Q&A: Karen Coombs of Library Web Chic

A self professed "web geek" with a passionate dedication to libraries, Karen Coombs is one of the most visible leaders in the library tech world. Through the blog Library Web Chic she's provided inspiration and insight to libraries and librarians bringing their services to the web. Both pragmatic and thoughtful, Coombs' blog is as likely to offer tips on configuring RSS feeds as it is to ponder the dearth of women in Systems librarianship. An active writer and presenter, she is a fixture at Code4Lib and Internet Librarian as well as ALA's LITA, where she was chair of the social software-centric BIGWIG group.

In 2007, Coombs was instrumental in organizing "Five Weeks to a Social Library", a free online course for librarians on learning and implementing social software in the libraries. Now, she's literally written the book on Library Blogging. Written with fellow tech advocate Jason Griffey, Library Blogging offers an introduction to what blogging can do for libraries, and a program for enriching libraries' online presence.

Now the Head of Web Services at University of Houston Libraries. Her day to day duties include development and maintenance of the libraries’ web site and virtual presence for 35,000 plus students, faculty and staff, as well as spearheading an ever- evolving program of technology learning and experimentation. She graciously agreed to be interivewed for Libgig.com, and share her insights on career planning, implementing technologies, and developing a good blog.

You wear a lot of hats in the UH libraries and in the library tech community. How would you sum up your professional life?

I’m a web geek at heart. This is pretty broad because the web comes into play in so many ways in libraries: electronic resources, digital libraries, and library website stuff. I often describe my department as “if it touches the library web it is our problem” while this isn’t EXACTLY true per se we are involved in most web-oriented project. What this means for me professionally is that I have pretty diverse interests. I’ve written and spoken about library web design issues, but also about things like privacy, authentication and authorization, federated search, blogging, etc. For me this diversity is what I like best about my job. I’m always doing something different, which keeps it interesting.

How did you decide to become a librarian, and specifically, how did you get into library tech? If you had to start your career again, what would you do differently?

I’d work for the Music Department in college helping them organize and catalog their sheet music. I’d also worked as a research assistant for an anthropology professor of mine. After undergraduate school, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. After graduating I had a sequence of jobs where I got to work with technology and information a lot. It made me realize that what I was good at was organizing stuff with technology. I stumbled upon University of Illinois and Syracuse University’s library programs and they sounded like the kind of library work I wanted to do. It seemed like looking at jobs technology and cataloging/metadata librarian jobs were plentiful so I focused on those areas. I was sort of shocked to realize how much the cataloging aspects of my library education dove-tailed with my interest in web design. The truth was when I got to the end of library school I didn’t want to work in a library, I wanted to build interactive, helpful and useful websites. Unfortunately, I hit the job market just as the tech bubble burst and ended up going with my fall back plan of working in the technology division of an academic library.

If I had to do it over again, I’d probably stayed at Syracuse and gotten my PhD in information science. I love what I do, but the things that interest me most, require the time to do real research. I don’t have quite the skills and time for that working in an academic library.

What role have mentors played in your career? What advice would you give aspiring tech librarians for seeking mentors, and what advice would you give those mentoring newer professionals?

Mentors have played a really important role in my career. I think without them I wouldn’t have been as inspired or successful. I’ve had mentors locally at the institutions I’ve worked at who helped me learn how things worked there and with day-to-day issues. But I’ve also had mentors who were geographically disparate that play a role in shaping my career, helping me to build my confidence as a professional, build my social network, think about where I want to go in the future career-wise. I’ve been really fortunate that my mentor in this arena is a very experienced and respected in the professional. We have a great rapport and interact as colleagues on the same level so much that I’d guess most people would see us as colleagues not mentor and mentee.

The most important thing about finding a mentor is making sure it is a good fit. You really need to get along with the person and there be mutual respect and trust. A relationship with a mentor can’t be forced. Try to build relationships with colleagues first; one of these is may to turn into a mentor relationship on its own. In order for this to work potential mentors need to be on the lookout for people they might mentor. Almost everyone can act as a mentor to someone else. People need to think about giving back to the profession by helping newer people in librarianship. I ended up acting as a mentor to someone very early in my career simply because we had a good working relationship and I knew more about how things worked than her. Be available, generous with your time, and willing to help.

Library Web Chic has both really practical tips for working with specific technologies and your larger insights on technology in libraries. You've headed up a major effort at your library to rework the library's web site and implement new technologies. What skills, tech-specific and not, have been most important?

It is pretty difficult, near impossible to work in library technology and not have good tech skills. I think one thing that has made me successful is the well-roundedness of my library tech background. This wasn’t intentional but happenstance of working in a smaller library. Knowing something about all different kinds of library systems makes it easier to bring together data and interfaces across systems. Project management skills are essential for someone in my type of job. When I worked at a smaller library it was more an issue of managing my own time. At a bigger librarian though, if you can’t run the project chaos ensues. I had some training in this area, but it was sufficient compared to the real world experience.

On the tech end of things, I could list a bunch of acronyms but really the most important thing is to have the ability to learn constantly, particularly new programming languages. One does necessarily have to be fluent just understand what is going on in the code. If I had to rattle off one acronym if would be XML. To me it is crucial, so much is being done in XML if you don’t understand it you are going to be at a serious disadvantage. Cataloging and metadata skills are a must for building interfaces. You can’t display or index the right data if you don’t know what field it is in. Also, interface design influences the metadata collected. I’m really fortunate to work with a great Head of Cataloging and Metadata Services here who brings a good understanding of this intersection to the table and is willing to let me ask questions about cataloging rules and the like.

I once heard you say something to the extent that it was important to bring the values of librarianship to the web, and it really resonated. What do you think these values are, and how can they be brought to the web?

I’m not sure what I meant by this at the time but right now the thing that is most pressing in my mind as a value that librarianship needs to bring to the web is preservation of materials. So much cultural material is born digital now that there is a serious danger in my mind of cultural history being lost. What people used to have in boxes in their attic, now is on their hard drives or media sharing sites. Libraries are being removed from the equation and that is a dangerous thing given that much of the web is profit-driven and has no motivation to preserve anything. Things like the picture Australia project are bright spots but there just isn’t enough of this going on to keep up with the pace at which materials are being created. Libraries could bring the value of preservation to the web by partnering with media sharing sites to allow people to contribute their materials easily to a library repository. We could do this both at academic and public libraries and gain a vast amount of cultural history and research materials for our collections.

Along with Jason Griffey, you've just published a book on Library Blogging. What can libraries gain from blogging, and what should libraries strive for in setting up blogs? Conversely, what are some pratfalls to avoid?

Libraries can learn and gain so much by blogging and using blogging software. Blogs themselves can be a great way for libraries to interact with their users. This interaction can be feedback, ideas, or even metadata about digital library objects. Through blogs, libraries can involve a much larger portion of their staff and potential users in content creation. This is a good thing, because web geeks aren’t typically knowledgeable about specific library content. Also blog-related technologies such as RSS can enable libraries to push their content out to places other than the library website.

Libraries setting up a blog should strive to have meaningful, lively, and rich content, without this a blog is pointless. Make your blog speak to a particular group, make sure it allows people to participate. I don’t’ believe that our blogs at the UH Libraries aren’t as successful as they could be because they aren’t participative enough. That something we need to work on.

The biggest pitfalls I think libraries fall into with blogs are creating blogs without a clear purpose and voice. What often happens as a result is that content isn’t interesting and it often isn’t kept up to date. This is a major no-no. Also in some cases libraries make the mistake of not allowing their blogs to be participative. There are some instances where perhaps disabling comments is appropriate, but these are few and far between. Comments are a way for libraries to enable their users so we can’t turn them off or edit them heavily without this losing this engagement.

One obstacle that's commonly cited for adoption of new technology in libraries is budget constraints. Do you have any suggestions that don't require a huge investment of time and money?

Any change requires some amount of time investment, whether it is to setup the system or train people how to use it. It is unavoidable; it is a fallacy to think you can adopt a new technology without making some kind of time or money commitment. Individual libraries need to examine new technologies to determine which of them best helps the library realize its goals and is the best return on investment. If our library has a goal to enhance outreach and communication with library users, a blog would be an appropriate technology to reach this goal. Exactly what blogging solution we choose would depend on the types of staff and monetary resources at our disposal.

Early in my career I worked under serious financial constraints and still managed to get things done. I believe that the key to this was creating clear goals that were in line with the library’s mission and thinking about which technologies could best help us accomplish those goals. Often, open source software has been used to meet goals, but not always. Sometimes an effective commercial hosted product is a better solution. Much of this is a case of making judgment calls about how much time and money you are willing to invest. Wordpress and Drupal (an open source content management system) are easy to get up and running in their most basic form. It is customizations that take time. Talking about technologies in terms of the library’s goals, setting clear objectives and expectations is key to being successful in these endeavors.
You've had the honor of being a panelist for LITA's "Top Tech Trends" program. What are some new things you're experimenting with now?

We are just starting to work on a project involving mobile devices (iPod Touch). The goal is to find out what content our end-users and librarian want to use on a mobile device and determine the best way to get this content to those users. We hope to experiment with mobile stylesheets, applications for iPod Touch and iPhone, and potentially building mobile section to the website.

We also working on building an API for content that is part of the library website to enable this information to be drawn out of the site and incorporated other places like college and department webpages and into course management systems. It is a challenge, not just designing the API but figuring out how to make it easy for people to use.

How have things changed in libraries since you started your career, and what changes do you predict for the next decade?

One big change I’ve seen is the rise of open source systems. More and more libraries are going open source. It isn’t something that is just for big institutions with lots of programmers anymore. I’m thrilled to see companies like LibLime and Equinox be successful because I believe that it means that more libraries can realistically adopt open source. Silos also are on their way out. People want one stop shopping and libraries are finally getting this and trying to provide this functionality. It is really hard though and we’ve got a long way to go.

Nobody wants to say the physical library will go away but I think the library as a physical storage facility is on its way out the door. I think we will do more direct deliver of content to users, whether in electronic format or by mailing stuff. The virtual presence of libraries has to get better. Having a library website isn’t good enough and many libraries are realizing this and pushing their content out into their users spaces. I think we will see much more of this in the future and library websites themselves become simplified. Lastly, I think libraries will get into the born digital arena for real. We will become digital stored facilities. Storage is cheap and there is lots of content being created and waiting to be grabbed from cultural history materials to government-funded research.

Lastly, what's a seemingly unrelated skill you've learned that is really useful in your work?

Getting my degree in anthropology I learn a lot about ethnology and ethnographic research. These skills and techniques have come in really handy when conducting usability testing and observing user behavior in order to improve the library website. I figured I’d never use my Bachelors in Anthropology after I graduate from undergrad. I’m both surprised and gratified that I actually get to use these skills.

Amelia Abreu, LibGig Blogger, contributed this story.