This morning, I’ve been watching a small PR fiasco unfold. According to CBS Boston, Charlton Public Library sent a police officer to collect overdue books from a 5-year-old. The story also made the Drudge Report and the UK’s Daily Mail – gotta love that international media attention!

OK – there’s obviously a LOT more to the story that was left out. For example, there’s no mention in the article of the reporter actually talking to library staff, who could have filled in the details (they DID talk to the library – it’s mentioned in the video version of the story).

Via Facebook, the library filled in some pertinent details (i.e., what actually happened) after getting some nasty Facebook comments:

“Library materials are purchased using taxpayer dollars. We feel as library staff that it is our duty to safeguard those tax dollars. We have asked the Charlton Police Dept. to help recover items from those patrons who have been delinquent in returning materials for more than 6 months and who have at least $100 worth of unreturned materials at their homes. We follow our standard procedure of phonecalls and/or emails to remind patrons to return their materials. A bill is sent out once an item is overdue for a month. Sending out the police is a last resort effort to get back some of our most valuable items. The police visited 13 families whose outstanding balance totaled $2634.00 in library materials.” (from Charlton Public Library’s Facebook Page - also just added to the main page of the library’s website).

So good for them for using Facebook and their website to quickly respond to the story.

After I read the article, I first visited the library’s website and tried to find their fines and fees policy. Here’s all I found (until they updated the site and their Facebook Page):

• Print and audio materials accrue a  10 cent daily overdue fine with a $3.00 maximum fine per item.
• Dvd and video items accrue a $1.00 daily overdue fine with a maximum fine of $5.00 per item.
• Patrons are responsible for the repair or replacement of lost or damaged items. Failure to pay fines or damages will result in the loss of borrowing privileges at C/WMARS libraries.
• from their Library Services page

What’s missing here? Any information about the process, what happens if you don’t pay your late fees, etc – other than the “loss of borrowing privileges” info. That sounds VERY different than explanation from the library quoted above, doesn’t it?

How can this be improved? Simple – if you have a policy, a guideline, a process for fines and fees (or for anything else, for that matter) – put it on your website. Probably in a Library Policies section, or a link to appropriate places on your site. For example, the late fee policy/process could be added to your “get a library card” page.

Then, when the media calls asking why you’re sending police to a poor 5 year old child, you can explain … but you can also email them a link to the appropriate policy and process.

Question – if one of your library customers had a policy-type question, could that question be answered using your  website?

Update button by Bigstock

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I’m reading The Secrets of Facilitation: The S.M.A.R.T. Guide to Getting Results with Groups by Michael Wilkinson (all us managers at the library are reading it right now).

I just read about the 5 P’s of Preparation – talking about planning for a meeting (on page 53). But I realized as I was reading the 5 P’s that they also work pretty well for planning and discussing a technology project.

So – here are my modified 5 P’s of Techie Project Planning:

1. Purpose – what are the key objectives, why are we building/redesigning this?
2. Product – what’s the goal? What’s the end result? How will we know we were successful?
3. Participants – who needs to be involved? Who are we building this for?
4. Probable issues – are there any concerns? Any roadblocks or challenges in our way? How can we prevent those?
5. Process – What steps do we need to take to meet our goals?

What steps do you use when planning a technology or web project? Do they look similar to this? Let us know in the comments!

Photo by Bigstock

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Remember that Library Podcasts you Might Find Useful post of mine from a few weeks back? Well … I was just  interviewed on one of them!

The Bibliotech podcast, one of the five podcasts from Dquarium, interviewed me. I chatted with Kayhan B., Erin Anderson, and Doug Mirams, and we had a fun, interesting chat about the social web, new media, and the importance of well-designed library websites and digital branches.

Here’s the embed of the show (or better yet, just go subscribe via iTunes):

Bibliotech 10: Digitized and Virtualized by dquarium

Not familiar with Bibliotech? Here’s what they say about their show: “Libraries have always been the backbone of any information society. Bibliotech is an audio podcast that discusses all things digital technology at our libraries. Hosted by Kayhan B., Erin Anderson and Doug Mirams (with occasional guests).”

So far, they’ve interviewed me, Michael Stephens, Sarah Houghton, Jan Dawson, and have talked about a variety of technology and web-related topics. Check it out!

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SuHui Ho – digital services librarian, UC, San Diego

She gave a solid general overview of Google Analytics

Why web metrics?
- Hit count is misleading

Help decisions on:

Content life cycle management priority
- Which pages should I update first?

Information architecture

Top tasks
- Which pages on homepage

She is saying you can find your most popular content, then make sure that stuff is on your main page. I would change that slightly to say make sure those pages are easily findable – the main page isn’t as important as it used to be

********************

Jeff Wisniewski

Google analytics: goals and funnels

Goal – the page a visitor reaches once they have completed a desired action
Funnel – the (optimized) steps along the way to the goal

You can track where, along the way, people fall out of your funnel – then figure out how to fix that

Jeff gave an example from his library’s website then walked us through the process of setting up a goal and funnel in google analytics

Give your goal a good, intuitive name – this shows up in reports later

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Sarah Houghton – librarianinblack.net

#1 – where to put your websites.

WordPress. Blogger. Drupal – not really where your website goes… Squarespace – not free, but cheap.

#2 – images.

Gimp. Image editing program.
picasa – edit and host images.
Picnik – simple editing that most people need. Connected to Flickr
Flickr – great place to host, find cc-licensed photos
Pictobrowser – great slideshow for images
Openphoto – free images – high quality

#3 – hot topics

Addictomatic – info gathering place Sarah’s library used this for a local city emergency

#4 – make ur codez priteez

Beautify JavaScript – helps make code pretty – also CSS beautify

#5 – surveys and polls

Google forms – simple and easy
Polldaddy – easy polling

#6 – slider

Wow slider – web based image rotator/slider

#7 – translate

Google translate – easy, adequate.

#8 – remote assistance

Log me in (logmein) – remote access to your pc or Mac – there’s a free version. This is a very quick tool. I sends an email asking for permission to access the other persons computer

#9 – wireframing

Balsamiq – gives pre-made parts and pieces

Wow – 40% of Sarah’s library web traffic is mobile

#10 – testing your mobile stuff

W3c mobileOK Checker

#11 – stats

Google analytics

#12 – Skype

Great place to talk to users, to staff, etc

#13 – social management

Tweetdeck
Namechk – searches dozens of sites to find names that you can use

#14 – webcasts
Slideshares zipcast – works great.

#15 – video

Jaycut – browser based editing tool
YouTube – they have online editing too
Animato
Xtranormal

#16 – audio

Audacity
Podbean – great place to host audio

#17 – learning environments

Moodle

#18 – infographics

Visual.ly

#19 – librarything

#20 – the google

Google plus has some potentially cool stuff…

Helios – from the audience
Cheap calendar … ?

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Want to improve the writing on your library’s website? Check out Five Copywriting Errors That Can Ruin A Company’s Website by Smashing Magazine.

here are their five copywriting errors:

1. Writing inwardly
2. Burying the lead
3. Mediocre meta material
4. Saying too much
5. Weak or no Calls to Action

Good stuff – go read it, then work on improving those copywriting skills!

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The Creative Group

In my last blog post, I mentioned my library’s Creative Group. What is that, exactly?

My library decided that Public Relations and the web team did a lot of similar things, and needed to work together. PR routinely creates print ads, newsletters, posters, banners, and PR campaigns. The web team does much the same thing, just online. Why not collaborate up-front, so the message online and in-print is the same?

And hey – while we’re at it … both teams are highly creative. What’s not to like about schmushing two creative teams together into the same physical space, to see what happens?

So we stuck both teams into the same work space. We also started holding regular weekly meetings. So every week, our three PR staff, two web developers, me, our Programs Supervisor, our Digital Content Librarian (new position that’s part of Public Services), the Deputy Director, and sometimes our library director meet. Anyone else in the library is invited, too.

What do we do? We talk about projects. Last week, we talked about our Personalized Reading List service – we’re reworking the form and the page the form lives on. The staffer in charge of that service and the Public Services Manager came for that part of the meeting. We also talked about creating some database widgets (did you know database vendors like Gale and EbscoHost have widgets now? Who knew?), guest posts for book reviews, and a new blog we’re creating.

So what do you think? Is it helpful for PR and the Web team to meet regularly? It’s sure been helpful for us!

And – boring pic by me, using my Instagr.am account. Follow me at davidleeking on instagr.am if you’re interested!

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During my library’s last website redesign, we went through quite a few design iterations, and we still weren’t happy. Two people in our Creative Group team (more on that in the next post) … ok, our head of marketing and the deputy director … kept sending us website examples they liked. Sites like shoe stores or clothing shops. Yes, they were beautiful websites, and nicely designed. But they weren’t really all that similar to a library website.

One big difference – these attractive websites did one thing well – they sold shoes or clothes. They didn’t have any catalog to speak of. The websites were full of single pages that pointed to single items.

But a library website has at least two basic needs – a site that talks about the library, and shares useful stuff. And we have a library catalog. So it didn’t really make much sense to me to base our library website design around a site that only does half of what we do.

So I started poking around, looking for websites that focus on two things:

1. stuff, like a storefront.
2. a “catalog” of some sort.

Amazon and Zappos? Pretty much all catalog. News sites? Pretty much large multi-blog sites – focusing on stuff. Then it dawned on me – library websites are like Apple. Apple essentially has two separate websites – the main site that focuses on their stuff, and their “catalog” – their online store.

We based our redesign around Apple, in these ways:

• Top horizontal navigation with drop down menus. We also found some “nav bar inspiration” at NPR’s website.
• Focusing on a single large ad, then a couple of smaller ones, then more detailed content below that – based on many of Apple’s pages. This directs customers to a few things that you REALLY WANT THEM TO DO, while still having easy access to everything else.
• A prominent link to the store. That’s where you’d click “Find Stuff” to get to our three catalogs (catalog, digital downloads catalog, and DVD dispenser catalog).

So far, it’s working out great – few complaints, lots of compliments. Our public trainers have told us they cut down training on how to use our website from an hour to 10-15 minutes. Fingers crossed that it stays that way for a while!

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Last week, I focused on three questions every webpage should answer. The questions were:

1. What can I do here?
2. What should I do next?
3. Why should I care?

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One more question every webpage should answer – #3: “Why should I care?”

This one comes from my library’s Executive Director, Gina Millsap. Another way to ask this question is “Why would I want to do that?” or “What’s in it for me?”

This is where your PR, marketing and promotion skills come into play. Why? Because you need to sell your content to your customers.

Selling? I hate selling – I’m a librarian, for peet’s sake!

Yep – I get that. But just putting information about something up on a website doesn’t mean people will attend that event, read that blog post, or check out that book. Sometimes we need to go a bit further, and work on convincing our customers to take those next actions I talked about in my last post.

The goal on a website is to move people from point A to point B – from reading a book review to actually checking out the book, for example. This isn’t selling as in “smarmy used-car salesman” selling … but it IS a form of selling, and a good organization learns to do this – on posters, in person, and even on our websites.

Answering “why” can be as simple as a brief explanation on why something is useful. For example – why should I apply for a library card? Because you get to read all your favorite books, and check out movies … for free! And you have already paid for it anyway (via taxes).

Look around your website, and see if you are answering the “why should I care” question. If not – rework your content so this question is answered up-front and often.

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