How do we embrace experimentation in libraries to adapt to our rapidly changing professional landscape? On this show, Cathryn Copper, Head of the Eberhard Zeidler Library in Ontario and the author of The Experimental Library, talks about how we can all use experimental techniques to create success in our organizations.
Transcript
Library Leadership Podcast is brought to you by Innovative. Innovative, a part of Clarivate, is a globally recognized library industry partner with nearly five decades of experience developing library management solutions, discovery tools, marketing and communication services, and digital resource management products. Innovative believes every person in every community deserves a personalized library experience. Learn more at www.iii.com
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. You’re listening to Library Leadership Podcast, where we talk about libraries and leadership, and speak with guests who share their ideas, innovations, and strategic insights in the profession.
How do we embrace experimentation in libraries to adapt to our rapidly changing professional landscape? On this show, Cathryn Copper, head of the Eberhard Zeidler Library in Ontario and the author of The Experimental Library, talks about how we can all use experimental techniques to create success in our organizations. Enjoy the show!
Cathryn, welcome to the show.
Cathryn Copper:
Thank you for having me.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #1: Thank you for being here to discuss your book, The Experimental Library: A Guide to Taking Risks, Failing Forward, and Creating Change. Libraries constantly adapt to a rapidly changing professional landscape. How does your book help us embrace experimentation as a practical approach to doing this effectively? 01:26
Cathryn Copper:
Thank you for having me on to talk about the book. It’s been really exciting—the interest in the community about this topic. The first thing I wanted to do with the book was to make it practical, and teach and help us learn about experimentation. I wanted it to be inspiring. I wanted it to have this kind of can-do approach because I think it can be daunting sometimes. I drew a lot on tech companies and startups. It’s quite obvious libraries are not tech companies, or startups. We don’t have hundreds of thousands of users and we don’t make multi-millions of dollars, but we can still take things from that sector to help us drive experimentation forward. So, I really wanted to write it as, We can do this.
Then secondly, I didn’t want it to just be a book about, Let’s be more innovative. We can do this. I wanted it to also be a book that was very practical and give something manageable to take away. So I developed a method that I’ll talk about a little later. That was really step-by-step, Here are the things we need to do to test a new idea. What do we do once we’ve tested that idea? How do we then turn it into something bigger, or not? That’s an option.
The third thing was introducing a new way of thinking into what I call the library sphere. So traditionally libraries can be risk-averse, and that’s again understandable. I’m a librarian. I’ve only ever been a librarian. I’m not from tech or startups, so I do understand. We have stats we have to keep. We have to prove our impact, prove our usage, and it does create risk aversion. But there are techniques that we can learn from these other industries to make us more risk-adept. Those were the kind of practical things I was bringing to this book—techniques that could be implemented. You didn’t have to be a huge tech company to do it. Then also a breakdown—here’s what we can do to actually get something done.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #2: In your book, you cite examples from various sectors that utilize experimental techniques for success. How can we learn from them? 04:08
Cathryn Copper:
I’ve looked at a lot of different tech companies—startups. Like I said, I’ve always been a librarian, but I’ve also always been very interested in this sector. I also work—I’m an academic librarian. I work in architecture libraries. Again, that’s all I’ve ever done was be an architecture librarian. So I’ve learned a lot from the architects that I work with as well about design thinking and experiential learning—this kind of learn-by-doing mentality. So that was very influential, in addition to the technology and startups.
I would say across all of those areas, there were four or five things that I thought we could really take and pull into libraries. The first thing I found was that they’re always solving a problem. This is especially true for startups. I love startups because oftentimes they’re trying to solve the problem that hasn’t been solved before, or you don’t even know it’s a problem. Looking at what hasn’t been done and doing that, and if it’s not that, then it’s also very user-focused. What are their user’s needs and how can they address that problem? Always with experimentation you’re solving a problem, whatever that problem might be.
Design thinking, of course, comes from the architects and the creative people that I work with as well. This idea of just throwing an idea out there, let’s run with it for a little bit and see where it gets us. And if it doesn’t get us somewhere, go back to the brainstorming—let’s think of something else to do. So this design thinking and being open to new ideas like encouraging quantity of ideas to be brought to the table—solving problems, that way of thinking.
Then this huge focus on being human-centered. At the end of the day it’s about the stats and the dollars and everything. But really the companies operate in a way that it’s all about the users. And they’ve brought this user experience—user UX design into the work that they do. That was a big piece of it. When doing that UX design—then getting data. Every decision is made based on the data that is collected. You’re not just making a decision based on your intuition or your gut. They’re all getting data and making the decisions based on that.
Those are the four or five, because the human approach can be broken up a little bit—but those are the elements that I thought, Here’s what these companies are doing that we can do also. A lot of times we are already doing that. It’s just a different way of thinking about it.
Then the last thing that I mentioned is that they’re always willing to fail. I think this goes with being a very risk-tolerant organization—that you’re willing to try something new, knowing there’s a pretty high chance it’s not going to work out. But you also know that it’s worth taking that chance because it could open up the door to new ideas—bringing this mentality of being okay with failure because it’s worth the risk.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #3: It’s a good mentality. So I’m happy you talked about that. Can any organization with any budget engage in experimentation, and how can we make this part of our culture? 07:46
Cathryn Copper:
Yes, and I’m so glad you asked me this, because that was another thing with the book. I felt like it could be a misconception that in order to do experimentation, you needed to have a big budget and be able to buy fancy technology. That is the opposite of what is true. To me the idea of doing experimentation is really the answer to the problem of, We have no money and we have no staff, which seems to be the kind of eternal problem that we’re dealing with in libraries. So even though that’s the environment that we’re working in, where there’s often low budgets and low staffing, we can still drive initiatives forward because it’s not about having the money for the new technology, it’s about having the mindset of being willing to try something new.
I came to this coming from different institutions. Like I said, I’ve always been an academic architecture librarian, but I worked at institutions that have a different size, a scale—a small private institution to the kind of bigger research institution and also different types of management. I’ve always found when you pitch something as an experiment or you just say, Hey, I just want to try this one small thing. You can build up momentum, gather some stats, get the evidence that you need to then pitch it as something bigger. So this has worked for me—again when I had no money and I had no budget, to institutions that, Oh, you want VR headsets have VR headsets. So it’s a different type of how you go about it, but in the end, it’s all about pitching it in a certain way.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
I like bringing that sensibility to this process. Anybody can do this.
Cathryn Copper:
Anybody can. That’s what’s so great about it.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #4: It really is. So in your book, what models do you offer for librarians to use in brainstorming and doing what you’re talking about—trying out ideas? 10:11
Cathryn Copper:
Yes. Thank you for asking me this because anybody can do this. But, okay, well, How do we actually do this? The second part of the book is all about what I’ve come up with—coined The IDEEA Anti-Method, and I call it an Anti-Method intentionally, because in the spirit of experimentation there’s not a prescribed, If you do this, then you’ll get this. So here’s what we need to do. Ideate—create the idea. Design an experiment. Experiment. Engage our users and then assess. These are the five components of he IDEEA Anti-Method. But it’s again, take what you can, mix it up. How one person ideates is going to be different from how another library ideates. It gives ideas in the ideation section—there’s a whole area on brainstorming and different design thinking exercises that you can do. I even talk about using AI tools to help generate ideas.
These are again, practical things that we can use to get the ideas flowing. Then to work our way through the method, which is really about coming up with an idea, prototype it. When we say prototype it’s, what is the bare minimum, the lowest common denominator you need to get this idea out there. Before when I was testing VR headsets—before we bought the VR headsets we could test it with a Google Cardboard, which was like a cheap way to say, Hey, this is in the library, come borrow this. Tell us what you think of it. Do you want more of this? That was a prototype for us.
Then using that prototype and doing increments of it. Okay, maybe then you scale it up and then you get the data on that. Then maybe you can scale it up from there. So it’s about putting something out there, getting some feedback on it and then making the changes. And sometimes the changes are, Let’s go all in on this. And sometimes the changes are, You know what, this one isn’t going to be worth our time and our effort and our money. Which again goes back to that idea of why it works so well for the no-budget, no-people problem.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #5: That makes sense. So how do you recommend librarians build a roadmap to success for experimental libraries? 12:54
Cathryn Copper:
Okay, so this really is the big piece. It really is, because it’s easy to be inspired by the techs and the startups and the innovation. Even implementing the experiments is not hard. It’s not difficult. It’s just about doing it. But mapping this into the culture of libraries and making it throughout the DNA of the organization—it’s not just one person doing one experiment, but it’s everybody doing it. This is a culture change for many of us.
What I’ve found when I was looking—doing the research into technology companies, startups, this is exactly what it’s like. It is part of their culture. It is from the top to the bottom, everybody experiments. Everybody is encouraged to do it. There’s minimal roadblocks. So if you’re on the front lines—if you’re at the circ desk, you’re empowered to do the experiment just as the people in the boardroom.
This is the bigger question of it all. In the book I do discuss a roadmap to help bring this into the culture of the organization. It’s made up of four categories. The first category I call The Green Light, because I didn’t want to title it anything that gave it any other idea than that this was not about a kind of approval process. It was about everybody gets the green light. It was removing barriers, removing the risk aversion in our organization. The book goes into much more detail about this.
For example at an administrative level, we could set goals or themes for experimentation. Maybe you want your organization to do experiments on AI or, let’s do something around diversity and inclusion. And then, that’s it. Then we step away. It’s not that we’re not approving what experiments go forward, it’s just like if it meets that kind of target, Go try it and then come back and let’s discuss how it worked, what didn’t work.
That’s the second category—communication. It’s about communicating these experiments or this mentality, this mindset internally and externally. Telling our users, Hey, here at the library we’re trying new things. We want to hear from you. This is the place you come to try the new ideas. But it’s also communicating it internally to our staff, to our librarians about, Hey, we’re a place where we’re trying new ideas.
And so again, there’s a number of different ways—examples that outline this in the book. One example was I had created a manifesto on our library website and it said, Hey, we’re experimenting. And it talked about our existing experiments, but it also talked about what I called our expired experiments. Experiments we were no longer doing and including the ones that failed, or that we’re not moving forward with. So it was as much about communicating, We’re trying something new. Here’s what we’re trying. But we’re also willing to acknowledge when something doesn’t work and why—which is the big part of understanding the ‘why’ it didn’t work. So giving people the green light—communicating.
The other category is tools. Offering things like professional development workshops, things that incentivize experimentation. It doesn’t always have to be a monetary reward for the people that experiment. It can be just even recognition—or non-monetary rewards like giving out an award for the most innovative experiment this year, the most scalable experiment, whatever it may be.
The third category is the people and structuring our teams in certain ways. There’s a whole chapter on reskilling. What are the skills needed, how do we bring that? I’ll give you a little clue-in—curiosity is the best skill you can have for experimentation. I think most of our librarians are very curious by nature. So yeah, those were what I thought were the categories that needed to be part of a culture that truly embraced experimentation.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
And we’re so lucky that librarians are curious by nature because it makes us want to jump in on this kind of work.
Cathryn Copper:
We’re made to do these kinds of things.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #6: We were. Is there anything else you’d like to share, Cathryn? 17:53
Cathryn Copper:
What I would like to share about this is the idea of experimentation—using it as a tool to drive innovation, which clearly stemmed from the sciences. If you look historically at the idea of doing an experiment, now has infiltrated across sectors. What I came to realize when I was researching this book is that this really isn’t a fad or a trend or something that’s isolated to one sector or not. I really think that this is—I hesitate to use the word revolution, though I do use it in the book. But this is the way these organizations that are driving innovation are operating and will continue to operate in the future. This is how new ideas are getting moved forward. So to me, it’s like you get on board or you don’t. And it’s been proven, it’s been tested. Other sectors have used these methods and have created great change. So I think that it really is something that we need to be thinking about for the longevity of our profession.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Definitely. And I would encourage anyone who hasn’t taken a look at your book, The Experimental Librarian, to dive in on that resource to get a solid idea of exactly what you’re talking about.
Cathryn Copper:
Yes, thank you.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #7: So, speaking of books, do you have any favorite leadership books or resources and why? 19:28
Cathryn Copper:
I do. And actually, it’s not so much a book, but a resource I often go back to. I took some of the Data Joan’s workshops. They were courses. Where I’m at now—University of Toronto, it is really great about honing leadership skills and supporting us in doing that. I found the Data Joan’s great. I mean, it was really about building DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion capacity in leadership. They gave us so many practical checklists, meeting organizers—I often go back to that all the time. This has been a great resource for me.
Another book I love is called When Women Lead by Julia Boorstein. And okay, I’ve done the leadership workshops, and I feel like this can sometimes get glossed over being a woman in a leadership role. To me, when this book was recommended, it came at a time where I felt like I really needed to read this. I don’t want to give it all away, but what she comes to is that the women, the organizations that she looked at, that women who were leading were more adaptive to change and more empathetic in their management styles. This is exciting to me, being a woman leader that likes change. I feel that was a good book.
Then one that’s on my list, but I haven’t read is called Emergent Strategy. And again, about creating change when we’re in this constant state of flux. You’ll have to have me back to talk about that book.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #8: I’d love to have you back. Thank you for those. Cathryn, in closing, what do libraries mean to you personally? 21:19
Cathryn Copper:
They mean so much to me. I ended up in libraries, truthfully, because I liked the space. I thought, Oh, that would be a great place to work. Who doesn’t want to be in a library? It has never felt like work to me. I just love being here. I love the ideas, the projects I get to work on, the people I get to work with. Yeah, for me, it all centers around the space, whether it be a physical or a virtual space, but where you can create and exchange knowledge, and who doesn’t like that?
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
I hear you on that. Who doesn’t want to be in a library? And who wouldn’t want to be in an experimental library? The things you’ve been sharing with me today—make libraries exciting, adaptive, and open to change that makes positive differences in our organizations. So I’m glad that we got to talk about this today. Thank you.
Cathryn Copper:
Yes. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
You’ve been listening to Library Leadership podcast. This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. For more episodes, tune in to Library Leadership Podcast.com, where you can now subscribe to get episodes delivered right to your email inbox. Our producer is Nathan Sinclair Vineyard. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
We would like to thank the Park City Library for their dedicated support of this show. The opinions expressed on this show are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the views of Library Leadership podcast or our sponsors.