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?

Growing Up Online

BAck in January the PBS program Frontline aired this program on "Growing Up Online".  The entire episode and a lot of interesting supplemental material is available on the Frontline website.  It will take about an hour of your time to view all of the "chapters" - but I found it was an hour well spent in terms of the insights I gained into how today's teens, the first generation to grow up with the Internet as a fact of life, are using the technology.

The program doesn't shy away from the risks of being online, including a poignant segment on the tragic consequences of cyber-bullying, and I have to confess that even my Internet-embracing self was shocked by some of what the kids were doing online. And as a childless person I sure felt for the parents interviewed!  (At the same time the former adolescent in me was also moved by the way some of the kids interviewed were using the Internet to connect with, empower, and validate their deepest selves in ways that would be impossible in the physical world).

In the end I appreciated Danah Boyd's comment to the effect that these kids live in a society with fundamentally different properties than the one I grew up in, and this is not going to change.  Strategies like blocking access to the parts of that society that make us fearful are not at the end of the day going to keep kids safe.  As fast as we block access to something, an alternative will spring up. What we need to do is teach people how to live in this new society safely - just as we teach them to look before crossing the street or to wear a seatbelt.

Libraries are already playing a role in helping people understand how to be safe online, but it seems to me there is more that we could do....

News from the Public Library Association Conference 2008

Adult Services Assistant Manager Debra Petersen and Branch Manager Jennifer Addington attended the Public Library Association's biennial conference in Minneapolis last week and came back full of ideas and enthusiasm.

They are sharing what they learned and their thoughts on their PLA Minneapolis blog.  Check it out for some great ideas...and keep checking as there is more to come!

I think we might transform this blog into the "PVLD conference" blog as a way of sharing what we learn at the various conferences and workshops that staff attend. 

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.       

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!

 

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!

New systems - 24 hours later

Well, our new systems have been up for more than 24 hours and overall things are going pretty well.  There are still issues with the online calendar, the Integrated Library System software has some inherent shortcomings that we didn't realize were there until we went live, we need to continue to fill out the content of the new website, and we continue to find and fix little glitches.

Some of the key realizations and learnings from this process for me include -

• The traditonal software sales/support model that hands the customer off from the sales team to the implementation team to the help desk and "post-implementation sales" really sucks.  You just get one group of people understanding your organization and what you are trying to achieve and then you have to educate a whole new group.  Vendors - what about an organization structure that aligns with the customer relationship?
• If the technology model of Web 2.0+ is (as I think it is) one where various pieces of software are connected togther via open interfaces in ways that are transparent to the end user, the library technology world seems to have its feet firmly planted in Web 1.0.  Our goal is to have the integration from the PVLD website to other software/systems such as the ILS' online catalog or the online calendar be as invisible and as seamless as possible.  I think our guys have done a great job moving us in this direction, but has been much more difficult to get everything to work together than it should have been.  We can only imagine the challenge when we want to start layering on a new social catalog a la Bibliocommons or knowledge sharing system a la Libguides.
• There is a long way to go to make the library catalog and user account functionality even close to what is available in commercial sites such as Amazon or Netflix.  We believe we selected the best available off-the-shelf ILS for a library of our size, but it has a ways to go to deliver an excellent user experience.  The online catalog has some nice features, like RSS feeds and user reviews and ratings, but they seem to have been "patchworked" into the system rather than being part of a comprehensive and integrated design.  Our vendor does offer an alternative online user interface, called Encore, but it is expensive and still nowhere near what we would consider state-of-the art.  We will be looking at alternatives once things have settled down around here. 

On the plus side

• The new website looks incredible and has some great new features.  It will only get better as we fill out the content and add new functionality.  Even the challenges have provided learning opportunities, so we will also get faster and better at implementing enhancements.
• The new ILS is on the whole far better than the old one.  We lost a couple of important features in the transition, but we gained much more than we lost.  We also have a core group of employees that have a deep understanding of the system's data structure and functionality, which will enable us to work with the vendor to resolve issues and identify opportunities for improvements.
• Our frontline staff have been amazing.  They've embraced the new system and done a great job of dealing with the inevitable little glitches and customer issues.

Are we where we want to be from a technology standpoint?  Not yet.  Are we a LOT further down the road?  Absolutely.

 

New website, new catalog - what fun!

Yesterday we closed all of our libraries in preparation for going live with our new website (note that if you are a regular user of our old website you may need to clear the cache of your Internet browser and then restart your computer to see the new site) and Integrated Library System (or ILS - the system that supports all of our library operations like the catalog, issuing library cards, checking library materials in and out....). 

Closing the libraries is a big deal for us, as we take great pride in closing only on a very few major holidays like Christmas and the 4th of July.  We took advantage of the opportunity to have all of the staff together for a Staff Development Day...the first in many years.  We had a great time as staff from the various locations got to meet one another, we did some training, and finished the day with our first ever PVLD Drum Circle:

This proved to be energizing, stress-relieving, and a lot of fun...just what we needed to get ready for the launch of our new systems today.

So...how're we doing with the new systems?  Overall pretty well although we have found a few glitches, like -

• When we moved the new website into production some of the feeds to our online calendar of events broke.  We should have this fixed tomorrow, though.
• There are wierd discrepancies between how the ILS functions when it is being operated by staff vs when a library user tries to do things via the online library catalog.  We're working on trying to resolve these.
• Some features seem to work intermittently, but not consistently - like the ability to add user reviews, and the display of book covers alongside items in the catalog.

The biggest surprise of the day has been the number of people complaining about the fact that the new system doesn't have the capability to create and save lists of items from the library catalog for future reading/reference.  In our old system not only could a user create such lists, they could go directly from a list item to the catalog to place a hold.   We had no idea this feature was so popular, and unfortunately we didn't do a good enough job of alerting people to the fact that it would disappear.  Definitely a "lesson learned" but also a reason to continue our exploration of Bibliocommons which is built around the ability to create and share lists.

The new systems have some great new features, though - things that our users have been asking for like the ability to rate and review items (once we get it working consistently - it seems it may be a software bug), the ability to keep some or all of your borrowing history for future reference, and new email notification capabilities like getting alerts of pending due dates BEFORE the item is due, or saving catalog searches on topics of interest and then getting email notification when new items that meet the search criteria are added to the collection.

All in all its been a good couple of days, although this is definitely a work in progress as we resolve issues, add new content and capabilities to the website, and implement additional features like the ability to pay fines and fees online.

The staff have been as amazing as always - the core project team has worked long and hard to get the new systems set up and tested and the front-line staff at the public service desks have accepted the changes willingly and are doing a great job of coaching our customers through the transition. 

Everyone is a bit wearly right now, but if we can get through the next few days and get some of our niggling issues resolved we've got a great foundation for continuing to offer leading online services to our users. 

The Library of Congress and Flickr

From the Library of Congress blog – the Library of Congress is partnering with Flickr to "help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity." [And thanks to David Weinberger over at Everything is Miscellaneous for sharing the link]

The Library of Congress blogging? Posting to Flickr? Tagging? How cool is that!

I love the idea of The Commons – using Flickr to share the world's public photo collections. We've already used Flickr for our 40families project site, and it would be great to get all of our local history photos into The Commons.

This quote from the end of the post is also great -

"From the Library's perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and—most importantly—wisdom. One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it."

To Matt Raymond and the folks at LoC – thanks for helping light the path through the social web.