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I am sure I am not alone in my experience with magical thinking in law libraries. I’m sure it’s not unique to law libraries either. We operate in an environment where the people who oversee our libraries often know how to use legal information, perform legal research. There is a danger when people who have experienced something think that they know how it works. Or, worse, when they are presented with something that seems like a fit for a problem they have, but they do not have the expertise or data to make the determination.
When I started in law libraries, I had a professor on the faculty who read a weekly technology column. The column was written about emerging technology and the technology was geared towards the individual. I mean, the column was called Personal Technology. It appeared on Thursdays and I could expect a call from that faculty member by Friday morning asking (a) how the technology worked and (b) when we could adopt it for the law school.
We had some good chats about technology but there was always a bit of a tension. They wanted to implement new technology. But personal—or as it’s more commonly known, consumer—technology doesn’t always work well in larger environments. For one thing, something that may be for one user may be free, but it probably won’t be for a larger group. Also, when you are dealing with a larger group, you have more competing interests than the single-mindedness or the one problem to be solved of an individual.
At an AALL annual meeting session on electronic resource management, I wasn’t at all surprised to hear of lawyers getting legal publisher demos on their own and then seeking to have the resource purchased by the law library. It was interesting to hear the variety of ways that the law firm libraries had to wrangle those purchase requests. The issue of expertise is universal: who has it, who recognizes that they don’t have it, and what are the possible outcomes.
This is not to be dismissive of input. Sure, librarians or IT teams could buy new products or license resources without asking the recipient what they need. That’s obviously pretty foolish. There’s a balance to maintain, a bit like when dealing with a governance board. It can be uncomfortable to put forth your expertise with someone who may make decisions about your advancement, retention, or compensation.
I have found most input to be respectful, or unintentionally dismissive at least. Magical thinking happens on a spectrum. It is magicked into existence when the decision-making process becomes closed to expertise. A solution is sought for an identified problem, but there is no input on how to match them.
This balance can be put out of kilter by marketing. You can’t really blame people for their sales pitches. They need to eat too and it’s not that the products aren’t appropriate, but they just may not be appropriate for everyone. There are times, though, that a vendor makes a direct line to a sale that runs through people who may not have the expertise or complete information to make the decision.
Fortunately it’s pretty rare, in my experience, to have a hard sell come from a vendor through a decision-maker. Usually they understand that they may make this one sale, but at the expense of any possible relationship and future sales. I think it’s more common in situations where, like my Thursday professor, they see something and make assumptions without the benefit of expertise or data.
When Marketing Unbalances Thinking
One thing I can’t stand is when a vendor mischaracterizes their product, putting people in hopes that their problem will be solved when there is evidence to show it won’t be. This happened to be last week, when my brother flew back to the United States. Like many thousands of people, we had run a crowdfunding campaign during his imprisonment by Russia. Over the years, it enabled us to get fresh food and medicine to him, things the Russian prisons don’t provide.
GoFundMe was the platform we used. They took the moment of the release of these hostages to champion the success we had all had on their platform. This was their tweet.
I thought this was pretty gross. Sure, it was a celebratory moment but not one that GoFundMe had contributed to except that it was a tool that many hostage families look to. I expect that, like most desperate people using crowdfunding sites, we had agreed to this callous use of our experience to help them get clicks.
The problem is that it obscures the fact that GoFundMe was not a successful platform for us. In fact, of the three Americans released and whose campaigns are mentioned by GoFundMe’s tweet, none of them reached their goals.
It’s almost laughable in hindsight. We were connected to a very sketchy (big law) lawyer in January 2019. He suggested that we create a GoFundMe asking for $1 million. We took it under advisement and set a more realistic goal of $100,000.
Here’s the reality of our fundraising effort. Paul had been a hostage in Russia for 3 years and we had barely cracked $41,000 in donations. We were very grateful for every one but if it hadn’t been for Brittney Griner and our own media push when she was released, we would never have gotten close to the $95,828 we finally raised. In the months from December 2022 to August 2024, we raised 150% of what we had in the first 3 years. Even that never reached the actual goal of the campaign. The Kurmasheva campaign raised $8,100 of $10,000 in about 1 year. The Gershkovich campaign raised $97,886 of $100,000 by his release.
It was ironic, then, that the week before the release of the hostages, some researchers had posted about GoFundMe. I’ll let the article’s title tell the story: What GoFundMe conceals: The campaigns that fail. In particular, this:
In “GoFailMe: The Unfulfilled Promise of Digital Crowdfunding,” our book based on this research, we explain that behind GoFundMe’s winners, whose stories are paraded on the site’s front page and its podcast – “True Stories of Good People” – stands a long line of also-rans.
They raise almost no money this way but are put through an emotional roller coaster and give up a considerable amount of their privacy and personal data.What GoFundMe Conceals: The Campaigns That Fail, Martin Lukk and Erik Schneiderhan, The Conversation,
The researchers from the University of Toronto found:
- “estimate that only about 17 percent of U.S. GoFundMe campaigns for health care and emergency costs meet their goal.”
- “We saw in the data we analyzed that the top 5 percent of highest-earning campaigns claimed about half of all dollars raised on GoFundMe.”
To be clear: something is better than nothing. We were grateful to each and every donor. But the reality was also that we were lucky. Worst case scenario, we would have run out of donations well before Paul finished his 16-year sentence.
Crowdfunding sites are marketing solutions but are really just lotteries. A very few will be wildly successful. Most will remain under or unfunded and the underlying peril will go untreated. They become a way for those who may owe a responsibility—like providing accessible healthcare, which seems such a huge reason people use crowdfunding—to shirk that obligation. Public attention is assuaged because there may not be an understanding that most crowdfunding (well, GoFundMe) campaigns will not result in the desired outcome.
A Dose of Reality
As I say, we were fortunate. We recognized that the lawyer who posed a $1 million campaign was wildly out of his depth. We reset expectations and realized that, for us to have any chance, we’d have to have reasonable, achievable goals.
It reminds me a lot of viral marketing. We all know viral marketing campaigns. We have no idea how many marketing campaigns didn’t go viral. They disappear, creating who knows what sort of outcomes for the people seeking attention. I laugh when I read someone describing how to go viral. If there was really a method, then everyone would be using it. Viral marketing has its negative aspects too, similarly uncontrollable except to turn off the messaging.
Unfortunately not uniquely, he was a lawyer who was willing to share his expert opinions with a high degree of confidence and a low degree of knowledge. It’s not something that lawyers will usually be so cavalier with when it comes to legal issues. In other words, when they are expert, they are more careful; when they are not expert, they may say any old thing.
Someone may read a personal technology column and think that, because they use a PC, they can roll out an enterprise technology (or diagnose its need and then delegate the work to an actual expert). People who have used a library may think they can run one, or at least make decisions about the content it needs. This is especially true if they are not responsible for the resources required to implement the choice.
Let’s go back to that balance. In the case of GoFundMe, they and other crowdfunding sites are putting a finger on the scales. It creates an increased need to overcome the incorrect perception that crowdfunding meets most campaign goals. But it’s not just crowdfunding. Decision-makers may be peppered with messaging that can impact how our law libraries operate, how we are valued, and what our role might be.
When we are working with people who want to have us acquire technology or information for them, we need to ensure that our expertise is part of the discussion. Those law firm librarians? They had worked with their finance teams, turning some of the potential confrontation into a more manageable, less personal, operational process. The goal isn’t to say no. It’s to ensure that each decision gets the necessary professional input.
This can be an exceptionally hard thing to do from a library. It takes time to develop that level of visibility and trust. It takes creating relationships. As a library director, it requires keeping in mind that you are a steward for that role. Your choices will impact any successors, and when you take on a new director role, you should be looking for the relationships that you can continue and carry forward for the benefit of your team.
In my experience, it requires reading and listening outside of our immediate area. What are technology or information trends that seem tangential but might impact us? AI might be a good example of something we didn’t focus on until it had arrived (or was already disappearing). It’s trend watching outside of our own knowledge domain. We might monitor newspapers to understand paid tiers to information. We might watch customer service domains to understand self-service and what works and what doesn’t: why are we seeing this retreat from self-checkout, for example? Is it truly just theft? Or magical thinking?
It matters who is expressing the magical thinking. Someone asked me recently about what to do with … suggestions … from a governance board member. I tend to take them as honestly meant input, but just that. Especially with governance boards, their role is not to direct operations. I have had some real brainwaves sparked by a board member’s idea, even if it didn’t take into account the realities of our operation. It can be more difficult when you are in a hierarchical relationship with the person with the solution and the need, and the goal of matching them.
It also takes flexing that expertise. I had a conversation with some lawyers about ebooks. They wanted us to license audiobooks in the same way we were licensing text-based ebooks. But there are lots of reasons why not:
- audio books, like ebooks, tend to be a resource that is delivered individually. Licensing audio books to a group of lawyers or faculty will require a platform, meaning that the cost of the audio book will be increased by the cost to run the platform. Libraries use OverDrive or Cloudlibrary because they don’t want (or can’t) spin up their own delivery methods;
- audio books are at the shallow end of the legal information swimming pool. There aren’t a lot, and they’re more likely to be social science rather than practical legal information;
- you may be able to meet individual needs by just licensing something directly. Public libraries can’t, but a law firm or a law school could throw money at the person needing the audio book and have them create an individual subscription. If more people want the same resource, then you can make the decision to scale it up.
In other words, it means saying no, or no but, when your expertise is sought and there isn’t a good, rational outcome. That’s part of being an expert. We can bring the reality to the magical thinking.