PVLD Director's Blog

From the "world wide web" to a "web of one"?

This TED talk by Eli Pariser is a scary view is happening as the role of filtering information shifts from humans to algorithms:

Librarians have long played the role of "information curators", helping ensure that our communities have access to a balanced and broad array of information.  The question now is "What does that mean in a world of filter bubbles?"

To me it means -

• Continuing to fight like hell to maintain our place in the school/education community where we can help give future generations the skills to navigate and evaluate the sea of information bubbles in which they will be swimming.
• Find a way to embed ourselves into the commercial entities that are developing the algorithms that determine who finds what so we can nudge that development in ways that foster transparency and a diversity of viewpoints.
•   Become the creators of algorithms - offer something better, without a commercial agenda.

None of these pathways are easy, and they require skills that we may not have today...but what an opportunity to cement ourselves into the foundations of the new digital infrastructure.

From clerks guarding dead paper to passionate raconteurs of information

As usual, Seth Godin says it better than I ever could - his vision of the future of libraries?

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it's fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there's always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don't view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight--it's the entire point.

Wouldn't you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don't need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

When I got to the end of the post I felt like cheering....what about you?

Libraries and Economic Development

The role libraries can play in economic development is often discussed in terms of the resources we offer - databases, books,workshops, meeting rooms, computers and wireless Internet, etc.  Examples include this article from Kiplinger  about a year ago, or the concept of the "entrepreneurium" referenced in the R. David Lankes presentation I blogged about last week.

Less common is to hear how the mere presence of a library can foster economic development by generating foot traffic and attracting people to commercial areas.  I've seen a few references to this in professional journals, and a local developer of a "senior" condominium development highlighted the benefits of proximity to the library in some of his advertising, but I've never seen anything like this website for a mixed-use (residential and commercial)  development in Everett, Washington - in which everything from the name to the clever use of "library" terminology and imagery is intended to highlight the benefit of living next door to the public library...the website even has a link to the library's website. 

PVLD Librarian Jim O'Grady (and native Washingtonian) shared the link to the Library Place website, and also passed on this quote from the local newspaper - [The project developer] noted that the adjacent library had 400,000 visitors last year that could also be potential customers.

In a commercial district like the one in which our Peninsula Center Library is located, where retail businesses struggle even in the best of times, we need to keep reminding people that things would be much worse without the anchor of the library and its 600,000 visitors each year.

Librarians - Masters of the Universe!

It's National Library Week and the media have had some great stories about libraries, librarians and the value we deliver.  Since I'm not going to have time in the next few days to write any kind of thoughtful post, I thought I'd pass along a couple of items that friends of mine have shared on Facebook (thanks Rosario and Paula!)

The first, from NPR, chronicles a non-library-user's return to the library.  The second, by a librarian at CNN, reminds people that we are the "masters" of the information universe.

At a time when we are wrestling with short-term issues like budget cuts, and longer term issues like what the rapid evolution of e-books means for how we deliver services, it's nice to see some good press in the national media!

A hopeful vision for libraries

Earlier this week Kiwi librarian Joann Ransom shared this presentation by R. David Lankes (of the Syracuse University Information Institute) on her Library Matters blog.  At over 50 minutes long it is not a quick view, but I found it rich in ideas.  Like Joann I think I'll need to watch it a few times to extract all of the goodness.

Watch it if you are interested in some thought-provoking ideas about the changing role of libraries, and a hopeful vision of the future based on focusing on functions and activities (as opposed to buildings and collections) that facilitate knowledge creation in our communities. 

Now I've got to figure out how we can convert our business center into an "entrepreneurium"!

If the video doesn't disply correctly click here to get to Joann's post)

Future of Libraries from R. David Lankes on Vimeo.

Want to accomplish more? View your boss as a librarian!

I don't think I am alone among my librarian colleagues in being sensitive to stereotypes about our profession, and any image of a "librarian" in bun and glasses never fails to make me cringe.

On the flip side, I take great delight when someone describes a librarian in non-stereoptypcial way and even greater delight when a non-librarian demonstrates that they really "get" what a librarian is/does.  That's why this post from Seth Godin made my day.

Exhorting people to move beyond an "attitude of minimization" that sees bosses as taskmasters and limiters of what can be accomplished, Seth writes

If your boss is seen as a librarian, she becomes a resource, not a limit.

Librarians as limitless resources...now there's an image that I can live with!

 

The Time for Libraries is Now

Great stuff via Stephanie Beverage, Director of the Huntington Beach Public Library: 

The time for Libraries is NOW

View more presentations from Ned Potter

Library colleagues in the news

It's the Tuesday after Labor Day and the glow of a relaxing holiday weekend has already been tarnished by a seemingly non-stop barrage of issues large and small.  My plan for today was to write about a couple of recent posts by Emily Lloyd, creator of the usually pointed and always funny ShelfCheck library comic strip, about the value (or not) of a Master's degree in Library Science.   I'm still hoping to muster up the time and energy to comment on Emily's thought-provoking comments...but it won't be today.

Instead I'm going to take the lazy way out and pass along a couple of news items about friends and colleagues from the library world.

The first is a terrific profile of San Diego County Library Director Jose Aponte from this weekend's San Diego Union-Tribune.  Jose is a high-energy guy and a relentless promoter of libraries, and the article not only describes him well, it describes how his libraries are thriving even in these tough economic times.  Jose is going to be my mentor-partner at the upcoming Eureka Leadership Institute...I just hope I can keep up!

The second is a radio interview  (if the link doesn't work you can click here and scroll down to "Are Libraries Necesssary") of the inimitable George Needham and Joan Frye-Williams (coincidentally, or maybe not, fellow Eureka mentors from last year!).  The interview is about 7 minutes long, and well worth listening to for George and Joan's articulation of why libraries are important. 

I especially loved Joan's statement that "We're not the grocery store, we're the kitchen" which captures so well the idea that we are not just a place where you come pull things off the shelf, but a place where real transformation takes place.  Listen!

When Librarians Gather

This past weekend I had the unadulterated pleasure of spending a couple of days with 9 other librarians who share the common bond of having worked at the Pasadena Public Library in and around the 1980s.  Not all of us worked there at the same time but it was a special place with special people (still is I think!) and some wonderful friendships were formed.  This weekend it was fun to discover how much I like and have in common with even those I didn't work with during my relatively brief time at PPL.

We ate; drank good wine; made an excursion into San Francisco (we were staying in Lafayette) to shop the Ferry Market, see the impressionist exhibit at the DeYoung, and enjoy more food and drink; but mostly we talked and talked and talked.

And what did we talk about?  Travel, food, pets, family, movies....but most of all books.  Our hostess, Anne, had the inspiration of posting a big long sheet of paper on her mantle to write down all of the books that were mentioned but when that didn't work we just jotted everything down on a regular piece of paper.  By the time the weekend ended titles and authors names were jammed onto both sides of the paper and when Mary Ann listed them all on our shared blog there were over 70 titles!

These are people whose recommendations I really trust, so now I have my reading future cut out for me!  Next on my list is The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest (the third of the Steig Larsson trilogy), and then I think I'll try Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone, and then????

Thank you PPL Pals for a wonderful weekend and for making sure I won't run out of things to read before we get together again!

Getting the best answers

A couple of days ago the Fast Company blog posted this article about the relaunch of Ask.com.  In its new incarnation people will be able to post questions and Ask.com will crawl the web to compile answers from other sites that connect questioners with human "experts", like Yahoo Answers.  If no good match can be found on the web the question will posted for response by any member of the Ask.com community.

Leaving aside the issue of how a questioner would verify the qualifications of the human responders, I thought this statement was particularly telling -

"Ask.com can't compete with Google on sheer algorithmic muscle; nobody can, really. But there are chinks in Google's armor, chinks Google itself is perfectly aware of. Google knows that curated answers can often be more useful..." [emphasis mine]

Librarians may not be experts in a particular specialized field of knowledge per se they are experts in finding, validating, and curating information.  Curating answers is a large part of what we currently do, and maybe an even larger part of our professional self-identity. 

The challenge is that to date, at least as far as public libraries are concerned, we mostly provide those curated answers to people who walk through our doors, or maybe call us on the phone.  A number of libraries, PVLD included, have experimented with other channels such as websites ("Ask A Librarian"), instant messaging/chat, and text messaging but everything I have seen or read indicates that the volume of questions through these channels is a very small proportion of the total questions that we answer.  Not to mention that the total questions answered is on a long-term downward trend.

It seems to me that if libraries and librarians want to hold on to providing curated answers as a key part of our value proposition and professional identitiy we nee to establish ourselves on the Web as a trusted source of answers, something we have not managed to do after many years of trying.  Ask.com says that it has 90 million visitors monthly...that is nearly 3x the total number of reference questions answered by California libraries of all types through all channels in a year!  And what about the people who go to Yahoo Answers, ChaCha or other online sources of curated answers.

What would it take to get even 10% of the people who use commercial "answer" sites to turn to libraries instead?  Some of the things that come to my mind -

• A single web-based portal for all libraries (or at least all public libraries) designed by people with real consumer user interface experience, not librarians (we tend all too often to design things the way we think they should work!) and that can be easily accessed by mobile devices, tablet computers, etc. as well as traditional computers. This probably also means development of apps for a variety of platforms as well.
• Effective use of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to ensure that when someone searches Google, Bing, or any other search engine the library website is near the top of the list. This probably requires employing SEO experts on an ongoing basis.
• Investment in consumer marketing including web advertising (such as becoming a "sponsored link" on Google), as well as in other forms of advertising and marketing.
• A way of harnessing the collective knowledge and skills of librarians across time zones to provide extremely prompt, succinct and high quality answers (actual answers, not bibliographies and references to where to find information!) to questions as soon as they are posted...live and in real time.

In other words, it will require a significant investment of hard cash and time, the engagement of a whole set of non-librarian professional skills (e.g. user interface design, app design, SEO, consumer marketing) and a level of collaboration (even to agree on the design of the system) that is rare. 

Is it possible?  Maybe.  Should we hang our hats on a future where providing answers remains at the core of our value proposition?  I'm not so sure....