Need to Know

One of my first library school classes was about library management. Professor (now Dean Emeritus) Herman Totten taught us a lot of concepts and one that has stuck with me was the lattice concept. We want to encourage peer interactions, connections that do not rely on the vertical chain of command, to enable our libraries to do more, for our staff to be more. The lattice is within the library (reference to cataloging, for example) as well as without (library to corporate IT, or marketing, and teams that don’t serve the library). It creates opportunities for collaboration and idea sharing.

I am mostly focusing on knowledge flow and communication and not the elimination of hierarchy. The lattice concept is attributed to Bill Gore (of Gore-Tex) and one of their in-house leadership consultants wrote about it in a trade publication. The elimination of hierarchy is a whole different kettle of fish, as they found out at Zappos with the implementation of holacracy. Whether we want to or not, law libraries tend to exist within the constraints of a hierarchy, whether it’s law firm, university, or government.

One of my most fruitful experiences was with the IT heads at the business school and engineering school at SMU while I was at the law school library. We had similar interests and functions but no shared accountability or resources. I learned a lot from how they ran open computing centers and professional school IT. Occasionally it meant we found ourselves in a bloc, advocating with campus IT.

I’ve just finished reading Gillian Tett’s The Silo Effect because this issue of vertical and horizontal relationships is so constant and important. One key takeaway is that silos are merely manifestations of expertise. From that perspective, a vertical structure with high expertise is not necessarily a bad thing. The isolation the silo creates is the challenge, the inability to communicate, learn, and be curious beyond those boundaries. To avoid silo rigidity, there needs to be information and expertise sharing where it makes sense to do so.

Limited Licensing

Library leaders can help to facilitate this with our resource planning as well as our management decisions. I was talking to some information folks recently about a licensing issue they had. Apparently their license and the implementation became, well, unaligned.

It took me back to the late 1990s. The Bureau of National Affairs, before it was absorbed by Bloomberg, had some excellent daily newsletters. Before ubiquitous email, they arrived in paper. We routed the paper through the practice groups, with cost determining the number of copies we had to circulate. There was some story at the time, though, that law firms were photocopying the licensed copy and just sending each lawyer a copy and were being sued for it. I can’t find any public note of that now, so feel free to ascribe it to urban legend. But you can see the issue: photocopying 100% of anything under copyright violates copyright.

I’ve always thought it true because I can imagine it. Lawyers operate in a caste-based and hierarchical world, and certain people expect to eat from the carcass first, before the rest of the pack. A distribution list replicates a hierarchy or breaks it (like going in alpha order) and a high-prestige lawyer may not want to wait for a lower-prestige lawyer to have information access first. Information sharing on a lattice can upset an environment where knowledge is currency or is hoarded.

Copyright violations are a corporate risk. Violations can lead to litigation. The over-sharing of this organization’s digital license was even easier to do than photocopying. And, unlike in the print days, there’s a decent possibility that people who forward licensed content don’t know the details of the license under which they received the content.

About this time, someone is probably thinking what I thought: why don’t we just fire up some alerts or training on doing alerts in legal research databases with news content, and bypass the issue? And I’m not suggesting that shouldn’t happen. But at the end of the day, law libraries are just one unit in an organization that may license informational content, due to a different silo’s expertise, and they need to own their role in the organization, not everyone else’s.

Long story short, the organization took a risk averse approach. They pulled back on who could receive the licensed content, to bring it in line with the terms of the license. No argument there. But the change caused a number of people to surface who had been relying on the information but now were excluded from it.

The reason they surfaced is because the licensing was limited to the top of the hierarchical tree. This is not unusual. People at the top of the hierarchy may, rightly or wrongly, see themselves as the most important and get access to resources that those further down do not. I’ve seen this most often with technology, even to the point of senior management using tools outside the IT standard that other departments are denied.

But being uncommon doesn’t make it correct. To the extent that the licensed content was enabling communication to flow horizontally, across the organization, it was helping ensure that information didn’t stop within a silo. In theory, horizontal distribution at the top of a hierarchy might trickle down to managers. But there are some substantial obstacles. First, the license may not allow that distribution. Second, the senior staff may not know what the information needs are one or two layers down. Third, they may not have the incentive or interest in ensuring the information is shared.

I’ve worked at a couple of law libraries. In every single one, I know of reference librarians who’ve followed up with someone they helped and said, “this just popped up and I thought it might be of interest based on your previous research.” This takes time, curiosity, and a customer service orientation that not everyone shares.

If the law library is responsible for the license and the information flow, it should:

• find out who all these other people are. For one thing, we should craft licenses to help people get access to information. For another, it would be useful to understand why they have needs you didn’t know about.
• craft a license that serves these people. This may mean asking for more money or shifting money to enable it.
• follow up with the information recipients. How many of them actually open the email? Ask those who don’t interact with it whether they still want to get it. Are they getting information because they value it or because they don’t want to be excluded? (FOMO) Consider cost-shifting, so that people who receive the emailed content are paying for it from a departmental budget. People are always happier to spend someone else’s money.

Uncover the Uninformed

Inside my silo, I can see communication issues. I can make sure teams work together, meetings happen, share information, and so on. It’s a lot harder outside of my silo. Even senior managers can’t really do anything beyond their silo. As soon as you cross an organizational line, you are in someone else’s bailiwick.

One great tip I got from Vicki Whitmell at a leadership institute she was giving was on communication inclusivity. When you’re going to share information, make a list of people who should receive it. That sort of deliberate approach can help to make sure you don’t exclude someone in a rush to communicate. It can also suggest edge cases or “might be interested” people.

A recent example of this involved an email I’d received and to which I wrote a response. But, before sending, I stopped to think (a) whether the response was appropriate and (b) whether I needed more input. So I forwarded the original email to a group of people for advice, which I took. In the end, the result was the same but I gained two things. The first was confidence in my approach. The second was information sharing so that a bunch of other people who might benefit from the knowledge also knew what I knew.

The flip side is that you don’t always know who needs or might want to know what you have to share. The folks who had to revoke information sharing for their license certainly didn’t know who was accessing it. But now they do, and so one hopes that any future license will be broad enough to cover everyone.

We can’t know what people find valuable. Even if we learn it at one point, it may change. At best, we can know that certain people, by the silo they are in or group identity they have (practice group, judges, criminal lawyers), share some characteristics. But what if we shared that knowledge more broadly?

Here’s what I’m picturing. When I was in Ohio, our law library spun up a bunch of e-mail case digests focused on practice areas. We didn’t pre-populate any of the lists although we started with meat and potatoes practice areas that we knew had audiences. We marketed the lists and let lawyers (and others) subscribe to the ones they wanted. We learned who valued the information, and who might value it enough to pay a subscription to the library.

It needn’t be that organized though. A law firm or government library isn’t going to have subscribers. But I bet every law library is creating current awareness tools and alerts for different audiences. The question is: can we make those re-usable for other audiences?

Let’s say a law library has created a couple of dozen RSS feeds for one or more audiences. Or, as in my personal case, I’ve got email alerts to trip on certain phrases or keywords. Do we have a way on the law firm intranet or other shared resource to surface those for anyone to follow?

It can serve a couple of purposes. One, it takes library expertise in creating the resource and creates an opportunity for greater re-use beyond its original purpose. Two, it highlights resources that may not be properly tailored but that might encourage others to seek out the library for their own versions. Three, because you’ll be watching usage metrics for the feeds or shared alerts, you’ll know what broader groups of people find valuable. You’ll need to market them but you can also use your marketing efforts to highlight new feeds or alerts (now I’m wondering if there is an easy way to aggregate all alerts created within a legal publisher system on a single account).

Law libraries can benefit from better horizontal communication. We can tailor our licenses better – perhaps wider but also perhaps more narrowly – by understanding who uses what information. We can leverage our work by making it re-usable by audiences who were not the intended ones. And we can market our resources to help unearth new interests or to measure unexpected sources of interest in information access. Communication across the edges of our silo, where our subject matter expertise ends, can also help us to make connections that weaken the rigidity that our silos may otherwise experience.