Web 3.0? Not so fast, there!

Some of my favorite bloggers are sounding cautionary notes. Amid recent concerns about Library 2.0 from folks like John Blyberg, Jeff Scott and Rochelle Hartman, there are new concerns from Tasha Saecker and growing affirmations of slow reading and slow library.

Blyberg notes that Library 2.0 "represents technology that is inherently disruptive on many levels" and that it can "undermine notions of authority and control." These concerns were discussed here recently. Hey, in a 2.0 world. we can read lots of reviews on Amazon -- let's cancel that Booklist subscription. And Tasha's concern about the personalized web 3.0 is right on:

...perhaps our strength is that instead of having a faceless computer ... making suggestions, we have REAL LIVE PEOPLE who can do it. And do it well.

Honestly, let's use our technology knowledge to blog, tweet, post, comment, shout that we already do this. Let's offer the service online to make it shiny and new, but let's not forget that LIBRARIANS RULE in this arena already. And let's keep on making sure that we are the human face of information, of recommendations. "

I dearly love InfoSoup, our consortial catalog, as a great library tool. I want to continue developing our online resources in an interactive 2.0 way. But I'm concerned if patrons identify more strongly with online resources than with the physical library. Call me old-fashioned (maybe just old), but I think we need to mindfully maintain high touch as well as high tech. That means library as place and librarians as face-to-face. It means marketing the value of our staff expertise and our reference services as well as library programs.

I remember my colleague Barbara Kelly, twenty years ago having an argument in correspondence with Alfred Glossbrenner, author of How to Look It Up Online. At that time Barbara and I were the apostles of online service at our library, but in the emerging Internet, we were already concerned with the downside of disintermediation which Glossbrenner was touting. Yes, you can look it up for yourself, but the information you find will be presented without authority -- or with anonymous authority. Is it surprising that not long ago, I found myself in a meeting where a community was debating building a library and a high school teacher publicly declared that the Internet had made libraries obsolete? We hear that misperception too often, but we need to be careful how we feed it. As Tasha notes, our role as mediators has value.

In a self-check, instant message world where people google for information, we need to think about how we build connections and community, how we turn information into education, and why people should pay taxes to ensure we keep doing it. If the library is a growing organism, we need to promote growth for our users and communities -- in a balanced way, online and in person. We need to connect. Or we could turn into Amazon and Netflix.

INFOSOUP vs. CARD CATALOG

Winner of the OWLSnet YouTube contest.

BlogJunction: 10 Ways to Make Your Library Great

I've been enjoying BlogJunction's series of ten postings following up on the "10 Ways to Make Your Library Great in 2008" webinar. The postings and original presentation are from Ed Rossman, Interim Branch Manager for the Bertram Woods branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library and author of Castles Against Ignorance: How to Make Libraries Great Educational Environments. Good ideas, some tips on 2.0 tools -- worth reading and discussing.

Resolutions:

1. Use Technology
   
2. Continuously Train
   
3. Polish Your Comportment
   
4. Reduce Clutter (yeah, I know)
   
5. Handle Noise
   
6. Handle Conflict - a good follow-up to our recent "Black Belt Librarians" discussion
   
7. Have a Plan
   
8. Develop Partnerships
   
9. Create Great Programming
   
10. Build Staff Camaraderie
    

The Librarian Song: don't sit there with your mouth open...

Singer Joe Uveges thinks librarians are so fine.

Black Belt Librarians

Thanks to OWLS, our library system, and an LSTA grant, we’re having two days of Black Belt Librarian training with Warren Graham, the author and library security consultant. An unsolicited endorsement: he gives a terrific presentation, entertaining, full of common sense wisdom and useful ideas. Feedback from dozens of staff is uniformly enthusiastic.

Graham describes library security in broad contexts: library staff and users are human, with all the inherent strengths and weaknesses. He teaches us to approach problems by understanding ourselves, being self-affirming not self-defeating, and responding than reacting. He teaches good communication techniques and ways to keep improving. He shares good ideas about using our organizational structure to make our organizations and our libraries better places to be. He teaches how to be "all about communication, rather than confrontation".

Listening to Warren talk, I had to think about pros and cons of current practice at our library.

Things we’re doing right:

• We have a security policy and procedures -- developed with staff input
  
• We have communication mechanisms, we document problems
• We use progressive discipline and ban people from the library when we need to
• We orient new staff to security concerns, policies & procedures and specifically tell them:
• There’s nothing more important than the safety of users and staff
• Anyone on staff is authorized to call the police any time – you won’t be wrong
• Anyone on staff is authorized to throw people out of the library
• Every one of us is responsible for maintaining the library environment

Things we might improve:

• Some of our procedures are a bit black and white. But in a gray world, our rules will never cover every problem, so maybe we should have fewer rules
• Some staff areas need locking doors, and it’s possible we need to do some construction work to build a doorway or two
• We need to keep talking about the security gate / book alarm and how we respond. Much of this is driven by our space design and how materials are processed in other libraries before we get them. Nonetheless, more talk is in order.
• We should talk about visibility and mirrors in out of the way corners.
• We should have a security review process – we’ve done this with Police and we’ve done it with staff, but we need to plan to keep doing it.

To people not in our area, I strongly recommend getting Warren Graham to do a presentation. This would make a great preconference program for a state association. Or at least read his book

To APL staff, trustees, friends, whether or not you made it to Warren’s program – let me know what you think – comment here or drop me an email. A program like this does not resolve issues – it helps start new conversations.

The Threat of Web 2.0

Rory Litwin at Library Juice reports on a speech by Jurgen Habermas on the perils of Web 2.0. Relevant quotes:

The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralised access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.

And in his report on the speech, Andrew Keen notes:

So the great achievement of the Web 2.0 is the undermining of the idea of a specialist, an expert, an intellectual.

So, is this repressive disintermediation? Or just anarchy? How much wikiality is there in such concerns? Not everything about Web 2.0 applies to Library 2.0, which encourages involvement but still has some central role for the library as institution. But there are valid cautionary notes.

Project Play: Remember the Milk & Jott

These tools are cool, cute, well done and flexible. I may never use them again. I already have this mostly covered with my palm Treo, a phone which shares my calendar contacts, data files and to do list with web-accessible desktop Outlook and others at the library. Do I need more lists and reminders?

My phone already lets me blog or send messages. Still, it's kind of cool to blog via speech to text phone call. This entry was sent through Jott. listen

Powered by Jott

[Afterword: Jott is phone based reminders and speech conversion to text for messaging. Remember the Milk is a web-based to do list, which can be used collaboratively. The above posting required drastic simplification and editing to fit into Jott's 30 seconds per message maximum.

Both these services are easy to use. Both are in Beta, which makes one wonder if they will graduate to requiring some fees down the road. One thing I really liked about Remember the Milk was its slick integration with Google calendar. It would also be good for collaborative project to do lists with a disparate group of folks. For my current purposes, they're marginal, but worth knowing about.]

On not sucking

I was happy to see in this month's issue of Wired, with a cover story of "Why Things Suck", that public libraries made their short list of "things that don't suck."

Thanks to Jeff Scott of Gather No Dust, I found out even more. In his blog posting, Jeff talks about why we don't suck. He also links to a Wired online copy of the "don't suck" list. This includes interactive ratings and according to people that have voted, we're doing pretty well.

Turn and face the strain...

Our good neighbors at the Neenah Public Library got a nice article in yesterday's paper about changes in usage patterns as seen in annual circulation numbers. My immediate reaction was how universal some of the trends seemed: if you change the exact numbers and a few proper names, the article would have been true of many libraries, and certainly ours.

The last sentence grabbed me: "...library staff has been able to keep pace with the growth in circulation though the help of volunteers and self-checkout machines..." -- yep, that's us, too, spot on.

But it occurred that we should look at specific numbers to see where we were alike and different -- and thank about why. Neenah's growth in circulation was 52,422 -- the largest increase in their five countypublic library system. Our growth at APL was 79,173, but we're a larger library, so it might be more useful to compare percentage changes.

Circulation comparison, % changes 2006-7:



Interesting stuff... more of our growth is coming in books, CDs, books on CD and magazines. Some of the differences may have to do with how the two libraries have implemented format changes in their collections. I know that we've been trying to grow our books on CD collection, and the numbers reflect that. We also finished bar-coding all our magazines, and while that's not a big number for us, it's probably more accurate now than previously.

But just like in Neenah, people like our video collection for the wide-ranging selections not found in video stores, and we're also pushing books and literacy.

"I am curious -- library"

A video of business author Seth Godin, found on John Blyberg's blog -- under the posting "Let's be curious with our users."

We certainly rely on users being curious with us.