Keeping up with the Joneses

I recently wrote up a brief summary of my major job responsibilities, and it occurred to me that a large part of what I do falls under "stay informed."

This is actually written into my job description: I'm charged with being a leader for my library on emerging technologies for instruction. These days, that's a pretty broad sphere, and "staying informed" means that I read blogs, articles, reports, and other stuff about online catalogs, del.icio.us, student engagement, wikis, copyright and intellectual property, Silverlight and all its kin, e-books, Firefox plug-ins, innovative library programming, teaching and learning spaces...you name it, I'm interested in it. Sometimes it's hard to keep a clear focus, when it seems that literally everything we do, from buying books to putting up signs, has an effect on how our users engage with us and learn.

I love having the opportunity to stay so plugged into what's going on, not just in libraries but in higher education generally and even outside the campus gates. It's exciting and stimulating. It's also, sometimes, problematic. Is reading blogs for half an hour actually "work"? I know this is an ongoing conversation in libraries--how do we quantify (or qualify) the work of "staying informed"? How do we balance it with concrete, day-to-day responsibilities like the reference desk and teaching classes? Should we have to justify it? Should we devote a discrete amount of time to it--say, half a day one day a week to catch up with RSS feeds? Would that make it seem more like "real" work?

I think the struggle I see some libraries going through over this issue (and that I feel to some extent in myself, when I'm reading blog posts at my workstation) is one more indication of the sea change taking place in libraries and in businesses more generally. As libraries shift their workflows and redesign positions to tackle the rapid changes in the world of information, everyone's going through some growing pains. Library staff who aren't particularly technology-savvy want to be supported by those who are. The question for librarians to consider, then, how do we actually stay informed? When a colleague comes to ask me what the best web tool is to accomplish a particular goal, how do I know what to recommend to him?

Chances are, I know because I've been reading blogs, articles, reports, and other stuff.

It seems to me that a New Model Library (a 2.o Library, for lack of a better term) needs to rethink not only its home page design and some of its services to users, but also how it writes its job descriptions and how it evaluates and rewards work. It may also need to find creative ways to develop clear goals and outcomes for jobs with very unclear boundaries and fluctuating needs. How do you evaluate someone's success at "staying informed"? How do you support them in their efforts to do so?

I don't have a perfect answer for this, but as usual, I think clear communication is going to be key. And that's something that almost all libraries (all workplaces!) could stand to pay more attention to.