Connecting Librarian

As a public library we are involved in regular surveys. Our service has to submit an annual survey to our State government, we run our own in-house surveys of our users and we also participate in phone surveys of users/non-users alongside several other regional library services. All this gives us a pretty good idea of who are users are and what they think of us.

However, you can never have enough information about your users or find out enough about potential users. So it has been very interesting, reading the results of 2 surveys out of the US.

The first is from the American Library Association, whose @ your library survey 1000 adults, nationwide on their atittudes towards public libraries. It surveyed what people thought of libraries and for those who used them, what they used them for. Interesting reading.

The second was a very comprehensive survey from OCLC, entitled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources. This survey examined information seeking habits and preferences of users of all sorts of libraries and included respondents from around the world, of which 535 were Australian. Its value was not only in the survey results, more so because of the Australian component, but also in the comments from survey respondents, which were interspersed as appropriate throughout the report.

Quite often the value of these reports is in hearing from the public – especially from those who don’t use the library. It helps give you an idea of why, which can then lead to ways in which your service can either offer new services to this market or better market existing ones, which would meet their needs.

Pew Internet is also a great resource for studies on usersof the Internet from a variety of perspectives – all which helps to build up a picture of our existing and potential users online.

We are an information organisation in an information society. We should be using this information to improve our services and continue to best serve our users and potential users well into the future.

Having asked the question in the title, you probably would correctly guess the answer for me is yes. But not for just one reason, as you might suppose, but a few.

Firstly and definitely mostly, is spam. I only work part-time, so my inbox can get quite full between work days, even more ridiculously so when I am away for a few days or on annual leave. What I am finding so frustrating these days, is that I spend at least the first 10 minutes of even a normal day, deleting junk email. My workplace has a spam filter, so this 10 minutes is only on the email that gets past that filter. When I tell you I would easily have 70+ emails each work day, with anything up to 80% of it being spam, you can understand my frustration.

I use email to communicate with workmates, colleagues, to subscribe to discussion lists etc, so I still need it for those uses, at least for now, so for the moment I have to put up with the frustration and the time-wasting clean ups.

My other problem with email is its time delay. Its so easy to ignore email, but some things are not urgent enough for a phone call or requires input from several people. I wouldn’t even know if I could make a conference call on our phone system, let alone know how to do it if we could.

So if not email, what? My workmates and I have been making inroads into IM. We now have 10 middle and senior managers connected through Messenger and its been great. As I work part-time, I use it to get in touch with workmates from home on occasion, to ask a quick question or verify a detail. I am online anyway, so I don’t need to make a phone call. We can also draft more than one person into the conversation, hence covering the conference call type situation.

The main disadvantage is that we can only catch people when they are at their PC, which in the case of middle managers, is not often. However, they wouldn’t be there to respond quickly to an email either, so its not much different. No ads, no spam, and its fun. It has the added bonus of getting us all familiar with the technologies that our young community uses everyday. (we see it on our public Internet PCs).

Are there any other options? Yes, there are and we are already talking about using some of these other tools to communicate with each other, with the rest of the staff and with our users.
Tools such as wikis, rss feeds, blogs and podcasting are getting higher on the priority list, so I am optimistically expecting to see some action in the wake of our new LMS later this year. One of the biggest pluses for all these means is the cost of the software – $0 – its all free! You will need some equipment for podcasting, but otherwise you just need some enthusiasm and some time.

Want to know more: try these articles:

• Email must die!
• E-mail making you crazy
• E-mail is so five minutes ago

Email won’t disappear, it still has its uses, especially in the short term, but some communication will be better served using other tools. If email is driving you crazy too, maybe you should explore your options and tap into some very nifty and free communication media.