Category: libraries

When citizens enter a library, they want to see librarians and books. and 26 other rules for good library design. [thanks blake]

People sent me links for a few libraries that have tsunami relief information: the Waterboro Library blog got something up the day after Christmas (not on the main page, but on the RSS feed for sure) and the University of Texas maps library. This huge disaster happening over the holiday season drives the point home that we’re still offering much more in the way of services and up to date information during the hours we’re open, than when we’re closed. Check the statistics on your library web site. When are people coming to visit it? Our library page views go down when the library is closed, but they don’t drop to zero. If your library home page doesn’t change in response to massive world-changing events, doesn’t that sent a message, however inadvertent, about the responsiveness and plugged-in-edness of the library itself? [thanks marylaine & elyssa]

Andrea puts together some thoughts about libraries and success. It seems that public institutions sometimes have a difficult time promoting services without going all in for the “your library is a business. the customer is always right.” idea. I like my outreach job because I can do a lot of marketing and at the end of the day, not take peoples’ money, just offer good service and a good [and improving] product. Do you think your patrons recommend your library?

Somewhat off-topic, I picked up a hitchhiker on Friday (I work near a ski area with very little public transportation, this is a fairly normal thing to do) and met a 20-something guy from the town I work in who worked at a local restaurant. I asked him if he’d been to the library lately and he confessed that he didn’t have a card. I told him all about the library’s fairly large DVD collection (“I just saw Bourne Supremacy last week…”) and the usefulness of the internet access during power failures, and I’d be suprised if he didn’t drop by and get a card if for no other reason than he can save money by doing what he normally does @ the library instead of @ Blockbuster. It doesn’t take a french fry stand to make a library a success, you just need to figure out how to make the library worthwhile for people in the lives they are already living.

It’s been interesting putting together a list of links for my library news page about the recent disaster. I went to the home pages of BPL, NYPL, MPL, SFPL, LAPL, ALA, ALIA, IFLA and a few others, to see if anyone had put up links on their home pages to disaster relief news and information that I could borrow, the way Yahoo, Amazon, IMDB, Apple and a few others did. Milwaukee Public had a link to a list of charities on another site, the other libraries didn’t have home page links, or didn’t as of this morning. Personally, I got most of my links either directly from blogs I read, Google, or through collaborative community sites like Metafilter and Technorati.

This is not a criticism, just an observation about responsiveness, and possibly scale. In our small library, staff can add a link to the library home page just by going into the blog software we use and editing it. I’m sure at larger libraries with site design either outsourced or done only by specialized staff [who likely have time off this week] home page changes can be slower in coming. I think as librarians we all sort of assume that people read the news someplace other than the library home page. What is our responsibility to be responsive to current events with our online presence as well as in person? If anyone has seen good library web pages about the current situation in Southeast Asia, please send them along and I’ll link them here.

My friend Matt went to the new Seattle Public Library and took photos of all the temporary signage that has had to be put in place to clearly state some directional/usage guidelines that were perhaps intended to be obvious. [update: apparently many of these “temporary” signs have been up since May]