Oh no NOT another Survey!

In this world of polls and surveys it seems that nothing gets done unless the polls show a high favorability rating. Politicians flip-flop on issues because one poll shows strong support for one direction and a week later a new poll favors the opposite direction. If your direction is decided by the whims of many, varied and ever-changing public opinions you will sail in a sea of chaos. Businesses often face this type of dilemma and must often go back to their basic business plans for guidance: why are we in business, what is it we do, and where or how should we expand our services. Sticking to the plan without considering changes or modernizations isn't an optimal way to go either. Consider the coach and buggy companies of the 1800s, a thriving business in their day. Not too much need for buggies these days, as a speciality for a specific market yes, but not as a Fortune 500 performer. Many of the coach and buggy industries changed to designing the interiors and bodies of various automobiles. They evaluated their business and changed with the times. So how does a business or service maintain optimal user satisfaction while not going in ten different directions all headed for failure?

Some basic guidelines to consider:
Know your history - why do libraries exist? What are the basic services they have provided over the years?
How have these services changed through the years? New formats? Emphasis on collections? Audiences? When fiction books were first introduced into public library collections a hue and cry went up - librarians felt they had a moral obligation to provide educational materials, not sleazy fiction!! Was the cry any less loud when DVDs, and contemporary music CDs were introduced into the collections!? And now computer games - WHAT gaming in libraries - NO!! Oh yeah, gaming in libraries - bring that and more into our world!
What relevant services should we be offering our public? Some librarians still want to produce buggies and some want to branch out adding coffee shops, while others wouldn't mind becoming a local WAWA - get your books and gas up at the same time! Or even worse let's pretend we are bookstores and totally negate the information organization and retrieval principles and values that we have refined over the years.

How did you answer the earlier Question: What is our basic service?
In my opinion libraries open the doors of possibilities and life long learning to the world of people we serve. We do it within dwindling budget constraints and with competing industries that also provide what used to be our own little niche of knowledge.

Survey time!

• How would you define a modern library?
• List the top five services we should provide for our customers.
• How should technology impact and change the services we provide?
• Describe an innovative way libraries could capitalize on new technologies
• What advertising and marketing campaign would move us from the libraries of old to being the hot new APP in town? Imagine having a AD campaign with the astronauts using their mobile library APP to research sun spot data while in space!! Libraries to infinity and beyond !!

Basic questions with no easy answers, but questions we must ask.  What makes us more valuable than bookstores and what makes us more complete than simply being a search engine on a computer? Until we can provide answers to these questions we will be floundering and irrelevant to the world of ideas and knowledge.

And remember ideas without actions are useless.  Individual librarians will be the catalyst of change.  As more librarians add their voices to OUR future and the future of all libraries we will improve as a profession.  To remain silent is to cease to exist.  OUR choice.

What is Library 2.0 to Me?

While learning about Library 2.0 at Virginia Beach Public Library we were asked to contemplate the following question: Library 2.0 is many things to many people -- what does it mean to you?

My thoughts on that question...
Library 2.0 for me is the opening up of information to customers whenever, however, and wherever they need it. Library collections should be collaboratively linked to one another with their entire contents accessible 24/7. Librarians should work seamlessly in the background to provide the special touch of information enrichment that librarianship offers: selection, metadata, connections, references, and linkages. The information should be available in such a way that a specific page of a book, a specific scene in a movie or a specific song on a CD is instantaneously at the fingertips of our customers. In an age where this is all possible, and in many cases already available why would we want to cling to past practices? “Sorry the library is closed, we will re-open at 10am tomorrow – please hold your information needs until that time”… No way!!
After watching a You Tube video: A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto by Laura CohenI thought about cataloging in relation to 2.0, again here are my thoughts.... The Librarian 2.0 Manifesto was thought provoking. The idea I wish to add comes from the Manifesto item: I will lobby for an open catalog that provides personalized, interactive features that users expect in online information environments. Remember when….Manual typewriters were available for term papers? Then came the electric typewriter, followed by the word processor – wow what a difference! I don’t know of anyone who clung to a manual typewriter [remember footnotes?!] once they experienced a word processor. The same is true for library technology – first came the handwritten card catalog cards (I’m not old enough to remember those days!), which gave way to typed cards, first on manual typewriters [oh the pain of typing the tracings at the bottom!], then electric typewriters (with bars to hold the cards in place!), which gave way to OCLC with MARC records collaboratively input by thousands of librarians. This was a technological innovation that allowed richer subject access, searching that could connect series titles and keyword searches that were IMPOSSIBLE in the card catalog, early COM CATs (microfiche catalogs), and OPACs. Now we have a new library revolution that is using WEB 2.0 and adapting it to libraries, Library 2.0 – I say go for it!! Why would librarians cling to the old way of creating and searching static information when the possibilities are endless in what we will be able to provide both now and in the future… the 3x5 library catalog card severely limited what we could represent about a title ; the MARC record provided ways for more information to be recorded about a title, but Library 2.0 OPENS resources in their entirety anytime, anyplace, anywhere to be viewed, evaluated, notated, criticized, shared, given tags and hyperlinked to more info … why would anyone cling to Library 1.0 once they experience the world of Library 2.0 – why?
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