Increasingly, less really is more. That said, we need strategies for presenting meaningful choices to our clients. In a recent TED talk, Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar shed light on how choice overload impacts our ability to make productive decisions. She also offered valuable tips on streamlining the information choices we present. Librarians can learn a lot from what she had to say.

Iyengar described an experiment she conducted involving different numbers of jam samples offered at a grocery store tasting. When there were 24 jams available for sampling, 20 percent more people stopped to sample than when only six jams were offered. But sampling is different from buying. Only three percent of people purchased a jam from the 24-jam sample test, while 30 percent bought a jar when presented with six choices.

Let’s pretend the jam jars are data that librarians are presenting to teachers. While teachers might be drawn in to a workshop that lets them sample from 24 databases, they are more likely to buy in to a database when offered just a few options.

Iyengar identified four ways to fight choice overload. These methods will help teachers make more effective use of your library.

1) Cut. Weeding your digital collection is as critical as weeding your physical books. Just because you can offer three or four controversial topic databases doesn’t mean you should. Evaluate the choices and pick one. Then spend time going deep into a single resource.

2) Concretize. We know that selecting a resource is more meaningful when we teach about it at the point of need. But this isn’t always realistic for librarians who are stretched thin. You can still make things concrete by creating short screen capture movies using free CamStudio software on Windows or the built in QuickTime Player in Mac OS.

3) Categorize. According to Iyengar, people felt they had more choices when presented with 400 options divided into 20 categories as opposed to 600 options spread across 10. Don’t make teachers or students guess what a resource is for. Separate them into specific subjects or use case groupings.

4) Start simple. Present users with smaller sets of options first and then work up to larger sets. In my training sessions, I start with a single broad reference resource and then show a few more choices for specific use scenarios (science resources, pro/con papers, etc). To focus on quality over quantity, consider adopting a single broad informational resource and then pick more selections targeted to specific projects, courses, or subjects.

Don’t overwhelm teachers by showing them everything. Remember, less really is more.

Illustration by Mark Tuchman

One option, championed by Jamie LaRue, director of Douglas County (CO) Libraries(DCL), is to pursue other sources of content. LaRue has struck deals with independent—meaning self-published—authors. DCL recently launched a deal to purchase titles from Smashwords, an aggregator and reseller of self-published content and so-called independent publishers, some of which offer hundreds of books on the site, while others publish just a couple titles. But the real problem is that most of the larger publishers and best-selling books on Smashwords deal in adult fiction—which is to say, erotica.

Even more troubling, in a recent interview by Publishers’ Weekly, LaRue was asked about DCL’s acquisition of children’s ebooks from Smashwords that were being made available with no review. “‘Can we vet every children’s book before we add it? I am not sure that we can,” LaRue responded, noting that he suspects DCL might “get stung once or twice.” This laissez faire approach simply will not cut it in school libraries. Truly inappropriate books in schools result in lawsuits, not minor stings.

I understand LaRue’s frustration and his desire to work actively toward a solution. Yet the maxim of quality over quantity certainly applies here. Publishers serve a critical role in the information ecosystem and are especially important for school libraries.

Unlike public and academic libraries, which have whole departments dedicated to new title acquisition, school librarians largely work alone. Even if we don’t always realize it, we rely on publishers to help with book selection. It’s the publishers who bear the cost of paying people to read the thousands of manuscripts submitted each year. Publishers pay for someone to then work with the selected authors to ensure that the books are accurate, grammatical, and appropriate in content and reading level for the intended audience. We’re left with the relatively easy task of having to select from the small percentage of books that make it through the established publishing houses each year. Our biggest challenge is that there always seem to be more books that we want than we can afford.

Imagine for a second if, instead of just having to consider among a few thousand vetted and professionally produced books, you had to wade through exponentially more choices? There are about 20,000 children’s and young adult books listed on Smashwords, but are any of them worth your time? The highest reviewed children’s book, Storm and the Magic Saddle, has 12 5-star reviews. But on deeper examination, I found only 10 actual reviews (two are duplicates), and only one of those reviewers has assessed any other books. There are also two reviews with no rating that question the accuracy of the information about horsemanship in the book as well as the age-appropriateness of the writing.

It all seems so, well, unprofessional. Given the publishers, aggregators, and professional review sources like SLJ that we’ve come to rely on, I just can’t believe that self-publishing is ever going to be the next big thing for libraries. Not when there are so many other great books still waiting to be read from the expert and established publishers with whom we already work.