successful.

On that note, I end with some conclusions from Choo (2002) that were written for the Web in general, but which I find also applicable to social media:

• the Web is not just an information network, but also a work space where employees communicate in order to acquire and access actionable information for work purposes.
• more liberal Web [and social media] policies are required and fewer controls in order to empower workers to use these resources to 'promote self-directed learning and problem solving' (p. 196).
• spaces for sharing what employees discover on the Web [or social media] that may be useful to others in the company could be created to permit collective or organizational learning and memory. 

This is the challenge that I suggest organizations take on rather than just adopting a negative or anti-social media use policies.


References:

Brown, J. S., & Duguid, P. (2000). The social life of information. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Choo, C. W. (2002). Information management for the intelligent organization : The art of scanning the environment (3rd ed.). Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Feldman, B. (2013, February 15). The government is watching social media policies. PRWeek Retrieved from http://www.prweekus.com/pages/login.aspx?returl=/the-government-is-watching-social-media-policies/article/279587/&pagetypeid=28&articleid=279587&accesslevel=2&expireddays=0&accessAndPrice=0

Gavett, G. (2013, February, 21). Is Your Social Media Policy Useless? Harvard Business Review [HBR] Blog Retrieved from
http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2013/02/is_your_social_media_policy_useless.html

Hirsh, S. & Dinkelacker, J. (2004). Seeking information in order to produce information: AN empirical study at Hewlett Packards Labs. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55:807-817. doi:10.1002/asi.20024


Lampe, C., Vitak, J., Gray, R., & Ellison, N. B. (2012). Perceptions of Facebook’s value as an information source. Paper presented at the CHI '12 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Austin, TX, USA. 3195--3204. doi: 10.1145/2207676.2208739

Orr, J. E. (1996). Talking about machines :An ethnography of a modern job. Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press.

Teigland, R., & Wasko, M. (2005). Knowledge exchange in electronic networks of practice. Encyclopedia of information science and technology (pp. 1757-1762) IGI Global. doi: 10.4018/978-1-59140-553-5.ch309

Threats to the freedom to blog

In this blog entry, I would like to focus on the issues concerning the growing threats to the freedom to blog. My reasons for posting my views on the matter comes as a result of two particular developments within this month that I see as representing threats to the blogosphere. Specifically, one of the incidents is the case of Edwin Mellen Press suing a university librarian for libel (New, 2013).  Another incident is the issue of employees getting fired for user-generated content as reflected in the Applebee's waitress who posted a receipt with a customer's complaint regarding tipping (Stableford, 2013).

Both stories indicate the dangers of the growing powers of organizations and institutions to take away the freedom to create user-generated content via social media. Organisations and institutions today are able to take away the freedom of people to blog and share content via social media through

1. law suit for libel or defamation and
2. the threat of termination of employment. 

I note that today all human beings are affected by organisations and institutions. We are not only citizens governed by governmental institutions that regulate who are citizens and who are not, but we are also either employees of organisations or can be sued by them for rants or exchanges that we make via social media. As such, I note that the freedom of persons to blog, especially blogs critical of organisations or institutions including religious ones and businesses are in threat of being curtailed by:

1. threats of law suit
2. threats of disciplinary action from an employer

In light of this, I saw an interesting event by Harvard Business Review on Wednesday, 23 January 2013, the #HBRchat Topic, January 24: It’s My Job and I’ll Tweet If I Want To . While I did not participate, I noted the important questions the public chat raised:

Q1: How much freedom should employees have to discuss work problems online?
Q2: Are you comfortable using social media to complain about work?
Q3: Does your company have a policy about employee conduct on social media?

These are important questions that are increasingly relevant as our freedom to blog and share content via social media is now one that employers and other institutions are now monitoring or are planning to monitor in the future. We must note then that the freedom to blog cannot protect us from losing our jobs or from law suits from organisations and may indeed impact on what information we will be able to share and access on blogs in the future.

This brings me to the issue that such pressures will change forever the information sources that blogs are. Blogs will no longer become authentic and real sources of personal information. People instead will be censored and provide only information that they know they cannot get in trouble for. Imagine the world that this creates, where I want to find authentic and real information online about a company or an institution, and all I can find are positive stories and comments about the company and institution? No complaints? No criticism? No person's real thoughts or beliefs about that company or institution? Is that the online world that we want to live in and create?

Where are the values of freedom and freedom of information? Librarians and the information professional community need to speak out against this new online world order, where organisations and institutions are robbing individuals of the freedom to make authentic contributions to the blogosphere and user-generated content that gives us expanded realities about our world and the institutions and organizations that inhabit them.



References

New, J. (2013, Feb 8). Edwin Mellen Press sues university librarian for libel. The Chronicle of Higher Education Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/edwin-mellen-press-sues-university-librarian-for-libel/42193


Stableford,  D. (2013, Jan 31). Applebee’s fires waitress who posted receipt from pastor complaining about auto-tip. Yahoo! News Retrieved from http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/applebees-waitress-fired-pastor-receipt-193820748.html

The potential role of fictional stories in strategic planning

I am back (for a little while) to share some of the progression of my thoughts that have been informed by my comprehensive reading of scholarship in knowledge sharing and storytelling. In this particular post, I would like to focus on some preliminary thoughts on the issue of the role of fictional storytelling in planning.

I have read a few authors that has advocated the use of fictional storytelling in planning. In previous blog posts I mentioned how the education field (see blog post on Drake) and library and information field (see blog post on Nyström and Sjögren (2012)) have seen a place for fictional storytelling in planning for the future. I have also read Bennet and Bennet (2007), who discuss an instance where storytelling has been used in technology planning in institutions such as the United States Military. In this post, I would like to extend on these ideas with a few of my own.

First, I would like to assert a number of propositions, that I believe future researchers can test. Throughout this post, I use the term stories to mean the account of an event or experience:

Proposition 1: In the absence of factual data and statistics, one can use stories of the past as a precedent to plan for future events.

This is not a new idea. Organisational storytelling already points out that experts based their judgements on their prior experiences (Orr, 1996; Denning, 2005). I already observe that this activity is taking place in fields such as law, where lawyers and judges use prior cases to make judgements about what should be done in a present case. Doctors and other health professionals also use this method of referring to historical cases to make judgements about the treatment of patients in the present.  

Proposition 2: Even in the absence of stories in the past, one can use imaginative storytelling to predict the future.

This second proposition is already being used in some fields under names such as scenario planning or thought experiments. Scenario planning is used in the military; thought experiment in philosophy and game theory in economics. Scenario planning and game theory practices use imaginative or fictional storytelling to help reduce uncertainty and consider how an event may unfold if one take certain actions. Thought experiments on the other hand, utilise one's imagination to attempt to experience a phenomenon or phenomena (Brown and Fehige, 2011). It is on this basis that I argue that fictional storytelling can be deployed as a tool to help one contemplate future events, based on projection of the past into the future or speculation about how the present will change.

Conclusion
I conclude this post by suggesting that organisations and institutions can plan for the future through applying fictional storytelling. This is already done in a number of fields. I further argue that we can predict and perhaps even create the future by imagining worst case and best case scenarios. We can ask questions such as:

• What are the worst things that can happen if we take a particular action?
• What bad can happen if we do not address a particular situation?
• If we pursue a particular strategy, what good could come out of it?
• If we address a particular situation, what good could result from it?

As such, we can frame our planning in terms of tragic or epic stories. We can use tragic studies to tell us the dangers that we need to protect ourselves or institutions against. However we can also use epic storytelling to motivate ourselves or organisations to aim for new possibilities, goals and achievement. These are some of my preliminary thoughts on the matter, as informed by some of my readings, some of which I have not explicitly mentioned here. Hopefully, after my comprehensive examinations, I will have more time to develop on these ideas and even conduct some research and experiments to test the validity of my propositions.


References:

Bennet, A., & Bennet, D. (2007). From stories to strategy: Putting organizational learning to work. VINE: The Journal of Information and Knowledge Management Systems, 37(4), 404-409. doi:10.1108/03055720710838489


Brown, J. R. & Fehige, Y. (2011). Thought experiments. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/thought-experiment/.

Denning, S. (2005). The leader's guide to storytelling :Mastering the art and discipline of business narrative. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/A Wiley Imprint.

Drake, S. M., Bebbington, J., Laksman, S., Mackie, P., Maynes, N., & Wayne, L. (1992).


Developing an integrated curriculum using the Story Model. Toronto, ON: OISE Press.

Drake, Susan M. (2010) "Enhancing Canadian Teacher Education Using a Story Framework,"The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 1(2), Retrieved from http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cjsotl_rcacea/vol1/iss2/2

Nyström, V., & Sjögren, L. (2012). An evaluation of the benefits and value of libraries. Oxford, U.K.: Chandos Publishing.

Orr, J. E. (1996). Talking about machines: An ethnography of a modern job. Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press.

Corporate online storytelling: for libraries?

I found an interesting read on movements towards corporate online storytelling this week in my Twitter feed. In Elliot's (2012) article for The New York Times, I discovered that Coca Cola is about to rebrand their online presence as an online magazine. In doing so, Coca Cola's new Web site is to reflect its marketers recasting 'communications with consumers as storytelling rather than advertising.' I quote:

'Just as attention is being paid to developing content ...for brand storytelling, an appetite also exists for corporate storytelling.'

Storytelling on Coke's Web site will be 'subjective, not objective...favorable to the brands, products and interests of the Coca-Cola Company.'

'Although the content comes “with a point of view,” Mr. Brown acknowledged, “we want to be a credible source.”'

Coca Cola is also not afraid to make mistakes with their online storytelling and magazine type site. The informant Ashley Brown, director for digital communications and social media at the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, states:

“I’m sure we’re going to make mistakes,” he said, “and readers are going to tell us.”

Implication for libraries

I think I am ahead of my time in LIS: advocating online storytelling for library websites when the field's not quite ready for it. Currently there have been moves within library schools to dispense with storytelling courses from LIS curriculum and library education (Sturm, 2010). Further, within LIS, librarians have predominantly seen storytelling as a service to children (Sturm, 2010). This is despite the fact that there is a growing interest in storytelling and the professionalization of storytelling for adults (Sturm, 2010). In fact, there is also growing interest in corporations for corporate storytelling (Greene & Del Negro, 2010). Hence, while business schools are becoming more interested in offering storytelling courses (Marek, 2011), library schools are thinking about getting rid of them altogether.



In my view, there needs to be a course within library schools that will deals with institutional digital storytelling. This is because, in the age of social media and Library 2.0, libraries need to move online and tell their stories. Libraries need to find ways of connecting with their users and potential users in the online world. We need content on our websites and a social media presence that is constantly updated and engaging, reminding our users that we are a channel to credible information sources. Our Websites must now be more like blogs or online magazines, with a constant flow of information. We should not only tell users what we have, but also post commentaries and view points, to represent the information that we have within our collections. In short, we need to take a page from Coca Cola's book on corporate storytelling. If Coca Cola is thinking about becoming a publisher, why not libraries?

Libraries are already telling stories within their walls. We have countless exhibits and exhibitions within our walls and some libraries have taken these and posted them on their websites. However, our practices are all being done without examining the theories of good storytelling, digital storytelling and even the theories of institutional or corporate storytelling. My questions are:

• Are library professionals equipped to tell good stories online and offline? 
• Are library professionals able to recognise what stories are worthy of being told?

Storytelling can be fictional, non-fictional or a mixture of realism with fiction as in the case with life writing or organisational storytelling. Libraries can use parables to tell stories that convey a truth about how libraries work. Libraries can tell stories to workers within the libraries or even to the users and other outsiders of the library.  In fact, I have written 3 blogs posts about how libraries can use storytelling to their advantage (See blog post 1, blog post 2 and blog post 3). However, none of these posts even begin to speak to how libraries can use online storytelling to attract library users and engage them in using the library's online or physical services. This is a gap that I am also studying at current.


At least one LIS scholar, Marek (2011) has begun to develop a body of knowledge on organisational storytelling for libraries, though aimed at library managers and administrators (see my blog post on Kate Marek) Hopefully, I will be able to develop a course after completing my comprehensive examinations and research proposal that will also address this issue. For indeed, from the start of my PhD program, my original interest has always been in using the Web and folklore to design a more engaging experience for library users. And so far, I have felt that my extensive readings have equipped me with the theoretical knowledge to do so.



References:

Elliott, Stuart. (2012, November 11). Coke Revamps Web Site to Tell Its Story. The New York Times. Retrieved from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/business/media/coke-revamps-web-site-to-tell-its-story.html?_r=0

Greene, E., & Del Negro, J. M. (2010). Storytelling: Art and technique (4th ed.). Santa Barbara, California, Denver, Colorado, Oxford, England: Libraries Unlimited.

Marek, K. (2011). Organizational storytelling for librarians: Using stories for effective leadership. Chicago: American Library Association.

Sturm, B. (2010) Storytelling. In  Bates, M. J., & Maack, M. N. Encyclopedia of library and information sciences (3rd ed.). Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. 

Earliest library book on organisational storytelling for librarians?

Some time ago I posted that I had discovered the first library professional book to deal with the application of storytelling for developing libraries (See previous articles 1 and 2). This week, I stand corrected, with the discovery of Marek's (2011) book on Organizational Storytelling for librarians. Marek's book on organisational storytelling for librarians is published by the American Library Association and was released in 2011 according to this press release: http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/ala/using-storytelling-effective-library-leadership

In fact, Marek is even offering a training webinar on the topic on August 15, 2012 (See: http://infopeople.org/training/organizational-storytelling)

I am currently perusing the book to see its coverage and how it treats the topic.

References:

Marek, K. (2011). Organizational storytelling for librarians :Using stories for effective leadership. Chicago: American Library Association.

Story model applied to education can apply to libraries

I recently discovered Drake et al's (1992) story framework or model, and how it can be applied to helping in bringing about organisational and personal change in education.

Drake (2010) states in an article indicating:

The purpose of this reflective essay is to explore a “story” conceptual framework that university faculties may find useful to deepen understanding of current educational issues. It has been used in a variety of ways including curriculum development and as an effective instructional strategy for analyzing complex issues and teaching future teachers to think analytically and critically.

Drake (2010) also sees storytelling as a 'powerful way of making meaning of the world'. While Drake's model seems to be applied to education, I think it is fitting that librarians and information professionals also see the relevance of using this model to analyse libraries and our past and future directions.


While her model is not directly related to my research (as I am more interested in applying a story model to developing web-based library services), I see the story model as important for assessing, evaluating and enhancing library education as well as the future of libraries. One of the contributions that I think the story model can do for the library profession is to help us think of the new story that we want to write for the future of libraries in relation to the stories that the media and society is writing about us. There is a new story being written about libraries today, and we need to participate in listening to the stories that others outside the profession are telling about us, as well as to participate in writing this new story.

As I write this, I realise how influenced I have become by my organisational storytelling readings. Works of David Boje etc. have been internalised. As I see libraries as organisations, I also see the relevance of organisational storytelling to librarians and information specialists. I encourage you to read Drake (2010) or Drake et al. (1992) to be acquainted with the story model or framework, and try fitting libraries and LIS concerns and issues into the framework.



References:

Drake, S. M., Bebbington, J., Laksman, S., Mackie, P., Maynes, N., & Wayne, L. (1992).

Developing an integrated curriculum using the Story Model. Toronto, ON: OISE Press.

Drake, Susan M. (2010) "Enhancing Canadian Teacher Education Using a Story Framework,"The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Vol. 1: Iss. 2, Article 2.
Available at: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cjsotl_rcacea/vol1/iss2/2

How storytelling can be used for library development? Part 2

In part one of my review of the authors Nyström and Sjögren (2012) who cover in 2 chapters how storytelling can benefit the development of libraries, I focused on customer, user or patron storytelling (to me it does not matter what we call them, though some LIS persons are at war over the semantics). In this entry I wish to focus on chapter 7 of their work, in which they discuss the persona method.

The persona method creates a fictional user based on real data about users, including the stories that are collected from users and the statistical results of surveys. In this method, this fictitious person represents the entire group of users believed to act similarly and need a particular product or service. This fictitious representation of users is a way of aggregating what is known about a range of users or nonusers. This fictitious person is then placed in a specific context, and a storyline created to describe that user or non user (or the group to which the person belongs). In this sense, the persona method reverses the principle of organizational and even personal storytelling.


In personal or organisational storytelling,  people construct stories that represents a real event happening to real people (Gabriel, 2000). These stories created are symbolic representations of a real event that is filtered by one's own mind and memory (Gabriel, 2000).  However, with the persona method, the story is begins by characterising real people or persons and then constructing an artificial event based on these persons who are the main characters in the story. In this sense, persona is like the method of novelists, while personal and organisational storytelling is in the tradition of memoirs and other lifewriting forms.


Nyström and Sjögren advocate that one of the advantages of applying and creating personas is that it enables the retention of details revealed from data collection in organizational memory. They argue that the method also simplifies the communicative task of getting employees to understand, identify with and care about the targeted group. In this sense the persona method helps to aggregate quantitative and qualitative data into a narrative or story format that makes for easier communication and presentation to employees and even funding partners.

The persona method according to Nyström and Sjögren is a tool to be applied for strategic development or scenario planning, for marketing and for the designing of web services. Nyström and Sjögren also discusses the history of the method, describing it as being developed in the mid-1990s by designers of computer based systems. The method has been applied for designing websites and Internet services to ensure that these are functional for certain target groups. (For those wanting more coverage on what the persona method is, please check http://usability.gov/methods/analyze_current/personas.html, or the last reading below).


References:

Gabriel, Y. (1991). ON ORGANISATIONAL STORIES AND MYTHS: WHY IT IS EASIER TO SLAY A DRAGON THAN TO KILL A MYTH. International Sociology, 6(4), 427-442. doi:10.1177/026858091006004004 

Nyström, V., & Sjögren, L. (2012). An evaluation of the benefits and value of libraries. Oxford, U.K.: Chandos Publishing.

U.S. Government: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. (nd.). Develop Personas . [ONLINE] Available at: http://usability.gov/methods/analyze_current/personas.html. [Last Accessed July 10, 2012].

How storytelling can be used for library development? Part 1

To my small but loyal readership, I want to share with you my exciting discovery of the first library professional book that discusses storytelling as a tool for library development. That's right! I have discovered the first authors from the library and information discipline that discuss the application of storytelling to developing the library as an institution. And it was discovered in a serendipitous way, while physically browsing the library's newly acquired books for LIS and flipping through the pages. Meet Nyström and Sjögren (2012) who covers 2 whole chapters on how storytelling can be used to advance libraries. This is part 1 of my review on chapter 6 of the book that covers this topic.

While Nyström and Sjögren’s work is not wholly related to the theme of storytelling, the authors do provide in their book, two chapters that outline the use of storytelling for the development of libraries. In a chapter on customer surveys, Nyström and Sjögren outline storytelling as a both method of gathering research or collecting data from users and as a method for report and presenting data collected from surveys and interviews. In Nyström and Sjögren’s conceptualization, stories and narratives are essentially the same, and can refer to accounts of experiences that actually happened or are imagined. They conclude that stories do not provide an exact account of happenings, but are subjective, personal interpretations or constructions of events that took place.

Nyström and Sjögren focus on building a case for librarians to use storytelling in research methods to capture customer stories.   They begin this case by first establishing the history of the storytelling as a research method, explaining that narrative method was first used by historians for sharing knowledge. They provide a further timeline of the adoption of the method by other research disciplines, indicating that in the 1980s, social scientists adopted the method, using it in anthropology, ethnology, pedagogy, psychology and organizational theory.  They then discuss that in the 1990s, corporate storytelling developed especially in the United States where it was used primarily for marketing, but adapted in the 2000s as a tool for communicating internally to employees as well as externally with customers or the wider environment in which the organization existed.

Nyström and Sjögren also in building their case for the use of storytelling in library research on customers, also discuss that there is consensus on the value of studying stories to gain new perspectives and be able to analyse facts in new ways. They propose and demonstrate the use of storytelling in customer surveys as a method of obtaining information that questionnaire surveys could not collect, concluding that customer stories are rich sources of information about users’ library experiences. They suggest that these experiences can be used as a metric of quality demonstrating whether the library is of value to users and whether or not it is meeting users’ needs. As such, this information can provide the library with data to identify what needs to be improved or even generate new ideas. The authors affirm that libraries can learn from dialogue with users and from listening to customer experiences, while mentioning that storytelling can be used as both a marketing tool for libraries, as well as useful in meetings with funding organisations as well as in annual reports.

From this, I see the profession is on its way to repurpose storytelling from just an activity or service offered to our young users, to a tool that we use internally and externally to advance our noble institutions.

References:

Nyström, V., & Sjögren, L. (2012). An evaluation of the benefits and value of libraries. Oxford, U.K.: Chandos Publishing.

Organizational storytelling research part 1

I am now unto my second annotated bibliography on storytelling and the connection with businesses. This part of the research is now uncovering dozens of articles on the subject of organisational storytelling. To help me make sense of the literature, I have realised that it is useful to think visually or graphically incorporating diagrams, illustrations and tables to help make sense of scholarly works. So this is what I have done so far with more readings, note taking and writings to be undertaken.

Organisational storytelling research Part 1

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