making complexity work

While many of the details in a recent article from CIO Insight magazine on creative thinking are rather specific to information technology, one particular point in the article does resonate for anyone in the information professions, "...culturally you want a certain amount of complexity and churn because it creates a chemical reaction that jars creative thinking." Thinking creatively is an important skill when dealing with complexity because it can help us deal in new ways with many of the issues our organizations face.

Think about things in different ways can help us work through the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that accompanies complexity. In doing so, it provides us with new ways of addressing critical issues, such as how to standardize and consolidate functions so we can decrease spending in less critical areas while increasing spending in areas that generate greater strategic return for our organization overall. An example of this from a library IT perspective would be investing in new data mining software. One of the potential benefits of doing so is it would allow us to spend less time tinkering with routine library management system reports and shift the responsibility for that type of reporting closer to where it belongs in the organization. It would also allow the systems development staff to focus on "higher-value" projects, such as developing enhanced user-interfaces that bring all our content together which is one of the most important issues we need to address today.

refocusing our attention in the world of institutional repositories

Dorothea Salo's recent post in Caveat Lector is just the latest thing to remind us what we've known for some time now - that the successful institutional repositories (IRs) are those where the library has been proactive in soliciting content and has actively taken responsibility for doing all the work to get the content into the IR. Even so, success in IRs must be thought of in terms of modest acquisitions since no IR has truly taken off the way their planners had hoped. Part of this seems to be related to the work libraries have to do to convince faculty that an institutional repository is a worthwhile endeavor. This reluctance to engage with an IR effort seems to be mainly because the incentives to faculty just aren't obvious to most of them. In general, faculty don't see longevity as an issue for their published material, whether that's reflective of reality or not. The biggest gains that have been documented in relationship to gathering faculty contributions have been in grey literature.

What I found somewhat discouraging about Salo's post is the apparent ambivalence toward student contributions. We tend to forget that a lot of the emergent research in our institutions is conducted by students. This is reflected in the reality of most IRs where the majority of contributions are, in fact, from students in one form or another. McDowell's article in the latest issue of D-Lib is just the latest study to document this.

Perhaps, if we focus on what is meaningful to faculty and students, rather than what is of interest to us as librarians, we might be more successful in getting participation in our IRs.

reenvisioning our processes

A recent article in Computerworld documented the unexpected problems a bank experienced after installing a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Basically, the problem was that the bank was too focused on fulfilling its own information needs at the expense of its customers. Although the context in most libraries is quite different from that of the bank, much can be learned from this example. For instance, how often do we ask for more information than is truly necessary "just to make sure." A perfect example here is the typical interlibrary loan form where we ask for so much information it makes it appear we are actually trying to discourage people from using the service. By asking too many questions, the bank started losing people in droves. The question we must ask ourselves is, "Are we doing the same thing in our libraries?"

on being more adaptable

A recent article in CIO Insight magazine talked about IT's Bad Reputation. What is interesting about this article is that the same issues the author identifies as stifling innovation in information technology services are the same issues we face that contribute to a lack of innovation in information agencies and libraries in general.

If we are going to move forward in ways that are meaningful to our publics we have to change some things:
1) Decision making needs to be pushed down in the organization to the most appropriate level - the "trenches" as it were,
2) Even non-managerial employees must know how to make business decisions and not simply focus on the good of their local department or area of specialty, and
3) We have to make sure our colleagues understand how developments, such as Web 2.0, are disrupting the way organizations operate.

on Dewey and complexity

The recent uproar (by librarians) following the decision of the Gilbert, AZ public library to abandon Dewey as the primary means of locating materials on the shelves demonstrates how we do (or do not) adapt to complexity.

The basic jist of the problem is summed up nicely in a Wall Street Journal article. In discussing the controversy, the author states that "it feeds into a broader, increasingly urgent discussion about libraries, where a growing number of patrons, used to Google and Yahoo, simply don't look for books and information the way they used to." As was the case with web design, in a complex system we must gather our information and adapt based on the environment.

As Bowker and Star pointed out in their book, Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences, classification works best when it is invisible. When classification starts to become visible you have a good indication that the classification system isn't performing its job. That's the problem here, Dewey (in this case, but it really could be any classification system common in libraries) doesn't work for the average person because it doesn't conform to our current mental models. It requires too much, "What does that mean?" or "Why is that?" processing to be viable for many uses. For example, why is computer science classified in the 004-006 range instead of the 500's (sciences) where it really belongs? Why when I perform a subject heading search for "Social network research" do I find books scattered throughout the library in spots as disparate as 658.472 G562c, 305.80072 M297, and 300.72 A244?

Adaptation is one of the ways we continue to make systems work in a changing environment. An example of this is the organization of books at Northwestern University. Here we use Dewey (which is odd for an academic library to begin with) but we do not have books arranged in strict call numeric order. The Dewey ranges are combined based on very high-level topic areas (humanities, hard science, natural science, social science, etc.) in an effort to bring disparate areas in the classification system together to make more sense of the order for our patrons. Is it perfect? No, but it is does make discovery easier in many areas that have been "broken up" due to anomalies of Dewey.

Rather than castigating the folks in Gilbert, we should be trying to learn from their approach. It's too bad the naysayers don't get that.

complexity, libraries, and web design

At Computers in Libraries a couple of weeks ago, Ellyssa Kroski gave a talk about Information Design for the New Web. What I found particularly interesting, in addition to the design tips, was how this presentation demonstrated so vividly the point that libraries exist within a complex system. While complexity in the sense of a complex system was never mentioned in her presentation, the clear dependency of our library environment on the external world was demonstrated in the fact that all of the examples on how libraries need to be designing their services were drawn from outside of libraryland.

The message from this isn't particularly new, but it is clear: we must take our clues and directions from our environment. Libraries do not exist in an isolated or rarified world and our environment is being determined within a larger context that is not under our direct control. Even in the most traditional environments, the world expects differ things for us today. If we do not meet the expectations of the environment, the other systems with which we interact, such as our patron populations, will adapt and meet their needs in ways that are better suited to their needs. If that doesn't include us, it's not going to be a big concern for them, so it better be for us.

what is a complex system?

If you ask 10 different people what a complex system is you are likely to get 13 different answers because the term complex system has been used in many disciplines, but not in a consistent way. There is a common theme that brings all these differing uses together though and that theme is an attempt to understand the implications and context of how various types of systems work. In contrast to the classical reductionist approach, which break things down into discrete components for analysis, complexity theory takes a much broader, macro-level view. Complex systems analysis acknowledges that systems (whether in a computer or among the people you work with) do not exist in a vacuum and are influenced by that environment, often in ways that are not seemingly apparent.

Some features of complex systems are that they:

• remember in the sense that what has already happened usually influences what will happen next; however, that influence may be completely unpredictable,


• "learn", meaning that feedback into the system affects the way individual elements (and the system overall, of course) subsequently work. This feedback, therefore, alters elements and system overall, although not necessarily affecting everything in the same way,


• do not have easily defined boundaries as in most complex systems it is not clear where one system begins and another ends,


• can be recursive in the sense that the components of a complex system may be complex systems that themselves contain complex systems and so forth,


• exhibit emergent behavior, which are properties of the interactions of the system that can only be studied at a high level. In most cases, these behaviors are undetectable at the element level.

In future posts, my intent is to take a look at how these concepts apply to libraries as well as begin to explore the implications of this. A nice overview of complex systems by Gershenson and Heylighen can be found at http://uk.arxiv.org/ftp/nlin/papers/0402/0402023.pdf