Thanks to MySpace’s birthday reminders, I can actually seem like an attentive friend and wish my pal Andrea a very happy birthday today! Like me, Andrea balances her professional time in both offline and online librarianish pursuits. She writes her own blog Library Techtonics and co-manages the PLA Blog while also working at the Reading Public Library where I am sure she was instrumental in helping them get their pictures on Flickr. We are in each other’s Top Eight how’s that for friendship? I hope you have a happy birthday Andrea.
the customer is always … what?
Benjamin over at InfoBreaker has a good point. As we try to open our communities and have patrons “join the conversation” and bemore interactive with users, how do we learn to set new boundaries? He outlines a case of a patron not wanting to make a phone call to renew books when she was on vacation, thinking that should be something the library could do themselves, knowing she was on vacation. I think about other examples that have been getting a hearing lately.
If the library was totally democratic, would users still fine themselves? Implement noise policies? Shirt/shoes dress codes? We know they would be unlikely to, as a group, create their own ILS or their own classification system (no, folksonomy is not a classification system, yes it is very useful on its own). So my question is and has been, what is the role for the librarian, the supposed “information expert” in our 2.0 vision of ourselves? We facilitate access to information surely. However, there are many people, librarians and patrons, deeply in love with the idea of library as place. Then there are our board members and taxpayers who also like the idea of “money as thing,” that is the money that funds the library, pays the salary, keeps the lights on and leaves the pockets of taxpayers who are convinced that libraries are a Good Thing. Once your library is 100% in Second Life and not a side project of librarians who work in brick and mortar library buildings, who pays for their health care?
I know that in my job at MetaFilter, the money that pays me comes directly from user signups and advertising that others see on the site. Since we’re not claiming to be a public-sphere institution, I don’t have a problem with ads helping pay the bills of keeping the site running. I’m fairly secure in the site owner’s scruples, as well as my own. However once the library has ads for Amazon in its catalog, or preferences iPods as MP3 players over other available products, or stops buying VHS tapes in favor of DVDs, we’ve made a consumer choice, and we’ve made it for the public. I always get a little fidgety when people talk about brand consciousness and “markets” when they’re talking about the library, but I also realize that’s really the way the world of information is going. That’s getting a little off the topic of whether or not a patron on vacation should be able to have the library just say “oh you’re on vacation, we’ll just auto-renew your books until you come back.” but it is along the same spectrum.
How much do we bend to meet our users? How much do we expect them to bend to meet us?
the rainbow of librarian haircolor
Erica shows us another great use for Flickr — demonstrating the wide range of librarian haircolors to disprove people who would cast aspersions on the tones of librarian tresses. Nice work!
library as conversation
I find it interesting that the conversation model is used frequently in favorable comparisons, implying that there is value in speaking and in being heard. I won’t contest that, but I think that it can sometimes gloss over power dynamics. In this way you can ask for input, for example, ignore it when you make your decisions, and then claim you “listened” to all the interested parties. Technically true, but not in spirit. This is apropos of nothing, just a sort of meme I’ve noticed lately. What I wanted to mention is Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation which looks like a well-funded mini project produced for the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy by R. David Lankes and Joanne Silverstein, of the Information Institute of Syracuse.
They want feedback. They have a wiki and a forum. Please consider reading the draft and letting them know what you think about their ideas. I haven’t read it all yet, but the table-heavy image-heavy home page design with no actual text on the page (even using images where text naturally should go) and no ALT tags on all the images raises “participation” red flags in the “Who is this call for participation really geared towards?” way. Seriously, it’s a great idea to have the library be more interactive for the patrons. However, another slick web page that seems to be selling the idea of participation with phrases like “libraries are in the conversation business” makes me a little wary.
The paper has few endnotes or footnotes making it tough to detemine whether untrue assertions like “to join LiveJournal, you must be invited, thus the community confers identity” or typos in URLS (flicr.com?) are author mistakes or source mistakes. This is a smart paper, so I’m sort of just splitting hairs here, but I feel like in some ways I’m waiting to read papers written by people who use these social software networks in their daily lives, not just get test accounts to study them and write about them. The extreme local nature of libraries means that even smart ideas will have a hard time catching on in broad ways if you can’t make them relevant to all kinds of libraries. Just because social software and the read/write web make sense to techies, kids and academics doesn’t mean that I can explain it to the librarians I work with, yet. Wikipedia has an entry for the phrase “Will it play in Peoria” and that’s what I think about when I read papers like this.
snakes!
“Anyone who thinks working at a library is dull is sadly mistaken,” said librarian Jackie Rafferty. “They’re really in no danger in the library. It’s really a pet snake.”
Pythons kill their prey by squeezing it and do not pose a threat to humans. But circulation and visits to the library have been down since Fithi’s escape.
[thanks mom!]