David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

The ReadWriteWeb needs Sexy Librarians

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In December, the awesome blog ReadWriteWeb posted a couple of great articles about how librarians are needed (and even linked to Michael Porter’s flickr photo of Michael and yours truly battling it out on Guitar Hero). That’s all dandy!

But the ReadWriteWeb just posted Deconstructing Real Google Searches: Why Powerset Matters … I’d add “real BAD Google searches” to that title. Sure, the point of the article was to point out the perils of current search engine searches/results, and to show why a semantic-based or a natural language search engine would be better. And ultimately, that really might be the case.

But my librarian self kicked in as I was reading the post, because the author obviously needed the help of us sexy librarians! Here are the search examples given:

  1. what are movie spears made out of?
  2. car hit by bicycle
  3. Famous science fiction writers other than Isaac Asimov

Librarians… I ask you. Are these good Google queries? Hmm… I’m hearing a resounding “not.” 🙂

And this is a great example of why we’re still needed. Yes – there’s the web. Yes – there’s Google. And yes – there are extremely smart people that write great blogs like the ReadWriteWeb. But does that mean everyone knows how to search? What happens if the semantic web or true natural language searching kicked in tomorrow – would that negate us? No – we’d still encounter people asking why they get 50 million hits when they type “I need to find stuff on cars” or whatever into search engines.

I’m thinking we can improve the ReadWriteWeb‘s search examples mentioned in the article – let’s have some fun and help them out (not that they’ll notice, but heck – we can try, can’t we?). So – here are my “better” suggestions on structuring the three search queries:

  1. what are movie spears made out of? Why not try zulu extras spears instead?
  2. car hit by bicycle – how about “bicycle accident” “hitting car” or car “hit by bicycle” or even “car damage” bicycle?
  3. Famous science fiction writers other than Isaac Asimov – hmm… why not try “science fiction author” famous -“isaac asimov” instead?

I found better results … but I don’t consider myself to be an expert searcher by any means. What do you think? How can we improve those searches? Librarians, show your awesome search skills! How would YOU do the three searches?

Pew Internet & American Life Project’s New Report on Public Libraries

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The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report out: Information searches that solve problems: How people use the internet, libraries, and government agencies when they need help.

It’s an interesting read… and I’m not quite sure how to take it! So… here’s a list of what I saw as some highlights in the report, with some yays and boos to go along with each (mainly taken from the executive summary part of the report):

Page v: “Faced with a problem in the past two years that they needed to address, about one in eight adults (13%) say they turned to their local public library for help and information.”

  • Yay! a goodly chunk of people used the library for real help – cool!
  • Boo! One in eight is dismal! How can we raise that number?

Page vi: “Major finding: 53% of American adults report going to a local public library in the past 12 months.”

  • Yay! 53%! That’s a majority of Americans! They love us!
  • Boo! Read the fine print – “in the past 12 months.” This says nothing about how many times they visited – only that they had visited at least once. Dave’s illogical translation: that could be one visit last year, to stop off at the bathroom or to pick up a child. that’s not a good indicator of library use!

Page viii: “Major finding: About a fifth of Americans with problems to address said they were concerned about privacy disclosures as they hunted for information.”

  • Yay! We’re all about privacy!
  • Boo! 4/5’s of Americans could care less about what librarians consider a major, huge issue. We’re spinning our wheels on the wrong road!

So… here’s what Pew concludes (from their website): “The survey results challenge the assumption that libraries are losing relevance in the internet age. Libraries drew visits by more than half of Americans (53%) in the past year for all kinds of purposes, not just the problems mentioned in this survey. And it was the young adults in tech-loving Generation Y (age 18-30) who led the pack. Compared to their elders, Gen Y members were the most likely to use libraries for problem-solving information and in general patronage for any purpose.”

But here’s what I saw:

  • only 1 in 8 adults use the library [when faced with a problem]
  • 53% of American adults visited the library… at least once.
  • 4/5’s of Americans aren’t as concerned about privacy as librarians are

I think we have some more work to do!

The Physical Library in the 21st Century?

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From the comments on this post:

“… what happens to the physical library? If Topeka Public mails the holds to patrons and they can drop the returned item at boxes, and the patrons need not come to the physical library… I’m the systems librarian at the Academy Library Budapest and am alarmed by the declining clientele. What still draws them to the library is the line of subscribed databases which are unavailable outside of the library. What can we offer to repopulate the spaces, apart from the complementary agora-like events like occasional exhibitions, book presentations and invited lecturers-speakers?”

Great question, and a great way to end the year… or start the new year, depending on when you read this. So – readers, what do you think? How can we get people into the physical library?

Here’s my shot at it – we need to run the library a bit more like a business, and simply offer people something they want (like a good or product that a business offers to a customer). But what do we offer them? Here’s a great example from the ReadWriteWeb:

“Imagine a future when you go to the library with a 5 minute video you’ve just made about last night’s Presidential debates and that librarian says to you:

‘You should upload it to YouTube and tag it with these four tags – two broad and two more specific to existing communities of interest on YouTube and the topic of your video. Then you should embed that video in a blog post along with some text introducing it and linking to some of your favorite posts by other people who have also written today about the Presidential debates. Make sure to send trackbacks to those posts!’

‘Now, I think this is a particularly good video on the topic, so if you’re interested I will vote for it on StumbleUpon (as a sexy librarian I have a very powerful account there) and give it a good summary explanation. Any of those are steps you can take that will make your work all the easier for people to discover.’ ”

So again – readers? What do you think? Why should our customers still visit the physical library, and how do we get them to do it?

And… Happy New Year!!!!!!!!!!!

You-promotion or Me-promotion?

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Just saw this on Seth Godin’s blog today, and thought I’d pass it along. Go read it – but here’s the jist:

  • Seth writes about self-promotion
  • He explains that 37 Signals doesn’t do self-promotion, because they’re “promoting useful ideas. They’re promoting tactics or products that actually benefit the person they’re reaching out to.”

Then he sums it up by saying “that’s because they’re doing you-promotion, not me-promotion.”

And that made me think – which type of promotion do libraries do? When we want people to know about our databases for example – do we do me-promotion (i.e., “we have a new business database”) or do we do you-promotion (i.e., “we have a way for your new business to gather B2B leads…. in this new database at the library.”)?

I’m not even sure those are good examples of me- and you-promotion… but – do you get this idea? In our advertising, in our writing, in our video making (for those libraries doing video) – are you simply sharing what you have? Or are you emphasizing the benefit to the customer? Showing the customer what our content, our expertise, our form of community will do for them?

That has the potential TO BE HUGE.

Thoughts?

Actual Work Using Facebook

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Just a small aside… but I’ve been doing real live work the last two days using facebook (go friend me – David Lee King at facebook)!

Michael Porter, my writing buddy, is to blame for some of it… 🙂 We write the Internet Spotlight column in Public Libraries Magazine together, and he posted a question to his facebook friends. The plan is to incorporate some of those responses, some he’d gotten via email, etc into a cool article [status: article almost done, and IS cool].

So part of the work was copying/pasting quotes and contacting the quotees to get job titles, etc. Whew!

But that has spawned a whole host of facebook emailing back and forth, getting new information, thinking “out loud” via facebook email about library innovation in other areas, and even making a few new facebook friends.

So – real live library work in facebook. It can be done! Anyone else want to pony up? How do you use facebook to do actual work (or do you?).