PVLD Director's Blog

Web 2.0 and the Read/Write Library

I came across a couple of interesting items on the subject of Web 2.0 and libraries during my blog-surfing over lunch today.

First, courtesy of Michael Sauers at the Travelin' Librarian blog, is this video produced by British innovation and creativity expert Charles Leadbeater and colleagues about "Web 2.0" and its implications.

It's a good description of the social web and how it is transforming society, and while the Annoyed Librarian might call it another piece of "twopointopian" propaganda, it does at least acknowledge that for all of the opportunities it provides the social web also raises as-yet-unanswered questions and possible concerns.

I was just reflecting on the video when I got an email from Jackie Siminitus, "E-Rate Specialist and Library Advocate" of AT&T with a link to this very interesting post about how libraries in Chile are moving "from cataloging books to training users how to blog" from  the PBS Idealab blog.

In a world where all too often civilians (i.e. non-library people) think that the Internet is making libraries obsolete it was great to see a "non-library" blog recognize "...a larger trend taking place at libraries large and small from the southern tip of Chile to the Siberian tundra of Russia. Public libraries are no longer just points of reception; they are transforming into centers of transmission and communication, where local users take advantage of increasingly affordable digital cameras and free online tools to write and share their own local stories."

It was also inspiring to read that "nearly every library - from the southern tip of Patagonia to the northern border with Bolivia and Peru - will be equipped with wi-fi by the end of the year."  Wouldn't it be great to be able to say that about libraries in the U.S.?

Most inspiring of all was this video of Enzo Abbagliati of of Chile's national library network talking about how Chilean libraries are embracing the world of Web 3.0 (not 2.0!) as a catalyst for social change and to support participatory democracy:

Enzo Abbagliati from BiblioRedes

And his term "Catalysts for opportunity" is about the best description of what libraries and librarians can provide that I've heard!

Another bit of evidence that Web 2.0 et seq. is something to be embraced, not feared!

 

Digital Generation Gap

The other day I was talking on the phone to my 16 year old niece in Canada, who was telling me about her new haircut.  I said "Sounds cute - email me a picture" to which she responded "Just look on my Facebook page"  Duh!

The conversation reminded me of a couple of articles that I came across a few weeks ago about parenting in this digital age.  The first, from the New York Times, talks about how text messaging is changing how parents and kids communicate.  The second, from the Washington Post, is about the perils and pitfalls of parents becoming "Facebook friends" with their kids.

Both articles make some interesting points about privacy.  I'd never though of cell phones and text messaging as enabling kids to have more privacy, but as the New York Times article points out its a lot harder for your parents to know what you are up to if you are accessing the Internet from your cell phone, or sending a text message to a friend rather than talking on the phone where your parent can hear at least one side of the conversation.

I also thought the Washington Post quote from Steve Jones, University of Illinois Professor and digital communications expert was interesting -

"What they want to keep most private is not something they wish to keep from strangers, it's the things they want to keep from people that know them," he said. "It's 'I don't care what someone who doesn't know me finds out. But I do care about what someone I know intimately [does].' "

On the one hand, a technology gives parents a much greater ability to stay in touch with their kids, but on the other hand that same technology allows kids to conduct a much greater portion of their lives in ways that are hidden from their parents.

Part of growing up is expanding the parts of your life that you want to keep private from your parents, so there is nothing new in that.  What is new I think is the extent to which technology is enabling that process to happen earlier and faster than ever before.

The articles also made me think that PVLD's policy of requiring parental permission for minors to access the Internet via library computers is of greater symbolic than practical value.  Kids who want to use technology to "hide" stuff from their parents will find a way to do it whether they use library computers or not, and kids like my niece who have little to hide will let even their aunts and uncles be their Facebook friends.  I hope we aren't creating a false sense of security.       

Investing in the Future

Seth Godin had an interesting post today called Managing Urgencies - basically about the human and organizational tendency to give our priority to fighting fires and "managing urgencies" at the expense of working towards long-term goals.

The post particularly resonated with me because we are working on our 2008/2009 budget and 2009/2010 forecast and things are looking pretty grim.  Over 85% of our revenue comes from property taxes, so the housing market downturn is having a real impact.  Add to that reductions in the little State funding we do get, recent cuts to passport processing fees, and rising costs for everything from databases to health insurance and we are facing some very challenging times.   Oh yeah, and we recently completed a Classification and Compensation study and would very much like to start implementing the results...but this will be expensive.

In this environment it's easy to focus on the short-term - where can we cut costs?  Do we really need to send people to conferences or training? Can we defer replacement of computers for another year?  How much can we cut the book budget without having a significant impact on the collection?

We're asking ourselves these questions and more, but we're also trying very hard to stay focused on the long-term.  This is definitely not easy!

For example, our Friends of the Library are embarking on a major capital campaign to raise funds for restoration of our historic Malaga Cove Library and expansion and remodeling of our Miraleste Library so that these libraries can meet the long-term needs of our community.  They are also starting to build an endowment that  will provide a long-term source of supplemental income to PVLD.  As they turn their attention to these long-term projects we are working with them to cut the amount of support they will give to PVLD in the coming fiscal year in half - a reduction from $278,000 to $135,000.  Will this really hurt in the current budget climate?  Absolutely!  Is it the right thing to do for the long-term?  Absolutely!

We are also looking closely at our budget for training, workshops, and conferences.  Will we be sending as many people to conferences as in previous years?  Probably not.  Will we still try to send at least some people?  Definitely.  Why?  Exposing our staff to new ideas, interacting with new people, and learning about new technologies and products is a short-term cost but an investment in the future.

Will we be replacing all of the computers we had hoped to, or adding as many new public computers as we would like? No.  Will we be making strategic investments in new technologies like IPhones and PDA phones for a few staff members?  Yes.  Why?  Because as the world around us moves toward the mobile delivery of information we need to understand those technologies and develop services for that new world.

Is it going to be a tough couple of years?  No doubt, but we're going to do our best to make sure we don't let the short-term pain tempt us into sacrificing our long-term vitality.   

Designing Libraries for Fun

I came across this blog posting from Jenny Levine of the Shifted Librarian about her visit to DOK, the public library in Delft, Holland and I had to share it.  You've got to love a library that has designed its facilities and services around the idea that “life is all about having more fun than you can think of, and it starts at the library.”

Not all of the "ultra modern" furniture and ambience would play well in our PVLD libraries but ideas like computer "pods" and listening stations?  Collections identified by "natural language" names?  Modular shelving and display stations on wheels?  Embracing genres such as graphic novels and romance novels?  There's plenty that we could figure out how to do here....and not all of them take much $$$

Vacation is great, re-entry is rough!

I'm back from vacation and trying to get back into the swing of things at work.  Our trip was fabulous...snorkeling, watching whales breach offshore, drinking mai tais at sunset.  It went by much too quickly, though. 

I managed to stay on top of my emails by checking once a day (15 minutes max), and while that meant I wasn't faced with an overflowing inbox this morning, the re-entry has still been rough.  I don't know whether to blame the full moon last Friday, or the powers that be punishing me for my vacation, but it has just been one of those days.  Among the things needing to be dealt with -

• A phone call with the still-grieving stepson of one of our long-serving volunteers and library supporters who died recently
• Lingering issues from the implementation of our new Integrated Library System including a complaint from a regular library user about why items that were ordered several months ago have not yet been received by the library while they can be bought at Costco (this was the result of a combination of a hiatus on purchasing and receiving during the cut-over period and ongoing issues with the transmission of data between our book vendor and the new ILS) and the failure of online payments to show up in our bank account (resulting from an issue between our bank and the credit card processor)
• A complaint about the "sexually explicit" ads in the free newspaper the LA Weekly, which along with many other free publications (such as the local magazine Peninsula People, and newsletters advertising activities for children) is available in our library foyer, and the requst that it be removed from the library.  This turns out to be a more complicated issue than it sounds, and unfortunately our library policy is neither clear nor helpful.  I'll be getting legal advice and making policy recommendations to the Board.

With all of that it will take the rest of the week to get back on track with paperwork and other "normal" tasks....and by that time the month will be over and it will be time to put together another Board of Trustees agenda and packet.

I'll get back to writing more meaty library-related posts as soon as I get caught up!

What a difference a decade makes

Yesterday out of the blue I got a call from an executive recruiter asking if I was interested in being considered for the position of head of a large urban library system back east.  I was flattered (it is a big and high-profile position), but it took me about 30 seconds to realize that I had absolutely no interest.  As I have said before, I think I have one of the best Library Director positions in the country, my husband has a great job close to home, we are living where we want to live, and we have no interest in moving.

As I was walking the dog last night, I got to thinking about how different my response is than it would have been a decade ago.  Back then if a recruiter called (and they did) and the position represented a "step up" I would have pursued the opportunity just to prove I could do it.  Maybe its the difference between being in your early 30s and being in your 40s, the fact that I am no longer in a male-dominated and macho environment (10 years ago I was working at an underground coal mine in Central Queensland, Australia, and for a number of years before that I worked in aluminum smelting...both environments where women in anyhting other than secretarial roles definitely had to prove themselves), or maybe its the just the lessons learned over the intervening years but I no longer feel the need to pursue every opportunity just because I can.

That train of thought led me to reflect on how tremendously my life has changed over the past 10 years.

In March of 1998 my husband and I were living in Emerald, Queensland.  I was working in the aforementioned coal mine, which was making headline news across the country because we were at the leading edge of labor relations changes.  We lived in a company house, and because of the labor environment had armed guards living next door.   It sounds grim, but it was actually one of the most exciting and intellectually stimulating times in my career.

Emerald is a small rural (farming and mining) community about a 3 hour drive inland from the central Queensland coast.  It is the center of a large Shire (county) that stretches for hundreds of kilometers.  My husband was the Shire librarian, operating a small library in town, a tiny branch in an even smaller town nearby, and serving customers who often only made the trip into town only every month or two.

Recreational activities included hiking in nearby national parks where you rarely saw another person but could see plants that dated to pre-historic times; "fossicking" for sapphires in the nearby gemfields; swimming at the town's Olympic-sized pool; and lots of parties with a close-knot group of co-workers. 

March of 1998 was also the month we decided, due largely to my mother-in-law's failing health, that it was time to return to the States.  We came back to the U.S. on a combined vacation/job search that month, and through my professional network I was offered executive positions with two different aluminum companies, and ended up taking a position as Vice President Corporate System with Commonwealth Industries in Louisville, Kentucky.

We moved to Louisville in the summer of '98 and spent the next five years there.  We enjoyed Louisville (especially the restaurants!)and I had the opportunity to really build my management skills in new areas including finance, shareholder relations, internal audit, and compensation and benefits....but it wasn't home.

In 2003, after 15 years of marriage during which we lived in 7 places stretching from California to New Zealand to various places in Australia to Kentucky, we were ready to settle down.  I was also increasingly burned out by corporate life, aspects of which did not fit well with my personal values and was ready to make the change back to a position where I was more directly giving back to the community.

In the summer of 2003 we sold our house in Louisville, quit our jobs, and put the dogs in the car, and took a long road trip back home to California (where we already had purchased my grandparents home).  We had no idea where that adventure would lead - would we find jobs?  would living in Redondo Beach live up to our hopes and dreams?

I'm a fan of the kind of "non-Nashville" country music performed by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Guy Clark, and others of that ilk and one of my favorite Guy Clark songs is called The Cape...probably because my whole life has been marked by taking seemingly wild leaps of faith and finding that I landed just where I was meant to be at that time.

The move to California was definitely one of those leaps...and again my cape didn't fail.  Within 4 months both Don and I had found jobs in public libraries within a few miles of home, we'd established a routine of regular walks by the ocean, we'd re-connected with old friends and relatives, and we had turned my grandparents house into our home. 

Nearly five years later we are where we want to be.  Our work lives are fulfilling and (most days at least) they are also enjoyable.  Our home has become a place where family and friends visit often, and where we really feel many days as if we are on vacation.  We have made new friends through our work, and feel part of the South Bay community in a way when we knew we were short-timers in other communities.  Life's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

Looking back over what I just wrote I realize it doesn't have a lot to do with libraries, but it's what was on my mind on this beautiful Southern California Friday afternoon as I head off for a week of much-anticipated vacation on the Big Island of Hawaii.  Any posts (if any) between now and March 24th will be from my Treo...and will probably have little to do with libraries and lots to do with sunsets and mai tais - or at least that's my hope!

I'll be back refreshed and ready to post on real library stuff in a week. 

Fewer items, higher circulation? Can we learn from Borders?

Under the leadership of Customer Service Manager Eve Wittenmyer and Assistant Manager Melissa Little PVLD has been working to more effectively "merchandise" our collection by displaying more books face-out and displaying more books on the ends of the shelves.  We started with the new book area, and are doing our best to apply these techniques elsewhere in the library in the face of space and shelving design limitations.  Customers seem to love the face out display, but we haven't had it in use long enough to get real data about whether it is resulting in increased circulation.

That's why I was interested to read this article from the Wall Street Journal about Borders Bookstores' experience with face out displays.  Sales went up 9% when books were displayed with their covers, not spines, facing out!

As we are experiencing, face-out display means more shelf space consumed per book, and Borders is anticipating that it will need to reduce the number of titles carried in its stores by up to 10% to accomodate the new approach.

This overturns a longstanding orthodoxy in the bookstore business that faced with competition from Amazon.com and its ilk the bricks and mortar stores need to carry more and deeper inventories.

However, as John Deighton of the Journal of Consumer Research notes "We can be overwhelmed or thrust into indecisiveness by the presence of a large number of temptations," Mr. Deighton adds. "People don't want choice, they want what they want. And what they want is sometimes constructed for them in the store by the attractiveness of what's on offer."

Interestingly, "Borders says customers visiting its prototype store said their impression was that more books were available." [emphasis mine]

Borders also intends to couple its merchandising strategy with a new online service that will give customers fairly ready access to titles that are not in store inventory.

Commenting on the Borders strategy Seth Godin  makes the point that Borders is adopting the second of two potentially valid strategies:

1.  "Order taking" where you try to stock everything so that the answer to "Do you have....?" is YES, or

2.  Marketing and selling so that instead of trying to answer as many permutations of the "Do you have...?" question as possible you instead do the asking and the question is "Do you want...?" (and as Mr. Deighton notes in the quote above, sometimes wants are created by what people see when they walk through the door.)

As Seth notes, "Bookstores that follow this strategy need to be pickier about what they carry, organized differently (alphabetical order again!) and staffed differently as well. Don't put all the cookbooks in a little corner. Instead, put books for me (whether they are cookbooks or computer books) together and make me delighted I found you."

If the Borders strategy works there are some interesting implications for libraries -

• Maybe we can get higher circulation, and better customer satisfaction, with fewer items displayed more creatively and attractively....surely a good thing in the face of perennial budget pressures.
• We may need different types of shelving and furniture - more display cubes, tilted shelves, etc.  Bookstores make good use of temporary displays, cardboard fold-outs, etc.  Can we?
• Our Dewey Decimal and alphabetical shelving schemes are counter to the idea of,as Seth Godin so eloquently puts it, putting books for me together -

  "Do you want this cool new cookbook about Spain? It's right next to that amazing new novel about food in Spain..."
  
  Dewey may not just be too limiting for the digital world, it may be to limiting for the physical world as well.

Interesting stuff...and an indication that Eve and Melissa are leading us in a worthwhile direction.

Getting the Word Out

After yesterday's post I don't want anyone to think that I am anti promoting the library....of course we want to let people know what we offer.  That said, I'm not sure traditional approaches to marketing, promoting, branding, etc. will work in the Web 2.0 world. 

As the blogs and articles referenced in yesterday's point out....in an era of "cheap, ubiquitous interaction" one of the goals is to "do something worth talking about" (worth talking about positively of course!)

Another goal is to find ways to get yourself into the conversation.  That's why having a presence in online communities is so important.  We still haven't had a good opportunity to get PVLD onto Facebook, Ning or some of the other social networking sites, but we re taking steps to get ourselves out ontp the social web.

We're now on the new LibraryThing Local, which allows us to make people aware of our libraries and our programs via the popular LibraryThing social catalog (and, by the way, mark us as a favorite, subscribe to an RSS feed of local events including ours,  or add comments to the "comment wall".

I'm also pleased to see that we now have 9 reviews on  Yelp.com - with an average rating of 5 stars.

Ways of getting into the conversation...and they didn't cost us a dime!

Marketing vs. Doing

While I was battling the forces of chaos at work and at home last week I missed a couple of great posts by Jeff Brooks on the always insightful DonorPower blog.  Both make the point that it's what you do and how you do it, NOT how good you are at marketing that determines success.

In Advertising Can't Buy Me Love Jeff has a link to this post on Ron Shevlin's Marketing Whims blog, which makes the point that "You cannot advertise your way to greatness." 

In the library world you often hear people say that one of our problems is that we're just not very good at telling people what we do and why they should love us.  That's why I thought Jeff's comments were particularly relevent:

"It's a common delusion in brand advertising: That you can -- through superior creativity, some elbow grease, and a lot of media spending -- become loved and admired.

Maybe it used to be possible. Back when there weren't very many brands, there was no easy way to find out what other people beyond your immediate social circle were experiencing, and the average person had a pretty weak BS-filter. Now, people see right through your claims, and can find out the real truth in a few minutes online.

The only way to get people to love you is to be consistently lovable, and to do something worth talking about. And the only way to be "iconic" is to stay that way for a long time. Advertising hardly helps at all. And when it reeks of BS, it only makes things worse.

So take that creativity and money you might have spent on advertising, and use it to actually become great. Then you won't need advertising."

Jeff followed that post with another challenging the orthodoxy that "branding" is the key to success. He quotes a recent Harvard Business School blog posting by Umair Haque on The Shrinking Power of Brands about how in a web 2.0 economy "characterized by cheap, ubiquitous interaction... the very economic rationale for orthodox brands actually begins to implode: information about expected costs and benefits doesn't have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots or column-inches -- instead, consumers can debate and discuss expected costs and benefits in incredibly rich detail."

As Jeff points out on DonorPower - "If you want to have a powerful brand, you need to do something very cool, very useful, and very worth talking about."

Do libraries need to pay attention to the fundamental blocking and tackling of marketing and promotion - e.g. getting our events into the local papers, telling our story in the community, and making people aware of our services - of course we do.

The challenge for libraries is to do things that are, to re-quote Jeff, "very cool, very useful, and very worth talking about ".  Recent experiences here at PVLD would support this theory -

• Our Meebo instant messaging reference service was rolled out with no PR the day before thanksgiving and was immediately discovered and used
• The online homework help service has been largely promoted via flyers in the library and a few presentations to PTAs and school groups...and we now routinely exceed 300 tutoring sessions/month

If what we offer isn't cool, useful, and worth talking about then no amount of marketing will make it succeed.  If it is, it will succeed even if we don't market it well....

Taking a virtual break

I loved Mark Bittman's article I Need a Virtual Break in last Sunday's New York Times, although as a compulsive email-checker, blog-reader, and gadget-geek- I must confess that I'm not sure I'm up to the challenge of totally disconnecting.

This week, however, my email seems to have brought mostly bad news - from personnel issues to parking issues to a (rare) customer complaint to a request for a meeting during which an outstanding employee told me she was moving back east to take a job with the Queens Library and to be closer to family as she and her husband await the birth of their first child....I'm starting to dread that little envelope in the lower right corner of my screen.

Couple that with a house that is in chaos due to the unexpected opportunity to get our bedroom painted (we've been trying to find a painter for months...wouldn't you know that the first one willing to do a job that small happened to be free for two days right away!); a sore throat and splitting headache; a scheduling mix-up that took my husband and me to Culver City on the wrong day; and a desktop that is overflowing and I am ready to give Mr. Bittman's "secular Sabbath" a try.

I'm taking a day off on Friday, and a week off in mid-March and I'm going to do my best to get control of my technology addiction.  I can't promise I'll swear off email completely, but I'm going to try to confine my checking to defined times.

Who knows, if I get really good at managing my technology habit I might achieve Tim Ferriss' nirvana of a 4-Hour Work Week ...I checked the book out of the library, now I just have to find time to read it!