FOREMAN (clip from "I Love Lucy"): All right, girls. Now, this is your last chance. If one piece of candy gets past you and into the packing room unwrapped, you're fired. LUCY: Yes, ma'am. FORMAN: Let her roll. [LAUGHTER] Fine. You're doing splendidly. Speed it up. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I am Charlie in the studio with Ameet, Fred, Marlee, Matthew, and a couple of off-mic guests. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it. AMEET DOSHI: That's right, Charlie. Today's show is called, "When Did Efficiency Become the End Goal?" CHARLIE BENNETT: That rhetorical question seems like a very inefficient title. FRED RASCOE: Well, I guess we could have just called it WDEBTEG, "woo-deb-a-tig-eg." CHARLIE BENNETT: "wa-deb-teg." Are we, indeed, fighting a losing game? We'll be talking about quality, efficiency metrics, project management, Theory X, and Theory Y-- Sounds like a Dr. Seuss book-- and what works for us in the library and archival professions. WOMAN 3: If you want to join the conversation, the hashtag for this show is LITS 453 for Lost in the Stacks episode 453. Feel free to tweet your thoughts, questions, or four hour workweek fantasies with that hashtag. AMEET DOSHI: Our songs today are about time, money, and the theory and practice of balancing them out, whether efficiently or not. So whether your goal is to exchange one for a lot or a little of the other, either way, it's a transaction. CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm totally confused. AMEET DOSHI: So let's start with a song all about the economic transaction of time and money. There you go. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK, I think I'm getting it. AMEET DOSHI: And questions about whether it's worth it. CHARLIE BENNETT: I think I understand this is Depth Charge Ethel by Grinderman. I am in complete agreement with you. AMEET DOSHI: Right here on Lost in the Stacks. Let her roll. [GRINDERMAN - "DEPTH CHARGE ETHEL"] Come on, Jill. CHARLIE BENNETT: "Depth Charge Ethel." FRED RASCOE: Doo, doo, doo, doo. CHARLIE BENNETT: By Grinderman. FRED RASCOE: Yeah, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo. This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "When Did Efficiency Become The End Goal," which is a title that we borrowed from an ACRL blog post authored by Veronica Arellano Douglas, who is the instruction coordinator at the University of Houston libraries. Amit, you were the one that first pointed out this blog post and gave it to us to read. AMEET DOSHI: Yeah, I saw it. It felt like a cree de coeur. FRED RASCOE: A what? AMEET DOSHI: A cry of the heart, a cry of the soul. Because I think all of us have done instruction. And it can be a grueling-- a very enjoyable and enlightening experience, but also grueling. And I think this blog post keyed in on something that faces education, in general, and that's measurement and purpose. And libraries, in particular, are kind of unique places because we are constantly concerned about our future. And it's not just what will it look like, but this question of, will there be a library in the future seems to be a core part of this blog post. And the theory or the hypothesis that Veronica suggests is maybe that's what's driving our desire for having the most classes, the most students, hitting as many majors as possible. It's just the existential kind of crisis that is either imagined or real that's driving it rather than the education itself. So I guess the question for us is, do we agree with this central premise that efficiency has, indeed, become the end goal instead of a means to the end? FRED RASCOE: We're worried about it-- you're saying that we're worried about it as librarians because, as librarians, we worry about not being able to meet with or adapt to a swiftly onrushing future situation. And maximizing efficiency in so many ways is how we're trying to get ahead of that curve. CHARLIE BENNETT: I read it in a different way in the light of recently going from a very loose improvisational kind of instructional support distribution process to a very thorough remedy, ticket style distribution process. All that to say, we used to just meet with faculty and create schedules of instruction sessions on our own, but now it's centralized and there is measurement of time to respond to requests that go through a web form, time between each beat, there's a workflow that's been established. And it feels to me like a little bit of overkill. And already, I've found in the remedy ticket system a couple of things that we have to just let go by. Because instead of, oh, there's a problem that needs to be solved, how quickly did you solve it? There's also, the problem is, can we schedule something for a month from now? So when is that resolved? Is it a month from now? Is it as soon as I send the email? And that little tension makes me feel like, oh, this philosophy of efficient response, best practices, quickness, or maximum effect because you have to fake some of the measurements, maybe it's not appropriate to be applied to what we do. So that's what I took from the blog post. And I might have read myself in the blog post. MARLEE GIVENS: I totally read myself on the blog post because I do instruction. [LAUGHTER] But the issue for me is we have to measure something if we're going to make any kind of judgments of what we're doing and whether we're having an impact on anyone and whether that's the number of butts in the seats or the actual outcomes for the students. Are they doing a better job because we're there? And I think that's really the key. Because if we're worried-- if the premise of this blog post or the article is we're fighting against a future where there is no library, and our argument is, no, there has to be a library because we're teaching all these students and we're having all these outcomes-- positive outcomes on the students. And right now, we're not really measuring that. So yeah, I agree. Maybe this time to respond is not the best measurement, but it's a measurement. And maybe it will help us build something that is more meaningful. CHARLIE BENNETT: Why has librarianship been in crisis since the moment it was defined as a profession? And it's not a rhetorical question. What do you all think? Why is it that it is constantly the question? What are we going to do? How will we make people understand what we do? Why has there been this inferiority complex from the moment it began? AMEET DOSHI: I think it's interesting that the information seeking process has some analogy to the way people seek meaning through religion. And yeah, and I just see the phone light went on, so this will be great. And where I'm going with this is, I think if you talk to members of the clergy, there's a similar kind of existential uncertainty that's pervaded that profession, that calling that we share. We share that same kind of existential anguish. Because the problem itself of finding meaning is so ineffable and unanswerable. And when you overlay these metrics that are driven by systemized thinking, how many people showed up to our instruction session and so on, that-- I see at least some-- a corollary there, but I don't know. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK let me jump in the car of this metaphor and try and drive it into the ground. AMEET DOSHI: All right, let's do it. CHARLIE BENNETT: So if I connect those the way that I think you're connecting them, then there is a way that people understand that they're creating meaning or creating knowledge. That they're absorbing the world, that they're examining the world. And if Dewey declared the profession about the moment that the Industrial Revolution was being launched, that the cotton gin was understood that we were headed at a high speed towards telegraphs and automobiles, then at the same time, the people were starting to think about knowledge as a measurable, do you know enough, did you do enough with it thing is when libraries were declaring, we are part of education, we are part of knowledge construction. And so a long history of betterment of the human condition slammed head first into the assembly line. AMEET DOSHI: The early 1900s. Some people referenced that era as the second Civil War because of this assembly line mentality. All right, we are-- gosh, this is a great conversation. CHARLIE BENNETT: Is it great. AMEET DOSHI: Oh yeah, I'm really digging it. Our show today is called when did efficiency become the end goal. We're going to talk more about efficiency and effectiveness in libraries after a music set. MATTHEW: File to set under HG211.I524. MAN 2: 1, 2, 3, 5. [INAUDIBLE] MARLEE GIVENS: That was "Paper Money" by Soul Savers. And before that, we heard "Horray For Money" by the Cleveland Steamers. Songs about money or lack thereof. [LAUGHTER] [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: Marlee's set review was too funny for me to remind everyone that was Soul Savers featuring Mark Lanegan, which I feel like I need to call out at any moment. You are listening to Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. And today's episode asks a question, when did efficiency become the end goal? And I feel like Ameet has been thinking about this question quite a lot in many AMEET DOSHI: 1911 and the show's over. I answered your question. CHARLIE BENNETT: OK, good. AMEET DOSHI: So roll the credits. CHARLIE BENNETT: Matthew, you can hit the A/V button again. AMEET DOSHI: Yeah, I'm not joking. 1911, there was a book published by Charles Taylor called Scientific Management, and it was, essentially, the field guide for factories to be more efficient in their production and their operations. It had huge effects in the ramp up of American Industrialization, but there were a lot of other places where it had, let's say, unintended consequences. CHARLIE BENNETT: I'm having a mini panic attack just hearing you talk about this. I was just reading Eugene Thacker's Starry Speculative Corpse, and there's a line in it that was so good I had to tweet it. And he was basically saying, what if depression, which is reason's inability to achieve self-mastery, is not a failure, but an actual end result? What if reason creates this lack that then sort of disturbs the human spirit? And so I'm connecting now efficiency and the reduction of human experience to measurable quantities not as a thing that is an end goal that we need to work out how it's going to be, but the actual problem with the modern era is that, what do I tell my friends when they're about to go off and do a thing? I always say, now, remember, don't be a statistic. Have a experience that's not universalized into a numeric quantity. I'm talking about don't get drunk and crash a car. But one could say that, to be a good person, to be a human in the world, don't be a statistic. Don't be a number. Don't be a part of a bar graph. Will someone please take this away from me before I start? Thank you. FRED RASCOE: Those numbers, though, they lead, ultimately, bottom line, they lead to money. We said at the top of the show, we're playing songs about the transaction between money and time. The fact that we are so focused on efficiency is kind of an acknowledgment that librarianship and higher ed, we are part of a business. There's a business with a calling of public good, a mission of doing public good. But it's just the reality that universities, academic libraries, the higher ed environment has evolved into this business. Business demands efficiency and return on investment. CHARLIE BENNETT: In the late '60s, someone who I am related to was a seminarian. And when he reached the moment that he could be ordained, he said to everyone around him, well, it took me this long, but I figured out the church is a business. And if I'm going to be a part of a business, which was not my intent, that's why I went to seminary, then I'm going to be in a business that actually benefits myself and my family. And he split, you know, like Episcopalians do. But I mean, you saying that about higher education is a business, which it was not, and now is. FRED RASCOE: I mean, there's the old joke that some people say about Georgia Tech. It used to be state-funded, now it's state-located. CHARLIE BENNETT: And the money comes from very large entities that are profiting from the aggregation of what comes out of Georgia Tech as opposed to the idea that students are educated. The concept of an education does not profit any shareholder or corporate partner. And so what are we-- I can't continue this. Someone else is going to have to start talking a lot more than I am. AMEET DOSHI: I don't know, Charlie. It's part of that-- when librarians deal with this angst about the future and trying to meet the future, I think it means that we're seeing the future as a continued and growing industrialization and business ifying of higher education. MARLEE GIVENS: Yes, I think that's true. And I see it in-- outside of the library as well. I mean, if you just read sort of general higher ed publications, there's a lot of this same talk. Although, I don't know that anyone is necessarily questioning the future of higher ed, the future of the university as an institution in the way that we're questioning whether the library is going to be around. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, because they're questioning higher ed for sure, but just on a very different-- on a market basis. The article that triggered the blog post starts with a neo-- it starts with a definition of neoliberalism, which I think a lot of people have tossed around recently as an epithet, as a slur, as kind of the neoliberal era is over, whatever. But the core of neoliberalism is that the idea that the human experience is bettered if all of our decisions are based around a kind of market metaphor, the free market and its mechanism is how one can understand human existence being bettered constantly. And that is the core of this problem, of the idea of efficiency as an end goal, as the difference between-- did we even get to Theory X and Theory Y? AMEET DOSHI: Well, so we are talking about Theory X and I think it's bringing everyone down. So let me talk about Theory Y, which will uplift the room. [INTERPOSING VOICES] AMEET DOSHI: MacGregor published this book, Douglas MacGregor in 1960, where he-- CHARLIE BENNETT: You're going to have to do this very efficiently and quickly because you have 50 seconds to explain it. AMEET DOSHI: He says people are self motivated and actually enjoy the challenge of work. So managers with the assumption that people are self-motivated have a more collaborative relationship. Motivate by allowing librarians to work on their own initiative with creativity and personal autonomy, responsibility. And a lot of organizations want to be Theory Y, but in actuality, they're Theory X. CHARLIE BENNETT: Well, they were once Theory Y, and now they're taking on Theory X so they can say, here's why you should spend money on us. Look at what we do. Whereas, previously it was, just give us the money. We do a thing. You know it's the right thing. This is back to church, isn't it? FRED RASCOE: This is Lost in the Stacks, and our show today is called winded efficiency become the end goal. We'll be back with more about Theory X, Theory Y, maybe we'll even come up with a theory of Z or something like that. I don't know. We'll see. But it'll happen on the left side of the hour. [ACCORDION PLAYING] MANDY: Hi, I'm Mandy, the accordion playing data librarian, and you are listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta. CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's Lost in the Stacks is called "When Did Efficiency Become The End Goal?" In chapter 4 of Douglas McGregor's modern classic, The Human Side of Enterprise, Theory Y, which we just introduced, is described as follows. External control and the threat of punishment are not the only means for bringing about effort towards organizational objectives. People will exercise self-direction and self-control in the service of objectives to which they are committed. The capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in the solution of organizational problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population. Under the conditions of modern industrial life, the intellectual potential of the average human being is only partially utilized. Above all, the assumptions of Theory Y point up the fact that the limits on human collaboration in the organizational setting are not limits of human nature, but of management's ingenuity in discovering how to realize the potential represented by its human resources. If I can try to translate all that. Back off, man, and let me do my work. That sound right, Amit? AMEET DOSHI: Yeah, trust me. FRED RASCOE: File this under T55.9.T377. [MUSIC PLAYING] AMEET DOSHI: "Where Do Money Go" by the Jim Jones Revue. Before that, "Contract" by Gang of Four. Songs about the negotiations that go on between our time and money. MARLEE GIVENS: You are listening to Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called "When Did Efficiency Become The End Goal?" Also, the title of a blog post that asked, when did we become so worried about the future? Aren't we also supposed to be practicing mindfulness and being aware of the present? In this blog post, Veronica Arellano Douglas challenges us to consider, so what can a present aware, meaningful practice of librarianship look like in the current academic library? CHARLIE BENNETT: And this question is asked-- against the backdrop of measurements of efficiency in distribution of instruction appear to make us think more about how do we get to the end of a semester with high numbers and low cost so that we can then say, look, we do so much with so little. Please do not fire us. The institute itself, not to our fellow librarian managers. FRED RASCOE: Or maybe it gets us to a point where we can accept we didn't do as much instruction, but it was more meaningful. AMEET DOSHI: Yeah, I really like the idea of capturing user stories, as you all have done, where you get a paragraph or two or six from a person that had a transformative experience in the classroom. CHARLIE BENNETT: So this is the first part of the answer. What can a present, aware, meaningful practice of librarianship look like in the current academic library is assessment based on narrative as opposed to numbers. That's one. What else? FRED RASCOE: And as Marley said in the last segment, though, just to stay on that topic for just a second, as Marley said in the last second segment, that's really hard to do to get that kind of asset. That would be called qualitative assessment. MARLEE GIVENS: Exactly. I did make an attempt to do that in the fall. I ran a little experiment with some faculty in the School of Psychology where we attempted to run some surveys, pre-test, post-test, find out if we had an impact on the students. It's really hard to say because there's so many variables. I mean, the students themselves are very diverse, but who can say whether it was the librarian coming in or a student watching one of our videos versus students just becoming more experienced and maybe learning from each other. Maybe it was something they learned during one of the professor's lectures. It's really hard to say. And in another psychology class, I tried to get the same information. And this professor had actually applied three or four different interventions. And so he did get better results, but he couldn't really pin it to the library. CHARLIE BENNETT: And what are the better results? MARLEE GIVENS: Well, the better results were that his students didn't end up plagiarizing as they had in the previous semester. Inadvertently. But he used Turnitin for the first time. AMEET DOSHI: Yeah, is that just due to the fact that they were threatened by the Turnitin software or was it a known threat to them? CHARLIE BENNETT: See, the control group for all of these experiments is some group of students who miss out on something like, hey, for the next two years, let's find this cohort and we're not going to give them special things, right? And we'll give this cohort special things. And then, we'll measure what at the end like, are you happy? I feel very lost. I feel lost in my critique as much as I do in the definition of these things. What is the end goal? Obviously, when did efficiency become the end goal sort of says, why are we measuring so much? Why are we using that to measure things-- to assess things. But then, also, do we believe that we know what a good higher education experience is and that we're trying to attain it, or are we trying to define the good experience while also trying to figure out how to make it happen? MARLEE GIVENS: I don't think that's our job. I mean, I think that it's maybe the job of the institute, the university as a whole, which is where the learning analytics piece comes in. I attended a presentation at the LOEX conference a couple of years ago and there was a university that was presenting. The library was working with the campus learning analytics team. And the learning analytics team had already started looking at measures of correlation between students who had swiped their ID to get into the gym and whether they had better grades. And so they then moved on to the library and they were just going to count swipes at the library and see if they could add that to their own bank of data measures within the learning analytics department. I don't know if the burden has to be on the library so much to show our worth. CHARLIE BENNETT: Ameet, what's one of the greatest weaknesses of econometric analysis? AMEET DOSHI: I think you said it earlier, you implied that correlation is not causation here. You can't make that causal. There are ways to do it, but it involves a control group. That's Just not possible. MARLEE GIVENS: And yeah, control groups, as you say, control groups in education, that means that one group doesn't benefit from it. They'll probably benefit at some point from getting library instruction because we do catch students in random groups when we do our instruction. But there is that worry that there would be this group of students that would just completely miss out on library instruction. CHARLIE BENNETT: So it seems like efficiency became the end goal once we began to imagine that education was a product that was being delivered to customers as opposed to a service that was being delivered to a community or even a venture that was being joined by students. So the Mcdonaldization, the menu aspect of higher education is when efficiency became the end goal. FRED RASCOE: I think libraries kind of have that-- are the last remaining bastion of the old style of higher education. Because in libraries, there's still folks who would not want library cards swipes counted and correlated to grades like a one to one correlation and tracked over a period of time, like in the example of the gym and grade correlation. I just can't imagine librarians thinking that collecting that kind of data would be a good idea. CHARLIE BENNETT: Some desperate librarians might. Can't we at least just show that people are coming? We have to show that they walked in. FRED RASCOE: These may be desperate times. CHARLIE BENNETT: I wonder if the trouble-- the larger trouble is that our mission that the library is purely support. And so there's no individual or unique goal that we're supposed to follow through on. We're supposed to support people outside of us, outside of our organization to do their thing. But then, now, we are a single entity that has to define their goals and show that they can do them and show that those goals are useful to the institute all at once. This is Lost in the Stacks. Our show today is called "When Did Efficiency Become The End Goal?" We seem to have answered nothing and only created more questions in our shallow dive, so mission accomplished. [MUSIC PLAYING] MATTHEW: Isn't the nature of academics. File this set under BD638.S526 [MUSIC PLAYING] That was "Sunday Morning" by Margo Guryan. Before that, "Time Goes By So Slow" by The Distractions and "Don't Waste My Time" by the Daughters of Eve. Songs about haste and slowing down. [MUSIC PLAYING] AMEET DOSHI: Today's show was about existential efficiency in today's academic library. CHARLIE BENNETT: By asking the question, when did efficiency become the end goal, we recognize that the end goal is actually in question. FRED RASCOE: And I said this last week, but I have seen the future of librarianship and I see it as doing less with more. MARLEE GIVENS: Well, I like the idea that efficiency is only the end goal if you believe the hype that we're doomed. I choose not to believe the hype. I go for present, aware, and meaning-- AMEET DOSHI: We ended on optimism. CHARLIE BENNETT: Another optimism. MARLEE GIVENS: Meaningful librarianship. AMEET DOSHI: We have a bunch of Theory Y in the room. Let her roll. [MUSIC PLAYING] MATTHEW: Lost In the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library. Produced by Charlie Bennett, Ameet Doshi, Wendy Hagenmaier, and Fred Rascoe. Matthew was our engineer today, and the show is brought to you in part by the Library Collective and their social and professional network, the League of Awesome Librarians. You can find out more about them at thelibrarycollective.org. FRED RASCOE: Legal counsel and those little chocolates falling off the conveyor belt were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. CHARLIE BENNETT: I got a bunch of those under my hat. AMEET DOSHI: Special Thanks to Veronica for her post., Douglas MacGregor for his book, and thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. FRED RASCOE: Find us online at lostinthestacks.org. You can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week on Lost in the Stacks, we find out if it is possible for global political trends to ruin open access. I assume that anything can be ruined by anything. FRED RASCOE: I'm a pessimist. AMEET DOSHI: It's time for our last song today. However one may feel about efficiency, it's pretty clear that the ultimate fundamental bottom line metrics of efficiency are time and money. CHARLIE BENNETT: Which are not the metrics of sanguinity or peace of mind. AMEET DOSHI: Which leads us to today's closing song about how time and money are not the metrics of contentment. This is "Time and Money" by the Meat Puppets. CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, the 'Brothers Meat'. AMEET DOSHI: On Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend, everybody. [MUSIC PLAYING]