Its Day 5 of the 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge, its Saturday and I worked today, so I thought I’d share a bit about working a weekend shift in a public library.
It seems to be a habit of ours to start work on a Saturday, trying to predict what sort of day its going to be. Is it going to busy or quiet? This is not just dependent on numbers, you can have low numbers on a day, but still be very busy because of the type of interactions you have with users. They could be lengthy inquiries, long interactions, complaints or problems or everything could run as smooth as silk.
I’ve worked one Saturday where it felt like twice the number of people had beent through, because just about everyone needed that extra time. And I’ve worked other Saturdays where it felt quiet, but was extra busy, because everything went so smoothly with very little demand.
So each Saturday morning we try to predict what sort of day it will be. We try to take into account factors such as weather, other events on either locally, city-wide or national, whether’s its holidays or a long weekend and more.
Today, we wondered if it would be quiet as the weather was very chilly and dreary. It did start quiet and stretched beyond what we usually thought of as a slow Saturday morning start. Then briefly the sun came out and all of sudden, everyone was streaming through our doors.
So it was weather, we thought. No. A few hours later, it starting bucketing down with rain and it didn’t get any quieter, people just kept coming in (and not for the shelter). We ended up with numbers reflecting a busy Saturday which meant that with the slower start in the morning, we ended with more people over the course of the afternoon.
So do I want a job predicting use patterns for our library? Considering the dedication of our library users in the face of such weather and our record for predicting such use patterns, I think not. I’ll stick with managing the branch and providing the best user service we can, regardless of how busy it is.
We all know that our users don’t really care all that much about copyright. If they did, they wouldn’t be ripping CDs and DVDs or illegally downloading a wide variety of content in a wide variety of formats from the Internet.
We know it happens, but apart from the producers of such content and formats, libraries are amongst the last bastions of copyright protection.
photomastergreg, Uploaded on August 17, 2009 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
So I don’t know why I was suprised at the response of one of our users to – what to them anyway, seemed like a straightforward request.
She had been told of a small publication which covered a local history topic in which she was interested. She had contacted the small history group holding the publication and somewhere communication got crossed and she ended up on our doorpost, wanting to get a copy through our library.
Several problems with that request: it was an interstate publication, there was only one library who had holdings and it was not available for inter-library loan, being more pamphlet sized than book.
So user, understandably in a way, wanted it now and expected that it would be delivered soonest. That’s where the problem started. She wanted it now, so was expecting that we could just get an email copy and hand it over to her in minutes. Up popped copyright considerations. We couldn’t do that – it was in breach of copyright. But we couldn’t find a way to explain copyright and the implicaitons to her in a way that she either cared about or understood.
In the end, we helped her get her own email address and she contacted the library herself, to see what they could do for her directly.
So how do you explain to someone that doesn’t understand, that the thing they want is not on the internet and can’t be just scanned and sent without legal obligations being filled. Especially when for many things, they can just go on the internet and download it?
How can we explain them in ways that they can understand, that copyright is important and that everyone’s intellectual property needs to be protected in the way the creator wants?
Creative Commons - Some Right Reserved - Algunos Derechos Reservados
Or instead of trying to explain copyright, do we instead get everything licenced under a Creative Commons attribution and save everyone a lot of time and grief. I have used Creative Commons images here and am doing so in my presentations. If you don’t know what it is, I strongly suggest you check it out!
Would love to hear your stories, your solutions and your thoughts about copyright and your users, I can’t be the only one having these experiences.
Today, 25th January, was Round 4 of the Library Day in the Life Project. The aim of the project is for librarian’s to document what they do in a day, for others to discover. So here’s mine.
To give context, I am an Information Librarian working for the Casey-Cardinia Library Corporation – a public library service serving 300,000+ people in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. We have 7 branch libraries and a mobile library. My main area of responsibility is our online services, but I also work at our biggest branch. I work half-time – Mondays, Thursdays and alternate Tuesdays. Monday I work at HQ on online services – all day.
So here’s today.
8.30am – Arrived at work at our Regional HQ, which I do every Monday. Spent the next 30 minutes checking email, printing off articles for later reading, catching up on memos, bookmarking sites of interest, returning and renewing my loans and a brief moment catching up with the Finance Manager on the progress of our intranet development.
9.00am – Checked for updates to Drupal modules for our website and downloaded, then uploaded the only one required. Also took the opportunity to delete old versions of modules that were no longer required, both locally and on our IPS’s server.
Discussed adding information about our mobile library’s forthcoming renovation to the website.
Posted a review received from one of our local teens via our website, to our teen review blog. Added an image and a catalogue linking before publishing it and then refreshed the feed on our website so it would appear there too.
Updated a post on our Staff training blog, with information emailed me by the reviewing staff member. Made some minor additional changes to that post of my own as well.
9.30am – Posted information on our website in several places, about the Mobile Library renovations.
Being the day before a public holiday, we were very quiet at HQ as many staff took the opportunity to enjoy a long weekend. So I spent some time filling in urgent requests for stationery etc that were phoned in from the branches.
Worked on the agenda for our forthcoming Information Services team meeting that is on the week I return from leave.
10.00am – Lots more bits and pieces (did I mention that there were lots of people taking a long weekend).
Chatted briefly with my boss, who was seconded to help out at one of our branches, which resulted in me taking on the answering of email questions for the day. Quickly cleared up a few procedural queries, started the process on a claims returned and sought further information on an inter-library loan request from a staff member at one of our local Councils. Was quite pleased that I found the article he requested, even with minimal information and so was he when I emailed him both the full citation and a link to the full article not long afterwards.
11.00am – Morning tea done after successfully completing that information request, it was now onto a new blog post for our library news blog. Spent some time looking for inspiration and accidently came across links on our catalogue that I hadn’t noticed before. Ended up blogging about the public holiday tomorrow instead, as one of our libraries will be open to support the Book Sale that their Friends’ group is running.
11.30am – Did a backup of our email newsletter subscribers lists. Not very exciting, but very necessary. Then investigated further the new catalogue features and with the assistance of a colleague, figured out exactly how they worked and started thinking about how they could be taken advantage of by our users. That’s another blog post in the making – but not today.
12.00noon – Received an information request from the mobile library on behalf of one of their users (via email). Rang the mobile to clarify the request and the context and within the half hour I had a emailed a list of websites and book titles to be passed onto to the user.
12.30pm – Lunchtime and I escaped the building for a short time. Normally I would go out to lunch with my HQ partners in crime, but they were either on leave or elsewhere.
1.30pm – Played with ideas and images for a new slide for our website’s events slideshow. Gave up on it afer a time – software kept crashing and I couldn’t find the inspiration to make the slide more than bland. Will get back to it on Thursday.
2.00pm – Had a quick revisit of Event Brite. We are trialling it for online booking of library events, for a seminar we are holding in February. Chatted again with my boss to catch up on the day’s happenings and the week ahead.
Spent most of the rest of the time trying to work out how to get an imported Javascript working in Drupal. Lots of cutting, pasting, saving, trialling and repeating the process all over again. Got it working, but with lots of extraneous information, which when I remove it, kills the operation of the form. Its working for now, so will look at it again on Thursday.
4.00pm – Checked my Google alerts and Twitter searches for mentions of our libraries and service in those areas. Twitter mentions are growing slowly and we always get plenty of mentions on Google.
Began reviewing our brochures on online resources. Started considering how I could get the content of two to three brochures down into one.
Created three new book cover images and associated information to use in our books slide show on our library homepage. Uploaded these and then deleted the three oldest ones – we have a 4 weekly cycle on these.
Filled it out with other bits and pieces (did I mention there were many people away) and then called it a day just after 5pm.
So that was my day – never realised how busy it was and how much territory I covered until I documented it. Hope you find it interesting.
I’ve been pondering again. So I’m going to inflict it on you.
We have recently added Chili Fresh reviews to our catalogue. I like it, its easy to use, easy to add reviews, we have the weight of Chili Fresh reviews from around the world to populate our catalogue and they have some really cool social networking features coming soon.
Tagging from the Darien Catalogue
But Chili Fresh doesn’t have user tagging (at least not yet). Which of course got me thinking about tagging.
A common problem experienced in public libraries and I’m sure in other libraries too, is when you have a user come up and say something like:
“Can you help me, I’m looking for a book that I have had before. Its about gardening, its green and its about this big (demonstration using hands).”
They can’t remember anything about the author, but sometimes they can remember more about the content. In the above type of example, it would be something about vegetables.
Barring miraculous circumstances, (like you have read that same book), or the luck of finding said book on shelf or trolley in roughly the place you would expect it to be, the likelihood of finding it with that information alone is nigh impossible.
So my reasoning was that if users could tag our catalogue records with that sort of information, it we be of great use to both them and us in finding that same title in future.
A few problems with my reasoning as I pondered further.
First would be getting the users to tag the details in the first place. Although we have a few people (more than we expected) putting reviews on our catalogue, it is nowhere near critical mass.
Second, do you know how many green books about gardening, let alone vegetables, we have?
And finally, the piece de resistance. You finally find that book that the user was so desperate for and the only thing they got right was that it was about gardening. As for the rest of it, the subject was hydroponics, the book was orange and it was a very different shape and size.
Now only if we could tag each item by its actual details as well as its perceived details, we might have something. But by then, the tags will take up more than a screen of detail and would probably send the catalogue search feature into meltdown.
When we do get tagging (and we will somehow, someday), we won’t stop our users from adding this sort of information, but I guess only experience will be able to tell us if it will be of any help.
What sort of ideas have you had about new technologies, which might not work so well in a library situation? Maybe we can help you resolve your problems around it. Would also love to hear your thoughts on this one.
We all know about the various loyalty schemes run by the big chains, whether they are supermarkets, airlines, department stories, online sellers etc. Even small coffee shops do coffee cards to encourage repeat patronage.
However, I came across the rewarding of customer loyalty in a different way recently, which got me thinking about this topic again.
We have a local set of shops close to home, mostly food related (I know its a hardship…. lol). I regularly visit the local Charcoal Chicken shop because they have great chips and salads. Over time, because they are great people and because I understand what its like being on their side of the counter, I have developed a relationship with the staff that work there. You can imagine my delight when they told me recently that I was their favourite customer (and not just because I bought lots of stuff there).
This customer loyalty has not just been rewarded by their friendship and the conversations we share, but in other ways. I have been shouted lunch as a Christmas gift and I now get a discount on anything I buy from them (and as I said, that’s often because it is so good!).
That got me thinking about customer loyalty at the local level. They are a single shop, so don’t have have the buying power of a chain behind them, so anything they do comes directly from their end profit. So I really appreciate the discount, because I know what it costs them.
Now translate that to the library world. We all have great regular customers who utilise our services and borrow our items weekly if not more often. I know of library users who are on our website and catalogue almost daily. How can we reward those customers, encourage them to make even more use of the library and to also be our unheralded ambassadors to all they know?
One problem with this concept, especially in the bigger library where I work, is being able to identify these regulars. We have so many staff, who work at different libraries, so we don’t always realise that the people we serve each day are loyal, regular users. Sure we recognise some, but it wouldn’t been fair to offer a customer loyalty service to some and not others. So how do we discover these people?
The next problem is what do we offer them? We don’t charge to place holds at our library, so we can’t offer free holds for them. We do charge fines, but are hoping to remove those in future, so even if we could discount fines for our regulars, it would only be a (hopefully) short term solution. We have unlimited loans on most item types, although we still have some limits on AV, so maybe there’s potential there.
Some may say that our services and collections, being free, are reward enough. They are a reward in their own right, but my charcoal chicken place provides good quality food at a reasonable price and still give me a discount for loyalty (and being a nice person… ).
So the only things I have been able to come up with for our loyal, regular library users, have been discounted fines and increased AV limits. Anything else that you can think of would be appreciated. These people are the lifeblood of our public library and deserve to be rewarded. Please help me to figure out how we could do that.
As promised, here is the update. Its quick. Check out the previous blog post for the details of what happened, and for Monique (Branch Managers) update in the comments.
The cleaners did a great job and the carpet was dry and library staff were able to put all the shelving back to its normal places by late Friday afternoon.
Children's area as it was and is again
Although there was close on 100 items affected by water, only about 12 had to be withdrawn, mostly magazines and humour which were on fixed shelving. The rest of the affected books were dried out, the minor damage noted and returned to circulation.
Eighteen interior roofing tiles will be replaced, due to the water damage. The cause was the amount of rain – it was too much, too quickly and the gutters and drainage just couldn’t cope. Barring another such storm, it is not expected to happen again.
As of yesterday, the Council Offices were still drying out sections of their carpet affected by the flood. The shopping centre mostly returned to normal operations by Monday just gone, although the cinema complex, where 9 out of the 10 cinemas were flooded, only reopened yesterday. ( the noise of many wails heard from teenage girls not able to see New Moon locally, finally abated).
We were very fortunate in terms of where the flood hit us – it was not near electronic equipment and in the only part of the library where 90% of the collection was on wheels. So between placement and fast acting staff, we got off very lightly. Now its as if it never happened.
It could have been a lot worse, but with so many people expressing their empathy, I thought I would take the time to blog the story of my library being flooded. I will blog later about the implications further down the track.
Yesterday in Melbourne (Thursday 26th November), a severe thunderstorm came through, causing widespread damage across Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. I had seen the warnings via Twitter and had warned library staff, but we didn’t expect the impact that we got.
At about 3pm, the sky went so dark that our carpark lights came on automatically. The area also went very still – trees stopped moving, as did many birds. At 3.05pm the wind started really moving and a few minutes later the rain came down. The best way I can describe it was cyclonic. I was watching from the staff room and it reminded a little of those TV reports you see live from cyclone affected areas.
The children's area at the time of recarpeting
Moments later, we heard the fuss out in the library and raced out to discover a waterfall running down from the roof, near the windows in our children’s area – along a length of about 20 metres. You can see the windows in the background of the picture here, this one taken at the time of recarpeting.
Fortunately, most of our children’s shelving is on wheels, so staff had quickly moved it out of harms way in just moments. However, rain was still pouring outside and still waterfalling inside. Every bucket and bin we could find was placed under the downpour, but it didn’t make much difference, the amount of water coming in was too great.
Fortunately, 10 minutes after the storm had begun – it stopped. The storm front moved on and we began the process of assessing the damage and clearing up as best we could. We dug around for equipment to help, finding a couple of mops, a stiff brush and a long armed window washer (which is great not only for windows, but only for squeezing water out of carpet tiles).
Calls were made to the Council and to our HQ for assistance and direction. Unfortunately, due to the state of other Council buildings in the area, there was not much assistance available from Council, so we got to work ourselves.
We were concerned about the state of our roof tiles, especially after hearing the news of roof collapses in the nearby shopping centre, Council offices and swimming pool. Ours held.
Flooding at Narre Warren Library
The clean up involved sopping up the extra water, which had spread close to our front desk, with the mops and using the brush and squeegee to push as much of it out the emergency exit as possible. Once there was no longer a flood on top of the carpet tiles, the next job was to try and squeeze the excess water out of the sopping ones. Fortunately, as we had only been recarpeted a year ago, the tiles were still relatively clean. Still it meant, shoes off and pants rolled up – not the usual library staff look.
In the meantime, other staff were checking for other leaks (none fortunately) and removing stock which had been affected by the downfall. Much of it just needed a quick wipe down, but even with the speedy response by staff, there was some stock damaged (I’d estimate up to 100 titles), so they took them out the staff area to remove the excess water and set them up to dry, in the hope of saving at least some of them.
Drying out water affected stock
The library did not close at any time during this whole affair and we were able to provide access to at least part of the childrens collections during that time.
After all that, a reassessment of the flooded area and some more judicious shelf rearranging, staff were able to reopen access to all of the children’s collections, whilst leaving the flooded areas and a good safety margin, roped off to all access.
When I left work at 6pm, the cleaners had arrived, with equipment to sop up even more water, before putting the blowers to work on drying out the tiles.
We were very lucky. Even though it was a short storm, because of the leak’s location and the quick action of staff, major damage was averted.
Will report more on the aftermath next week, when I know more about what we’ve lost in terms of collections and the condition of the roof.
After my last post, it seems only appropriate that this one is my notes taken from a marketing seminar.
LibMark, which is the marketing subcommittee of the Public Libraries Victoria Network, ran a full day seminar on Digital Marketing and Libraries on Friday 23rd October. From here on in are my notes from the day, which was great – I came away with a lot of ideas and new perspectives. Hopefully these notes can give you some too.
Australians are generally early adopters of technology. We have one of the highest rates of mobile phone ownership in the world. 3/4s of Australian online adults use soical media and 1/4 have created their own content (Forrester Research). Our largest online demographic is the 35-44 year olds (Gen X), followed by the 25-34, then the 45-54 and then the 18-24s.
Marketing has changed, it is now pull not push, many to many not only one to many, its about conversation now not just a message, its peer to peer not organisation controlled and its generative not static. Marketing is no longer fully in our hands to control and we need to be aware of this and to learn how to make the most of it.
Social media comprises:
connection – which enables people, data, events and issues to meet u
community – there is a lot of power in self-organising groups, which have represent an identity, have common purpose, trust and representation (See Seth Godin’s book Tribes)
context – where you can interpret, find, personalise and complement content that you find -
co-creation – take existing content, change it, add to it and more, then share it again
When talking about new forms of value, He gave us a quote from jeff Jarvis (2005) in “Who wants to own content”, which in its purest form says “The value is in relationships. The value is in trust.”
The new values in today’s social media are sharing, reputation, collaboration, attention, transparency, trust, authenticity and openness.
So what is the challenge for public libraries?
Connect your with your community via Social Media (highlighted Boroondara’s blogs)
Provide access to open data, tools and APIs (he gave examples from the Gov 2.0 Workforce)
Build engaging user communities – our own tribes around a common purpose (WePlan Alpine and Open Austin)
Enable crowdsourcing – so our users can feel involved (NLA Digitisation – OCR checking)
Facilitate the acquisition of new literacies – help our users to learn and interact with today’s online environment
Libraries are rich with social objects – books for one, other items, that people can gather around, around which tribes can be built. We can provide the right conditions for tribes to flourish.
Libraries are only going to become more important as our communities look to use for our informational leadership.
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Matthew Hunter from Thorpe-Bowker then gave a demonstration of Library Thing for Libraries and Aqua Browser, which I had seen before. What was news was that there is a new interface for Global Books in Print (I think this is it) on its way – something to look forward to.
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Matthew Van Hasselt from the State Library of Victoria (SLV) gave an excellent presentation on email newsletters and why they still have a place in our emarketing strategies.
SLV’s communications needs is to communicate broadly their range of offerings to geodemographically diverse audiences. They do this through traditional paid media advertising, in-house promotional materials, signage, website, editorials in media, social media and through their email newsletter. They use multiple solutions so that the message is communicated as widely as possible and so that they can ensure it is received by as many people as possible.
Email is considered by many to be old hat, a thing of the past, so why use it for marketing? Email has many things in its favour, including: its a long standing communication tool – accepted and stable, its cheap and fast, measurable, understood, more formal than social media and more widely available – its not blocked by filters and more people have email addresses than social networking accounts.
One of the problems with social media is knowing which of the many tools out there to invest your resources in. There is also the question of longevity, not only in the tools themselves, but in people’s dedication to them. Whereas email has proven staying power and high use.
So how do you market via email?
Always ask permission – NEVER spam
Understand what your users want
Decide how you will give them what they want
Keep it simple, clear and to the point
Be responsive
What to consider in design? Matthew gave us some information from Nielson’s “Surviving inbox congestion”, including:
Average time given to an email newsletter after opening is 51 seconds
Only 19% of content is fully read
Content is mostly scanned
35% of users only skim a small part of the content
Important stuff we need to be aware of before immersing ourselves:
Have a straightforward subscribing and unsubscribing process
Have an easy to read privacy policy
Offer both text and html options – for equality of access
Strip formatting from the text option – it can much it up otherwise – use Notepad to do this
Make sure all images have tags – for accessability
Check all links twice, more if you can
Have someone else proof read your work
Use a clear sender address ie. the name of your organisation
Create brief and relevant subject lines that will engage your reader
He recommend the Inverted pyramid of writing, where the information the reader must have for the communication to be successful is first, then the helpful but not crucial information, then lastly the bonus but not necessary content. You want to be sure they get the important stuff if they only read for a short time.
Always give your users the option to view the enewsletter in a browser and include all the important links at the bottom of the newsletter.
For more examples, check out the Australian Writers’ Guild (awg.com), Empire Online (empireonline.co.uk), BabyCentre.com and DailyOm.com.
Software services that offer email newsletters include MailChimp, iContact, Vertical Response and Mail Out.
Last notes:
Subscribe to your newsletter and test the experience
Don’t build your newsletter in email software
Get advice from someone already doing it
Learn some basic HTML for tweaking if needed
Keep it simple from the start
Be happy with the limitations of the medium
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Leith Baggs stepped in on the day to replace a last minute cancellation and did a great presentation on viral marketing. (her presentation is available on the LibMark blog at http://libmarketing.blogspot.com/)
Viral marketing is a broader form of word of mouth – as new internet tools give us a way to spread the marketing message indirectly as well as directly through our users. Each person online has on average a network of 8-12 people in their close network – people who they would pass important messages onto.
Using such networks, a message’s exposure could grow exponentially, whilst being sustainable as well as cheap to distribute once the product has been created – after all its your users doing all the work of spreading the message!
Tips for great viral marketing:
Stand out from the crowd
Make it emotionally charged enough that people will send it on
Include something unexpected, weird or naughty to gain attention
Tell a story that people will want to share
YouTube is a great place to load your viral marketing product.
Creating a video is easy and YouTube is free for posting.
Homemade videos are fine and should be no longer than 3 minutes (shorter is better)
Descriptions should be clear and specific (shouldn’t be hard for librarians )
Don’t use fake customer insertions – product placement is OK though
Invite your communities to submit videos
Tell everyone about it
Make sure bloggers know about it
But most of all, have fun and experiment.
Viral marketing can also be about a simple email that meets the tips above. Make sure you personalise it so that it comes from a familiar source (ie. your library name). However, beware of being a spammer and respect the privacy of your users – you must get their contact details from them directly.
The next session was Katie Dawson on Accessible Online Places for your Events. Unfortunately I lost my notes on this session, but I can advise you to check EventBrite as a potential event booking tool for your library. I know I will be.
I will post the rest of my notes from the afternoon in Part 2, coming soon.
Got thinking about this topic the other day at work. We are trialling self-serve holds, where the patron collects their own hold. We are trialling it, because our holds are getting out of control, since we changed our LMS with a consortia of now 12 library services and dropped our holds fee. So now our users have access to the collections of 12 public library services, through our holds facility and it doesn’t cost them anything. We are getting so many holds that we don’t have enough room at the desk to hold them and it was causing all sorts of issues.
Anyway, the trial has only started this week and the first I heard about how it was going, was the fact that they had already had a complaint. We do things that our patrons don’t want all the time. We introduced library fines years ago and have lending limits on our collections. Quite a few years ago we stopped stamping our items and starting giving people receipts for their loans and we had an uproar of complaints and people almost begging to be able to stamp items themselves, if nothing else. Many, many years later, we still have the odd complaint about receipts, but these days its usually because they lost their receipt and then incurred overdue fines for not returning their items on time.
We have gaming consoles in one of our branches and are launching it in 2 others this week. When our first branch went live, we had a raft of complaints, which I thought our library CEO handled very well. A lot of people didn’t like it, but that hasn’t stopped us from installing them in 2 other branches.
Why don’t our users want these things? Because they perceive that its not better for them, or as with the gaming consoles, can be detrimental. Sometimes its because it doesn’t fit the image of what a public library is or does (as with many of the gaming complaints). But at what point do we do things or stop doing them, despite people not liking it?
We introduced fines many years ago because our average loan period, which should have been about 2 1/2 weeks, with items having either a 1 week or 4 week loan, was averaging about 6 weeks. We introduced fines so that people would be inspired to return items in a more timely manner, thereby making them available to all our users in a fairer manner. The same reasoning of fairness applies to our limit of 1 renewal and our limits on DVD, CD and video loans.
So I have some questions: What is the percentage of dissatisatisfaction you accept, before you stop a service or restriction? ie. proportion of people that are unhappy with something – 50%? 80%? Is there a limit or do other factors come into play to balance against those proportions? I know printing receipts has markedly reduced the possibility of RSI from the stamping process. How long do you trial something that causes dissatisfaction? In other words, how long do you give your users to get used to it and the benefits (because hopefully it will ultimately benefit them in some way) it produces, before you give up it? For our loan limits, it was decades!
Would love to hear of your experiences of when you give your users what they don’t want.
Next Space (OCLC) magazine includes a social networking article featuring Stuart Weibel.
Where is the Library as a brand?
Perceptions of libraries and information resources – OCLC report (available online)
3300 respondents to questions on library use, awareness and use of library electronic resources, internet search engine the library and the librarian, free vs for-fee information, the brand itself.
Libraries are trusted sources of information, search engines are trusted about the same, people care about quality and quantity of info they find, but speed is less important (not believable). However, convenience is very important.
Do not view paid infomration as more accurate than free info.
The overwhelming brand image of libraries is BOOKS!
Library Brand Equity – we need a strong visible brand on the web. Libraries currently are a black and white presence in a colorful, flashy web world.
How do we build the brand? Build on the trust of our patrons. Build on our business model – making info look free to our end-users. Build on the scale that libraries represent – presence in every community, global scope and reach. Improve awareness of library resources. Make libraires a part of the new electronic environments that dominate social, educational and work environments. We need to be there!
Social netowrking software! Its not new, just the technical manifestation is. Deliver library services into the emerging social networks. Motivate people to participate: tagging, book reviews, emergent relationships that are evident from data about what people borrow, like and dislike, link to the people as well. Need to build our own systems into the social structures that are so quickly developing.
Numbers of content creators and contributors are changing – increasing. More people are wanting to get their content out on the web. Their are great innovative approaches to attract that content to the library community.
Social Networking is not just for games: Facebook, MySpace, Second Life and Twitter. All are flawed as service delivery models – business models are closed or obscure, features are rudimentary or overbearing. But they foretell a digital future in both their virtues and faults. Stuart Weibel has both Twitter and Facebook accounts and will be your friend. They teach us about what people are doing out there – think of it as a professional investment. They are all goofy because they are all new. They will develop and some of that development will be interesting.
Libraries must compare favourably with experiences that our patrons expect: discovery and recommender services, web 2.0 social network capabilities, experiences of comparable commerical services, last-mile delivery capability, bookstore social experiences. We are offering an experience as well as a service. Save the user time.
Can Libraries compete in this space? Should they?
Social software movement is fueled by (dollar denominated) entrepreneurial fervor. Rate of innovation (and failure) is rapid. Distinguish between trends and the trendy and don’t get wrapped on the latter, especially when they fail.
Future of library catalogues?
Evolving towards network level. Collections linked to people, organisations, global location, concepts, context, metadata and social networking benefits. Fit into the workflow and social lives of patrons. Help create a scaffolding for past knowledge and future productivity.
Web or Scaffolding? We want more conherence and context, durable environments that help us preserve and fix resources in the context of culture, librarianship embedded in the emerging technologies of a social web.
Our catalogues need to be wholistic, treating not only works, but also people, concepts, works and objects (FRBR). In addition we need book reviews, lists, services, commentary, other? Book reviews are part of social bibliography, user created content. All these things should be First Class Objects which have to ahve a persistent identity on the web, accessible by anyone or any applicaation, stand alone (attribution, clear IP rights), curated (not left alone). Allow the user to enter and tranverse the catalogue from any point.
WorldCat Identities – Beta product from OCLC – Another piece of the puzzle?
Tag cloud shows the top 100 identities. Uses bibliographic data and mining it from other sources at OCLC.
Complicated puzzle – where ya gonna turn?
People, information, resources, places, terminologies, user generated content, FRBR (explain it to your patrons). We need to better mine and utilise the data that we have. Hook everything together with the right sort of identifiers. A coherent identifier infrastructure is essential. Broad dissemination of identifiers serves the library collaborative and is the single most compelling means of making library assets persistent and visible on the web.
Persistence: not technological but rather a function of the commitment of organisations. Libraries and other cultural memory organisations do this well. Harder to do in the digital era, but the community is up to the task.
Universal access and global scoping: open to all, public identifiers in a public Web. Should work everywhere. WorldCat is the first globally-scoped identifier architecture for library assets in which the global surrogate is mapped to locality. But we’re not quite done yet.
SEO and canonical identifiers – visibility of assets in the global library is diluted by the multiplicity of identifiers, agreement is needed on a canonical identifier. Lack of it is a dilution of our brand and a lack of visibility on the web.
Branding is an important component of URIs – every URI is a micro-billboard branding library content in a crowded and largely commercial Web landscape. URIs need to be designed for people as well as machines, should be speakable, should be as short can be as managed, should have a predictable pattern that makes them hackable and truncatable.
FRBR is an important ocintrubtion to resource organisation on the web, but it is a challenge to explain to users.
World Cat – Mid 2006. Globally unique, freely available, citable and resolvable, independent of location, but not quite canonical. Falls short because of duplicates, either mistaken or functional, not always resolvable to content and only sort of canonical.
NEWS!!!  Pilot project by OCLC – GLIMIR – Global Library Manifestation Identifier which is global in scope, canonical, business neutral, provides the URL equity necessary to support the library brand, fits comfortably with the FRBR model. If its going to work, it can’t be an OCLC product, but it will be managed by them. It will require participation, buy in and support, all of which will be very tricky to achieve. Can a global community agree and adopt this when there are already so many identifiers – eg. ISBN. OCLC is launching this pilot to identify functional requirements and practicalities solicited review from technical specialists,moving forward will require a careful balance of use cases, business issue and more.
Identifiers are key to fulfilling the mission of libraries in a digital future, to compete ont he open web for recognition of our brand, to integrate our traditional bibliographic values with social networking content, to provides services and access to the digital tribe – our future constituency.
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Got thinking about this topic the other day at work. We are trialling self-serve holds, where the patron collects their own hold. We are trialling it, because our holds are getting out of control, since we changed our LMS with a consortia of now 12 library services and dropped our holds fee. So now our users have access to the collections of 12 public library services, through our holds facility and it doesn’t cost them anything. We are getting so many holds that we don’t have enough room at the desk to hold them and it was causing all sorts of issues.
