PVLD Director's Blog

More on the Library Catalog and the Dewey Decimal System

If the persistance of a topic on the conference circuit and in the blogosphere is any indication of its importance as a topic of professional discussion, then the issue of whether the Dewey Decimal System meets the needs of 21st century library users is on the minds of a lot of librarians these days.  I've blogged about this before, but wanted to share a couple more contributions to the debate.

From the PLA Minneapolis Blog put together by PVLD librarians Jennifer Addington and Debra Petersen some thoughts about ways that library collections can be organzed to better meet the needs of users without abandoning Dewey.  There are some great ideas that we can use at PVLD...and I know Eve Wittenmyer and Melissa Little up in the Circulation Department have even more ideas about how to make the collection organization more user friendly.

And I loved this from Michael Casey , whose Library Crunch blog I is one of my favorites -

Wholesale abandonment of Dewey is probably not practical for an established library, but the discussion of its relevance is healthy, and its amazing to see all of the amazing ways libraries are adapting or working around it to better serve our customers.  Look for some of these kinds of adaptations at PVLD in the coming months!

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.

Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore - RIP

Given my recent posts about libraries and bookstores it was a sadly uncanny coincidence to read yesterday's Los Angeles Times article about the demise of Dutton's Brentwood Bookstore.  After libraries, independent bookstores are at the top of my list of places to spend time and I have many fond memories of sitting by the fire browsing through the amazing collection at the long-gone Earthling Books in my hometown of Santa Barbara.

This recent post from the Santa Barbara Daily Sound blog fondly recalls Earthling as an exemplar of a "destination booksstore" -

"It wasn’t the inventory or selection; it was the place that made it special—and not just for book-lovers or avid readers. Maybe it was the warmth of the inviting fireplace, the joy of Saturday morning storytime for kids, the intellectual challenge of meeting notable authors on book tours—the best-selling and the obscure.  Or maybe it was the opera nights, the window dedicated to nonprofits or Barnaby Conrad’s amazing, 3-D mural depicting literary giants that filled one wall."

[As an aside  -if that description doesn't bring to mind similarities between bookstores and libraries I don't know what would!]

It's interesting that the LA Times article does not attribute the demise of the independent bookstore to a decline in reading but to the fact that books are now sold in a much wider array of venues, including but not limited to, online.  As Dutton's parter Ed Conklin says in the article,

"it was difficult to make a profit in an environment 'where even a lot of places that sell backpacks sell books." '

The article aslo points out that the challenges of ubiquitous bookselling notwithstanding, there a number of independent bookstores across the country that are thriving, citing Powell's in Portland (where I could happily spend an entire vacation without leaving the premises), and Vroman's in Pasadena which was the subject of a recent comment on this blog.  And in our own neighborhood we have Williams' Bookstore in San Pedro, which keeps  the area supplied with author talks, poetry readings, and works by local authors.

One thing many of these successful independents have in common?  They own their own buildings and have therefore been able to withstand the pressures of redevelopment that brought down Earthling, and now Dutton's.

At least losing our lease is one competitive pressure that most public libraries don't face!

More on Libraries vs. Bookstores

After reading Tuesday's post, Sylvia Richardson, one of our PVLD Librarians, sent me the following email - 

Kathy, I have to say that this article expresses many things I see happening within libraries that undermine our

profession. The idea that we as librarians are qualified to be selectors or guides through the sea of information (& mis-information) is being forgotten or ignored, in part because our culture seems addicted to seeking increases in quantity, not quality---whether it is french fries, widgets, literature or information.  The idea that it is better to read 50 books, (or "items")--never mind that they are mediocre, formulaic repeats of what we read last year, rather than 25 titles that are more challenging, has become the new goal of many library systems.    Our profession used to be above the fray when it came to worrying about sales figures, which made us different, in a wonderful way, from the chain bookstore. If that "supermarket" model is becoming ours, it ought to worry anyone who cares about intellectual freedom and growth in our culture. Our job as librarians is to engage people in growth throughout their lives, before, during and after "school" days, to be a beacon of free thought unencumbered by sales figures, which more often indicates mass market thinking than new and daring concepts; the sales curve always follows some distance behind the new concepts humans create.  (Was Van Gogh a bestselling artist in his lifetime???)  It is our job, as I see it, to include in our collections "items" that may be less than mainstream, but more important precisely because they are out of the main stream; new directions, offshoots, upstarts, wellsprings off the beaten path.  One of my favorite quotations is from Kenneth Burke; "Art may be of value purely through preventing a society from becoming too assertively, too hopelessly, itself."  That reminded me, when I first saw it, of the quotation above Royce Hall at UCLA that I saw daily while i was in Library School there--"Where there is no vision, the people perish."

If we are not serving as navigational beacons by dint of our dedication to --do I dare use this word that has become a derogatory one--"intellectual" training as professionals, then we may as well just pile the mass market paperbacks up and let folks browse like so many ruminants on the chaff instead of separating it from the wheat, and let them wander through the internet haphazardly bumping into information of widely varying quality. .  I hope we as a profession continue to be visionaries, using the new technologies to further open windows to new visions without making the numbers game be our primary motivation.

Sorry I went on!! Got a little excited.  But this matters!

Sylvia raises some thought-provoking points....and I want to think about what she says before I respond.  In the meantime I thought her comments were worth sharing.  What do you think?

Bookstores as For-Profit Libraries?

Last week George Needham of OCLC wrote a post titled "Is Borders Becoming a For Profit Library" at It's All Good.  He linked to this article on Borders' new strategy for integrating technology-based services into the bricks and mortar bookstore experience:

"... Borders' newest retail strategy: a digital center where you can download music or books, burn CDs, research family histories, print pictures and order leather-bound books crammed with family photos — with help from clerks who know how to do those sorts of things and won't embarrass you if you don't...reinventing itself as a hub for knowledge, entertainment and digital downloading."

Ah, what you can do with money!  Here at PVLD we'd love to offer services like this, and to have the resources to train staff to "do those sorts of things".

For me, however, the most telling part of the article was not the description of the gee-whiz technology, or the description of how the new Borders "concept "store will be organized, with "... new themed book islands are built around lifestyle genres, including travel, cooking and health."

No, for me the most telling part of the article was this (emphasis mine!) -

"One of the saving graces for bookstores, say analysts, consumers and industry officials, is they offer people with shared interests a site to gather and socialize. The addition of coffee shops — which you'll find in nearly every Borders and Barnes & Nobles store — has accelerated the trend. Now, Jones hopes digital downloads can take the stores to the next level.

"Bookstores are typically the place that people like to go and congregate, so if (the stores) can monetize that, it's powerful," says Schick, who calls Borders' move "an attempt at evolution."

That's something that Amazon, for all its considerable market muscle, can't quite duplicate."

A major theme of the article is the threat that the slowing economy poses to bookstores.  When people are worried about job security, the housing market, and gas prices they are less likely to buy books.  That's good news for libraries because we offer much of what the book store does (ok maybe not the digital kiosk!) and its free.  That's why library use goes up in tough economic times, while bookstore sales go down.

The bad news? 

If you didn't know they were coming from Borders, phrases like "a hub for knowledge, entertainment, and digital downloading" or "they offer people with shared interests a site to gather and socialize" could have come straight from the strategic plan of many a library.

I'm one of those who thinks that bookstores actually do pose a competitive threat to libraries and that we need to face that threat head-on, and articles like this just reinforce that view. 

Borders and its ilk are definitely playing on our turf, and if they succeed in "monetizing" services that we offer for free (or close to free) while we struggle to maintain and improve services with budgets that are under even more pressure than usual in tough economic times, we're going to have to be pretty creative to hold our ground long-term. 

But back to some good news...evidence of our creativity abounds!  With examples like the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenberg County's Learning 2.0 program; the growing use of free Web 2.0 tools like Meebo or eBlogger to deliver library services; a culture that encourages sharing and collaboration; and technology-based tools that make that collaboration easier than ever before (witness the viral spread of the aforementioned Learning 2.0 idea), I think we have the ability to meet the competitive challenge, even if it sometimes feels like David vs. Goliath.  We should disregard what the bookstores are doing at our peril, though!