Connecting Librarian

Its Day 9 of the 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge and a comment from Penny on my last blog post got me thinking. Unfortunately its only a quick ponder, but  I would appreciate hearing your ideas.

So what’s the question?

If we weren’t such sticklers for privacy in our libraries, what could we do?  Penny’s comment was about having swipe cards to gain access to our public toilets, to help stop the issue of vandalism.  My immediate thoughts were both yes, protecting our facilities and users and no, protecting individual privacy.

But apart from the negatives we could protect from, what could we do if weren’t concerned with privacy?

We could have recommendation options such as those done by Amazon and take it further and link our users to other users who have similar interests or enjoyed the same titles. Taking it further, we could send recommendations or place holds on titles for our users, before they even realise that they would be interested in a particular title.

We could compile profiles on our users, based on their borrowing and useage patterns and then strongly focus our marketing to users who match the profile of any event or program we are running.  We could then use any and all of the contact details they provide us with, to get that marketing straight to them – personalised!  Or even just send them a confirmation with an opt out function.

There are plenty of more ideas out there I am sure and I would love to hear them, but having started to blog about this, I am confronted by conflicting emotions. First is excitement about the amazing level of service that we could offer to our users. Second is apprehension at anyone have control over that amount of information, even if it is initially only to be used for good! Once its collected, there are no guarantees that the line won’t move and things won’t change.

So what will happen to privacy?  Are we heading to a truly open society where privacy will be an out-of-date term that doesn’t really mean anything anymore?  But I think we’ll be losing out in some way, regardless of which way it goes.

Its Day 8 of the 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge. Let me start this post by saying that our public library users are, in the vast majority, lovely people who are pleasant, give us few problems and are generally fine to deal with.

Now for those who aren’t. Start of whinge.

I don’t know if I ever really experienced this in my previous branch manager incarnations (probably because the buildings were new then), but I seem to spend a lot of time logging, documenting and following up on maintenance requests, mostly building and fittings related.

A large number of these are not due to bad library design, poor maintenance of buildings or equipment or even accidental.  A large number of maintenance requests are a result of people deliberately getting up to no good. I won’t be specific, otherwise I will put you off whatever meal you have planned next.

It just gets me that maintenance problems in the main are not accidental, not a side-effect of something done incidentally, but a deliberate act.  I really don’t get why? Is there something brave, smart or otherwise extraordinary about picking on a public library and causing damage/disturbance to other members of the public – not just library staff? Or is it more cowardice as we can be seen to be a soft target?

And its not just the deliberate vandalism that makes me wonder, but also the way some ordinary people treat the facilities. If someone treated their home in the same way, they would be outraged. In a sense, the public library is a kind of home – a home for the staff who work there and for people who use it regularly. We all want a pleasant space to visit.

Unfortunately we can’t have eyes and ears everywhere, but we do what we can to help remind people to respect the facilities and the people using them.  On the otherhand, we wouldn’t want to have eyes in some areas, so instead we just deal with the issue as best we can.

End of whinge.

I feel better now, thanks!