Iowa Library Association's Annual Conferenc

"Out of the Comfort Zone"

Thank you for the kind words. I am delighted to be here.

2) CAMPAIGNING IN IOWA in 1987-88

Let me reminisce a minute or two about being in Iowa in the winter of 1987-88 while campaigning for my husband's nomination as presidential candidate. . .

3) BRIEFING AND FORUM ON CHILDREN'S AND YOUTH SERVICES IN DES MOINES IN DECEMBER 1993

Please allow me a minute or two longer for another reminiscence that I know my colleagues on the Commission would want me to express. We sponsored an open forum here in Des Moines on December 3, 1993, on children and youth services. It was the third regional hearing -- previous ones were in Boston and Sacramento -- to follow up on the number-one recommendation of the 1991 White House Conference on Library and Information Services. Of course, that recommendation, called the Omnibus Children and Youth Literacy Initiative, was about strengthening school and public library services for children and young adults.

The forum here was expertly arranged by Iowa State Librarian Sharman Smith and her staff, including Sandy Dixon and Jan Irving, and a committee of Iowa librarians. They also put together an enlightening briefing for Commissioners on December 2, just before the open forum. The briefing consisted of ten presentations on Midwestern demographics and economic conditions and the status of children, library support and school finance in the Midwest.

Commissioners at the briefing and forum were, of course, Iowa's very own Norm Kelinson, Ben chieh-Liu of Illinois, Dan Casey of New York, Elinor Swaim of North Carolina and Winston Tabb of Washington, D.C. The open forum on December 3 included 35 presentations by representatives from eight Midwestern states -- Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, Wisconsin, Kansas and Nebraska. The presentations were arranged in seven panels. Two of them were for representatives of the library and information communities in Kansas and Nebraska. The other panels focused on these five broad topics:

1. Literacy -- partnerships -- family programs
2. Collections -- resource-sharing -- cooperation -- legislation
3. Information technology
4. Resource-based learning -- schools, media centers and the public library
5. Cooperation.

At the forum we heard from some distinguished Iowans, including the following:

• Tom Cilek of the Hills Bank and Trust in Iowa City
• Carol Elbert of the Ames Public Library
• Lynne Miller of the Waterloo Public Library
• Elaine Estes and David Ashcraft from the public library here in Des Moines
• Katherine Von Wald, Central Iowa Regional Library System in Clive
• Ann Marie Kelzenberg from Hills Elementary School
• Betty Jo Buckingham from the Iowa Department of Education
• Barbara Black from the Iowa City Public Library
• Karlene Garn of Ames High School
• Rhonda Sheeley, Keystone Area Education Agency in Elkader
• Ann Schlapkohl, who's with the Manson Public Library
• Marie Harns with the North Central Regional Library in Mason City
• Jean Van Deusen in Iowa University's School of Library and Information Science
• Marian Kieffer from the Bellevue Public Library
• Ann Watts with the Slater Public Library
• Bette Kelinson from Congressman Jim Leach's office
• Bob Soukup from Senator Tom Harkins' office
• Senator Charles Grassley.

Would the speakers and the people who organized and hosted the briefing and forum stand and be recognized? Thank you very much for all your work and for your inspiring and cautionary words to the Commission two years ago. We are in your debt. How about a round of applause for yourselves? Please be seated.

4) REMARKS ON CONFERENCE THEME

I thank all of you for looking back with me at some memorable times in Iowa. On to today! I congratulate you on a super theme for your conference. It is one of the most thought-provoking I have heard or on which I have had the opportunity to speak and, I hope, to contribute. I hope also that by the end of today's sessions you will have explored this theme fully and enthusiastically and that you will take that enthusiasm home and apply it productively.

I want to cover several areas this morning:

• The first is an historical challenge to your conference theme;

• Next is a quick look of factors necessary for a comfort zone;

• Then an explication, primarily from Marshall Keys, of what makes for our present discomfort and what we can or must do about it;

• Then an acknowledgment that we're talking about basics, regardless of whether we refer to them as "back to basics" or "new basics";

• After that we'll look at how the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science expects to locate and maintain a comfort zone by defining and using operating principles, goals and desired federal roles;

• Fifth, what NCLIS views as some of the most important things happening in Washington for libraries and information services nationally and how the Commission is involved in those issues; and

• Finally, a credo from one of your Iowa colleagues.

5) CHALLENGE TO CONFERENCE THEME

Several minutes ago I complimented you on your conference theme. Now let me turn around and challenge it! Your theme implies that we have been or are now in a comfort zone. However, have we, as users, supporters and workers in libraries, ever actually been in a comfort zone?

I'm not sure that we've been in a comfort zone anytime in the last hundred years! We weren't during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which was a time of rapid expansion for libraries. The ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIBRARY HISTORY describes the period this way for public libraries: "While eastern and midwestern cities served their population with innovative urban public libraries, rural areas, especially those in the western states, struggled to provide library service in the face of geographic dispersion and sparse settlement." This description may sound familiar to our own time, but does it sound like a comfort zone?

The late nineteenth century also saw the emergence of private research libraries and the establishment of over 300 professional associations, including our own American Library Association. What about academic libraries in the late 1800s? Here's what the WORLD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SERVICES says: "The nation's transformation from an oral to a written culture, coupled with the effects of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization, pressed American academic libraries at the turn of the 20th century into a direction different from that of public libraries." Off we went into the twentieth century with reserve systems, the beginning of departmental libraries and bibliographic instruction. Comfort zone? I don't think so.

And in 1909 along came the Special Libraries Association, formed with its motto of "Putting Libraries to Work." Special libraries grew rapidly and spread to a variety of businesses as well as social and scientific organizations. They developed tools and services to communicate and disseminate information quickly. Were special librarians relaxing during the first part of this century? It doesn't sound that way, does it!

Did you know that in the 1920s the National Education Association developed standards for elementary and secondary school libraries and that state and local governments encouraged this trend by funding school library supervisors and recommended booklists? A quiet, lazy time? Hardly!

Well, this small venture into library history must end. We have to come quickly to the modern period. We know that national expansion of library services characterized the 1950s and 1960s and that it was fueled by the Great Society programs and by the coincidental growth of computer technology and accessibility. We also know that the next two decades brought financial setbacks. The 1970s and 1980s did not, however, stop the push for new or revamped services and new or revamped ways to deliver those services. In the 90s we strive to maintain time-honored services and branch out onto the electronic roads taking us sometimes we're not sure where.

It seems we have always been pushing ahead, at first in geographic terms. Now pushing ahead may be done more technologically -- in other words, in cyberspace. Still though, as always, our push has to do with removing barriers. Also, as we push ahead, we continue do so with open arms, striving to serve the widest and largest possible portion of our communities -- whether those communities be campuses, corporations, cities or counties. Indeed, libraries are the original "big tents."

6) CHARACTERISTICS OF A COMFORT ZONE

Picture our "big tent." It seems it's been in constant motion -- bulging on one side, shrinking on another, sides flapping with the processions of people, ideas, information, materials and equipment in and out. I don't think any of us wants the tent to be still, but we do want the stakes to hold, especially since some of us not-so-secretly fear the tent will blow away altogether and we'll be left sitting out in the open with nothing more than a computer and modem!

What are some of those stakes to secure our library tent? Let's look at a few of them, at why they don't seem to be holding in the current political climate, and then at what it might take to hold those stakes.

First, an important part of feeling comfortable is FAMILIARITY. Some things that are happening and being said now in our country's capital and elsewhere are unfamiliar to many of us. It is not just that these things are being spoken by new people, but that the statements and initiatives themselves evidence different philosophies from what many of us espouse.

A second part of being comfortable is PREDICTABILITY. I think the biggest and most damaging effect on users, supporters and workers in libraries to date of the current climate in Washington has been emotional. Mind you, I am not saying there will not be tangible effects of these initiatives for change. I'm just talking about what we've experienced to date. We are uncomfortable -- that is, out of our comfort zones -- because we are uncertain. We can't predict -- or we don't want to try to predict -- what may happen next.

I don't think any group is more enamored with ORGANIZATION than those of us associated with libraries. ORGANIZATION is a third important factor in our comfort zone. I don't consider myself a New Ager. On the other hand, I do keep looking for harmonic convergence! At the national level I want information policy to come together with production and dissemination of information, alongside of universal access, which backs up to information literacy, and the diagram goes on and on.

What do you think? Have we ever been in the comfort zone? Perhaps you agree that users, supporters and workers in libraries have not traditionally functioned in comfort zones. The question remains, however, of whether we want to be there in the future. Perhaps we need to begin to regard a comfort zone as Tom Peters might define it in his 1987 book, THRIVING ON CHAOS, the subtitle of which is HANDBOOK FOR A MANAGEMENT REVOLUTION.

Perhaps we need to look at familiarity, predictability and organization for libraries and information services in other ways. For example: the more we work with newly elected officials, the more familiar they will become. That familiarity may not breed fondness, agreement or comfort, but it should help us understand their views and goals and they ours. Predictability is served as well, the more we work with those whom we and others have elected.

In the September 1995 newsletter of the Urban Libraries Council, Joey Rodger mentions an article from HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW, and I quote: "It points out that the need for predictability is not the need for guarantees. Predictability is about the rules of the game, not the outcome." End quote. And magically the organization we crave appears when I say "rules"!

7) A COMFORT ZONE ABOUT TECHNOLOGY

Earlier I approached the notion of a comfort zone in historical terms and in terms of what we consider traditional library services. Now let's look at it in technological terms, which may be what the conference planners had in mind when they came up with this theme, "Out of the Comfort Zone." I think few people would dispute that many of us are in a comfort zone with books and other printed text and are deeply uncomfortable with electronic technology -- whether that discomfort is due to mistrust, ignorance, some other factor or a combination of factors.

Marshall Keys is the executive director of the New England Library Network, known as NELINET. In a recent article in the journal, RESOURCE SHARING 7 INFORMATION NETWORKS, Dr. Keys diagnoses our discomfort and prescribes some strong medicine. I think what he says is so timely and valuable that I'd like to quote a couple of paragraphs:

This paper is based on the premise that what happens in libraries is a result of what happens in the society at large. If we want to understand how libraries will be affected by emerging information technologies, we must first look broadly at how emerging technologies affect environments. . . .Revolutions depend on the conjunction of a need and a technology. . . .We stand today at the beginning of [a] revolution in the delivery of information. When this revolution is complete, most information will be delivered to users in digital format over high-speed telecommunication links.

Libraries are one of the institutions that stand to gain most from the networked information revolution, but, paradoxically, they are one of the institutions that stand to lost most as well. . . Fortunately, libraries are at a point where their future is not yet determined. What are the factors that will determine what their future looks like?. . . . We will be working, as far as information is concerned, in a post-scarcity environment.. .

More interesting perhaps are the implications of the revolution for the way librarians work. . . .What will libraries be like when librarians do something really radical--when we do different things?"

Dr. Keys continues about what is to be done to overcome the barriers libraries face because many librarians are not prepared to filter and evaluate a flood of information and are not comfortable with technology.

So, let's look again at our factors for a comfort zone -- familiarity, predictability and organization -- from a technological standpoint. If we want libraries to thrive and survive, in Dr. Keys' words, we had better become not just familiar but intimate with the new technology -- how to use it, manage it, promote it, and make sure it does the job our users need done.

Echoing Joey Rodger, Predictability is about the rules of the game, not the outcome. Increasingly it seems the rules for the orderliness and the organization that we seek come in the form of questions rather than commandments. Listen to how Dr. Keys phrases these questions, which do have to be consistently and insistently asked if things are ever to be predicted and organized. He cites three things to do:

First, we must understand what it is we are really about. Second, we must have a much better understanding of the cost of doing business. . . .Third, because networked environments encourage and even require new modes of behavior, we need to understand better how we relate to other people.

8) A COMFORT ZONE FOR THE 1990s

It may sound trite, but I don't know any better way to define a comfort zone for the 1990s than to revert to time-honored "rules" of planning, but with new emphases on flexibility and on customers. It sounds as though Marshall Keys would agree with me and I expect many of you would as well -- maybe even Tom Peters too. Here are a few sentences from Mr. Peters' book, THRIVING ON CHAOS, on how to orient an organization:

Too much is changing for anyone to be complacent. . . .There are two ways to respond to the end of the era of sustainable excellence. One is frenzy. . . .

The second strategy is paradoxical -- meeting uncertainty by emphasizing a set of new basics: world-class quality and service, enhanced responsiveness through greatly increased flexibility, short-cycle innovation and improvement aimed at creating new markets for both new and apparently mature products and services.

We at the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science refer to our "rules" of the game, our "new basics," as operating principles. These rules are in the context of the Commission as a federal agency, established in 1970 by Public Law 91-345. We have three key functions:

1. NCLIS determines the needs of the people of the United States for library and information services.

2. NCLIS translates those needs into recommended national policy.

3. NCLIS advises the President, the Congress, state and local governments and others on implementation of national policy.

We also have some operating principles in draft stages. [I have tried to generalize them to see if any might help in your situations:

1. We will consider new programs on the basis of whether they concern our mission and the extent to which they concern our mission.

2. We can consider starting a new program at the request of someone outside the Commission, such as the general public, the Congress, the Administration, the library and information services communities and other communities.

3. We can consider starting a new program at the request of one or more Commissioners or staff people if it is determined there is an external market or need for the products or services likely to be developed under the program.

4. We will undertake a new program only if its products can be measured and the results evaluated or outcomes measured.

5. Before a new program is undertaken, we will define the project by outlining the purposes, major components, approximate costs, time line, constituents served, products and/or services deriving from the project, Commissioners and/or staff responsible for overseeing and/or carrying out the program.

6. Before a new program is undertaken, we will evaluate the proposed program's cost/benefit and priority vis-a-vis our other ongoing or proposed programs and vis-a-vis related priorities at the national level;

7. We will proceed with the program(s) determined to be the most directly related to our mission.

8. When a program is completed, we will evaluate its achievements and shortcomings and use that information to design and carry out future programs.]

The keys in these new basics are focus on mission, responsiveness to our constituents, evaluation before and after the fact, and accountability.

9) AREAS OF CONCERN AND OPPORTUNITY FOR NCLIS

Well, you may be thinking that all these operating principles sound fine and good, but what guides them? At the Commission we are discussing several goals which we have framed in the context of desired federal roles in support of libraries and information services. At this point we have identified four roles and I am sure there are others we will discuss in the future. Here are the four goals, or desired federal roles, in draft form, that we are looking at now:

1. Federal policy that explicitly cites and supports libraries as necessary links and as the logical grass-roots links in the nation's information infrastructure.

2. Federal law and regulations and national guidelines that balance rights and responsibilities of creators, owners, distributors and users of intellectual property.

3. Federal policy and programs that collect, make available and analyze data on libraries and information services for decision-making at national, state and local levels.

4. Federal policy and programs that support research in the value of information and related topics.

The next question you may have is in what context we will apply these goals and principles. I know that Iowa's library community is very alert and knowledgeable about what is going on, not just and your local and state levels, but at the national as well. Still, let me list three of the National Commission's major concerns and opportunities in the coming months.

The first will not surprise you. It is libraries and the National Information Infrastructure. We have invested much in the last several years on that general topic and also in specific projects to gather data about public libraries' connections to, uses of and costs of Internet-based services and other electronic services. This fall and winter we're working again with Charles McClure, John Bertot and Douglas Zweizig to update the data collected in 1994 and 1995 so that we begin to build longitudinal data on which to project trends, costs and changes.

The second big area of concern and opportunity is no surprise either. It is the dissemination of public information and the extent to which that is changing and will change from print to electronic form. We will work with the Government Printing Office and others in the coming months to assess the situation and propose and evaluate additional and new avenues for disseminating the information our federal government produces.

A third large area is ownership and use of intellectual property. The Information Infrastructure Task Force published its white paper in September. The Conference on Fair Use continues to try to hammer out guidelines to protect intellectual property in an electronic, networked environment, yet make copyrighted information available to teachers and librarians in ways that promote accessibility and ease of use by learners in a multitude of situations.

You can see that technology is a basic factor putting these concerns at or near the top of many people's lists. You also know that technology is not the goal, the end purpose. It is a method to be used, like copyright is a method to be used, in the words of our Constitution, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. . ."

10) QUOTE FROM RHONDA SHEELEY ON TECHNOLOGY

Finally, let me close with the quote I promised from one of your own: Rhonda Sheeley, who was with the Keystone Area Education Agency in Elkader when she testified at the Commission's forum in Des Moines in December 1993. She expressed so well the basics we all know when she spoke about means versus ends. Let me give you a few highlights:

I'm here to tell you that this is not about technology, it's about access. . . .Let me tell you, it is not about technology, it is about motivation. . . .it is about life skills. . . .it is about equity. . . .it is about early childhood readiness to learn. . . .This is not about technology, it's about creativity. . . .it's about the arts. . . .it's about empowerment. . . .This is not about technology, it is about the future. . . .it is about inclusion. . . .it's about working smarter.

I hope you are as inspired and motivated by those words as I am. Are we challenged as well? If not, we should be. If we feel comfortable, something is wrong. Rhonda Sheeley's perspective can be simply paraphrased: "It's not about comfort. . .It's about serving people's need to learn, grow and develop."

11) CONCLUSION

Thank you very much for inviting me to the Iowa Library Association conference. It's been a pleasure. Best wishes on a very successful conclusion to your meetings here in Des Moines.