Future of Libraries

In December, the awesome blog ReadWriteWeb posted a couple of great articles about how librarians are needed (and even linked to Michael Porter’s flickr photo of Michael and yours truly battling it out on Guitar Hero). That’s all dandy!

But the ReadWriteWeb just posted Deconstructing Real Google Searches: Why Powerset Matters … I’d add “real BAD Google searches” to that title. Sure, the point of the article was to point out the perils of current search engine searches/results, and to show why a semantic-based or a natural language search engine would be better. And ultimately, that really might be the case.

But my librarian self kicked in as I was reading the post, because the author obviously needed the help of us sexy librarians! Here are the search examples given:

1. what are movie spears made out of?
2. car hit by bicycle
3. Famous science fiction writers other than Isaac Asimov

Librarians… I ask you. Are these good Google queries? Hmm… I’m hearing a resounding “not.”

And this is a great example of why we’re still needed. Yes - there’s the web. Yes - there’s Google. And yes - there are extremely smart people that write great blogs like the ReadWriteWeb. But does that mean everyone knows how to search? What happens if the semantic web or true natural language searching kicked in tomorrow - would that negate us? No - we’d still encounter people asking why they get 50 million hits when they type “I need to find stuff on cars” or whatever into search engines.

I’m thinking we can improve the ReadWriteWeb’s search examples mentioned in the article - let’s have some fun and help them out (not that they’ll notice, but heck - we can try, can’t we?). So - here are my “better” suggestions on structuring the three search queries:

1. what are movie spears made out of? Why not try zulu extras spears instead?
2. car hit by bicycle - how about “bicycle accident” “hitting car” or car “hit by bicycle” or even “car damage” bicycle?
3. Famous science fiction writers other than Isaac Asimov - hmm… why not try “science fiction author” famous -”isaac asimov” instead?

I found better results … but I don’t consider myself to be an expert searcher by any means. What do you think? How can we improve those searches? Librarians, show your awesome search skills! How would YOU do the three searches?

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The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report out: Information searches that solve problems: How people use the internet, libraries, and government agencies when they need help.

It’s an interesting read… and I’m not quite sure how to take it! So… here’s a list of what I saw as some highlights in the report, with some yays and boos to go along with each (mainly taken from the executive summary part of the report):

Page v: “Faced with a problem in the past two years that they needed to address, about one in eight adults (13%) say they turned to their local public library for help and information.”

• Yay! a goodly chunk of people used the library for real help - cool!
• Boo! One in eight is dismal! How can we raise that number?

Page vi: “Major finding: 53% of American adults report going to a local public library in the past 12 months.”

• Yay! 53%! That’s a majority of Americans! They love us!
• Boo! Read the fine print - “in the past 12 months.” This says nothing about how many times they visited - only that they had visited at least once. Dave’s illogical translation: that could be one visit last year, to stop off at the bathroom or to pick up a child. that’s not a good indicator of library use!

Page viii: “Major finding: About a fifth of Americans with problems to address said they were concerned about privacy disclosures as they hunted for information.”

• Yay! We’re all about privacy!
• Boo! 4/5’s of Americans could care less about what librarians consider a major, huge issue. We’re spinning our wheels on the wrong road!

So… here’s what Pew concludes (from their website): “The survey results challenge the assumption that libraries are losing relevance in the internet age. Libraries drew visits by more than half of Americans (53%) in the past year for all kinds of purposes, not just the problems mentioned in this survey. And it was the young adults in tech-loving Generation Y (age 18-30) who led the pack. Compared to their elders, Gen Y members were the most likely to use libraries for problem-solving information and in general patronage for any purpose.”

But here’s what I saw:

• only 1 in 8 adults use the library [when faced with a problem]
• 53% of American adults visited the library… at least once.
• 4/5’s of Americans aren’t as concerned about privacy as librarians are

I think we have some more work to do!

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From the comments on this post:

“… what happens to the physical library? If Topeka Public mails the holds to patrons and they can drop the returned item at boxes, and the patrons need not come to the physical library… I’m the systems librarian at the Academy Library Budapest and am alarmed by the declining clientele. What still draws them to the library is the line of subscribed databases which are unavailable outside of the library. What can we offer to repopulate the spaces, apart from the complementary agora-like events like occasional exhibitions, book presentations and invited lecturers-speakers?”

Great question, and a great way to end the year… or start the new year, depending on when you read this. So - readers, what do you think? How can we get people into the physical library?

Here’s my shot at it - we need to run the library a bit more like a business, and simply offer people something they want (like a good or product that a business offers to a customer). But what do we offer them? Here’s a great example from the ReadWriteWeb:

“Imagine a future when you go to the library with a 5 minute video you’ve just made about last night’s Presidential debates and that librarian says to you:

‘You should upload it to YouTube and tag it with these four tags - two broad and two more specific to existing communities of interest on YouTube and the topic of your video. Then you should embed that video in a blog post along with some text introducing it and linking to some of your favorite posts by other people who have also written today about the Presidential debates. Make sure to send trackbacks to those posts!’

‘Now, I think this is a particularly good video on the topic, so if you’re interested I will vote for it on StumbleUpon (as a sexy librarian I have a very powerful account there) and give it a good summary explanation. Any of those are steps you can take that will make your work all the easier for people to discover.’ “

So again - readers? What do you think? Why should our customers still visit the physical library, and how do we get them to do it?

And… Happy New Year!!!!!!!!!!!

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Just saw this on Seth Godin’s blog today, and thought I’d pass it along. Go read it - but here’s the jist:

• Seth writes about self-promotion
• He explains that 37 Signals doesn’t do self-promotion, because they’re “promoting useful ideas. They’re promoting tactics or products that actually benefit the person they’re reaching out to.”

Then he sums it up by saying “that’s because they’re doing you-promotion, not me-promotion.”

And that made me think - which type of promotion do libraries do? When we want people to know about our databases for example - do we do me-promotion (i.e., “we have a new business database”) or do we do you-promotion (i.e., “we have a way for your new business to gather B2B leads…. in this new database at the library.”)?

I’m not even sure those are good examples of me- and you-promotion… but - do you get this idea? In our advertising, in our writing, in our video making (for those libraries doing video) - are you simply sharing what you have? Or are you emphasizing the benefit to the customer? Showing the customer what our content, our expertise, our form of community will do for them?

That has the potential TO BE HUGE.

Thoughts?

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Just a small aside… but I’ve been doing real live work the last two days using facebook (go friend me - David Lee King at facebook)!

Michael Porter, my writing buddy, is to blame for some of it… We write the Internet Spotlight column in Public Libraries Magazine together, and he posted a question to his facebook friends. The plan is to incorporate some of those responses, some he’d gotten via email, etc into a cool article [status: article almost done, and IS cool].

So part of the work was copying/pasting quotes and contacting the quotees to get job titles, etc. Whew!

But that has spawned a whole host of facebook emailing back and forth, getting new information, thinking “out loud” via facebook email about library innovation in other areas, and even making a few new facebook friends.

So - real live library work in facebook. It can be done! Anyone else want to pony up? How do you use facebook to do actual work (or do you?).

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A new Facebook friend just asked me a question, and I thought I’d share it with y’all - in hopes of garnering him some more input, or “ammunition” if you will…

Here’s the deal:

“Maybe you can answer a question that our City attorney needs clarified?
She seems to think that if we [a public library] have a blog we can’t restrict commenting
(at all) because it’s a public forum (the City recently even got rid of
the Mayor’s bulletin board because of this). From my own Internet
research it seems that this is the case from a legal standpoint. How
are other libraries dealing with this? If this is the case it seems
that it’s only a matter of time before some library gets sued over this.”

“Do
you know of any libraries getting sued for removing comments, or where
to find any pro blog justification for libraries from a legal
standpoint? Blogging is obviously a good thing for a library to do, but
the City is deathly afraid of lawsuits… Even the chance of a lawsuit
and they won’t go out on a limb to disrupt the homeostasis. My
municipality is very conservative in this regard.”

As an aside - good the for the city attorney for recognizing blog comments as a form of public forum (because it is).

Now, obviously I’m no lawyer, but I told my fine facebook friend that as long as the library has a policy in place that covers how the library handles comments, they should be covered (certainly anyone CAN sue… but probably not successfully?). And that policy is probably already there in some form of patron behavior clause.

And - I’m pretty certain there are some libraries that really DON”T remove comments - they show the bad AND the good, and just filter a short list of “naughty” words. So that might meet the city attorney’s requirement, too.

So… what do you think? How does your library handle website/blog/myspace/facebook/youtube/etc comments? Do you moderate? Do you block words? Do you remove the nasty comments altogether? And do you have a policy or guideline in place for commenting?

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Lately, I’ve been hearing librarians say some interesting things about incorporating emerging online trends into their already hectic work lives. They’ll say “wow, this is cool” when I give a presentation - but when implementation time arrives - when these busy people actually need to start incorporating some of these new things into their work day, here’s what I sometimes hear (warning - simulations of real stuff I hear):

“we don’t have time to write blog posts - we’re busy serving customers” or “I’m extremely busy answering real patron questions all day long, so I don’t have time left to [fill in the blank with a 2.0 tool]“

I understand what they’re saying. It’s difficult to believe this new-fangled, 2.0-ish stuff is relevant when you are sitting at a busy service desk with a line 20 people deep, or when you have waiting lists for computer use. Library 2.0 is about building community? Visit a public library branch any day to see community building in action. Attend a program, join the bookclub, participate in an adult literacy or ESL program as a volunteer tutor or learner. That’s community building. Sometimes, emerging 2.0 tools and services seem to get in the way of all this busy, real-time activity already taking place.

Ok, wait a sec. This is davidleeking dot com we’re reading, right?

Yep… I see a small problem in the stuff I just said. Most of our library communities have a quickly-growing number of library customers that are actively participating in the emerging web - they are already creating content, participating, and interacting - with each other and with the companies and products they use. They are your library’s digital community.

The problem? We don’t have anything for our library’s digital community to do! OCLC’s recent report, Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World says this about our physical libraries: “Offline, libraries are vibrant social spaces. They are hubs of community activities and provide a venue for open exchange and dialogue” (8-5). But online? How many libraries can say they provide “vibrant social spaces,” hubs of community activity” or “a venue for open exchange and dialogue” in our digital spaces? Not too many.

Why is this? I think we’re simply not focusing on that growing digital community. Yes, we ARE focusing on customers (that’s a good thing)… but many of us are only focusing on our library’s regular in-house customers (that’s a bad thing). It’s quite possible that by focusing primarily on library customers who visit the physical library, we are ignoring our growing digital population.

Huh?
Let me use my library as an example. We certainly get our fair share of traditional walk-in customers - our parking lot is ALWAYS FULL. But we also have a huge number of digital customers. Remember what we do with holds? We mail them out - you never have to physically visit our library to check out a book (cool, huh?).

Those items our customers are putting on hold come from our digital community - most likely customers who used our online library catalog from home or work. That’s just one example of living, breathing members of our digital community using our digital library. And they are a growing digital community. What else do we offer them? Thankfully in my library’s case, quite a lot currently (with more to come next year).

Let’s develop this a little further by perusing OCLC’s report a little more. OCLC provides some amazing insight into our growing digital communities:

• “The vast majority (89%) of the 6,163 general public respondents have been using the Internet for four years or more” (page 7-1) [update - Michelle reminded me that OCLC surveyed online users… the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s research shows that 73% of the US are Internet users, for what it’s worth)
• “The majority of the online population surveyed have moved from “digital immigrant” status to fully naturalized digital citizens. Nearly two-thirds of the general public respondents over the age of 50 have been online for seven years or more, and nearly a third have been using the Internet for more than 10 years” (page 7-1)
• “The Web community has migrated from using the Internet to building it.” (7-1)

Did you hear that? Most A majority of our library customers have used the web for at least 4 years. And most of those customers (read the report for the stats) have grown beyond simple clicking and surfing… they are interacting, creating, and participating… at other websites.

The gist of the report is this - the web has moved on, and libraries need to catch up. “To entice users to the online library, libraries must expand their social activities, allowing users to easily share and create content and collaborate with others. They must build a high-value presence on the Web, a strong enough brand to compete…” (8-5).

First steps? Stop ignoring your library’s rapidly-growing digital community. They might not be current users of your physical library - how can you reach them? What do you have to offer them? Can you offer them something that would keep them coming back for more?

I think so.

Tagged as: community, Library 2.0, Web 2.0

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I’m reading Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine III (same guys that wrote The Experience Economy). I love this type of book - the focus is still on Pine and Gilmore’s favorite topic, that of the experience economy. But this time, they have narrowed that focus a bit, to how those experiences can be perceived as authentic experiences. I’ll be sharing thoughts and random quotes from the book as I read it.

The first quote comes from the preface of all places! “..too many [businesses] have latched onto that single word - experience - without changing core business practices. Too many companies say they’re offering ‘experiences’ without actually staging experiences” (page xii).

That actually answers a question I’ve had as I have started to check out some of these businesses that claim to offer an experience of some sort. For example, I’ve visited Cold Stone Creamery twice now. They have amazing ice cream (and their watermelon sherbet is to die for - it’s that good)… but the experience they tout? Not so much.

What have I actually seen in my two visits? Teenaged staff paying next to no attention to me while quickly making my ice cream concoction, not making a big deal of the cold stone marble mixing board at all, and quickly hustling me out of the way - even when there’s not a crowd. What gives? Well, apart from me smelling bad or something that day, somehow the corporate message of the Ultimate Ice Cream Experience wasn’t translated down to the Cold Stone Creamery workers in Topeka, Kansas. Did those employees receive the “hey, this is an experience we’re serving” message during initial training but decided against the practice? Were they even trained in imparting that staged experience at all? I have no idea. But in this case, the actual delivered experience did not match the experience the corporate office wants to provide.

Libraries and other organizations sometimes do the same thing - the experience we want to provide often doesn’t match what we actually dole out daily. Think about it for a sec - does your mission statement match what happens in your building on a daily basis? And… does “what happens in your building” match what goes on on your website? For example, some libraries think of themselves as community gathering places. But then when the community actually gathers, they’re told to be quiet, to turn their cell phones off, and to please drink that coffee outside the building. Or, the staff and the physical building both do a great job of offering a physical community gathering place, but doesn’t do a good job of offering a digital community gathering place. Their digital community tries to gather, but quickly finds no place to gather at all, because the website is no more than an electronic brochure with links and a catalog database - so they gather elsewhere (ebay forums, yahoo groups, myspace). They “have left the building.”

If this describes your library, maybe you need to take a step back… step back and give some hard thought to:

• what you want the end result to be
• even better, ask your customers what THEY want THEIR end result to be
• then create a strategic plan, mission statement, vision, etc that focuses on reaching that desired end result
• teach your staff how to create, mold, or otherwise deliver that end result (or at least work towards it) physically AND digitally
• redesign that website so it does the same thing - so it focuses on providing the desired end result

If we plan on offering experiences, let’s start changing those core business practices so we can actually deliver engaging experiences to our customers.

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Liz Lawley did the closing keynote, and had a bunch of good stuff to say.

TerraNova - blog on virtual worlds

TarrorNova - WoW guild made up of people involved with TerraNova

showed a pic of a library science professor who plays WoW

How can we make the real world more like games?

Make tasks delight us!

make us want to get up at 7am to play

collecting: you want to get stuff

points: we want to collect points and get more points than others

feedback: how do we know we’re doing the right thing?

exchanges: implicit and explicit communicative exchanges

customization

Then she gave two live demos - the “first 5 minutes” of WoW and Second Life

1st 5 Minutes of World of Warcraft:

• you can get a 10-day free trial online
• cool music plays
• create a character - very easy
• can choose randomize and pick the one that looks best to you or go through individual options
• click enter world - get put into the game, get an introductory narration
• go talk to non player characters with big yellow exclamation points over their heads
• help windows pop up when you seem to need them
• the game developers set up the game for multiple successes in the first five minutes of play

First 5 Minutes of Second Life:

• aside - her first five minutes wasn’t at all my first five minutes - she had some type of orientation task list, while I went to orientation island and walked through the steps….
• she flew
• a tutorial popped up
• the orientation was pretty lacking - it wasn’t set up to succeed.
• Aside again - of course, this isn’t really a game, and they aren’t really selling it….

Why does Liz like WoW better?

• no reason for her to be in Second Life
• not much for her to do there - no need or desire; for her, it’s a solution in search of a problem
• her 13 year old son loves Second Life - it’s a powerful tool for him. He can build - she doesn’t want to
• she can play with her son in WoW - she can’t in Second Life
• there are whole families that play WoW together

Nick Yee’s MMU Player Stages:

• entry: newcomer euphoria, playing with someone
• practice: ramping up, progression, solo to group
• mastery: staying for friends, casual guilds, high end content, social/community leadership, competition
• burnout: grind burnout (grind = having to do tasks thousands of times to move to the next level), social/raiding burnout, restarts, nothing left to do
• recovery: end-game casual, some do come back

Real World Games:

Tupperware - sales rewards)Super Sleuth: solve a weekly puzzle at a school, get a reward of some type

Summer Reading programs: after reading so many words/books, you get a rewardebay feedback - sort of like collecting points

myspace, linkedin, etc - collecting friends, customizing

PageRank - trying to raise your rank. She did a Google Smackdown between her name and Karen Schneider

Games that blur boundaries:passively multiplayer onlien games - sidebar in firefox, get points and rewards for browsing the web…

Sometimes, the game can be the things we really need to do

chorewars - create quests, get points, gain experience, redeem points for prizes! Huge motivation to clean up your house!

Seriosity: get currency, sending emails cost you and you have limited funds - so your email words start to matter more

social genious - helps learn people’s names, social, so you are trying to get more points than your colleagues

How can you make the library a game? Make it so people want to come back..

Raph (missed Raph’s last name) wrote “Theory of Fun for Game Design”

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