virtually a librarian

So I spent the last couple of days in Melbourne at NLS4. The New Librarians Symposium is a great biennial for new graduates to get together, present a first paper, hear from experts and have some seriously good times do some serious networking.

It was a chock-full program: 30 papers, 5 keynotes, a debate and a handful of other talks in two days. It was exhausting, and for the first time ever, I actually left the conference early and took an earlier flight home. The tiredness might have been made worse by the social program - which included a pre-conference drinks meet up (which a few of us followed up by a late, late, late dinner that kept us all awake half the night), a cocktail party and the conference dinner (which I skipped this time round) - and the fact that I managed to have a hotel room situated right on top of one of Melbourne’s most popular (and loudest) nightclubs. The music was great; it’s just that I didn’t particularly want to feel it vibrating through the floor and all the furniture at 2am after a long day of papers! Next time I book accommodation at the conference venue, I’ll be looking for reviews first.

Highlights of the conference for me:

• Donna Leung’s paper on transferable skills and using them to help you switch sectors, Any old library job versus the job your really want. I actually put my laptop down and just listened for this paper - something fairly rare! People talked about this paper for the rest of the conference.
• Alyson Dalby’s paper on being professionally active. I like that Alyson subtly highlighted the difference between being an active association / group / committee member and an inactive member. I think this was a timely lead in to the call for expressions of interest for the ALIA New Generation Advisory Committee (go! express your interest!), of which Alyson and I are both members. People always come away from conferences re energised; I hope some come away energised to get active.
• Naomi Doessel’s paper on professional development for librarians working in non-traditional library roles. Lots of notes were taken in this session. For me, the most interesting part was Naomi’s run-down of the different mentoring relationships that she makes use of. And the Ian images were highly amusing too.
• Bruce Klopsteins’ paper Butting heads or building minds, in which he pulled together a bunch of ideas from his reading and presented a paper that felt more like a keynote than a first time paper. Some really intelligent thought went into this one. I’m looking forward to reading the full paper.

Some non program highlights included dinner at a fabulous Italian restaurant on Thursday night, followed by dinner at my favourite Melbourne restaurant Cafe Zum Zum on Friday. Also a highlight was catching up with friends from afar - friends from uni, colleagues from my former pow, the people I get to see only on the conference circuit, and a whole bunch of new people.

The New Generation Advisory Committee (NGAC) is currently reviewing the future of the New Librarians Symposium and looking for feedback. If this is a topic close to your heart, check out the article in this month’s inCite, which outlines the four models we’ve come up with, then drop us an email with your feedback.

As for me, I think this will probably be my last NLS. I’m feeling a little like I’m at the end of my new grad-ness, and less like I identify with the issues that seem to be facing lots of new grads. I’m also stepping down as chair of NGAC as soon as new members have been recruited, so I can focus on a few other things in the year ahead. It’s been fun, but time to move on.

So, I blinked… and suddenly six months went by without a peep on this blog. Life has been doing what it does best - barreling along while I try to keep up. Where have I been? Right here, but buried under a pile of projects, a gaggle of committees, and a series of attempts at getting non-library, non-technology related hobbies.

Life’s not easing up but blogging has been on my mind lately, in more ways than one.

In my last post, I raised some questions measuring the success or otherwise of 2.0ish projects. I’m still thinking about this stuff - constantly. The time for me to evaluate mpow’s new blogging project is rapidly approaching, and I’m starting to look in earnest for literature on other libraries’ evaluations of similar projects. I’m still not turning up a lot.

I’m spending a fair bit of time thinking about what success for a project like this looks like. It’s a difficult thing to conceptualise. And obviously it’s something that needs to be conceptualised before you can figure out what sort of data you need to measure that success.

Of course, success for this project will be measured against our aims and objectives for the project - some of which relate to topics quite apart from the level of usage the blog has garnered, including aims like trialling blogging as a service delivery platform, and providing staff with an opportunity to get familiar and comfortable with blogging in the public domain (and with the technology itself).

But what other things should we be looking at? What, in general terms, makes a blog successful?

Conversational intensity

This is something I think a lot of bloggers get hung up on, so it gets its own sub heading. To what extent is success in blogging about “conversational intensity”?

We’re not getting a great deal of comments (I’ve got a theory about why that is, which I’ll probably blog about later), and I’m not particularly phased by that at this point. I had a chat with a colleague about the appropriateness of using blogs without being too concerned about generating conversation. She indicated she thought that a blog without multi-way conversation (ie with little commenting) misses the point of blogging. Her feeling is that conversation is a fundamental element of blogging.

I think I agree, to a certain extent, but I’m not convinced that blogs that exist without active commenting don’t have their own role to play. After all, we know that there are lots of different types of participants in this participatory web: consumers of information; occasional content producers (commenters); active content producers; and so on. (And this doesn’t even take into account the idea of using a blog as a CMS of sorts - people do great stuff with WordPress-driven websites. But that’s a little different.) Does it really matter if you don’t get a whole host of comments? Is there a ratio of comments to page views* that indicates a blog is successful in facilitating conversation?

In my opinion, level of conversation is a measure you should get hung up on only if it’s a primary aim for your blogging project.

Attributes of a successful blog

So, if the success of a blog does not hinge on conversational intensity, on what does it hinge (other than the blog’s aims and objectives)?

According to Asterisk, a successful blog is:

• Well written
• Frequently updated
• Consistent
• Open
• Responsive
• Well designed
• Aware of its audience
• Varied in topic
• Personal
• Thick skinned
• Honest
• Accountable
• Funny

Are these the kind of success measures against which libraries should be assessing their blogs? Are subjective measures like these valid? And how do we measure against them? These measures do appeal to me. Or some of them do - some are obviously personal preference things, and dependent on the type of blog (like funniness, for eg) but others could be useful.

An obvious thing to measure is readership - subscribers, site visits, post views and so forth. But how do you decide whether the level of readership is enough to mean success? And, in the case of our project, whether the level of readership is enough to warrant a transition from pilot to permanent service? Do we work with a ratio of site views for the blog versus site views for the library’s website? And if so, do we compare to page views for the library’s home page, or do we look at page views for the young people’s page on our website and compare to that? Do we look at site views for the blog versus population in our region for the target audience?

Is their any validity in looking at participation in polls? What if we created polls for the express purpose of getting a feel for the number of people who might participate? What would that tell us?

Clearly, my thoughts on evaluating blogging projects are still fairly nebulous, and I know I need to do some research outside the library field to see how (or even if) other industries are evaluating the success of customer facing, service oriented blogs. But I do want to here from other library-types on this, and it appears I aint gonna find what I need in the literature.

So now that that I’ve just suggested that conversation may not mean much in an assessment of a blog’s success, I’m going to try and start one. Tell me, readers (if there are any of you left, after my six month hiatus): what do you think the markers of a successful library-land blog might be? What are the attributes of a successful blog? If you were evaluating a blogging project, what data would you be collecting and what would you be comparing to? How would you decide if your blog is a success?

* Conversational intensity is often measured by dividing total comments by total posts, but I think another useful metric would be to get a feel for the number of visitors who feel compelled to get involved in a conversation.

There’s been plenty of talk around the Library 2.0 theme on the idea of evaluation or assessment. At Information Wants to be Free, Meredith Farkas says what she wanted to see come out of Library 2.0 was a greater focus on assessment. I certainly want to see libraries have a greater focus on assessment, too, and I want to see them publishing about it. (Particularly public libraries. We just don’t publish enough.)

Why aren’t we (libraries in general) publishing about the success (or failure) of our 2.0 projects? Why is there virtually no data to be found that quantifies some of the outcomes of 2.0 projects? We’ve been on this 2.0 bandwagon long enough for studies and assessments and evaluations to have been undertaken.  For a movement that’s intrinsically tied up with quick publishing channels like blogs and wikis, it seems strange that there is a real dearth of published studies on 2.0 projects. Why is that?

Walt Crawford had this to say in a recent post on his two blog survey books:

Maybe there’s a clear desire not to know how library blogs are doing in the real world, other than a few cherry-picked examples. I’d like to think that’s not the case. It would be unprofessional to tell people about how wonderful library blogs are, and encourage them to create such blogs, without giving them honest and broad-ranging information on what’s actually happening with such blogs.

I’d like to think that’s not the case, too. But I wonder. I wonder a few things:

• Is the lack of publishing indicative of a lack of success? (And a fear of talking about it?)
• Is the lack of publishing indicative of a perceived lack of success, a perception that might be formed because we’re not collecting the right data? (eg. How are we measuring ROI? Do we just count comments on blog posts? Or do we look at exit links, time spent on the page, holds on titles blogged about, impact on online resource usage stats…? I certainly hope all of these metrics and more are informing libraries’ evaluations of their blogs, because if we’re just relying on comments to measure user engagement, then we’re not seeing the full picture.)
• Is the lack of publishing indicative of a lack of evaluation? (And if so, why aren’t we evaluating? Because we don’t know how? Because we don’t have time? Because we don’t want to know?)
• Or, is it just that we’re not publishing about our evaluations?

I’ve got a blogging project in the pipeline at mpow. It’s germinating quite slowly, because I want to see it well planned. We want a well planned implementation, but also a well planned, multi-faceted evaluation. If it works, I want to know about it, and I want us to be able to reflect on what we did and make links to what worked. If it doesn’t work, I want to know about it just as much (if not more), because I want to be able to reflect on what we did, look for ways we could improve, and ultimately, pull the pin if that’s what we need to do.

Blogs (and all things shiny and 2.0) are just great. They’re fun for staff to work on, and have huge potential to engage our users. But none of us have time to run services that don’t work. If we don’t evaluate, we have no ability to know whether

We know that “because we always did it that way” is not a good reason to keep doing the things we’ve always done, whether they work or not. But neither should a failure to evaluate be the reason we keep on keeping on with our 2.0 services.

If you have evaluated your 2.0 service, publish about it! And if you have published, I’d love to receive some links.

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.

I stumbled across this amusing gem from the Annoyed Librarian tonight, while trying to deal with my well overflowing feed reader in a slightly more productive way than hitting ‘mark all as read’.

But then, I may as well just hit that oft maligned button, given that more than half the posts are from library blogs and will therefore say nothing, repeat themselves, link to images I don’t want to see, or be full of recipes and advice I’m not interested in. Pah! ‘Mark all as read’, here I come!

The Other Librarian makes a really useful analogy about swimming and the web. If we want to protect our kids from drowning, we teach them to swim, and we supervise them. Ideally, if we don’t know how to swim, we could (should?) learn to swim ourselves so we can save them if the need arises. It’s a no-brainer, right?

The same should apply for the web. To ’save’ kids from the potential ‘dangers’ of the web, we should teach them to swim (or surf safely). And if we aren’t the best swimmers (or surfers) ourselves, we should send them to a swimming (or web) school where they can learn what they need to know. Better still, if we only know how to tread water, we should send ourselves to swimming (or web) school too. And then we should be the lifeguards by the pool, giving advice.

We don’t drain every pool, pond, or other water-holding vessel our children are going to come into contact with to save them from drowning. We teach them how to deal with the water - and have fun in it. I wonder, is filtering Internet content akin to draining our pools of water?

Thanks for the analogy, Ryan. I love a good analogy (clearly, cause I just went to town with this one). This is one issue that I’ll personally find a lot easier to talk about with this kind of simple, on-the-money analogy up my sleeve.

At Free Range Librarian, K. G. Schneider posts about two positive customer service experiences she’s had recently. Proof that it’s often oh-so-easy to make our customers happy.

This is what I miss most about working on the frontline: the opportunity to surprise someone by providing a level of service they don’t expect; they opportunity to make a customer really happy through a very simple action. It’s so easy to do it, and the impact of creating an exceptional service experience extends far beyond the few minutes it takes for you to create the experience.

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!

David Lee King posts a closing thought for the year and asks us to ponder the physical library in the 21st century: is it’s demise looming? Prompted by comments on his post about Ignoring our digital community, DLK asks his readers to consider how we might bring people back into the physical library.

This is an important topic. We do need to provide programming and services that bring those people who like using the library in person, but have stopped doing so (for any number of reasons, including that we’re not offering them the things they want) back into the physical building.

How do we get people back into the physical library?

I think the answer is fairly obvious: we need to offer services and programming that are relevant and appealing to them, and promote them using the channels our users tune into. To do this, we need to consult with community members and groups and ask them what they want. We need to look at the communities around us and the activities that are happening in our areas and seek out synergies for service development and delivery. And then we need to be responsive - ready to tweak or redevelop services as the community demands it. And we need to evaluate, review, reshape, over and over again.

Not an easy task, but surely we can get the people who want to be in the library back into the library, with some careful planning and programming?

I know this is a tad simplistic and this is a a much bigger issue, deserving more attention than I’ve given it here… But what I’d like to focus on in this post is something a little different…

Should we really be so hung up on getting people back into the library?

There’s a proportion of our user base that doesn’t come into the library, and doesn’t ever want to. For those library users who only want to interact with us online (users like - I have to confess - myself), no amount of in-library programming or redefinition of in-library services is going to get them back into the library. And we need to accept that it’s perfectly fine if they never, ever walk into a library again - so long as we’re supplying them with what they want and need online.

We don’t want to neglect our physical library customers… because then we’ll end up with no physical libraries!

For the forseable future (always?), some people are going to want to visit the physical library in person, and we should absolutely cater for those people. We don’t want to get into the situation where usage is so low we’re forced to stop providing physical library facilities and services – at least not while there is a demand or a need for physical library services. But I don’t know that usage is going to drop to that degree any time soon. (Especially not if we offer the right services and programs.)

But all this talk about getting people through our physical doors makes me think we’re worried about the wrong issue. Is it really all about the number of people we get through the door?

DLK’s post was written in response to this comment on a previous post:

David, this is all great, but - really, I’m serious - what happens to the physical library? If Topeka Public mails the holds to patrons and they can drop the returned item at boxes, and the patrons need not come to the physical library, we may have crowds online and remote access and whatever, but an administrator comes in and sees the empty library and orders it closed, the librarians fired and a small studio in the country to be opened in the library’s stead that can be maintained by two technicians.

To my mind, we need to revisit the reason we do what we do. We provide physical libraries because people want or need physical libraries. We don’t provide physical libraries simply for the sake of providing physical libraries. We shouldn’t be hung up on getting people through the door for the sake of justifying our physical libraries. We should be hung up on providing the services people want and need. Right now, there’s a demand for physical library services. But if, at some point in the future, there’s a broadband connected computer in every household and a majority of people choose to use libraries online rather than in person, will we still be harping on about getting people back through our doors?

I don’t want to see our physical libraries closed because they’re underpopulated any more than the next person. But success in library service provision should not be measured by door counters and full car parks (or, for that matter, numbers through our digital doors). We should be measuring success by (at least in part) asking our users if we’re providing the services they want. The door count is not the be all and end all. If Topeka can make it easier for people to access library collections by mailing them their holds, then hallelujah for Topeka! Seriously, I’d love to see what this does for their circulation statistics and customer satisfaction levels.

Getting the people through the door… Are we asking the right question?

DLK asks how we get our customers to visit the physical library. The answer is pretty straightforward: provide the services and programs people want, deliver them the way they want them delivered, promote ourselves through the channels that reach our customers, and be prepared to evaluate, review and change constantly. Simple, right?! Ha! What a challenge!

But let’s not focus only on our physical buildings. I would suggest that we need to invest proportionate amounts of energy in both our user camps: those who want to come into the library, and those who want to interact with us in other ways. If we’re looking at ways to get our users back through our physical doors, we should also look at ways to entice our digital communities through our digital doors.

To my mind, DLK’s question is not the one I think I should be worrying about, because as I’ve said, I don’t see bums on seats as the one and only measure of successful service provision. If we’re looking to just increase numbers through the door, then we could just stick free wifi in all our libraries and forget about programming. But, I’m not looking for bums on seats as justification for our physical libraries (plus, where I work, we don’t have any lack of people coming through our doors - maybe this colours my POV on this issue a little).

So, as someone whose job is concerned predominantly with online library services, the questions I’ll be refocusing on as I head into 2008 are: What are the needs and wants of our in-library and online customers? How can technology assist us meet those needs? What suite of services should we offer, and how do our customers want to access them? With any luck, if we get the answers to these three questions right, the issue of getting people through the doors (both physical and digital) should take care of itself.

[Did I just talk round in a great big circle?]

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has published a set of FAQs on privacy issues related to social networking sites. The FAQs include some commonsense advice on protecting your privacy on sites like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. This is a good set of basic facts about privacy related issues that all social networking site users should be aware of.