Tag: libraries

the customer is always … what?

Posted on by jessamyn

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?

two “day in the life” anecdotes

Posted on by jessamyn

Library Oral History Project
I went to the Calef Library in Washington and after debugging a knotty problem about why one computer could get on the Internet and one couldn’t (weird cables and someone being creative with the wiring who was not the librarian) I headed over to the town offices where the library was spearheading an oral history project. They got a lot of the older people in town together — one of whom called herself new to the area because she arrived in 1946 — and asked people a few short questions: What’s your name, where did you live and what did you do for fun?

People talked about taking horse and buggies around town, discussed old buildings that burned down, people who had passed on, and walking two miles back and forth to school each day. The most memory-jogging topic seemed to be a notorious schoolteacher who half the people in the room had been taught by. Apparently she was a bit of a task master and mention of her name always brought laughter. I’m not sure what the eventual plan for the videos are, but it was an easy set-up, one video recorder and someone to point it and a microphone hooked to a boombox so that people could be heard from across the room. You can see a few more photos under my Flickr oral history tag.

Young Library Patrons

Then I went to the Tunbridge Library to help them debug their Internet connection which had been flakey and was currently down. As much as they love their new broadband connection, the dial-up connection was a bit more reliable and often easier to troubleshoot. Now there’s a router, a hub and a switch all of which have wires coming in and out of them and a ton of on/off/other buttons. It looked to me like someone had pressed one of the “other” buttons which took down the network. I set it back up and wrote a list of troubleshooting steps that they can use next time. It’s sort of a big responsibility when the library calls/emails you and lets you know their Internet access is down. In areas like this, there is a pretty short list of people who can troubleshoot something like that, though I’m working every day to try to expand that number.

At the library we also made a plan for them to get a wireless router, a hosted domain and a website. For under $150 in set-up costs, they’ll have a presence on the web, custom domains for their email addresses and a high speed wireless connection in a town with very little broadband saturation. It feels just like the rural electrification project, very exciting.

I know I sort of bang this drum a lot, but the Digital Divide isn’t just about not having access to the Internet, it’s about not living in an Internet-aware culture. So in the same way that poverty is really about paucity of options — so not only do you not have money or resources but no one you know has money or resources — the Digital Divide is really about not having access, having erratic access, or not knowing what to do with that access once you have it. Every time I see a web page with ads designed to look like page elements, or pop-ups designed to look like Windows error messages, I cringe because I know that the people I work with are likely to have trouble with them. While I go on the road and talk about library 2.0, I’m still explaining to many of my students that no, they haven’t won a free laptop no matter what the blinky ad on the page says. I feel sometimes like teaching computer skills is all about explaining to people why they should dip their toes into a culture that seems hellbent on deceiving them, misleading them and ripping them off.

hi – 12oct

Posted on by jessamyn

Hi. I’ve been scarce lately. Not that you need to know this thanks to the wonders of RSS, but I’ve felt scarce lately and that’s important as well. I spent this past week starting my Digital Pictures class, teaching two people to use computers for the first time, checking in on the Internet/wireless install at two of my tiny libraries, staffing my drop-in time and driving back and forth to Massachusetts to assist family members with a bunch of medical upsets, most of which have mostly passed. I generally don’t update here when life trumps blogging, but it’s worth a reminder that jessamyn.com sometimes reveals what this site doesn’t dwell on, for the curious.

I have a lot of travel coming up. I’ll be speaking at NELA here in Vermont and an ACRL event in Oregon. Next month takes me to Michigan, Wisconsin and Hawaii. It’s an odd combination of talks, Digital Divide issues on the one hand and Hot New Technologies on the other hand. I feel like that mayor in A Nightmare Before Christmas, with the two faces that oppose each other.

As the days get shorter I’ve also been in strategy mode. I like my job, the things I do in my life and I’m thrilled every time I get an IM or an email from someone saying “Hey I tried one of those things you talked about in your presentation and it really worked well!” I’ve been spending some time thinking about scalability and the problem of the technologically left-behind. We like technological solutions to problems because they often scale. If you can make software that solves a problem, you can replicate it and that problem solving spreads. IF, and this is a big if, if you have people that have a computer and can use software. Writing books to inform and educate adults who can read scales. Teaching adults to read doesn’t. Adults who don’t read have a variety of reasons why this is the case and often carry a lot of baggage about not being able to read.

Adults who can’t use computers are in the same boat. Many of these people come to libraries. One of the students I was working with this week had tried to go to the library, my old library. He had needed to fill out a job application for Home Depot and had very little computer experience. The library had 30 minute time computer slots (when I was there I recall it was 45, but in any case it wasn’t enough). There was a way for him to save his work on the website, but neither he nor the librarians he worked with could show him how to do this. He waited, and found me and my drop-in time a few weeks later. I worry sometimes that if we’re providing computers and internet access to people and then make them really only useful to people who already know how to use them, we’re reinforcing a bad bad trend.

As John Blyberg discussed in his Going to the Boneyard post about library detractors and our own abilities as marketers, lobbyists and activists, if people are saying we’re not serving them, that we’re irrelevant, maybe we’re not doing what we do correctly? I think there’s a difference between the “there’s something in my library to offend everyone, even me” sentiment and the article that John and many others are responding to claiming that libraries are obsolete but it’s not a huge difference. As a profession, we have a hard time standing up for ourselves, and a hard time defining our new directions. This makes us susceptible to attack. The nobility and rationality of our arguments isn’t always going to see us through. We need to be proactive and firm about our messages: DOPA is bad legislation, MySpace isn’t a threat, libraries are good places for kids and teens, reading bad words won’t make you a bad person. We need to develop solutions that scale.

The localness of libraries is their charm but also has the potential to be their undoing. I took a friend for a drive returning library books yesterday (five libraries!) and the difference between the little library in the poorer town and the little library in the bigger town was striking to her, whereas I’m more used to it. We’ve seen legislators and the Department of Education step in and deal with some of this inequality when it happens to schools, whats our large scale solution when we see this sort of thing happening to libraries?