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.

Here are the slides, if you’re into that sort of thing:

Was there a handout, you say? Was there. (PDF) I’ve also made a list of all the relevant links on my Delicious page.

All in all, I think it was a pretty successful program. Lynn Dennis from Roselle Public Library discussed the ins and outs of her library’s Ning network, which has managed to weather the initial burst of enthusiasm and become a site with a core user base and real longevity.
Jonathan Bullington and Katie Cousino from Triblocal helped to highlight ways libraries can leverage hyperlocal media to raise their profile and identify new community stakeholders.
And Bill Pardue of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library wrapped things up with his thoughts on “predatory reference,” taking a more active stance in pursuing reference service beyond the walls of the library.

It also marked my first attempt to do a talk using Prezi, the nifty Flash-based presentation software. In addition to looking nice (looking at all the slides at once – click the circle below to see the birdseye view – looks almost like certain Andy Goldsworthy pieces), I found the design and navigation interface to be fairly easy to use. Check it out below.

Because it’s true. Like Soylent Green, it’s the individuals within the institution that make it great. A big part of my job is harnessing these online resources to bring that same level of personality online. I’m hoping these slides serve as an crash course in many of the tricks of the trade.

Be sure to click on the links in the presentation for other relevant resources. And please share your strategies for organizational identity management in the comments.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While getting ready to leave Monterey this morning, I realized that I completely neglected to mention the contributions of Gail Shaw, my library’s webmaster/systems librarian in my presentation at Internet Librarian 2009, I’m taking the time nowto point out her contributions.

Simply put, there is no way this project would have happened without her contributions, feedback, and support. Implementing the mobile platform – either through the OPAC, the mobile website, or the Shoutbomb service did not happen overnight, and Gail did the vast majority of the legwork in making that happen.

If you’re hoping to implement a service like this at your organization, make sure you’re working closely with someone who knows your ILS inside and out. Not only that, make sure everyone knows of the impact their work on the back-end contributed to a smooth workflow on the user end.

All in all, I had a great time at IL2009, and I’m looking forward to putting everyone’s great ideas into practice. Expect some blogginess in the days to come, and I hope to hear about what everyone else extracted from the experience  – even if you couldn’t make out to California yourself!

I have a feeling that the title “Catalog Notices to Cell Phones” isn’t the most descriptive thing in the world, so I’ll also include a more fully-fleshed out description here. With any luck, they’ll get this added to the full website as well. Here goes:

Texting Your Library: Designing a Mobile-Friendly Service Platform

People are doing more and more with their mobile phones, but the market is a confusing mishmash of proprietary hardware, software, and service providers. How do you offer mobile-friendly library service that speaks to many types of mobile users, while providing the most bang for your buck? Toby Greenwalt, the Virtual Services Coordinator for the Skokie Public Library shares his experience building a suite of mobile services, including a mobile catalog and website. Special attention will be paid to ways libraries can use text messaging to send out account notices, offer reference service, and allow patrons to reserve items using their mobile phones.

Looking forward to (virtually)  seeing you there! If you have any questions beforehand, please leave me a comment and I’ll try to cover it in the presentation.

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.

The handout for the presentation can also be found here. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions after the fact.

LITA Camp gets off to a good start with a introductory keynote for library futurist Joan Frye Williams. Technology always runs the risk of being alienating, and social media hopefully provides the opportunity to address this issue. But because this stuff is so easy to use, it can also call attention to the walls we create in the library meatspace.

A brilliant illustration of the power of the personal connection emerged from an exercise Williams led, of which you can see the video below:

Contrasting this exercise with our standard “read X resource for Y piece of information” transaction raises a number of questions. We call ourselves professionals, yet we’re reluctant to give out our names. (Would you go to a doctor who doesn’t give out their name?) We’re beholden to building up our numbers for reference transactions, but we don’t really have metrics for the relationships we build. How do we address this? Can we make all of our spaces more personal – and improve our profession in the process?

Williams certainly seems to think so. But to do so, we’ll have to go long. The recession gives us a unique opportunity to accomplish this, as it can make those who are more wary of change a little more receptive to new possibilities.

View Williams’ slides in PPT.
Notes after the jump. My commentary is in italics.

The Everywhere Library: Creating, Communicating, and especially Integrating
Joan Frye Williams

Tough times for libraries

Many who see technology as just “expensive stuff”

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
Crisis gives us cover – gives us opportunity to try new things.
The shock doctrine!

People who wouldn’t otherwise listen are generally afraid – you can capitalize on that fear, if you use the right words.

Beloit College – Mindset List

“The library world in particular is full of former a students. We’re all in touch with our inner know-it-all”

Are we providing what civilians want, or what we think they should want?
How niche can we get, given that there generally is no one demographic (aside from maybe carbon-based) shared by all our customers? Can we create new services acknowledging that certain things just aren’t for everyone?

Blending our thinking – offering different things by synthesizing multiple services and modes of information delivery

Quality and Convenience
Convenience shapes consumer behavior more than just about anything else right now.

Place and Ubiquity
Library is no longer a place for the stuff. It’s a place for the people.
Librarians like searching. Civilians like finding. Civilians like doing stuff with what they find even more.
When people tag information, they usually include tags about its use, not just what it is about – we can’t ignore that but we do.

Security and Openness
Secure or Open? Safe or Accessible? We act like these are mutually exclusive.
Much library security has been guaranteed by hiding.

Accuracy and Opinion
Professionals are supposedly regarded for their opinions. Why are we so afraid of injecting ourselves into the information we find?
By trying to provide accurate and neutral information, we strip the life out of it.

Equality and Customization
Misconception of fairness as providing the exact same thing for everybody.
Circulation policy as model for fairness – “what is the difference between 10 books for 3 weeks and 3 books for 10 weeks?”

Preservation and Innovation
Closing the innovation gap – the tools make it possible for anyone to create these changes – but the system isn’t necessarily conducive to that.
Also question of how to treat work in progress – how do we treat stuff that’s still incubating?

High Standards and Generosity
Library community is rife with perfectionists, which may impede the permanent beta process.
Are we perfectionists because we stand to lose out personally if someone finds a flaw?

Planning and Improvisation
“I am a futurist, not a psychic.” We have to reconcile the need to improvise when circumstances change without abandoning the planning process.
Train ourselves to say “I don’t know that.”

Confidentiality and Relationships
Relationship-based enterprise, not a transaction-based
You do not get trust out of a transaction. cf. Lankes, participatory
“You guys have been doing information hookups. Don’t you feel cheap?”
Would you go to a dentist/lawyer/professional who wouldn’t tell you his name?
Confidentiality and anonymity is not the same. C often squashes the personal side of what we do.

Advice to a new college student: Find a librarian. Get to know them personally. They will help you ace any class. Best BI advice ever.

Expertise and Community Focus
We can be experts – and get to know the civilians – without dumbing down.

New metrics
We think “to know us is to love us” – are we right?
Data can be manipulated so that it is separate from individuals information, but still useful and predictive.

We measure transactions, but we don’t pay attention to what people do.
“Each time we answer a directional question at the reference desk, it’s a tick mark for the failure of our wayfinding system.”

What if it really is hard?
Even if it is hard, I hope you try.

Exercise: 3 minutes. Partner up. Think of a favorite book, movie, play, poem, or piece of music.
What is it?
Why is it important to you?
How has that affected your life

After: How did the person sell the item? How animated did the person get? How important for the story teller was it that the other person was convinced on the story?
It’s about meaning. That is the business we are in.

Go long. This is work worth doing.

These slides have seen a lot of mileage – my co-worker also used them for a public class. Twitter gets around.

Clearly, it’s something on the minds of quite a few people, as we went for far longer than the alotted 5-minute lightning talk. Maybe we could call it a thunderstorm talk!