PVLD Director's Blog

Libraries and the Cognitive Surplus

I just spent an hour writing a post about this amazing video featuring Clay Shirky, and then lost it due to some mysterious glitch! Now I need to try to recreate my "brilliant" thoughts!

For some reason the video won't embed in my post, so here's the link to the DonorPower blog post where I found it.  Take a look...it's well worth the 15 minutes or so.

As I watched it I kept thinking about the implications for libraries.

Libraries originated as essentially repositories of content (think the great library at Alexandria or the monks preserving their manuscripts during the middle ages), and have evolved into institutions focused largely on content delivery.  Its interesting that some of our most "innovative" service models (and sources of heated debate) are largely about how we get better at delivering content. Think about the current debate about the limitations of the Dewey Decimal System, or the move towards "merchandising" our collections, or the often heated discussions about whether we should more heavily emphasize customer demand or professional judgement when selecting materials.  All are about more effectively connecting our customers with our collections....i.e. content delivery.

Now think about the world that Mr. Shirky describes in the video.  A world in which people expect to participate in the creation and sharing of content, not just to consume it.  A world in which an individual, using low cost technologies, can participate in the domain of content organization and delivery that has traditionally been the domain of libraries and well-capitalized businesses.  A world in which the 200 billion hours/year that has been spent watching television can be redirected to the creation and sharing of content.

I think this shift from passive consumption to participatory creation and sharing will render our current delivery-based library service models obsolete.  The challenge for librarians and library institutions is to transform ourselves so that we become active participants in this new world.

What does this mean?  Some thoughts -

Librarians need to shift from being organizers of and gatekeepers to information and content to designers of the systems that allow people to actively participate in the creation and sharing of content and the design of library services.

The boundary between the "library" and the community will become increasingly permeable.  Our staff will need to have the deep knowledge of the needs and aspirations of the communities we serve that only active engagement outside the four walls of the library can provide.  As a young library school graduate and job applicant I interviewed the other day put it - "We need to have the kind of community involvement that means that wherever we go in the community we meet people we know, and we need to develop services based on real understanding of community needs not what we pretend to know."

Our internal boundaries will also become more permeable as we rapidly reconfigure our organizations and services to adapt to changing community needs. 

Our library buildings will become just one service point in an array that spans the virtual world and the physical communities we serve.  Web-based services, cell-phone based services, widgets on the websites of others, "pop ups" at community events, micro-services at locations throughout the community (mini-collections? kiosks? book-dispensing machines?) will become the norm.

The library buildings themselves need to be redesigned to foster participation and engagement.  Service desks that have staff and customers working side by side to collaborate on solving the customer's problem? Replacement of the discreet and somewhat secretive suggestion box with white boards (physical or virtual) where customers can share their thoughts about library services and build on the ideas of others?  Spaces where staff and customers come together on a regular basis to discuss library and community issues?

Our catalogs need to move beyond inventory management systems to platforms for users to share information, make connections with people of similar interests,  and help one another find the resources that are most relevent for their needs in their particular contexts. (See my previous post on the Social Catalog and Bibliocommons)

We need to build deep and broad institutional knowledge of emerging technologies and business/service models and skill in the rapid deployment of new technologies and models.  Technology-based innovation can no longer be the sole responsibility of the IT staff.

We need to stop viewing volunteers as supplemental labor and find ways to engage the full array of talents, experiences, and knowledge that our volunteers bring to us (See Boomer Volunteers)

Most of all we need to build library cultures that encourage and respect the participation of our communities and organizational designs that foster experimentation and learning.

There is a huge store of intellectual capital waiting to be tapped - in our communities and within our institutions.  Let's tap it!

Those are some of my thoughts...what are yours?

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!

Web 2.0, the Presidential Campaign, and Loss of Control

I've posted quite a bit about Web 2.0 and how it is shifts control away from "experts" (like librarians), so I found this article from the December 9^th New York Times Magazine about the impact of the Internet on the presidential campaign very interesting. I thought this description of the uncontrollability of the social web particularly apt –

"In the new and evolving online world, the greatest momentum goes not to the candidate with the most detailed plan for conquering the Web but to the candidate who surrenders his own image to the clicking masses, the same way a rock guitarist might fall backward off the stage into the hands of an adoring crowd." [emphasis mine].

The article goes on to talk about how smart businesses long ago realized that "since they can no longer expect to unilaterally define the market the way they once did, they may as well let the market have some control over designing and branding the product" and contrasts this approach with that of the political establishment in Washington where "…for decades, presidential campaigns have been the exclusive province of a small bevy of ad makers and strategists who profited from the illusion that they, and only they, could foresee the electorate's every reaction to everything. The results of that period are now in: a marked decline in voter participation, an uptake in cynicism toward public service, and a heap of critical policy challenges that have gone unaddressed."

I read the article while I was travelling home from a meeting with Beth Jefferson of Bibliocommons and representatives of several northern California libraries who, like PVLD, are contemplating becoming early adopters of the Bibliocommons online catalog platform. Two of the hallmarks of the Bibliocommons product are the extent to which its design is grounded in extensive research into how civilians (as opposed to librarians) use the library catalog, and the way that it allows users to become recognized as trusted sources of advice with librarians in effect becoming just some voices among many. In short, it transfers control from the expert librarian to the user, and forces librarians to earn their credibility by the quality of their input, not just by virtue of their qualifications or position.

That's why I thought the last lines of the NY Times article was as true for libraries and librarians as it is for politicians –

"Neither party's candidate [KG –substitute "librarian"] will escape the impulses, best or worst, of a newly empowered citizenry. The best they can do is to fall backward, and hope to be carried aloft."

What a great image!

Bibliocommons - more on the social catalog

Last Friday David Campbell and Erik Adams and I had the opportunity to actually see what the folks at Bibliocommons are up to. We were blown away! In essence Bibliocommons has developed a replacement for the online library catalog that allows users to make meaning out of the catalog for themselves – for example by "tagging" catalog records using terms that are more meaningful to them than Library of Congress subject headings, or by writing reviews and synopses, or by creating lists that group books in a way that is meaningful to that individual reader – and then sharing what they have created in a way that allows others to make their own meaning. This interview with Beth Jefferson of Bibliocommons give some indication of how smart these folks are, and how much they really "get" what David Weinberger and others have been writing about – that the power of the Internet is not in the individual bits of information that it contains, but in the ability to create links and connections between the bits of information in a way that creates meaning. I love the idea that the role of the library is not "expert navigator" of information resources but as facilitator of community in a way that helps people make their own meaning from information. I also love the idea that the library can play a role in encouraging and supporting the large majority of people who do not currently participate in the so-called social to do so.

What an exciting time to run a library!