David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Wanting Your Opinions about Blog Comments and City Attorneys

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A new Facebook friend just asked me a question, and I thought I’d share it with y’all – in hopes of garnering him some more input, or “ammunition” if you will…

Here’s the deal:

“Maybe you can answer a question that our City attorney needs clarified? She seems to think that if we [a public library] have a blog we can’t restrict commenting (at all) because it’s a public forum (the City recently even got rid of the Mayor’s bulletin board because of this). From my own Internet research it seems that this is the case from a legal standpoint. How are other libraries dealing with this? If this is the case it seems that it’s only a matter of time before some library gets sued over this.”

“Do you know of any libraries getting sued for removing comments, or where to find any pro blog justification for libraries from a legal standpoint? Blogging is obviously a good thing for a library to do, but the City is deathly afraid of lawsuits… Even the chance of a lawsuit and they won’t go out on a limb to disrupt the homeostasis. My municipality is very conservative in this regard.”

As an aside – good the for the city attorney for recognizing blog comments as a form of public forum (because it is).

Now, obviously I’m no lawyer, but I told my fine facebook friend that as long as the library has a policy in place that covers how the library handles comments, they should be covered (certainly anyone CAN sue… but probably not successfully?). And that policy is probably already there in some form of patron behavior clause.

And – I’m pretty certain there are some libraries that really DON’T remove comments – they show the bad AND the good, and just filter a short list of “naughty” words. So that might meet the city attorney’s requirement, too.

So… what do you think? How does your library handle website/blog/myspace/facebook/youtube/etc comments? Do you moderate? Do you block words? Do you remove the nasty comments altogether? And do you have a policy or guideline in place for commenting?

Ignoring our Digital Community

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Lately, I’ve been hearing librarians say some interesting things about incorporating emerging online trends into their already hectic work lives. They’ll say “wow, this is cool” when I give a presentation – but when implementation time arrives – when these busy people actually need to start incorporating some of these new things into their work day, here’s what I sometimes hear (warning – simulations of real stuff I hear):

“we don’t have time to write blog posts – we’re busy serving customers” or “I’m extremely busy answering real patron questions all day long, so I don’t have time left to [fill in the blank with a 2.0 tool]”

I understand what they’re saying. It’s difficult to believe this new-fangled, 2.0-ish stuff is relevant when you are sitting at a busy service desk with a line 20 people deep, or when you have waiting lists for computer use. Library 2.0 is about building community? Visit a public library branch any day to see community building in action. Attend a program, join the bookclub, participate in an adult literacy or ESL program as a volunteer tutor or learner. That’s community building. Sometimes, emerging 2.0 tools and services seem to get in the way of all this busy, real-time activity already taking place.

Ok, wait a sec. This is davidleeking dot com we’re reading, right?

Yep… I see a small problem in the stuff I just said. Most of our library communities have a quickly-growing number of library customers that are actively participating in the emerging web – they are already creating content, participating, and interacting – with each other and with the companies and products they use. They are your library’s digital community.

The problem? We don’t have anything for our library’s digital community to do! OCLC‘s recent report, Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World says this about our physical libraries: “Offline, libraries are vibrant social spaces. They are hubs of community activities and provide a venue for open exchange and dialogue” (8-5). But online? How many libraries can say they provide “vibrant social spaces,” hubs of community activity” or “a venue for open exchange and dialogue” in our digital spaces? Not too many.

Why is this? I think we’re simply not focusing on that growing digital community. Yes, we ARE focusing on customers (that’s a good thing)… but many of us are only focusing on our library’s regular in-house customers (that’s a bad thing). It’s quite possible that by focusing primarily on library customers who visit the physical library, we are ignoring our growing digital population.

Huh?
Let me use my library as an example. We certainly get our fair share of traditional walk-in customers – our parking lot is ALWAYS FULL. But we also have a huge number of digital customers. Remember what we do with holds? We mail them out – you never have to physically visit our library to check out a book (cool, huh?).

Those items our customers are putting on hold come from our digital community – most likely customers who used our online library catalog from home or work. That’s just one example of living, breathing members of our digital community using our digital library. And they are a growing digital community. What else do we offer them? Thankfully in my library’s case, quite a lot currently (with more to come next year).

Let’s develop this a little further by perusing OCLC’s report a little more. OCLC provides some amazing insight into our growing digital communities:

  • “The vast majority (89%) of the 6,163 general public respondents have been using the Internet for four years or more” (page 7-1) [update – Michelle reminded me that OCLC surveyed online users… the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s research shows that 73% of the US are Internet users, for what it’s worth)
  • “The majority of the online population surveyed have moved from “digital immigrant” status to fully naturalized digital citizens. Nearly two-thirds of the general public respondents over the age of 50 have been online for seven years or more, and nearly a third have been using the Internet for more than 10 years” (page 7-1)
  • “The Web community has migrated from using the Internet to building it.” (7-1)

Did you hear that? Most A majority of our library customers have used the web for at least 4 years. And most of those customers (read the report for the stats) have grown beyond simple clicking and surfing… they are interacting, creating, and participating… at other websites.

The gist of the report is this – the web has moved on, and libraries need to catch up. “To entice users to the online library, libraries must expand their social activities, allowing users to easily share and create content and collaborate with others. They must build a high-value presence on the Web, a strong enough brand to compete…” (8-5).

First steps? Stop ignoring your library’s rapidly-growing digital community. They might not be current users of your physical library – how can you reach them? What do you have to offer them? Can you offer them something that would keep them coming back for more?

I think so.

Some Thoughts and Quotes about Authenticity

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I’m reading Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine III (same guys that wrote The Experience Economy). I love this type of book – the focus is still on Pine and Gilmore’s favorite topic, that of the experience economy. But this time, they have narrowed that focus a bit, to how those experiences can be perceived as authentic experiences. I’ll be sharing thoughts and random quotes from the book as I read it.

The first quote comes from the preface of all places! “..too many [businesses] have latched onto that single word – experience – without changing core business practices. Too many companies say they’re offering ‘experiences’ without actually staging experiences” (page xii).

That actually answers a question I’ve had as I have started to check out some of these businesses that claim to offer an experience of some sort. For example, I’ve visited Cold Stone Creamery twice now. They have amazing ice cream (and their watermelon sherbet is to die for – it’s that good)… but the experience they tout? Not so much.

What have I actually seen in my two visits? Teenaged staff paying next to no attention to me while quickly making my ice cream concoction, not making a big deal of the cold stone marble mixing board at all, and quickly hustling me out of the way – even when there’s not a crowd. What gives? Well, apart from me smelling bad or something that day, somehow the corporate message of the Ultimate Ice Cream Experience wasn’t translated down to the Cold Stone Creamery workers in Topeka, Kansas. Did those employees receive the “hey, this is an experience we’re serving” message during initial training but decided against the practice? Were they even trained in imparting that staged experience at all? I have no idea. But in this case, the actual delivered experience did not match the experience the corporate office wants to provide.

Libraries and other organizations sometimes do the same thing – the experience we want to provide often doesn’t match what we actually dole out daily. Think about it for a sec – does your mission statement match what happens in your building on a daily basis? And… does “what happens in your building” match what goes on on your website? For example, some libraries think of themselves as community gathering places. But then when the community actually gathers, they’re told to be quiet, to turn their cell phones off, and to please drink that coffee outside the building. Or, the staff and the physical building both do a great job of offering a physical community gathering place, but doesn’t do a good job of offering a digital community gathering place. Their digital community tries to gather, but quickly finds no place to gather at all, because the website is no more than an electronic brochure with links and a catalog database – so they gather elsewhere (ebay forums, yahoo groups, myspace). They “have left the building.”

If this describes your library, maybe you need to take a step back… step back and give some hard thought to:

  • what you want the end result to be
  • even better, ask your customers what THEY want THEIR end result to be
  • then create a strategic plan, mission statement, vision, etc that focuses on reaching that desired end result
  • teach your staff how to create, mold, or otherwise deliver that end result (or at least work towards it) physically AND digitally
  • redesign that website so it does the same thing – so it focuses on providing the desired end result

If we plan on offering experiences, let’s start changing those core business practices so we can actually deliver engaging experiences to our customers.

IL2007, Day 3: Blurring Boundaries

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Liz Lawley did the closing keynote, and had a bunch of good stuff to say.

TerraNova – blog on virtual worlds

TarrorNova – WoW guild made up of people involved with TerraNova

showed a pic of a library science professor who plays WoW

How can we make the real world more like games?

Make tasks delight us!

make us want to get up at 7am to play

collecting: you want to get stuff

points: we want to collect points and get more points than others

feedback: how do we know we’re doing the right thing?

exchanges: implicit and explicit communicative exchanges

customization

Then she gave two live demos – the “first 5 minutes” of WoW and Second Life

1st 5 Minutes of World of Warcraft:

  • you can get a 10-day free trial online
  • cool music plays
  • create a character – very easy
  • can choose randomize and pick the one that looks best to you or go through individual options
  • click enter world – get put into the game, get an introductory narration
  • go talk to non player characters with big yellow exclamation points over their heads
  • help windows pop up when you seem to need them
  • the game developers set up the game for multiple successes in the first five minutes of play

First 5 Minutes of Second Life:

  • aside – her first five minutes wasn’t at all my first five minutes – she had some type of orientation task list, while I went to orientation island and walked through the steps….
  • she flew
  • a tutorial popped up
  • the orientation was pretty lacking – it wasn’t set up to succeed.
  • Aside again – of course, this isn’t really a game, and they aren’t really selling it….

Why does Liz like WoW better?

  • no reason for her to be in Second Life
  • not much for her to do there – no need or desire; for her, it’s a solution in search of a problem
  • her 13 year old son loves Second Life – it’s a powerful tool for him. He can build – she doesn’t want to
  • she can play with her son in WoW – she can’t in Second Life
  • there are whole families that play WoW together

Nick Yee’s MMU Player Stages:

  • entry: newcomer euphoria, playing with someone
  • practice: ramping up, progression, solo to group
  • mastery: staying for friends, casual guilds, high end content, social/community leadership, competition
  • burnout: grind burnout (grind = having to do tasks thousands of times to move to the next level), social/raiding burnout, restarts, nothing left to do
  • recovery: end-game casual, some do come back

Real World Games:

Tupperware – sales rewards)Super Sleuth: solve a weekly puzzle at a school, get a reward of some type

Summer Reading programs: after reading so many words/books, you get a rewardebay feedback – sort of like collecting points

myspace, linkedin, etc – collecting friends, customizing

PageRank – trying to raise your rank. She did a Google Smackdown between her name and Karen Schneider

Games that blur boundaries:passively multiplayer onlien games – sidebar in firefox, get points and rewards for browsing the web…

Sometimes, the game can be the things we really need to do

chorewars – create quests, get points, gain experience, redeem points for prizes! Huge motivation to clean up your house!

Seriosity: get currency, sending emails cost you and you have limited funds – so your email words start to matter more

social genious – helps learn people’s names, social, so you are trying to get more points than your colleagues

How can you make the library a game? Make it so people want to come back..

Raph (missed Raph’s last name) wrote “Theory of Fun for Game Design”

IL2007, Day 3: Building Web 2.0 Native Library Services

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Casey Bisson (met him for the first time – nice guy!)

“Libraries are much larger than our books and our OPACs”

Catalog challenges:

  • usability
  • findability
  • remindability

We use Linux daily – it’s the dominant platform of most social web apps

IBM saves over $900,000,000 annually because of LInux

Scriblio.net (used to be his WPOPAC) – very cool. He’s making this easily available to other libraries!

“sites that allow comments value their users”

“Your website is not a marketing tool – it’s a service point.”

Then Casey did a successful live install of Scriblio! Very cool. It’s basically WordPress with some customized widgets and plug-ins (and your catalog records) – took him 11 1/2 minutes, it seemed easy to do.

It’s going to work with Horizon soon. Book jackets come from Amazon.