PVLD Director's Blog

This very thoughtful talk by Sherry Turkle (thank you to Trent at The Simple Dollar for sharing) is well worth 20 minutes of your time. Once I got over my chagrin at how close to home many of Professor Turkle's points struck, I started to think about the role public libraries can (and already do) play in both being a place of real human connectedness and fostering the self-reflection that Professor Turkle asserts is so lacking in our world of technological hyper-connection. As we wrestle with what is our role in an increasingly digital world, we would probably be well-advised to keep this in mind.

Why are we (the library) here?

One of the things we have been talking about here at PVLD is what is the one overarching thing that we are trying to do as a library and how do we communicate that so that is the guiding force behind the actions and behavior of every employee and volunteer.

We don't necessarily mean a "vision statement" or a "mission statement" or a tagline...we already have one of each of those...but rather a simple articulation of why we are here.

The conversation is ongoing, but the more I think about the more I think that it is not about "access to information", or "reading" or "community center" or any of the other concepts that we in libraries often talk about.  What we are here to do is  make our community, and people's lives, better.

The wording may not be quite right, and the grammar could use some polishing, but at the end of the day if our community is not made better because of what the library does, and if the life of every person who comes through our doors or uses our services is not made better in some way small or large because of their interaction with us, we are not fulfilling our true mission.

For the community that means understanding its needs and problems, as well as its goals and aspirations, and finding ways to meet the needs, help solve the problems, or support the achievement the goals and aspirations through the resources, services, and programs that the library offers.

For individual people it means not only offering resources, services and programs to help them address their personal needs and problems or achieve their goals and aspirations but also doing what we can to make sure that every interaction with us enhances their lives.  That could be as simple as a smile and greeting to a lonely older adult or  or the speedy and polite resolution of an issue with their library account or the ability to find something enjoyable to read or a clean and comfortable place to study (or a clean restroom for that matter!)....or as complex as helping them research a medical issue or complete a homework assignment or learn a new skill or language.

The key is that whatever we do should pass the tests of making things better for our community and for every person we interact with.

At least that is what I think the real role of the library is....what about you?

Will libraries go out of business...gradually?

As expected, this holiday season saw an explosion in the sale of tablet computers and e-readers.  According to this article from MSNBC (shared by our Facilities Manager Charles Crouse), during December Amazon.com sold over 1 million Kindles of various types each week, and during the week between Christmas and New Years Eve over 20 million Adroid and Apple IOS mobile devices were activated and over 1 billion mobile apps were downloaded. 

We are certainly seeing the effects of this in the library, as patrons come in with their new devices seeking help with everything from connecting to our WiFi network to downloading e-books.  As I wrote in my earlier post, the staff is doing its best to help - our "Getting Started With E-Books" guide is prominantly featured on our website, we have invested in a selection of devices for staff training, and we will soon begin to offer small group (2-3 people) hand-on training to the public by appointment.  We also continue to beef up our e-book collection, which now has over 1,000 titles.

I'm sure we will make it through this wave in decent shape, but I am less confident about our institutional ability to respond to the tectonic shifts that are generating these waves.

 My friend Derek Wolfgram posted this article ("Why Best Buy Is Going Out of Business...Gradually") from Forbes on Facebook this morning.  It's about Best Buy's failures during the holiday season just past and what they say about the company's ability to survive in the digital age but, as Derek pointed out, the issues identified are as relevent to libraries as they are to retailers:

"Moving online required new thinking, new management structures, and new strategies.  It would also require integrated front and back-end information systems.  Customers would expect inventory to be transparent between the web and the stores, and that specials and “exclusives” would be consistent across all channels.  Whatever attributes they associated with a retailer’s brand—whether price, quality, convenience, expertise, service—would need to be translated to the online experience and enhanced.

To compete successfully against new online retailers, traditional retailers would also need to find ways to transform the expensive liabilities of physical locations with limited hours and high labor and inventory costs into assets that complemented rather than competed with the online experience.

...Amazon neither invented nor appropriated its basic strategies from Best Buy or anyone else.  It simply does what consumers want.  Best Buy does what would be most convenient for the company for consumers to want but don’t, then crosses its fingers and prays."

Antiquated back-end inventory and database systems that do not integrate seamlessly with the online experience, expensive physical locations with limited hours and high labor and inventory costs, inability to carry sufficient inventory to fulfill customer expectations, systems that are based on what we think the customer should need....sounds eerily familiar.

I know libraries and librarians across the country and around the world, and certainly here at PVLD, are working hard to fundamentally change our operating models so that we can surf the waves of technological change rather than being crushed as they crash over our heads...but I do worry that the changes are not as fast, or as fundamental, as they need to be.

 

A hopeful view of the future of libraries

My friends Rosario and Carolyn shared this of Facebook, and it is too good not to pass along. It's a great description of what libraries are and can be...as the author puts it places of new ideas, not old books. Happy reading, and happy New Year!

http://toptrends.nowandnext.com/2011/12/28/in-praise-of-libraries-and-librarians/

The E-Book Wave

For the first 7 of my nearly 8 years at PVLD the most common question I got out in the community was "We have the Internet, why do we need libraries?"  This past year, the question has changed.  It's now one of several variations of "Why do we need libraries if we can get nearly every book we want on our Kindle?"

My response usually touches on the digital divide and the role libraries play in bridging it, the aesthetic value of print, and the fact that libraries also offer e-books and they are free...but I have to confess that my words usually sound weak even to me.

The truth is that, especially as we face the first holiday season in which the price point of decent e-readers is low enough to make them an extremely popular gift, it feels a bit like iwhen I am heading into the ocean for a swim and look up to see a giant wave about to break on top of me.

This time the wave is a technological one, but I suspect that the only safe response is going to be the same - dive as deep as you can, , let the wave tumble you around without fighting it, and hope you can keep your balance once you are able to get your feet on solid ground and your head above water.

The signs of profound change are everywhere, and as articles and blog posts like these make clear, they are disrupting the entire writing/publishing/content distribution ecosystem:

http://www.idealog.com/blog/how-many-christmases-until-we-see-a-whole-new-industry notes that the % reduction in sales at bricks and mortar bookstores is doubling every year -from a 1% decline in '09 to a 2% decline in '10 to an estimated 4-5% decline in '11....and probably 10% or more in '12

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/39210/  identifies the rise of consumer e-books as one of the 5 disruptive technologies of 2011

 http://ebookfriendly.com/2011/12/15/3-out-of-top-10-best-selling-kindle-books-of-2011-are-self-published/ points out that 3 of the top 10 bestselling Kindle books are self-published

http://copyrightandtechnology.com/2011/12/04/a-bleak-future-for-public-libraries-and-e-books/ provides insight into just how vulnerable public libraries are to some of the new e-book distribution models arising in the public sector

Just the fact t that these links reflect just a sampling of articles and blog posts that have been published in December alone is scary enough, but when I read the contents all I can think is that libraries are in no way prepared for the wave that is about to hit.

I'm pretty sure that the PVLD staff is not alone in heading into the holiday season knowing that as fast as we've tried to grow it our e-book collection can't meet current demand much less what we expect once all of those Kindle's are unwrapped; Overdrive, our e-book lending system, is not easy to use (especially when contrasted to just downloading an e-book from Amazon); and our staff is struggling to learn the quirks of all of the devices and is not as well-equipped as we would like to help patrons learn how to use them.

We're putting some plans in place to help us cope with the post-holiday wave, and we'll make it through the near term rough surf...but I'm honetly not sure how we, and all public libraries, will adapt to the fundamental changes rocking our world.  The one thing I do know, is that getting out of the water is not the answer... 

(Thank you California State Library for sharing the above links)

 

 

Visions of the Future

The year 2000 as imagined in 1910. Thank you to the Centered Librarian as shared via the I Love Libraries page on Facebook.

PVLD recommends?

Last week I had the privilege of spending some time with Joan Frye Williams and George Needham.  One of the things we talked about was whether librarians' strongly-held professional values of patron privacy and confidentiality are causing us to miss an opportunity to use the data we have collected in our computer systems to deliver better and more focused services.

The very next day the Travelin' Librarian psoted this picture on his blog:

 

Since I work in a library and have access to the fabulous book sales organized by our Friends of the Library I haven't been inside a Barnes and Noble in years, so maybe this is old news, but my first thought was "Wouldn't it be cool ifthe library could deliver this kind of personalized recommendation to our patrons?"

Right now we simply don't have access to the kind of algorithms that would make this possible, but even if we did I suspect many librarians would shy away from this kind of personalized recommendation as compromising patron confidentiality.

Personally I love getting these kinds of recommendations from businesses that I frequent.  Sometimes the algorithm is a bit off and the suggestions aren't really a propos for me, but even then often they lead me down a new path of discovery.   

I'd love to know what the readers of this blog think.  What if the library could offer you personalized reading suggestions based on your checkout history?  Would that be of interest?  Would you worry about your privacy?  If privacy is a concern would being able to "opt out" address it?  Comments, please!

What is the life expectancy of the public library?

Later this week our PVLD management team and all of our full-time librarians are gathering for a discussion, facilitiated by Joan Frye Williams and George Needham, on the topic of what it means to be a professional in the 21st century.

As so often happens in the serendipitous world of the blogosphere, this morning I happened across a guest post on Tame the Web that pointed me to this challenging blog post predicting that public libraries will be dead within 15 years by Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company from a few months ago.  It's a response to media reports about a comment he made in a speech at the private Atwater Library in Montreal, and makes compelling argument that e-books will essentially kill the public library (what he calls the consumer library...as opposed to academic and other libraries with a more specialized purpose), and that all of the things our profession talks about as reasons for continued existance - unique local content, programs and activites, access for the underserved - will not be sufficient to justify the investment in our infrastruture, or alternatively will so fundamentally change what we are that the term "library" will no longer apply.

In his post Shatzkin systematically debunks many of the most cherished arguments of public librarians, as articulated very clearly by Gary Price, but agrees with Price on an important and intriguing point - "that  librarianship will be needed by people long after buildings full of books are not", requiring a whole new and as yet unimagined business model.

If Shatzkin is right and we need a new business model that is not about delivery of content in the form of books, or about bridging the digital divide, or about offering programs in a community center model,  or reliant on the creation, preservation and distribution of local content....what is it?

I'm looking forward to hearing what ideas our supervisors and librarians have when we get together later this week, and wish I had a clearer vision myself!

 

 

New ways of working

This article from Fast Company provided a fascinating look at how a new generation approaches work, and how at least one hotel is cashing in on it. 

It seems to me that, minus the mid-day tequila and the champagne and french fry lunches described in the article, libraries could learn some lessons from how the Ace Hotel is making its lobby a go-to workspace.  What would it take for libraries to become an environment where "...just by showing up, whatever you are working on becomes more interesting"?

Some of the things described in the article include - communal tables, free wifi, availability of food and drink (and the ability to consume it while you are working), a certain "buzzy" level of noise, and an environment that has "the feel of visiting with friends".  We certainly do some of this already, and at PVLD we know that some of our visitors are here working in much the same way as the people described in the article...as evidenced by this group of young entrepreneurs from a technology start up:

 

I wonder, however, whether we are doing enough?  I think in the library world being "business friendly" has meant making sure we have a strong collection of business resources (books, magazines, databases, etc.) and sometimes extends to offering workshops and seminars for the business community.  I'm pretty sure that is NOT what attracts young entrepreneurs like those pictured above to the library.  They already know how to get the information they need, and the often cumbersome and archaic user interfaces on our subscription databases probably would turn them off in any event.

Whenit comes to serving the business community maybe its time to stop thinking in terms of resources and programs, and think more about how we can set up our phsyical facilities, our technology infrastructure, and our policies (e.g. around food and noise) to support these new ways of working.

Why Digital Technology Will Never Entirely Replace Paper

I'm just back from vacation, swamped with work, and also dealing with some challenging family stuff, which doesn't leave much time for thoughtful blogging so I'm just going to pass this along (from Rubes via Michael Sauers at the Travelin' Librarian). 

Since librarians are often used as a source for public restrooms, I guess our future is assured :)