Greetings All:

The special library/information center/knowledge management sector aside, if we live by the information illusion, we die by the information illusion. So let's stop the seeming endless effort in LIS education to remake all libraries into ill-used information centers. Instead, let us encourage the development of the services that library supporters really want. Public and various other non-corporate libraries have always been low on the "information-seeking food chain." However, if you define and operate public, school and academic libraries as responsive facilitators of lifelong learning, the strategy for securing support becomes clear. People support institutions in which they have an emotional investment. I go into this a bit more in an article entitled "Know Your ROEI: Emotional investment in service delivery can return lifelong benefits" in the February 15, 2010 issue of "Library Journal." 

The "e-original" of "Know Your ROEI" can be found at the following address. However, for convenience sake, I have provided the text of the article in the email below my signature block.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6718541.html?&rid=##reg_visitor_id##&source=title 

Regards,
Bill
Bill Crowley, Ph.D.
Professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
Dominican University
7900 West Division Street
River Forest, IL 60305
708.524.6513 v
708.524.6657 f
[log in to unmask] 
www.gslis.dom.edu

____________________________________________________________________________________
Know Your ROEI
Emotional investment in service delivery can return lifelong benefits
By Bill Crowley -- Library Journal, 2/15/2010

Prior to retiring from full-time librarianship to concentrate on readers' advisory (RA) consulting, teaching, and book and media discussions, Ted Balcom, longtime administrator of the Villa Park Public Library (VPPL), IL, repeatedly demonstrated a particularly effective approach to shoring up essential library support. Balcom, 1996 winner of the Public Library Association's Allie Beth Martin Award, used his library's popular book talks to identify and encourage strong library supporters to stand for election to the library board.

As with most Illinois public libraries, VPPL is governed by an elected Board of Trustees. This means that fervent believers in the library, those termed super supporters in the 2008 OCLC/Leo Burnett report From Awareness to Funding: A Study of Library Support in America, need to gain the votes of their fellow citizens to participate at the board level. Over the years, the combination of first-rate book discussions and subsequent encouragement of readers to stand for election caused the governing body of VPPL to be regularly refreshed with staunch advocates.

An emotional connection

Balcom's years-long cultivation of the support of those who love reading, libraries, and librarians represents a particularly striking example of the use of ROEI or "return on emotional investment" (discussed by the author in Renewing Professional Librarianship: A Fundamental Rethinking, Libraries Unlimited, 2008). Briefly summarized, ROEI can be defined as a continuing emotional connection between users and the libraries and professional librarians who provide the library services and programs that people deem vital to their lives. ROEI is also an essential component of lifecycle librarianship, an approach to securing the future of libraries and professional librarians that is rooted in identifying and meeting priority community needs for responsive services from "the lapsit to the nursing home." [See "Lifecycle Librarianship," LJ 4/1/08, p. 46-48.]

It is important to distinguish ROEI from ROI, the classic business concept of "return on investment." When applied to libraries, usually through demands to "run the library like a business," ROI can mean sacrificing quality and the public library's fundamentally important lifelong learning role. The result can be a miserably supported institution strapped for programs and professional staff, little more than a book/video outlet and Internet café circulating materials in the least costly way.

Keep it fresh

OCLC's "Geek the Library" is an imaginative campaign to remind present and potential library users how this vital institution supports their passions-the critical interests of their lives. It also has the not-so-hidden agenda of stimulating public discussion about libraries and the resources needed to continue library effectiveness in a time of fiscal retrenchment. As a short-term response to accumulating horror tales of budget and staff reductions, it is a necessary rallying cry. However, as most consultants and marketers know, even the most innovative advertising approach has a limited time before it becomes tomorrow's cliché. Promoters of the similarly valuable concept of "Library 2.0" are already wondering whether "Library 4.0" or "5.0" or another name is needed to sustain its positive message of user and staff empowerment.

Even as "Geek the Library" mobilizes users and staff alike to advocate for library support, one long-range necessity remains the same: members of the library profession must continually modify a vision of the library that results in effective programs that the public, community leaders, and financial decision-makers alike can accept as a legitimate basis for supporting the library. They must document and market the transformational role played by public and other libraries in facilitating learning and reading throughout the human lifecycle. This process requires ongoing work that extends far beyond the five to seven years that even the most successful version of "Geek the Library" can buy us.

Supporting emotional labor

It is also going to demand a focus on the value of the professional librarian that is every bit as intense as the focus on the library itself. As anyone who has ever designed a marketing campaign knows, people relate to people. It is a truism underscored in OCLC's From Awareness to Funding. One of the "eight key insights" in Chapter 4 reads, "Perceptions of the librarian are highly related to support. 'Passionate librarians' who are involved in the community make a difference." This finding is critical both to any discussion of the future of libraries and the future of professional librarians.

As RA legend Balcom found in his successful efforts to recruit ardent readers to his library board, as OCLC determined with its "Geek the Library" strategy, and as this author found through participating in library marketing and political campaigns in several states, the willingness to commit to libraries represents an emotional, not a rational, connection. Data can help, of course, but tends to play a secondary role. At best, it supports actions taken by library supporters on the basis of an emotional connection with libraries developed in childhood and sustained through decades of positive interactions with libraries, librarians, and other staff.

Both the OCLC/Leo Burnett findings and the experience of long-serving librarians reinforce the essential truth that any discussion of the future of libraries and professional librarianship must be based on the reality that the field is grounded in the continuing human effort to assist people in their reading, lifelong-learning, and information-seeking activities. The most effective techniques have always involved emotional contacts in interactions ranging from children's storytelling to RA and reference interviews. Communications scholar Pamela Shockley-Zalabak has defined these as emotional labor, or "work performed by those whose jobs involve a high degree of personal contact and who are expected to produce an emotional state, such as pleasure, gratitude, or self-esteem in the people with whom they deal" (Fundamentals of Organizational Communication, Allyn & Bacon, 2006; 7th ed., 2008).

Long-term commitment

In this context, the model of lifecycle librarianship, grounded in ROEI, justifies and supports the need for librarians and other staff to develop long-term relationships with users at every age. This commitment, which must be extended far beyond the current financial crisis, is fundamental to lifecycle librarianship, a "new" philosophy, based on the "old" library verities of connection, expertise, and service in the support of reading, lifelong learning, and information provision.

Although experience suggests that the philosophy might have to be renamed after a few years, lifecycle librarianship emphasizes the perennial need for librarians and libraries to connect with-and serve-people throughout their lives. It provides a theoretical signpost for developing and sustaining community appreciation of the worth of libraries and librarians in both good times and bad.
Author Information
Bill Crowley, Ph.D., is Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Dominican University, River Forest, IL, and author of Renewing Professional Librarianship: A Fundamental Rethinking (Libraries Unlimited, 2008)

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