virtually a librarian

This post started out as a comment on Kathryn Greenhill’s latest post, Like a Virgin? If you haven’t read it, you should. In it, Kathryn talks about the concept of ‘fast’ - in a recent post, David Lee King identifies a number of services that are direct competitors for libraries, and Kathryn astutely points out that the defining characteristic of these competitors, and the characteristic that makes them such strong competitors for libraries, is that they get the idea of ‘fast’. Customers want what they want, right now, and the competitors that David Lee King lists get that.

I think what our customers want often goes beyond fast, into the realms of immediate. As the hyperconnected generations become independent library users (ie users in their own right, rather than kids brought along to libraries by their parents), they’re going to want immediacy, because they’re used to it in every aspect of their lives. I think that’s going to extend to the physical items we hold, too. If they have to go on a long hold list to get a popular book, as David Lee King suggests in his post on competitors, are they going to be willing to wait? Will they actually care about format at all, if they can get something in one format faster than in another?

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is agility. My greatest concern for the future of libraries is that I’m not sure we’re positioned as an industry (or as individual organisations, in some [many?] cases) to be agile in meeting the challenges that face us and the opportunities that await us. We’ve been playing catch up for too long. We need to take some giant leaps. This goes hand in hand with Kathryn’s notion of fast: we need to be able to act fast when opportunities or challenges arrive. We often just can’t do that.

So how can we address this? We need to kit our staff out with the skills they need to drive web based services and non-traditional service delivery and collecting models. We need to build the infrastructure required to sustain robust online services. We need lightweight policy frameworks that allow wriggle room. We need leaders that value innovation. Without all of this, we’ll never have any hope of being agile.

Kathryn also talks about marketing our strengths to ensure our future. I agree, we need to sell ourselves, to our funding bodies and to our customers. Public libraries, for example, already have some of what our customers are looking for: downloadable media, fast and free wifi, latest release dvds… but how many people in our communities actually know all of this? Do our funders even know what a rock-star job we do on some of this stuff?

For me, the keys to ensuring the future of libraries are agility, good marketing, and the ability to immediately satisfy customer needs. Becoming an agile industry is perhaps not an easy task, but it’s certainly something we can aspire to. When it comes to marketing - well, that’s not easy either, but how many libraries exist within larger organisations that have their own marketing departments, and how many of us make use of them? How many of us willing talk ourselves up, both as individuals and as organisations, by going after media, speaking at conferences, writing articles? Perhaps the hardest thing of all is going to be the immediacy issue: with limited funding, how can we satisfy our customers’ desire for immediacy? It’s not always feasible to buy more books, and how else do you meet demand? But even here, there are things we can do: think outside the square, like mpow has, and put in place programs designed to ensure the latest and hottest titles are on the shelves. Or run customer programs that teach people about how great eBooks are, so demand increases for this lower-priced format.

So, be agile, talk yourself up, and give your customers what they want, right now, then the future of the library is guaranteed. Piece of cake, right?!

February was a big month for me, with a paper at Beyond the Hype, a paper at VALA, a week away at Aurora (and subsequent brain explosion) and the roll out of two multi-session city wide computer training programs for customers. Consequently I’m only just catching up on some biblioblogospheric happenings. I haven’t had much of an opportunity to think out what I’m about to say, so it will be brief, and (I give you fair warning!) nebulous. But here goes:

I’ve been reading a bit about Chris Anderson’s recent article in Wired entitled Free - why $0.00 is the future of business. And I should confess up front that I haven’t read the article itself yet, so I’m almost certain to be missing the point here, to a degree.
There’s been some talk about promoting the free-ness of library services. Now, the first thing that jumped into my head when I started reading some of the posts that have cropped up in this conversation was this:

Library services are often not free at all. Our customers very often pay for the services we provide. In the case of public libraries, they pay for our services through their rates.

So, do we market our services as free? Or do we market them as the quality services they are, with the line that “you’re paying for them, so why not get the most you possibly can out of them”?

More on this to come, I’m sure.

At Aurora this past week, I was chatting with one of the facilitators, Becky Schreiber, who mentioned that she had bought a year’s worth of training along with her MacBook, using Apple’s One to One program. For $99 a year, you  can take advantage of up to 52 one hour sessions with a Mac trainer. The training takes place in Apple stores, one-on-one, and covers a huge variety of topics. (I’ve never heard of this before: do they do this in Australia?)

Why is this so great?

• First up, they’re making money from this - not a great deal, but they’re making some money where their staff would otherwise be idle.
• They’re maximising the amount of productive time their store staff have (I think - I’m working on the assumption that the training is run by sales staff - correct me if I’m wrong) - instead of downtime between customers, store staff could potentially be training customers.
• They’re up-skilling their users and creating power users. Power users are going to use products to their full and to my mind, are probably going to be a whole lot more likely to invest in other products
• Cost/benefit wise, this program has the potential to yield excellent return on investment for customers, and for Apple.
• They’re helping customers to become fully acquainted with the product, and to learn about all the features and benefits that they might otherwise never discover. Enlightened customers have the potential to use products to their fullest. I don’t know about you, but every time I discover something new I can do with one of my gadgets, I’m even more satisfied with my decision to buy it.

Becky suggested that it would be great if libraries could figure out a way to do something similar. How could we capitalise on the time when we’re not interacting with customers in our traditional roles to provide this kind of personalised, value added service? What a great idea, and one that warrants some thinking.

Instead of just signing customers up and handing over their membership cards, what if we offered them an appointment to come back and spend half an hour with a librarian, to assist them discover what the library has to offer? It wouldn’t even necessarily need to be a one-on-one session. We could simply offer every new customer the chance to book in for a group-based new customer tutorial, where we could feasibly run through the features and benefits of the product (ie. the library) they’ve just bought into and show them how to get the most out of it.

What if we invested even ten minutes orienting every new customer with, for example, the catalogue and our online resources before we hand their card over and send them on their merry way? We’d be on the way to creating happy, power users, and happy, power users are more likely to become regular users who want more of what we have to offer.

A number of libraries already offer customers the opportunity to make an appointment to chat with a librarian, through “book a librarian” or “book an information coach” sessions. But what if we said, to every new customer, “would you like a librarian with that library card?”

How many of our customers really know what the library can do for them, and how they can get the most out of the library? Getting them in the door is only half the battle. How do we keep them coming back?

After sales care and training for library customers? What a great idea! Thanks, Becky!

There was an interesting post on the Library Garden blog earlier this month relaying a twitter conversation about what terminology libraries could (or should) use to describe their electronic information resources, rather than the word ‘databases’.

I agree – we need a new word. Why? I’m just not sure that the word ‘database’ means anything much to anyone but library peops (and even for we library types, I think it’s a word we’ve gotten stuck with, for want of something better, rather than one that meaningfully describes what these resources are or do).

So what exactly do we call them?

One participant in the twitter conversation relayed in the Library Garden post suggests asking the user. Surely this is the answer! The principles of user-centred design could be employed here to help us come up with a label that means something to the people it should mean something to: the patrons. Let’s get them to explore the resources, describe their usefulness in their own words, and come up with some appropriate labels.

Down with jargon!