Category: Innovation

Posted on

Seven Complements for Each Criticism

Many years ago, someone who works as a professional therapist, told me that one key to maintaining positive relationships is to properly balance positives and negatives. She also made clear that because negatives register more readily than positives, a proper “balance” is at least seven positives for each negative.

As a boss, it’s easy to dish out negatives. In fact, some people seem to believe criticism is part of a boss’s job description. Superficially, it makes sense. The manager’s responsibility is to make sure everyone is doing their job properly, and to do so you have to tell them whenever they make a mistake or whenever they could be doing something better.

With a little further thought, however, it also makes sense that people do not enjoy being criticized and, if all they hear is criticism, they are not motivated to do their jobs well, but just to do their jobs.

Furthermore, in an environment that is subject to change or in an environment that is supposed to benefit from innovation and creativity, the fear of consequences that come from making mistakes inevitably stifles risk taking and innovation.

In other words, in a work environment that requires everything to function like clockwork and employees must follow rules carefully and precisely (eg: a McDonalds or a passport office), a boss who criticizes mistakes regularly may be valuable. However, in a work environment in which change and innovation are valued or customer satisfaction is a priority (eg: any work environment subject to technology change or a retail business), a boss must successfully balance any necessary criticisms with public recognition of even minor accomplishments.

Criticism discourages risk taking and innovation. A high criticism department in which the number of criticisms is the same as or even exceeds the number of complements is only effective in rigid, rote function work environments and creative, innovative, service oriented environments must both tolerate mistakes and provide high levels of positive reinforcement for work done well.

Of course, it’s not enough just to notice positives. As a leader, you have to articulate the recognition, ideally publicly but at least privately.

Positive acknowledgements can be simple, like these examples:

    • “Thank you for a good day’s work.”
    • “Closing went smoothly tonight, don’t you think?”
    • “That memo you wrote was helpful.”
    • “The suggestion you made jives nicely with other ideas we’re working on.
      We’ll see how it goes.”
    • “I’ve noticed that you’re (always on time / always in a good mood /
      supportive of your teammates / etc) and that makes my job a little
      easier. Thanks.”
    • “I heard you gave Jill some flowers when her dog died. That was nice.”

Net positive work environments are more flexible, more satisfying, and ultimately more productive than work environments in which criticism dominates.

Perhaps understandably, public libraries used to operate more like the rigid structures of a McDonalds. With their strict cataloging systems, infamous rules about keeping quiet, and monopoly on information access, public libraries did not need to worry about change or customer service. In the age of the Carnegie library building boom, “If you build it, they will come” was an accurate description of the wider environment in which libraries operated. As such, the emergence of rigid work cultures that emphasized following procedures and rules, criticizing staff who made mistakes, and resisting innovation and change is hardly surprising.

However, the environment in which public libraries operate has changed. Dramatically. With the advent of the internet, ebooks, and other rapidly evolving means of preserving and disseminating information for their communities, public libraries need to update their work cultures. Libraries that seek out change, embrace experimentation, and emphasize positive reinforcement will find that their communities will embrace them as part of the future rather than view them as anachronistic representatives of a dead or dying past.

To that end, library leadership needs to publicly reinforce desired behavior (experimentation, a willingness to take chances and make mistakes, a willingness to bend the rules to support the patron). Leave the hard-nosed rules in the passport office. From Circ to Youth Services, embrace change. It’s a different sort of leadership requiring different skills, but they are all trainable. They are all learnable. Find and complement seven positives for each negative.

Simon Sinek said it well:

Posted on

How Do We Know What We Don’t Know

When I first moved to Japan right out of college, I heard or read somewhere an aphorism that went something like this:

People who visit Japan for a week or two at a time go home and write books about Japanese culture and society; those who spend more time here – a few months now and then – go home and write articles about Japanese culture and society; but those who have lived here for a few years tend to go home and not talk or write much about Japanese culture and society. They sit quietly and make no attempt to explain.

First, I think this observation could be applied to any culture or society, not just Japan. It happened that I was in Japan at a time when everyone was trying to figure out how Japan worked, so many westerners crowned themselves as experts and wrote about their observations and opinions, but those who wrote the most and had the strongest opinions did not spend much time in Japan – or learn the language.

Second, this observation could be understood in a number of ways. I chose to interpret it as alluding to the challenge of communicating the complexities and nuances of a substantively different system of thought to people who have no basis for understanding that system. Recent neuro-biological research has shown that, indeed, the more you know the more you can know. So if you have spent most of your time in one culture it is hard to learn about a new culture unless you spend a good deal of time in it. I would posit, however, that in addition to neuro-biological influences on learning something new, there are socio-psychological factors that affect one’s ability to learn new things.

First and foremost among them is an awareness that one has an information gap.

Isaac Asimov once ruefully commented that people think that education is something that ends, that once we graduate from school we know as much as we need to know, so once we graduate from school we no longer benefit from seeking out new knowledge. As students in school we are aware that we don’t know everything and there are still things to learn but, as Asimov points out, after we graduate we tend to lose sight of the fact that even everyday life is full of information gaps that need to be filled.

This is as true for wisened scholars at elite universities with their PhDs as it is for high school dropouts working as a deckhands on a ferry. Furthermore, this is as true when it comes to considerations about politics and social policy as it is when it comes to making appliance purchasing decisions.

However, when we sit down with friends and neighbors in our social groups and we start discussing religion, politics, and other complicated subjects full of opinion, how do we know where our information gaps are? How do we know what we don’t know?

I think the answer is rather simple: We can’t.

Therefore, we owe it to ourselves and to the world we live in to assume we know very little. In the grand scheme of things, whether the subject is nuclear physics or political science, even the experts have imperfect, incomplete knowledge. We may not know specifically what we don’t know, but we should look, listen, and read not only for new facts but for new or reinforcing insights in the opinions of others. There will always be more to learn, so we should start with the assumption that our information is incomplete and actively seek to discover, and fill-in, the gaps.

Posted on

Change – And Communication Required by Change

We’ve all seen it or experienced it: A substantial new change is introduced by a colleague, a boss, or some outside consultants and the people who are expected to actually implement the change stumble and make mistakes. Why does this keep happening? Here are four explanations (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive).

    1. The people making mistakes are dumb. This is a surprisingly common explanation from the people who design and roll out a change. However, because change associated errors are so common, it could only be true if most people are dumb, and that simply is not the case. People only appear dumb because that which is obvious to the designer is not always obvious to the people who have to learn the change, regardless of how bright or dumb they are. In the vast majority of cases, blaming the people who have to carry out the change simply makes no sense. Blame is neither accurate nor productive.
    2. The change is poorly explained. Despite thorough instructions, in many cases people simply may not have understood or remembered their instructions. Here’s why:
      • Not everyone learns the same way. Some people learn well through written instructions. Other people learn well through verbal instructions.   Still others are highly visual and need to see a demonstration of what they are learning before they can remember anything. If instructions are provided in only one form, learning preferences for some portion of the people who need to execution on a change are likely to be missed. When a change is complex, it’s a good idea to provide instruction both in writing and verbally. Also, keep in mind that some people, no matter how well they understand instructions, can’t really master something new until they do it. Surprisingly, this is particularly true of bright people who think in abstractions – like Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Steven Spielberg. It is usually best to allow someone who is learning a change to practice it; showing them is fine, but having them do it is better. Of course, having them do it is slower and requires vastly more patience on the part of the instructor, but the reduced error rate in later actions is well worth the time and tolerance.
      • Sometimes the instructions are not clear or complete. This goes back to the earlier point that what’s obvious to the creator is not always obvious to the users. In the early days of computer programming, first iterations of products were designed by engineers who could not understand why users didn’t automatically understand how to use their products. This phenomenon also appeared in the early days of PC software, again in the early days of the internet, and then again in the early days of mobile devices. The industry’s quite brilliant and imaginative engineers understood how to use their products because they had designed them; the users, however, were flummoxed. The same thing can happen with process changes in any work environment.
    3. People aren’t accustomed to change and habits are hard to break. In some work environments, especially environments in which people are expected to work robotically and follow the same patterns all the time, workers sometimes fall back on old habits and patterns. When tasks are reduced to mindless repetition, people who have been mindlessly following those patterns cannot be expected to quickly and easily abandon them. One way to avoid this problem is to reduce the expectation for robotic function in the workplace. People who routinely experience change and are routinely expected to be flexible find it easier to adopt change. In other words, the more change people experience, the easier it is for them to adapt to it when it happens.
    4. The people who are affected by the change weren’t involved in developing or rolling out the change.  People always find it easier to implement a change that they have had a hand in developing. For one thing, they understand why the change is designed the way it is. For another, they have probably been able to affect the design of the change so it suits them. Perhaps most importantly, however, they have had the opportunity to learn the change over time so, when it comes time to implement the change, the change feels familiar. In the end, if the people who are affected by a change have been involved in the development of the change, even if the change is not exactly as they would have designed it themselves, at least they are prepared to accept it and implement it as it is.

A final point about change and mistakes: sometimes mistakes reveal problems in the change itself, not in the people who are implementing the change. When a change is introduced, if people have trouble implementing it, perhaps the change itself needs further modification. People designing change should be prepared to change their changes as appropriate. Think of change as evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Here a few suggestions for avoiding problems when rolling out a change:

    • Early in the process of planning a change, involve the people who are affected by the change. Help people become familiar with the changes so the changes are already familiar when they are rolled out. Listen to what the people have to say so you can adapt the changes to accommodate their needs.
    • Provide both written and verbal instructions.
    • Ideally, let people practice. At a minimum, provide them with supervision the first time they have to work with the change.
    • Make change routine. A series of small changes may be easier to accommodate than a single big change.
    • Allow for mistakes. As Alexander Pope said, “To err is human.”
    • Learn from the mistakes people make. How can the changes be improved to avoid further mistakes? How can future changes be designed and rolled out such that they result in fewer mistakes?
Posted on

In a Team, Two Kinds of Communication are Essential

Do a Google search on “essential components of teamwork” and you’ll get a long list of articles on the subject. Teamwork is complicated and takes effort, but it can be much less complicated and take much less effort if the team communicates well.

There are two kinds of essential communication in teams. The first is vertical communication (top down and bottom up) and the other is horizontal communication (between teammates).

As obvious and intuitive as the above statement may be, poor communication probably causes more team failure than any other factor. Well-led teams are successful communicators in all directions on an ongoing basis.

Top down communication has to do with setting direction. Defining the goal. Everyone on the team must be working towards the same objective and each member of the team must prioritize that goal above self-interest. Top down communication is also how task assignments are determined, although this can, in good teams, be delegated to the team members to work out for themselves.

Bottom up communication is how team leaders get all kinds of information.

      • How well do team members understand the objectives and how committed is the team to achieving them? How efficiently is the team working? Are problems brewing?
      • How could the team work better? What improvements can be made so the team has a greater likelihood of success? What changes would result in less effort or lower costs?
      • What are customers saying about the product or service? What ideas do they have? How are their needs or interests evolving?
      • What could the team leader do better to ensure success of the team?

Horizontal communication may be the most important form of communication. This is the communication that allows team members to coordinate their actions in furtherance of their shared objectives.

When I was setting up a small US startup/subsidiary for a large Japanese company, we had a very aggressive time frame for achieving a set of goals. My VPs (software development, creative, operations, finance, and sales/marketing) and I would meet regularly to go over priorities and near term action items. Budget, labor resources, and skill sets in their respective departments had to be juggled to meet a series of milestones required to obtain further funding. Every time we encountered a problem or a change, we worked through those changes and the ways a change in one group’s output or activities would affect the other groups and their contributions.

Of course, each of the department heads had needs. Everyone was working against a tight schedule with limited resources, but by the time we ended each meeting, each team leader (and management team member) understood why resources were being allocated they way they were. Each VP understood what tradeoffs had been made and why. My role was not to make all the decisions, although imposing a decision was necessary from time to time. I talked as little as I could. My role was principally to guide the process, keep things moving (push for decisions), periodically remind everyone of the larger objective, and trust them to listen to and work with each other. We rarely achieved universal happiness over decisions, but everyone came away understanding why each decision was made and committed to executing with it. Working with that team was among the more enjoyable and rewarding experiences of my life.

Libraries rarely operate under the time crunches that early stage companies face, but, like early stage companies, libraries have to achieve objectives with limited resources. Building teams that communicate well so everyone understands what is being done by whom and how their work affects everyone else is essential in any organization that aspires to efficiency and effectiveness in achieving goals. Including libraries. Building a culture of open, complete, and ongoing communication at all levels of the organization is essential to building a winning team.

Posted on

Use Library “After Action Reviews” for Successes as Well as for Challenges

I grew up calling them “post-mortems.” You know, those horrible one-off meetings that are often held after something goes badly (eg: a grant application is denied or turnout for an event is abysmal). The objective is to figure out what went wrong and fix the mistakes. No one likes post-mortems because they mean facing failure and everyone comes away discouraged. The very name (“after-death”) is a turn-off. And libraries rarely have them.

And yet, I have always believed that constantly reviewing actions is essential to a healthy, productive organization. Such reviews are important both when something goes badly and when something goes very well indeed, thank you. I also believe they should be held for all sorts of events, large and small.

So let’s start with a name change. After Action Review (AAR) sounds more neutral and is a widely used term.

And let’s stop thinking of them as long, boring, discouraging meetings. Quick surveys and short, two paragraph reports posted on groupware for discussion are usually more useful forms of AAR than sit-down meetings.

I was pleased to hear a discussion of AARs as a core element of strategy on a recent episode of The Library Leadership Podcast. When learning becomes a core element of ongoing strategy, After Action Reviews can be seen as positive rather than negative exercises. Through them, the organization can learn from the community and from each other. Instead of resisting, staff and management embrace the practice and incorporate assessments into the organization’s culture. In addition to encouraging an outward looking orientation, AARs stimulate communication and idea sharing that is not merely reactive to negative circumstances but rather positive and forward looking.

Perhaps most importantly, AARs encourage constant change. Instead of doing things the same way every time year after year even as technology, community needs / interests, and staff skills change, AARs facilitate steady evolution from mediocre to good to excellent. They also make it possible to face failure when that happens (and it will) because staff will have the sense that positive outcomes outnumber the failures and failures are merely additional opportunities to learn, change and improve.

After an event, ask participants to quickly fill out a short survey. What did they like; what didn’t they like; what could be better? Get specific where you need to (speaker quality, etc), but make it easy for people to reply. After an event, ask staff to submit a short report on what went well and what could have gone better. Ask everyone for suggested improvements. Staff reports and summaries of surveys should be posted publicly on groupware so others can see, learn, and discuss as well.

For example, an AAR for response to a power outage might look something like this:

Management should make a point of reading AARs (another reason for keeping them concise) and responding. This way staff realize that the reports matter and can make a difference. We have all worked in environments in which suggestions and reports are requested or even required but no action is taken. Management sets the tone, so step up and interact.

Posted on

Outreach, Marketing & Engagement in Public Libraries

Librarians frequently use the terms outreach, marketing and engagement interchangeably. Many people, not just librarians, do. However, the terms are fundamentally different, and the underlying philosophy of how a library works and participates in its community affects which term applies. It is essential for librarians, especially library leadership, to understand the differences.

Outreach: The primary – almost exclusive – function of outreach is to increase awareness within an audience. Libraries conduct outreach to make community members aware of their services and programs. The underlying objective of outreach is to increase attendance or use of existing services and programs developed by the library for the audience. Usually this is accomplished Outreach is fundamentally a PR function consisting of outbound, unidirectional communication from the library to the community.through unidirectional communications such as posters in the library, e- newsletters, social media posts, handouts available through the circulation or reference desks and blurbs or articles in local news outlets. Outreach is fundamentally a PR function. It consists of outbound, unidirectional communication from the library to thecommunity.

Marketing: The function of marketing is rarely used by libraries. Marketing has three essential parts. First, marketing is a proactive effort to identify distinct audiences within a community. These audience might be defined, for example, by age, language, education level, gender identity, political views, reading habits or any combination of characteristics. Next, marketing requires the institution to make a proactive effort to understand the wants and needs of each group it serves and what motivates the people who make up that group. Young adults uncertain about their gender identities have information interests and reading / browsing habits that are different from the information interests and reading / browsing habits of retirees with grandchildren and health problems.

Marketing also assumes that there are segments of the community that the library does not reach well, and, because they are part of the community, we should connect with them. Marketing then assumes that we may not know the people in these groups as well as we think, and we need to understand them to provide them with the programs and services they want. Therefore, we librarians need to identify the various groups in our communities, and then we need to understand them. 

Second, marketing uses what it has learned about the various segments of its community to change existing programs or develop new ones that meet the needs and interests of those segments.

The last, and not least, component of marketing is much like outreach. Marketing includes letting the community know about all these great programs and services that the library has developed for it based on what the library has learned about the various segments of the community.

Marketing is a continuous cycle of learning about the community, how it is changing and what new segments are emerging, and then adjusting the library’s mix of programs and services to meet the community’s current needs and interests. Outreach is just a piece of marketing.

Engagement: Both outreach and marketing start with predetermined assumptions about the role of the library in the community and those assumptions are made by the library. Engagement allows the community to have a bigger say in the role of the library in the community.

Engagement, like marketing, starts with identifying the constituencies within a community and then goes to them and asks them about their aspirations for their community. The community, not the library, is the center of the discussion. Instead of asking what the community wants from the library, which is the classic marketing question, the basic engagement question is what does the community want for itself. The library then has to figure out how to facilitate those aspirations.

Sometimes the best way to facilitate a community With engagement, the community, not the library, is the center of the discussion.aspiration will require the library to develop programs and services within the library with input from the community, but many times the best way for the library to facilitate a community aspiration will be to empower individuals or other organizations within the community to work towards related goals. Richard Harwood of the Harwood Institute refers to this as “turning outward”. Instead of the library looking at itself as an institution first, the library looks first and primarily at the community for a definition of what the library is and does.

The ALA has developed a program called Libraries Transforming Communities (LTC). LTC is an engagement program for libraries and includes tools and training for library staff. LTC (engagement) makes it possible for libraries to work with their communities to develop programs and services in conjunction with the community to achieve aspirations defined by the communities.

Libraries that engage with their communities not only provide programs and services defined and created by their communities, they also facilitate work done by others.

“Bad libraries build collections, good libraries build services,
great libraries build communities.“
R. David Lankes

 

Outreach, therefore, is fundamentally the PR function of marketing. Marketing is fundamentally the cyclical process of learning about a library’s community, building and revising library programs and services to meet the needs of the community and then using outreach to make the public aware of those programs and services. Engagement, however, puts the community front and center and calls on the library not only to build library programs and services but also to enable and participate in programs and services developed by the community itself or by other institutions. Engagement makes the library a member of the community.

Posted on

What is the Role of a Library in a Pandemic?

The fundamental mission around which everything a library does is the accumulation and dissemination of information for its community.

A secondary objective of a library is to provide a certain amount of entertainment. 

We can debate the details of these assertions at another time, but if you grant me that “accumulation and dissemination of information” is at least a fundamental mission of all libraries, we can continue.

We can also assume that people need information and entertainment to survive an emergency, especially a pandemic. They need information so they know what to do – how to respond to the pandemic – and they need to have confidence in that information so they do not panic. In addition, community members need entertainment so they can survive emotionally as well as physically.

Finally, let us take as a given that in a pandemic, library buildings will close. In the current pandemic, many states have ordered libraries to close their doors. Many libraries in other states have voluntarily curtailed in-building operations.

Does closing the building mean that libraries have to cease operations? Of course not. That’s absurd. Libraries can still offer much of what makes libraries libraries through online services. It takes some adaptation, to be sure, but it can be done. 

I have listed below some ideas of what a library can do while it is still “open for business” even while the library building is closed.

1. Communicate library activities to the community. This can and should be done aggressively by all means available. 

    • The cheapest and easiest way to let the community know what a library is doing is to post it on the library’s web site! Use basic marketing principles around placement and messaging (do not, for example, have a message that says “the library is closed until further notice” right next to a message that says “come to these online meetings.” From the patron’s point of view, that’s very confusing. The building may be closed, but the library is open. It’s that simple.
    • Facebook is a great way to get word out to much of the community. For a few dollars (literally about $10), it is possible to put announcements that “The Building is Closed, But the Library is Still Open” in front of thousands of community members who are stuck at home browsing Facebook. Direct them to your Facebook page and your web site where they can find out all the other details.
    • The visual nature of Instagram makes it a tool good for generating interest in and excitement about library activities.
    • Email is also cheap. Send a note to members about changes to policy (due dates have been extended, blocked cards have been unblocked, etc) and in the same email, tell them about all the things going on at the library. Get patrons to sign up for a monthly newsletter that provides updates on past and upcoming activities. Send out a vibrant, low text, high-imagery newsletter sharing past and upcoming events.
    • Newspapers are still being published, online and in print. Make the library a story and get the newspaper to cover it (both online and in print!).
    • Have the mayor and other public officials mention in their announcements that the library is still functioning online and encourage community members to visit the library’s home page for information about resources and activities that are available.

2. Move book clubs and other groups online. Don’t cancel anything! GoToMeeting, WebEx, and Zoom are just three of multiple online meeting services available to libraries that make virtual meetings possible. I belong to a literary group at my neighborhood library. We don’t read specific books each month, we talk about different genres and aspects of literature. The average age of members may well be around 60, but everyone quickly learned how to participate using a virtual meeting tool and everyone has been grateful to have the human contact during the stay-at-home period. It’s possible to chat while knitting in a virtual meeting. ESL sessions can be conducted online. Even chess is possible. D&D would be easy. Perhaps board games would be a challenge.

3. Add (online) events. Take advantage of online resources to add events, especially for kids. Pandemics – any emergency requiring people to stay home – are especially hard on kids and parents with small children. The more events you have that can keep kids entertained, the happier the kids will be – and the happier the parents will be that they have an active and supportive library. I know a librarian who organized an art group for teens that produced spectacular imagery. Another library added reader’s advisory services via FB in which a librarian would interact with multiple patrons looking for books to read.

4. Expand existing online services. When people are stuck at home, unable to go to theaters or the gym, they look to the internet for services. Some need more variety than what is available through paid services. Others simply can’t afford them. Most libraries have access to magazines, ebooks, and streaming video. These can all be expanded. Team up with other libraries through the county or state or the ALA to negotiate for greater availability of titles and less restrictive limits on the number and length of time digital assets can be accessed.

5. Expand internet access services. Libraries are often the primary source for internet access for students and adults who do not have high speed internet access at home. They made need access to broadband internet access through the library just to access the library’s online services, but they are also likely to need it for school or work, not to mention entertainment. Even when the library is closed, the library can facilitate internet access by

    • Extending WiFi services deep into the parking lot. If patrons have access to a car, they can sit in the parking lot and use the internet.
    • Lending WiFi hot spots. Obviously, anything that is being lent by the library requires the object be moved from the library to the patron, which can be an infection transmission mechanism. However, if the sterilization procedures can be worked out, libraries that can lend WiFi hot spots to patrons will do a great favor to high school students preparing for college (or college students trying to wrap up courses for graduation).

6. Provide community updates. People want and need to know what’s going on. Cable news and even regional newspapers are pretty good at covering state and national news. But what about local news and information that provide actionable knowledge to residents? Often it comes from many sources. Often community members only get part of the news they need. The library should consolidate it on their web site. No commentary. No editing. Just post it.

    • Updates from the mayor’s office.
    • Notices and updates from the police department.
    • Updates from the county health department.
    • Anything else that applies directly to the decisions being made by community members such as:
      • Testing locations.
      • Lists of businesses providing curbside pickup.
      • News about non-library community activities.
      • Stories about good-deeds in the community.
      • Stories about scams or people abusing the crisis.

7. Post information on the disease (or other emergency). Find basic, factual, non-Wikipedia sources of information about the disease, how it spreads, where it came from, what it does inside our bodies, etc. Libraries should NOT attempt to digest this information and write their own material about it. Instead, create a reading list of magazine and journal articles, books, videos (lots of videos), and webinars, all of which should be available through the library, with links for ready access. Librarians should use all of their information literacy skills to sift through the available information to find the most current, reliable information. Be sure that the information is in a form the library’s community can readily digest – the latest peer reviewed journal article in Lancet on the way the virus affects protein replication in lung cells may be useful to a practicing physician, but it will not help an accountant or a mom understand what they are facing. The library may want to break out the information according to age group so parents can share (and learn) with their children.

Remember, it’s all about the patrons. Don’t forget who your patrons are. If you have a large Spanish or Mandarin speaking community, be sure to offer these services in Spanish or Chinese as well. In many ways, these communities are the most shut off from reliable information and will depend upon the services of the library more than majority language communities.

Stay in touch with the community. While the building is closed, direct person-to-person contact with the community may be curtailed. The library staff, especially the executive director and the department heads, need to stay in touch with members of the community to identify needs the library can fill and or things that it could do better.

In a pandemic, as in any emergency, access to current, reliable information is essential for productive debate and coordinated, unified public response. Make the library what it is supposed to be: A center for reliable information for the community it serves.

Author’s note: This blog post is dated in mid-May 2020. However, it draws extensively on conversations held over the last five years in which I asked, “What is the role of a library in an emergency (such as a blizzard)?” Beginning a year ago, influenced by years of exposure to Bill Gates’ warnings about the likelihood of a global pandemic, I refined that question to “What would the role of a library be in a pandemic?” In early February of 2020, as reports of the Chinese COVID-19 outbreak spreading to other countries began appearing in the news, I proposed to the library where I worked that we begin a basic information campaign around flu avoidance (washing hands, coughing into sleeves, etc). Then in early March of 2020, as reports of the virus in Washington State and New York City appeared in the news, I asked my pandemic question of a group of library leadership graduate students at Rutgers University. In the Rutgers discussion and in the conversations last year about the role of libraries in a pandemic, I proposed many of the ideas presented here. Of course, I got lots of thoughtful feedback then and I welcome more thoughtful comments here now.

Posted on

Is SciFi Dead? Putting a Prediction to Rest

When Spaceballs, the epic comic parody based on Star Wars, came out in 1987, a little known and now forgotten film critic announced that Spaceballs signaled the demise of science fiction film as a genre.  His logic was as follows: The appearance of a comic parody 10 years after the original film release could only mean that science fiction had little new to offer.  In short, the genre was doomed, strangled in a dead end by a dearth of original material.

Yet here we are almost 30 years later, and last year (2015) over 30 feature length science fiction films were released into the American film market.  True, some of them (eg: Jupiter Ascending, Pixels, and Hot Tub Time Machine 2) were horrible – or simply silly – with little social, technical, creative, or artistic merit.  Others (eg: Jurassic World and Terminator Genesis) could only be explained as money machines drawing on the reboot of established SciFi brands.  SciFi films for the summer of 2016 had similar problems; Star Trek: Beyond, Independence Day: Resurgence, and Ghostbusters are all largely considered flops despite famous heritage.  Looking only at these films, one might agree with the critic’s accusation that science fiction was out of material.

But lets take a closer look, especially at 2015 for which we have a full year of films – including the important Thanksgiving and year-end moviegoing weekends.  Several science fiction movies released in 2015 were well worth seeing, and still others were seriously good movies.

So what makes a “seriously good” science fiction movie?

+ Craftsmanship: A seriously good movie must meet high standards for story, acting, script, special effects, and other basic mechanics of a movie.

+ More than Entertainment:  A seriously good movie needs to be thought provoking.  In particular, it should look at social, political, or scientific issues.  Alternatively, the movie can inspire us to improve the world we live in – or will live in.

+ Plausibility: Finally, viewers must walk away from a seriously good movie believing that what they have just seen is possible.

Unfortunately, the plausibility requirement automatically excludes some long time favorite SciFi movies from consideration as “seriously good,” but movies that get all the craftsmanship elements right are well worth seeing and we have plenty of them in our sample of 2015 movies.  Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens and Mad Max: Fury Road fall into this category.  These movies are both entertaining and engrossing; they can be as much fun as a two hour roller coaster ride.

2015 saw several commendable efforts that went beyond entertainment.  For example, both Tomorrowland and Hunger Games benefit from having underlying themes that are more important than plot and almost as important as the special effects.  Both movies are arguably more than raw entertainment.  Both, however, lack plausibility, both succumb to Hollywood desire for flash, and Tomorrowland additionally suffers from weak craftsmanship – predictability and a somewhat obvious lecturing tone.  Besides, it doesn’t take long to find other 2015 SciFi movies that are worth seeing – depending on your tolerance for foul language (Chappie) or your patience with familiar concepts (Self/less).

Of the 2015 crop of SciFi movies, the ones that meet all the criteria and qualify as “seriously good” are Ex Machina and The Martian

Tension builds steadily in Ex Machina, but you won’t find any explosions and little gore in this low key film.  The movie is sexy but shows no sex.  The special effects are seamless and (along with the sexiness) serve the tragic plot line and the underlying messaging.  If you haven’t seen Ex Machina, put it at the top of your list.

The Martian, unlike Ex Machina, wants very badly to be a blockbuster film, and in the end it caves to the shallow demands of Hollywood to serve up a thoroughly unplausable climax.  Up to the very end, however, The Martian largely adheres to good science, good film craftsmanship, plausibility, and thoroughly entertaining storytelling.  If you’re a science fiction fan, you’ve undoubtedly already seen The Martian, but it’s worth seeing twice.  If you aren’t a science fiction fan, you’re still likely to enjoy The Martian.  Either way, just close your eyes at the end.

With movies like Ex Machina and The Martian, science fiction has shown that it is far from dead as a film genre.  If anything, SciFi is gaining strength.

As humankind becomes more confident of the future and of our own ability to shape it, good science fiction helps us imagine the science, technology, and social changes that are possible.  We can investigate both the outcomes that we want to avoid and the opportunities that we want to embrace.  Science fiction is far from dead.  More people embrace seriously good science fiction than ever before.  We just have to hope that Hollywood – or someone – will make the movies.

Posted on

How Good is the Augmented Reality in Pokémon GO?

For those who have already played Pokémon GO and understand Augmented Reality (AR), you may skip to the next paragraph.  For those who have not or do not, Pokémon GO features real time insertion of animated images (creatures called Pokémon) into a live video stream that comes through the camera lens on your smart phone.  Point your camera lens at a the sidewalk in front of you and, if the software expects a Pokémon to be in that geography, you’ll see it on your screen even though you don’t see it when you look directly at the sidewalk.

Outside of Pokémon GO, you can find a number of examples of excellent AR implementations on contemporary TV, especially in sports broadcasts.  That yellow first down line you see in American football games?  Yup, that’s great AR.  It moves with the field when the camera pans, tilts, or zooms and it disappears behind players when they walk over it.  It really does look like there’s a yellow line painted on the field.  But if you think about it, you know the line is not really there.  No one in the stadium can see it – only people watching the live TV broadcast.

You know those ads on the wall behind home plate during The World Series?  Yup.  Those, too, are artificially inserted.  In fact, depending on where you are in the world, you’ll see different ads.  And they exhibit the same characteristics as the yellow first down line: they stick with the field when the camera pans, tilts, or zooms and they disappear behind anyone who walks in front of them.

The math and the video technology behind those two examples of AR would blow your mind.   Watch for more AR this summer during the Olympics.  You’ll notice that all these AR implementations exhibit the same three characteristics (in order of technical difficulty):

1. A graphic image, sometimes animated, is inserted into a live video stream.

2. The image seems to move with its “real world” surroundings, whether the real world surroundings consists of an American football field, a wall in a baseball stadium, or (in the Olympics) the bottom of a pool.

3. The inserted image disappears behind any object that passes between the camera lens and the place where the inserted image is supposed to be – including batters, catchers, and umpires in a baseball game or referees and players in a football game.

But what about Pokémon GO?IMG_8803

The AR software used in Pokémon GO is very cool and exciting, but it’s also pretty basic.  It only really manages the first of the three features mentioned above, and it’s the easiest one.  It also partially manages the second characteristic.  The Pokémon are inserted into the video stream when you point your camera in the direction of the Pokémon, but the Pokémon doesn’t move with the “real world” very smoothly.  If you tilt, pan, or zoom your camera, the Pokémon moves around fairly wildly and doesn’t give a very good illusion of actually being part of the “real world” surrounding it.

IMG_8805The third and most difficult characteristic of AR, of course, isn’t implemented at all in Pokémon GO.  If you find a Pokémon and, while viewing it through your camera lens, pass your hand between the lens and the Pokémon, the “real world” surrounding the Pokémon will disappear behind your hand, but the Pokémon will not (see the accompanying image).  The same thing applies if a friend, a car, or a passing dog comes between your phone and the Pokémon: the world disappears behind the new object but the Pokémon does not.

There’s no doubt about it: Pokémon GO has brought augmented reality into everyday life and made it fun for millions of people.  As video processing power on mobile devices improves and more games take advantage of AR (which they will) the AR implementation will improve and we’ll see better integration of the artificial images with the surrounding environment – and they’ll begin to disappear behind intervening objects.  For now, although the Pokémon GO implementation is far from ideal, “Progress over Perfection.”

Posted on

Augmented vs Virtual Reality: Contrasting Technologies and Tools

While both augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) may use computing power, they use very different applications to achieve their ends.

Ok. Time to get the boring stuff out of the way…

First, a quick note on the distinction between AR and VR.

VR is the complete replacement of the real world with an artificial world.  At this time, VR usually replaces only visual and auditory input, but VR fans and businesses are increasingly incorporating artificial stimuli for other senses, especially balance (motion detection), touch, and smell, to make ever more complete virtual realities.

AR, on the other hand, is the artificial, seamless, and dynamic integration of new content into, or removal of existing content from, perceptions of the real world.  AR is most commonly seen in sports broadcasts, such as the yellow first down line in American football games, national flags in the lanes of swimmers and runners in the Olympics, and advertisements on the wall behind home plate in baseball games.  These augmentations of reality are so convincing that most TV viewers do not realize that they are artificially inserted.

Now for a small surprise…

Considering these two descriptions, one might assume that VR is much harder to implement than AR.  After all, VR has to replace all that visual and auditory input.  In fact, however, AR requires much more sophisticated programming and consumes more computing horsepower.

It turns out that recognizing and tracking a range of objects in the real world requires powerful, very fast computing.  The vast majority of computing power in augmented reality is consumed in identifying and tracking reality.  The insertion and removal of content, on the other hand, is relatively simple (other than occlusion, which is hard and discussed later).

Seeing something is not the same as recognizing it…

Human vision can identify all kinds of complex objects, distinguishing objects with only small apparent differences.  It’s useful, for example, to be able to tell your spouse from everyone else of the same gender with the same color hair, skin, and eyes (and let’s face it, there are a lot of people out there who are the same in those respects).

Computer vision still has a hard time even recognizing a large number of random, individual objects.  Specialized software exists for facial recognition and is used routinely by Facebook, iPhoto, and other applications, but to work reliably the camera angles and lighting have to be consistent.  Artificial intelligence (AI) that can generalize facial recognition skills into recognizing everything from sofas to automobiles and distinguishing between different kinds of sofas and automobiles has not yet made it into the public domain.

For now, AR must, therefore, settle for recognizing a few, clearly defined and pre-programmed objects: lines on a football field, or the blank green box behind home plate in a baseball stadium, for example.

As a further complication, with augmented reality, the developer has to allow for the nearly infinite array of variables that the “real world” could throw at his program, from shifting light, to varying camera angles, to falling rain, to a van partially obscuring a sign or the front of a building (making it unrecognizable to the AR application).

This is the point at which virtual reality programming becomes much easier than augmented reality.  In virtual reality, everything is known so all changes are understood.  If a van partially obscures the front of a building in a virtual world, the program knows about it because the van and the front of the building are both part of the virtual world created by the program.  If it starts to rain, or it snows, or a thick blanket of fog changes objects from clearly defined images into ghostly shadows, the program still knows what they are and how they will behave because the weather and the objects are part of the program.

Even the apparently random movements of a player controlled object in a virtual world are completely known to the program because, although the commands that result in the random movement come from an external source (the human), the program makes the changes in the player controlled object in the virtual world and thus knows how the object is changing or moving in the virtual world.

Believe it or not, it gets harder…

One of the big problems in augmented reality is determining whether a real world object is in front of or behind an augmented reality object.  For example, let’s assume you are watching a digital zombie walking down a sidewalk in a crowded city using a smartphone to do the appropriate digital insertion of the zombie.  Some of the (real) pedestrians will be behind the zombie and some will be in front of it.  Of course, the zombie must obscure the pedestrians behind it and the pedestrians in front of the zombie must obscure the zombie.  This is known as occlusion: objects in front hiding (or partially hiding) objects in back.

Right now, smartphones are far too dumb to handle occlusion, and, if the AR application chooses the wrong object to put in front, the results are visually very disturbing.  Therefore, AR apps on smartphones are learning the tracking piece, but have yet to make a serious attempt at occlusion, which means all of today’s AR digital insertions on smartphones and tablets float on top of the real world instead of integrating into it.

In the case of virtual reality, again, the program knows where each object is as well as the viewing angle, so, while the graphic rendering involved in having one object disappear behind another object and then reappear on the other side may not be easy, the harder process of identifying which object is in front of which is already solved.

Another big problem for AR is camera movement.  Let’s again imagine that digital zombie walking down a crowded city street.  Assume we have solved the problem of making people behind him disappear behind him and people passing in front of him causing him to disappear behind them.  The zombie is staggering down the sidewalk.  Each step, his foot lands on the pavement and plants itself relatively firmly in place while he lurches forward with the other foot.

Now start to move the camera with him.  Remember, he’s being inserted into the image seen through a camera.  Normally, the zombie will move with the camera, which means it looks like his feet are sliding along the pavement.  Or floating above the pavement.

So we have a new problem.  We have to be able to track changes in the camera view.  Cameras typically pan, tilt, and zoom.  They can also roll sideways, rise higher, or drop lower.  As the camera moves, the software that is inserting the digital zombie must know how to lock that zombie’s foot onto the ground so he moves with the “real world” environment, not with the camera motion.  This means precisely tracking the changes in the viewing angle, direction, and distance of the real world environment in which the digital zombie is moving.

In addition, the AR application has to change the angle and lighting for the digital zombie, making the zombie smaller or bigger as the camera either moves closer (zooms in) or moves away (zooms out) and shifting from a front view to a back view as the camera moves from in front of the zombie to behind the zombie, all of which is known and understood principally from analyzing the surrounding real world environment, a process that, at this juncture, even very smart computers find hard to do and smartphones find incomprehensible.

And then there’s lighting: Imagine an airplane or a cloud passing over the zombie and the city street.  The sidewalk, pedestrians, and litter blowing in the breeze are all briefly in shadow.  What happens to the digitally inserted zombie?  It would look very strange indeed if the AR app didn’t appropriately change the lighting on the zombie.

Keep in mind that the human eye/brain combination is trained and practiced at doing this routinely without effort.

Back to virtual worlds for a moment: If the zombie were in a virtual world, the software simply renders both the changes in the zombie viewing angle and the changes in the surrounding environment at the same time in the same way.

An interesting side note – one advantage that computers and AR have over the real world and vision: While it will take computers (especially mobile devices) decades to match the processing power of your average dog’s visual cortex, when it comes to augmenting reality, computers have access to information that dogs, let alone humans, will probably never access directly: gps data.

Here’s a thought experiment: Blindfold a human being, load him into a car for an hour long drive down winding roads, followed by an airplane ride of another hour, and then another car ride for a few hours.  Now take off the blindfold.  Unless the person has previously visited his new location and has a visual memory of it, he will have no idea where he is.

Now rewind back to the beginning of the experiment.  Put an iPhone in the pocket of that same blindfolded person and take him through the same confusing route.  Odds are that within a few seconds of taking the iPhone out of his pocket and turning it on, the iPhone will know with an accuracy level of a few feet where in the world the traveler has arrived and can display it to him on a built in mapping service.  It can even tell which way he is pointing the device.

AR applications often take advantage of gps systems to identify where they are and what buildings, streets, and businesses are nearby.  However, gps systems are not yet precise enough to plant a digital zombie’s feet on a real world sidewalk and zoom, pan, tilt, or roll past him as he staggers and lurches towards his next victim.

Even with the help of real world gps systems, AR is obviously harder computationally than VR.  True AR properly done has to recognize objects, appropriately occlude foreground and background objects, and keep digitally inserted objects tied to changes in the environment regardless of the camera angle or movement.