They can’t survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own.) More librarians are telling me (unhappily) that the number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals. That’s not a long-term strategy, nor is it particularly an uplifting use of our tax dollars.

Here’s my proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative.

Once again, the net turns things upside down. The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books. What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.

I thnk @itsjustkate sums my reaction to this rather eloquently:

so, wait… we *should* be helping ppl learn to find and contextualize info? Oh! *smacks forehead*

Gee thanks, Seth. All this time we’ve been pottering about in our workspaces, dusting and shushing the entire time, with our hair in buns and cats in our pockets. All we need to do to reinvent ourselves is to espouse the core belief behind our profession.

But rather than get too worked up about this, it may be better to consider the big picture. If Godin is seeing our industry this way, then we definitely have a problem. And while the biblioblogosphere/twitterverse/Friendfeed spaces help maintain an active flow of ideas, it’s still an inside-baseball echo chamber. Granted, that’s a feature rather than a bug, but it’s a reminder of how rarely our efforts are recognized on the larger scale.

So I’m hoping Mr. Godin will read this and give someone from the library world the opportunity to demonstrate just how well and how often we help people (in Godin’s parlance) scale otherwise insurmountable intellectual heights.

There are dozens of librarians out there who could do this. Jessamyn West. Buffy Hamilton. Brian Herzog. Bobbi Newman. Jason Griffey. The Darien coterie. Richard Kong*. And that’s just a small sampling – any attempt to list everyone would be a futile effort. I’m inspired by my colleagues every day, and it gives me such hope to see so many people being awesome in public.

To librarians who don’t see this as their raison d’etre, please don’t let the door to the profession hit you on the ass on your way out.

And to Seth, how about it? Why not use your considerable megaphone to let us demonstrate what we’ve accomplished, and how much more we’re capable of?

*full disclosure: I work with Richard, along with a host of other awesome people.

You know who you are.

Thanks for a great conference, those of you I met in-person finally, and those I got to talk to on the datastream. Let’s do what we can to continue the conversation, and make great things happen.

But my job is not all nose-to-the-grindstone technology work and Virtual Services development. To provide a teensy bit of balance, I’ve been purchasing the teen and adult graphic novels at the library. This has been an experience – on one side, I get to play Kid In A Candy Store and stock on all the trade paperbacks I’ve never quite gotten around to reading. On the other hand, it’s serving as a harsh reminder of how little I know about manga, which of course is the most popular genre of all of them by far.

(And yes, I realize that manga isn’t a genre per se. There’s a huge amount of diversity in the field, from artwork to subject matter to characters to everything in between. But we do have our patrons who simply ask for manga, and end up walking out of the building with an armload of different titles.)

Luckily, I’ve got the new New York Times Graphic Novel Best Seller Lists to fill in some of the gaps:

I’m not sure if this makes the collection job harder or easier. It certainly makes my understanding of Naruto more hilarious.

I’m particularly taken by David Lee King’s summary of Marshall Breeding’s talk on Next Generation Library Interfaces. We’re hard at work at implementing a new catalog discovery interface of our own, so these notes serve as a reminder that we’re doing The Lord’s Work.

These blocks of text, however, reads like my wish list for what I hope to accomplish with my library’s web presence:

strategic infrastructure + web 2.0
a more social and collaborative approach
web tools and tech that foster collaboration
integrated blogs, wiki, user reviews, etc
avoid 2.0 info silos – don’t have separate blogs, wikis, etc – make sure it’s integrated

scope of the next gen library interface:
attempt to collapse silos or draw appropriately from each silo
unified user experience
single point of entry into everything
print + electronic
local + remote
locally created content

Functions and features:
Interface features/user experience:
simple point of entry – optional advanced search
relevancy ranked results
facets for narrowing and navigation
query enhancement – spell check, etc
suggested related results / recommendation service
enriched visual and textual content
single sign-on

It’s like they’re saying what I’m thinking, before I’ve been able to put it into words. Thanks, Marshall. And thanks, David, and everyone who’s been posting their conference notes. Someone out there is reading them.

LOOKING FOR LIBRARIANS WHO HATE TO READ

We are an independant production company looking to interview librarians specifically those who don’t like to read. We would like to hear your story and see if it would be worthwhile to use you in our upcoming project. If we use your story for the feature you will be compensated. Please reply with your stories.

Those of you harboring this darkest secrets, you know where to go.

Again, just sayin’.

Just sayin’.

Like so many of you, I went ahead and searched for myself. Here’s what comes up:

Of those six hits, we see:

• An old airplay chart I made from my old college radio station (which has unfortunately disappeared)
• My background role in a college production of Death and the King’s Horseman
• My successful 1996 contest entry in a “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” contest, held by my local alternative newsweekly
• a quote from my high school newspaper on the dress code that manages to say nothing whatsoever, albeit awesomely
• A comment I submitted to the Taco Bell website, which I’ll attempt to qualify by saying I was trying to get all of their Tick kid’s meal toys.

Compare to a present-day Google search:

Which is mostly library-related stuff, at least on the front end. What happened to you, Toby? You used to be cool.

Or at least your digital footprint did.

What’s on your cache? How has it changed in the intervening eight years?

With all the exciting new changes taking place at WebJunction, I had to get reacquainted with the site. Jessamyn pointed out that a new WordPress for Libraries group had launched. As MPOW is getting more involved with WordPress, it seems like a good opportunity to get advice and talk shop.

I used to have an account, but it was tied to an email address from my former POW. That address no longer exists. (The former POW seems to be doing rather well, as last I checked.) So I thought I’d create a new ID, and connect it to a more permanent (for me, at least) email address.

Filling out my bibliodemographics, I came to the category to choose my library type. But something seems to be missing:

What about we public folk? If you return an item late, do we not fine? If you start yelling, do we not shush?

I’m sure it’s just an oversight on the part of the person who built the form. Still, Webjunction, don’t you forget about me.

The site functions much in the same vein as the Flickr toys at Big Huge Labs, which my colleague at MPOW has been using to great success. What I like most about all of this is the sense of instant gratification, which can have a huge impact on the patron. If you get the photo framing right, you can crank these out in a matter of minutes.

Great work, and I look forward to hearing how other libraries end up using the tool.