Blog about Libraries

Keith C. Kuhn, age 57 years, a 30 year resident of the Clifton area, passed away at Good Samaritan Hospital on Tuesday evening May 6, 2008. Keith was the Library Services Director of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Mr. Kuhn joined the Library on January 29, 1979 as the Adult Assistant in the Institutions/Books-By-Mail Department. in May 1980, he was appointed Interim Supervisor in the department. He was promoted to First Assistant of the department on June 6, 1983 and became the Department Head of Institutions/Books-by-Mail on March 31, 1986. Mr. Kuhn became the Department Head of Circulation Services in 1993 and was promoted to Deputy Librarian-Main on January 7, 1996. Mr. Kuhn was again promoted on January 30, 2000 as the Director of the newly formed Public Services Office.
Mr. Kuhn has served on numerous professional boards and committees, including the ProQuest Advisory Board and the Macmillan/Scribner's Advisory Board and as the Immediate Past President of the Indiana University SLIS Alumni Board. He also served as President of the W.J. Williams YMCA Advisory board and on the Board of the YMCA of Cincinnati. He received a B.A. from Indiana University/Purdue University, Indianapolis, and a M.L.S. from the Indiana University, Bloomington. He was a member of Beta Phi Chi Chapter. Mr. Kuhn was also a co-founder of the Cincinnati USA Books by the Banks Festival.
Mr. Kuhn was the 2007 recipient of the American Library Association's Sullivan Award for Public Library Administrators Supporting Services to Children. The award served to recognize Mr. Kuhn's leadership role in making children's services and organizational priority for the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Under his direction, a Children's Services Council was created for the PLCH System; this five-member panel established a mission, goals and priorities for children's library services. The success of this council led to the establishment of other such work groups in the library and also received state and national attention as the focus of several key programs at the Public Library Association (PLA) National conference and the Ohio Library Council (OLC) Children's Services Conference.
He also established the Indiana University SLIS-Keith C. Kuhn Tri-State Scholarship for Cincinnati area students to pursue their library degree at Indiana University.
Loving son of Arno Junior and the late Marjorie Jean (Brune) Kuhn of Waldron, IN. Devoted brother of Bruce A. and Max D. Kuhn of Waldron, IN, Sara Meloy of Atlanta, GA and Diana McNeely of Shelbyville, IN. Partner of Mark W. Rebstock. Friends may call at Miller-Busse & Borgmann Funeral Home, 3464 Central Parkway at Clifton Hills, Clifton, Thursday May 8, 2008 from 4:00-8:00 PM and on Friday May 9 from 9:30 AM until time of funeral service at 10:30 AM. Interment, Zion Cemetery, Shelbyville, Indiana. Memorials may be directed to W.J. Williams YMCA, c/o Chuck Barlage, 1228 E. McMillan Street, Cincinnati, OH 45206; Indiana University Foundation for the Keith Kuhn Tri-State Scholarship (or in memory of Keith Kuhn), PO Box 2298, Bloomington, IN 47402 or The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, 800 Vine Street, Cincinnati, OH 45202.

Beats me, but somehow Blogger decided I was posting from Afghanistan. Nope, I'm still posting from the heartland. And for those who have emailed- yes, I am still here. I just have a lot of other things going on right now and there isn't much time to maintain this blog.

However, I do have a particular topic on my mind, being a citizen of the US: Tax Season is here.

That's a pretty huge deal for a lot of public libraries and we are no exception. For one thing, as far as I can tell there is really no other source in town where people can find the paper forms. Sure, the guvmint is doing a really nice job of making all the forms and instructions available to taxpayers online, but there is something a little on the sneaky side going on if you look closely.

By restricting the supply of forms available the government saves money in paper costs by shifting the burden to the taxpayers. Secondly, by not providing forms via their own offices the IRS shifts the costs to other service providers who recognize that NOT providing a way for citizens to have a place to see, examine, study and choose forms on their own (and in paper) amounts to depriving them of valuable and potentially money saving information. And being in the business of facilitating easy access to useful information, I have a problem with that.

Furthermore, this cost shifting simply amounts to unfunded mandates. Rather than spending money to promote the collection of revenue, the federal government instead now causes local entities such as libraries and the citizens themselves to do so. I suppose I could make an argument for shifting the costs to the taxpayers directly; it's their money in the first place after all. However, to shift costs to the local entities without regard for their ability to pay is just bad policy. To me, this is another example of the counter intuitive, yet completely correct findings of the 2006 Public Libraries and the Internet study, which argues that with respect to e-government, the lack of local funding for libraries threatens and restricts access to the very resources these initiatives are meant to improve. Sure, having a computer at home is great, but I have a building full of people every day who don't and countless more who do not have the skills to find the right forms online or to e-file. Maybe one day we will be there, but not yet. Not nearly.

I have spoken to a few library directors about this and frankly, most just look at tax forms the wrong way. They have told me we are wasting time and money by providing tax forms, and by the way, my people do a fantastic job, better than anywhere I have seen. Most of the directors I have talked to tell me they don't do it, and that if the IRS or the Post Office won't do it, there is no reason why the library should.
Unfortunately, what these well meaning people don't understand is this- paper will eventually go away and we will then provide access to tax forms and government information whether we like it or not. At my own library we see a steady decline in the number of forms we provide each year. In fact, we are below the number of forms we passed out ten years ago. Well below. Eventually the IRS will just stop allowing me to order bulk forms, in which case my staff will still distribute them, only they will do it by helping people figure out how to do it online.

Secondly, since we are currently seen by several thousand repeat customers each year as "THE ONLY PLACE IN TOWN" for tax forms, there is an enormous amount of goodwill shed upon us for doing the great job we do. Each year, patrons tell me they think we are doing the community a favor. Many also tell me they think it is stupid that we have to do this, but that it is great that we do. What is that worth, I ask.

To borrow a well used phrase: "Making you local tax paying patrons happy- priceless."

Michael and Michael referred to a post I made a while back about professions not standing still. It's always nice to get recognized for something, yet at the same time it forces one to reread their own material, which in my case usually leads to the realization that the ideas therein are only half developed.

Such is the case with that post, which I now realize contained a glaring omission. Professions may not stand still, but it is also true that professions accumulate new processes and priorities while continuing to maintain old ones. We hang on to the tried and true, we cast off the obsolete and we respond to modernizing forces by adapting to the new.

Librarians have to remain open to new technologies and library patrons have expectations that the technology environment they encounter there will be state of the art. Yet those same patrons also expect that libraries will have the same things they have always had and that they will still have the time and expertise to help them understand and navigate the knowledge of the world. The point begging to be addressed here is the inherent difficulty of adding to what we do while also maintaining some or large parts of what we have always done. For that matter, how do we even know what to cast aside? And once we have decided what to add and what to keep, and since it is bound to seem like more work, how do we manage the workload without sacrificing quality or the thing we most want to spend with patrons- time?

I know, I know- probably this is not so insightful, yet it is something that deserves to be pointed out and I should have in that original post.

If nothing shows up on this blog for a while, then it's probably due to spending my free time as an amusement park for my kids rather than as a blogger. I'm still around, but between playing outside, swimming and working on my all too atrocious golf game, there's not much time left for anything else.

Send me an email if you need anything...

I have suggested that public service librarians must be technologically literate and that they must be willing to help people use the computers in their public libraries. One of the comments to that post said this:

"When libraries were solely about books, did we teach the illiterate how to read? Did we teach librarians how to teach people to read? Rarely that happened, but mostly we didn't do those things."

Well, yes we did. Literacy programs are an established service at public libraries throughout the country (cite & cite). What's more, literacy is included as one of the PLA service responses, (Literacy: "Learn to Read and Write: Adult, Teen, and Family Literacy") and I don't recall any responses on the discussion blog that said literacy was not a legitimate service.

Having said that, I do recoginize that we have limitations; we cannot teach people to use a computer in a reference interview, we cannot afford to immerse ourselves with an in depth tutoring session on setting up an email account with one patron while five others await our assistance with other matters. Like many reference librarians, I deal with this tension every day and I understand that there are truly times where the best answer to their request for help may very well be to send them elsewhere for assistance or instruction. Some people need to take a class (which we offer), some people need to take a little initiative, and some people need to understand that it really isn't our job to do the work for them. However, there are miles and miles between those extremes and the very ordinary expectations for assistance that we should be able to provide. My problem is with library public service staff who have a low level of competency and who are therefore unable to help patrons with perfectly reasonable requests, such as "how do I create columns in a document?", or "Does your wireless network have a SSID?"

So, speaking of reasonable requests, two questions I am typically asked about providing support for our public access computers are, "What kinds of questions should I be expected to answer?" and "Where to I draw the line?". These are fair questions, but unfortunately there is no list of questions we will and won't answer. And there will never be a list. The only answer I can give to these questions is based on competencies. Librarians have to master a certain set of skills and they have to have a familiarity and a comfort level with computers so that they will develop their own sense for when they are approaching "the line". Once they get to that point of having a high level of confidence in their own competencies, then they will have developed the authority to establish "the line".

I have a fairly high degree of computer competency, myself. I am not a programmer, or a webmaster by any stretch, but I am quite comfortable with most enduser tasks. But, first and foremost I have a well developed understanding of what I don't know. Furthermore, since my comfort level with computers in general is fairly high, I am confident that what I don't know is often beyond what a patron should expect to get from me. By contrast, a librarian with a low level of computer competency, someone who is very unsure of themself around computers is also someone who doesn't even know what they don't know. For me, it is fairly easy to help patrons solve many problems with our computers AND I have little trouble establishing the boundaries of service. For the librarian who is uncomfortable around computers, those boundaries do not exist because they don't ever really know whether the patron has a reasonable request or not.

The closest thing we can come to providing librarians with an operational understanding of what is required to provide high quality service with public access computers is to make sure they develop the skills necessary to understand what the difference is between reasonable and extreme requests. Staff should be evaluated on their level of computer competencies and they should be required to get the training they need to make sure they are comfortable and confident with computers. More importantly, those same staff members need to be involved in discussions about "the line" so that the service they provide can be as consistent as possible. They need to work together to share knowledge, to bail each other out when they need help and to establish a team based understanding of what kinds of questions they can and cannot answer.

I said in my previous post that providing assistance to patrons on our computers is not a choice. Perhaps that should be rephrased to say that providing assistance to patrons on our computers is a choice, but we choose not to do so at our peril. We create expectations by providing the computers in the first place. If we don't think we should be helping people use computers, then not only are we not providing a level of service that is a reasonable expectation, but we are also missing opportunity after opportunity to connect with patrons and demonstrate our worth.

This was said to me by a former staff member a few years ago.
This librarian was making the point that she did not agree with the expectation that she should be required to assist patrons with computer problems- helping them with word processing, spreadsheets, Powerpoint demos, formatting fliers, etc. on the library's public computers. She didn't have the skills to do it and felt that she couldn't give them the help they needed. She said she didn't go to library school to help people on the computers. I sympathized with her, but I could not agree with her for these reasons:

• Professions do not stand still.
  Have you ever met a plumber who doesn't work with PVC? An electrician who only uses knob and tube wiring? A firefighter who thinks those new fangled breathing masks are just too complicated? No, professionals who don't keep up with the technologies that affect their work go out of business. Librarianship is not immune to that.



• We don't have a choice.
  To me this is the most important reason. Even if we don't like computers, our patrons do. Libraries have established themselves as the place to get on the internet. We market this. We brag about it. We get federal funding for it (well, a little...). It is not responsible to provide access to computers without also providing the staff training necessary to make sure our people have the competencies to help patrons with them.
  Furthermore, the line between information tools, social software, games and productivity tools is thoroughly blurred by now. To expect that we can choose what part of the technology we will help patrons with is simply unrealistic.



• The jobs we signed up for may not exist anymore.
  Or, they may. It depends on how you look at it. I signed up for this because it's a service profession. Nothing drives me more than getting someone exactly what they want. The "what they want" has changed in the years I've been on the job. If professionals cannot adapt to that or cannot accept this, then I understand when they say they didn't get an MLS to do this.

A reasonable response to this post is to ask where the line is. How far should we go to help patrons (because sometimes their expectations for assistance really are more than we can or should provide)? Next post will be about that. So, don't touch that...mouse, or whatever.

I needed some information that I figured would be easily found at another library. I noticed they had chat reference, which they very proudly advertised, along with the hours of availability. So I gave it a shot. Here's the short, sad story of that experience:

(tick, tick, tick, tick....that's the sound of a clock. Keep it in your head as you read, okay?)

[17:30] stivab: Hi, have a question for you. Are you there?
[17:33] stivab: Hello?
[17:34] stivab: sigh...bye.


Look, I'm not impatient. But, from the perspective of a person who uses IM pretty frequently, waiting four minutes for a response is a lifetime. My guess is someone forgot they were online, or was too busy to answer. Either way, I wonder at the message this sends to people.

By the way, it is now about fifteen minutes later and still no response. Hello!?