Blog Every Day in June Day 18: The Past the Present the Future and the User.

Today's post comes from Phil Mullen, who is the Australian Library & Information Services Manager for K&L Gates.

The Past the Present the Future and the User.

There was a time before the Internet when I was starting my life as a law librarian. This world was really just books and indexes, how we loved those indexes and updates. The endless looseleaf filing, missing updates and misfiled pages. We used thousands of stickers very much like postage stamps that updated the Law Reports; happy days.

There was the occasional screaming modem (and babies) with green online screens staring out at you asking you to spend money and incur the wrath of the managing partner for spending 200 dollars on a computer search.

Retrieving an unreported judgment required us to attend the Law Courts Library and photocopy. Large law libraries such as Sydney University Law School Library and the NSW Law Courts Library reigned supreme and seem impermeable and mired in legal tradition.

Looking back today it is hard to believe we are living in the same world. The pace of change in law libraries has gone into overdrive since the GFC, as the legal industry has seen profits fall away and have recognised the economies the internet can bring creating what is called New Law.

We can now access online looseleaf services, Law Reports and books. Who needs indexes when we can access everything on the internet and often free through Austlii. You can see how the internet has torn apart a very comfy cartel between legal publishers, law firms and law librarians.

So where are law libraries going? Are they going? Well, I have no idea nor much of a sense what all this means for law libraries yet.

But I do know we have to recommit ourselves to the user and their information behaviour. Throughout this evolution there has been one constant; we know our users, we know what information they need and when they need it and maybe we have forgotten this.

In this world of New Law our users have to be at the centre of what we do and how we do “things” (not necessarily library "things"). We need to leave behind catalogues and all those back office jobs that simply distract us from our users information needs. We will need to be multitaskers - we are going to have to be training librarians and research librarians and intranet librarians and current awareness librarians and subject specialists and social media librarians.

In 2014 the SLA in association with the Financial Times (note how the SLA is working with publishers to redefine what we do) produced a very influential report called, The Evolving Value of Information Management And Five Essential Attributes of the Modern Information Professional. (2013)

The report asked business executives what they believed information professionals should be doing to add value and then the report identified five common attributes of the successful information professional in the modern era.

The Five Essential Attributes are:

●      Communicate Your Value

●      Understand the drivers

●      Manage the process

●      Keep up on technical skills

●      Provide "decision ready" information

In the rush to  protect and defend the old "law library traditions" we have forgotten our users and the New Law world they occupy. Using the Five Essential Attributes as a starting point we might be able to refocus our efforts back to user and as Sheryl Sandberg says, “Lean In”.

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Blog Every Day in June Day 14: It’s like Uber but for the Social Contract by Hugh Rundle

Today's post comes from Hugh Rundle's blog. Hugh is a librarian in Melbourne, and has been published over at In the Library with a Lead Pipe  and in the ALA's Planning Our Future Libraries: Blueprints for 2025. This piece was originally published to Hugh's website under the title It's like Uber but for the Social Contract.

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Governments throughout the Anglosphere have begun talking about ‘Digital First’ or ‘Digital by Default’ in the last couple of years. In 2012 President Obama launched the US Roadmap for Digital Government. The Cameron government in the UK launched the Government Digital Office in 2011 with the intention of delivering ‘digital by default’ government services. Here in Australia, Minister for Communications Malcolm Turnbull is a big proponent of this idea, launching the Digital Transformation Office a few weeks ago. Turnbull delights in visiting startup incubators to deliver soliloquies about how Government needs to become more responsive and support tech companies. The big idea of Digital by Default though, is that government departments should assume that the way people want to access information and services is online, with other channels a secondary consideration. In many ways this is a bit of a no-brainer; but there’s a catch. The great danger of digital first government is not that it will fail, but in how it measures success.

A concept that has become de rigeur in the software startup world is ‘user centred design’. This approach seeks to arrange the system around the needs and desires of the user, rather than forcing the user to adapt to the requirements of the system. If you’re thinking that sounds like the opposite of most interactions with government, you’re not alone. Indeed, virtually the first thing the Australian Government’s new Digital Transformation Office has done is release a Digital Service Standard for government departments, focussed on making their services user-centred. This is the first step governments need to understand when becoming ‘Digital by Default’. Unless the design of government services is ‘user centred’ digitising their delivery won’t make a whole lot of difference.

An example of this is eTax, the ATO’s software program introduced in 1999. eTaxwas only available for Windows PCs until 2013, and replicated the paper ‘Tax Pack’ forms. It was always clunky, and when a version for Macs was finally released in 2013, it was buggy and confusing to install. eTax may have been digital, but it certainly wasn’t a joy to use. Last year an alternative, in-browser system, MyTax,was finally introduced. MyTax is considerably easier to use, though the authentication process is still cumbersome, and last year it was only available for those with straightforward financial arrangements.

Reducing costs ...by passing them on to you

eTax did, at least, have the virtue of maintaining more or less the same usability of the paper Tax Pack. Other moves from State and Federal government to go digital have actually reduced usability. The Victorian Government annually publishes the Directory of Victorian Public Libraries. Until around 2008 this was produced and distributed in hard copy to all public libraries in the state. Then, the State Government suddenly discovered a desire to ‘reduce our environmental impact’ and announced that henceforth the Directory would be ‘published online’. What this means in practice is nine PDF files posted to an obscure web page. Of course, the only reason to publish something in PDF is if you want to retain the formatting so as to enable someone to print it out. Not exactly reducing paper use. Needless to say, the user experience of clicking and searching through nine PDF files rather than flicking to the dog-eared and specially coloured page in a hardcopy is significantly poorer.

The fate of the Directory of Victorian Public Libraries exemplifies what happens when governments go ‘digital by default’ for the wrong reason. It’s transparently the case that the Directory is ‘published’ as nine separate PDFs instead of one hardcopy because the State Government wants to pass on the printing costs to local Councils and library corporations. If the goal was to digitise in order to provide better service, it would have been turned into a searchable database.

This is how ‘digital by default’ currently works in Australian government. The goal is simply to reduce government overheads by passing the cost of production down the line. It’s Uber for Government. Just as Uber requires workers to provide and service their own vehicle, Government is looking to require citizens to BYO internet connection or smartphone in order to receive services. But this excludes those who need government support the most. Just as Uber simply ignores laws that it finds inconvenient, Digital by Default government aimed solely at reducing costs ignores citizens it finds inconvenient. Not only does this break the implicit rules of social democracy, it misunderstands the nature of many government services.

Friction

What we call reducing bureaucracy in government, increasing productivity in business, and removing friction in the app economy are all more or less the same thing - removing as many human interactions as possible. This might save money, but if you’re providing a service rather than a product it is very easy to take it past the point where service quality starts to diminish. Digital be Default needs to be squarely aimed at improving the quality of government services, rather than a way to treat Baumol’s cost disease. RFID in libraries is a good example of this. Library services focussed on reducing costs and becoming more efficient have introduced RFID as a way to reduce staff. Library services focussed on high quality service have introduced RFID in conjunction with new service models centred on interactions rather than transactions - retaining staff numbers but giving them more time to provide quality advice and experiences instead of merely transactions. Public libraries have always been more than mere book repositories. For many people, libraries are a place of refuge from a depressing and hostile world - a rare place with familiar faces and patient interlocutors. This is, as they say, a feature, not a bug.

Digital by Default must not lose sight of some of the positive outcomes from current government service provision. Whether we’re talking about food safety permits for restaurants, talking to real humans in public libraries, or minimum manufacturing standards for car brakes, it’s important to remember why we designed things that way in the first place. Sometimes when there’s no friction, people die.

Perspective

Turnbull, Cameron and Obama are all very rich white men in positions of power, but you merely need to be comfortably middle class to lose perspective. The same people who think public libraries were obsoleted by Google now call for all Government interactions to be appified, digitised and vaporised. Who wants to use the phone or go in and talk to a person anyway? People without your privilege - that’s who. The elderly, the illiterate, those without an internet connection and those who have simply run over their data limit for the month, people with complex combinations of needs that your software developer didn’t anticipate: these are the people who need to sit down with a real person. Seen from this angle, Digital by Default government - far from empowering citizens - breaks the very bonds that created social democracy in the first place.

So Digital by Default - sure, bring it on, people like me will love it. But your solution has to account for those who don’t or can’t love it, in a meaningful way that isn’t simply shoving them over to their local library to deal with (as so many state and federal government services do). It’s 2015 - the default way to get information and services from government should be digital, and it should be user-focussed and easy to use. But the non-default analogue option needs to exist, and be user-focussed and easy to use as well. Instead of Uber for the privileged and a once-a-day bus for the rest, let’s build government that’s like self-driving cars for everyone. Anything else is bullshit.

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