2020-10-02 SPLAT Curiosity Report: Volume 6, Issue 7
Featured Story
Consider Slacking at Work
It’s the start of a new workweek and you stayed up too late last night just-one-more-chapter-ing. You pull up your email to see 80 unread items in your inbox, a miasmic stew of FW:RE:FW and angry red !High Priority! icons. Of those 80 emails, how many are really a) pertinent to read first thing, and 2) actually sent to you specifically?
Email has been a transformative piece of workplace technology, but in a lot of cases it is not the most effective way to chat & exchange information. It’s great for things like sending memos about changes to the incomplete return procedure, but it is not necessarily the most effective means for project planning or day-to-day communication.
First, let’s look at some specific problems with email:
- Email isn’t a good medium for text- or tweet-length exchanges. It’s an able replacement for letters & office memos, but it’s unsuited for a shorter, more conversational style that resembles talking more than writing.
- Email all comes into one inbox. News about a former coworker’s new baby goes to the same space as the director sharing the latest tax revenue projections, which is the same space your work buddy sends you cat memes and HR sends you reminders about the EAP benefit and SPLAT sends your regular newsletter. You can get fancy with setting up email filters to send mail to different folders based on sender or keyword, but that’s not 100% effective, and anyway it’s a contorted way to make email do something it wasn’t designed for. You can spend all day teaching a goat how to climb a tree, but you’re better off just using a squirrel.
- It exists in a bizarre hole in space and time. You aren’t generally expected to reply immediately to an email, however, if you wait to respond until the next day, or God forbid a couple days later, one often begins with an apology for the delayed response.
- It doesn’t allow threaded responses. In this author’s experience, as soon as you’re putting the last edits on a well-thought-out response to someone’s email, someone else’s reply arrives and the conversation goalposts are moved. Emails are only organized chronologically, so with each response the conversation moves forward- there’s rarely a good way to go back to an earlier point, and it’s a headache if two (or more!) people respond at the same time & two (or more!) conversations develop a fork under the same subject line.
- Emails only go to the people addressed. It’s common for somebody who wasn’t included in an email chain to need to be brought up to speed, and email is an ineffective way to get caught up on a conversation. The indenting, the bottom-up nature, the idea that you can’t just forward an email with all the details- there are side emails and replies to individuals versus reply-alls and topics that have spun out in separate emails as in point 4 above. Similarly, people who have been added to an email conversation have no way to unsubscribe or back out if they aren’t participating or if it’s not actually pertinent to them- they just continue to watch and weep as their unread emails pile on.
So what’s a librarian to do? There are a number of services billed as email killers that will do nicely. Some are basically instant messaging or group texting programs that would be well suited for a small team. Others are more robust for larger groups. Let’s talk primarily about Slack & Microsoft Teams.
Slack is a program that allows a group to communicate in a series of channels denoted by hashtags. The idea is that each workgroup gets a dedicated channel, so the circ staff would have something like #circulation or #publicservices, reference might have #reference or #bookwizards, management could have #let-them-eat-cake, and so on. There can be general channels for all staff, dedicated channels for clubs or programs or library memes, private channels viewable only by members, and/or public channels viewable by anyone on staff. Communication is mostly text-based, although there are options to hold video/ audio chats right within Slack, or to integrate with other services like Zoom.
Slack has a tiered payment structure. There’s a free tier, but that might be troublesome for official library business- it only retains the last 10,000 messages exchanged, which could run you afoul of public records laws & electronic records retention policies. The next tier up is $6.67 per user per month, and there are a few more expensive tiers that offer more support & security options for large entities.
Teams is a similar program offered directly by Microsoft. If your library (and your IT department) already uses Outlook and/or Office 365, Teams may be easier to integrate with your existing software. Much like Slack, Teams offers file sharing, the ability to set up different channels for different work groups & purposes, and connect with other programs for things like scheduling and hosting shared documents. Teams also has a tiered payment structure. For those of you in academia or K-12, Teams is FERPA-compliant, while with Slack you need to do some research to find whether the tier you want is compliant.
To be sure, email will still be a feature in our daily lives for a long time to come. The email killers I discussed are notably for in-house use only: they are great for discussions within a team, but a patron or vendor or the SPLAT newsletter can’t contact you through Slack. Email is an open standard and will continue to be the norm for formal communication and communication with outside people & groups. However, it’s worth looking at alternatives to enable more effective communication and collaboration among your colleagues.
– Tyler McLane, Coeur d’Alene Public Library
Fail Forward
We’ve all been there. You pour your heart into a program, and no one shows up. You try something new, and you fall on your face. Sound familiar? Fail Forward is the place to share your failures, and give you the opportunity to share what you learned from them. Did you promote your program in a different way after no one showed up? Maybe you took a new approach to the new thing you were excited about? Awesome! Share your story via our online form so others can learn, and realize that failure is often part of the process.
All the Things I (Didn’t) Do When I Had the Time
Are you like me in that you have a list of things that you know you would accomplish if you just had the time? With so much downtime in the last six months you would think I would have learned that instrument, or cleaned that closet, or read that stack of books. However, I didn’t use the time to do all those things I have been meaning to do. I was really surprised to learn that lack of time wasn’t the main issue. In all honesty, it is probably plain old fear of failure that has kept me from all the things I have wanted to do. So, now what? Well, with this realization I am going to try to do those projects at work that I have always wanted to do, but have used the I just don’t have time excuse to get out of doing them. I am no longer going to let the details overwhelm me, and use the time I have to just do them.
– Gretchen Perkins, Caldwell School District
Crush Corner
Is there a library you follow on social media who is always doing new and exciting things? How about a blog you follow that inspires you? What about a new idea, book, or resource that you want to share? Library Crush Corner is a place for those working in Idaho libraries to share what inspires them, and who or what they’re crushing on… in a professional sense. Share your story via our online form so we can publish it in a future issue!
Oral Histories Collaboration
As Oral Histories become more prominent in the way we record our lives, University of Washington Tacoma’s Founding Stories Project is a great example to see how it’s done. In partnership with the University of Idaho Library and built using the IMLS funded CollectionBuilder platform, this innovative project highlights the hard work and dedication it takes to build a university campus.
– Jessica Martinez, University of Idaho Library
SPLAT explores the ever-evolving library world and supports library folks as they adapt to meet the needs of their communities. Library folk throughout the state of Idaho volunteer to serve on the Special Projects Library Action Team (SPLAT). Learn more about SPLAT at splat.lili.org
SPLAT is brought to you by the Idaho Commission for Libraries and was made possible, in part, by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (LS-246156-OLS-20). The views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.