From Each, to Each

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I was hired during the COVID-19 lockdown. My interviews were entirely virtual, which was great because I was living in a different country from the law library. There was an exacting testing regimen to cross the border. Virtual suited me fine. The one thing that I missed was to be able to see the library, but I have a utilitarian view of space: unless you have a lot of money, an act of God, or a specific mandate, you live with the space that you have. It was a huge surprise, then, when on my first day into work I found that there was a private bathroom in my office.

I’ve worked a lot of places and I’ve never seen an executive bathroom before. So perhaps they existed but the C-suite offices I’ve visited never visibly had extra exits. It strikes me (still) as outré in a public building. I was not surprised that other staff were unaware of its existence, nor that it appeared to be a creation during a renovation that was just copying a pre-existing resource. Porcelain from a prior period.

Idea, Meet Immovable Object

The thing about the bathroom is this: it’s unused space. As our operations have started to move in a slightly different direction—one relying more on partnerships and more focused on people without a legal background—we have new and different space needs. Walls are the enemy of efficient space utilization.

When I say unused, I mean unused. The mere existence of the washroom makes me feel weird in so many ways. My face would flush if I took advantage of the facilities. In our family home, at jobs, at university, camping, I can’t ever remember having anything but a commodity commode. It smacks of elitism and …, erm, waste, two things I can’t abide.

When it comes to space, we have slack in all the wrong places. Some of our teams have gotten smaller and need less space. Our IT staff has moved most of our stack to the cloud, so the server room is almost entirely empty. And one of our teams has grown, but without the space to do it comfortably. Even with hybrid work, we are now discussing quasi-hoteling and moving people around. Doing so can impact the social learning that happens when people are in shared spaces, though.

I have posted before about staff utilization. Now space utilization is tickling my brain. And, increasingly, I’m realizing how much of managing a law library revolves around managing utilization. We don’t use the term but we are always balancing services and information access against available budget and other resources (expertise, time, available people). Slack may exist, either in excess funding available or in excess staff time. More often, we discuss over-utilization: people working too many hours, doing too many things, and so utilization is about how to bring the resources and demands into balance.

Seek Out Disequilibrium

In a very loose sense, when I think about the “from each, to each” utilization perspective, it makes sense to me. I value equilibrium (and fairness, and sharing, and not letting resources sit idle in a pile). I even used Bernoulli’s principle one year to manage the water at the foot of a Christmas tree without having to crawl under the branches. Water poured into a container connected by a tube to the tree meant that the tree’s container would refill as the tree absorbed water.

The ability of a toilet to incommode efficient use of space is an obvious one. Unlike a desk or a chair, there’s not a lot of versatility in a toilet. One, maybe two options. A bathroom is designed around cultural expectations that are also relatively inflexible.

But there are other areas where we may not think about utilization and ought to. One that I have been wrestling with is our governance board. This is particularly tricky because they do not have an operational obligation to the law library in the same sense that our other resources do. Their job is to hire and fire me and to make sure our resources are not mismanaged, by way of reviewing our financials. In fact, the one place a law library director does not want their governance board, or funders, is to be involved in the law library’s operations. Ideally, that aversion is reciprocated but it can mean the governors may be idle.

At the same time, a governance board is a huge potential resource. I learned from John Mayer, CALI’s executive director, decades ago, about his approach at the time for creating a shared understanding in a governance board. He gave them books to read, like a book club. I copied that when I was at the ABA had to find a way to create a shared understanding among volunteers on a committee. We read John Seely Brown’s Social Life of Information and Larry Prusak’s and Don Cohen’s In Good Company: How Social Capital Makes Organizations Work.

My goal was to encourage them to think about things that would impact the shared work that we were doing. Even if they came to the work with a different mindset, perhaps especially so, we could still share some common understandings. In law libraries, I think this can be a huge challenge. Governance boards may have no understanding of how law libraries work, even if they have used law libraries for decades in their career. At the ABA, there was no unifier except a law degree and a membership. In law libraries, we often get more cohesion: judges from a shared bench, lawyers who are self-selecting to work on, and who may have decades of volunteering on, law libraries.

A public law library’s governance board may bring some additional advantages. Unlike a volunteer board (like the ABA or other membership associations, including local bars), a governance board created by statute may have people of consequence on it. People who are elected, or politically or otherwise connected in a way that elevates the likelihood of their being selected for a political board.

I don’t want them to be involved in our operations. So what do I want them to do? On one hand, the most fair expectation to have is to appreciate that they show up when asked for meetings and ask questions that show they are providing oversight. If you have a governance board with more energy, though, it can be worth seeing what else they can do.

Leverage the Under Utilized Resources

This is about utilization. When I first arrived in San Diego, I was encouraged to engage with the politicians in the area. None of them hold our purse strings but they, and their staff, can have an impact on our rent-free space and other elements of our operation. I struggled with this approach for a couple of reasons.

First, it was not clear to me that it had been a successful approach for my predecessor. In general, I have found that the best contacts for a staff person like a law library director are other staff people, at the county government or in the courts or what have you. Like you, they are probably the ones dealing with operational decisions and are more likely to have and be able to seek the information you both can use.

Also, politicians change more frequently than staff in most cases, so they are hard to create a relationship with. They have very different agendas from the narrow one a law library director brings to the table. It is hard to make them care about the law library. At best, you will be able to generate a relatively tenuous relationship with a politician over time.

It also occurred to me that the people recommending this approach were, themselves, part of this political class. It made sense for them to recommend to me the approach that they themselves would take. So why not have them take that step?

In the end, the opportunity arose when some members of our governance board identified a legislative change they wanted to pursue. It would allow more flexibility on how often the governance board would meet each year. It was not something they could enact as a board, since it was governed by state statute. In fact, I wasn’t sure they would have any success at all but it was entirely out of my hands. That was the whole point: staff shouldn’t be involved, except in a support role, in something that is the resource expertise of the governors.

It was a chance to try something that drew on the governance board’s strength’s, including activating their far more extensive political network, and would likely improve their cohesion as a group while also improving their ability to meet their governance obligations through attendance.

It is too early to know if this particular initiative is successful. But it gives me some hope. I would like to see our governance board members work and interact together on projects together. This creates cohesion at the board level. It may build on the otherwise individual reasons for volunteering for the board. And I think that their role evangelizing the law library’s mission to other political elites and leaders, and not just to the local bench and bar, will pay greater dividends than any amount of staff time spent doing the same thing.

When to Fold ‘Em

Resource utilization requires some fortitude of will. It is excellent when you realize you have an under-utilized resource and can expand. It is harder when you have an over-extended or over-utilized resource and need to reduce. There is often a good reason for the reduction. One aspect that I watch closely is staff utilization and trying to ensure no one is asked to do so many tasks or work that they can’t leave that work behind when they leave the library. If you have people who are over-tasked, you need to bring their utilization back into balance.

Another common over-utilization is funding. When we spend more money than we have, we need to reduce utilization. Budget meeting expenses is equilibrium. Funding cuts are a harder challenge because you are not just forgoing services or expertise in a limited way. You may be forgoing it permanently, by letting staff go or closing down services instead of curtailing their scope.

I have been surprised, though, how often I come across under-utilized resources, in a variety of libraries. Space is, perhaps, the worst, because there are so few options to change the utilization. We have conference rooms and training rooms that we’d like people to utilize and they may not. That sort of utilization may be impacted by more marketing or by holding more events. We have walls that limit where staff can be placed or where we can deliver clinics or other events that have privacy needs. And space is usually time-restricted: opening hours, work hours, courthouse or other building hours.

If I had my druthers, I would knock down as many walls as possible in any library I’m in. Not because the open concept is preferred but because fewer walls allow for greater flexibility. And, in lieu of that, continue to look for ways to increase utilization in staff, governance board, and any other resources available to the law library, to ensure we aren’t missing an opportunity.

And I’d get rid of the executive bathrooms.