David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

New Digital Branch

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Digital BranchSome of you might have noticed I’ve been dropping very vague hints on this blog about my library’s website redesign… well, no more vagueness! In fact – how about checking it out for yourselves? Go to webdev.tscpl.org and and see what my web team has been busy creating.

A few asides:

  • If something doesn’t work, most likely we are still working on it – we’re mostly done, but it’s still a work-in-progress at this point
  • We do our “soft launch” on March 17
  • We “go live” officially on March 31

Feel free to check it out, let me know what you like/don’t like, etc! Some things I’m real excited about:

  • RSS Everywhere. Think AADL – we are blog-based, for lack of a better term. You can subscribe to the whole site via RSS, or parts and pieces of it (i.e., if you just want to subscribe to the Business & Investments Guide, you can).
  • Content is provided by library staff – more on this later, but we consider our Digital Branch to be an actual branch… and our library staff is providing content, answering comments, creating resources, etc.
  • We’re trying to be very community focused – and we’re showing that via open commenting on the site, our IM Meebo widget prominently displayed, and via RSS feeds and multimedia (more photos and videos).
  • Modern visual design and a new logo for the library

And this is just phase one – we are starting to plan future phases right now! That’s all I can think of at the moment… 2008 should be a wild ride for us!

The Web Is Not Virtual

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At some point in my talks, I usually mention how websites are changing from a virtual brochure with lists of services to something a bit more “real” – but it can be difficult to explain that concept! I usually show an active library blog with comments, and discuss the website as a form of digital community.

But check this out – from The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus blog. It’s a comic strip that usually focuses on “Church 2.0” issues (think Library 2.0, but replace “patron” with “parishioner,” and you’ll get the idea).

Here’s the text of this comic strip (the graphic is much better, but the actual strip is too wide for my blog!):

“I no longer believe in ‘virtual reality’.
Real people, real opinions, real emotions,
real shopping, real relationships,
real junk mail, real joy, real sadness,
real empathy, real crime, real porn,
real info, real poetry, real art, real cruelty,
real goodness, real truth, real lies,
and so it goes on…
There is nothing ‘virtual’ about it at all.”

The web is much more than information and databases – we’re no longer traveling down an “information superhighway,” are we?

Has Elvis Left the Building?

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Gee whiz. Every now and then, someone decides to share that some new-fangled “library 2.0” project didn’t work out … and others start claiming “After John Blyberg and others come out and say that library 2.0 didn’t work and neither did tagging, etc., the flood gates open.” Huh?

It might be good to remember two things:

  1. If one 2.0 project doesn’t work as expected, that doesn’t mean that “library 2.0 didn’t work” as a whole.
  2. Social 2.0 projects require “Elvis” to leave the building.

Here’s what I mean. For #1 above, realize this – not every blog, wiki, IM reference service, Second Life project, or podcast that your library creates will be a blazing success. Some will be dismal failures. And that’s great! Why? Because you learned something, and you can take that knowledge and move on to the next project.

John Blyberg might be correct when he says “SOPAC was by-and-large a success, but its use of user-contributed tags is a failure.” Why does he think it was a failure? Because it’s not used by that library’s community. He’s not saying tagging in catalogs is bad in general (at least, I don’t think he’s saying that). He’s saying that a particular library’s 2.0-ish experiment wasn’t successful (though I’m sure they learned something about building stuff – that’s always a good thing). Make sure to read the comments to that post – he goes on to say that larger-scale tagging that can be added to catalogs (i.e., LibraryThing for Libraries) is much more useful than the SOPAC’s localized version.

How about #2? Who’s this Elvis guy? Elvis is the librarian – has he left the building? Or is he still sitting behind the oak reference desk, waiting for patrons to visit? You cannot participate if you haven’t “left the building.” What does it take for librarians to be successful in the digital space? Well… we have to go there. Not just randomly peek in once in awhile, but actually be present and active in that space.

Here’s a lame example – lots of people read my blog. It’s taken four years for that to happen (well, and me not spewing forth stupidity too often – that also helps) – four years of me thinking, writing, reading, and participating on other librarian blogs. That was active participation rather than passive flirting on the 2.0 block.

When you start hanging out in a new social circle, what’s it take to be respected there? You have to actually DO some things, like hang out with them, share yourself with them, build them up, be authentic, etc – you have to spend a significant amount of time just “being” in that social circle in order to be accepted by the new group. Social networking tools are the same – because we’re NOT DEALING WITH TECHNOLOGY. We’re dealing with people.

If you want people to comment on your library’s blog post, to friend your MySpace page, or to watch your YouTube videos… you have to actually tell your community they exist. here are some examples:

“No one subscribes to our RSS feeds!” Well – have you told them what RSS is and what they can do with it?

“No one watches our YouTube videos on bibliographic instruction!” Well… have you embedded the video on your website (I’ve seen some libraries that don’t do this)? Have you introduced them to your videos at all? Are your videos extremely boring?

Have you left your library building to visit community groups to introduce them to your new offerings? Have you asked your community how they want to participate?

The title to this post is “Has Elvis Left the Building?” Has he?

ProBlogger on Inviting Participation

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The ProBlogger blog has a great post on how to invite participation in your blog. Here are some bullet points from the article:

  • Reveal what you don’t know – admitting you don’t know something makes you seem real
  • Ask a Question – ideas: tie it to the thing you don’t know, or ask for experiences or examples
  • Run a poll – allows readers to participate in an anonymous way
  • Invite a response – call your readers to action (write a post of their own, enter a competition, etc)
  • Create a space for interaction – create a forum

Go read the post – lots of good stuff there!

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!!!!!!!!!!!