Library Voice

Gary Price has a post about the New Look and Features of Ask.com. In his post he writes:

One problem, from a marketing standpoint, is that many people, including librarians, educators, and the general public, have spent little time paying attention to what has been going on at Ask.com.

Why?

Old habits and beliefs die hard and, as I said earlier, many people still believe that Ask.com is the inferior product that it once was. That is no longer the case. In fact, it’s a goal to directly involve our profession in making Ask.com even better. That’s why your feedback/suggestions/comments are important.

I for one have not used Ask.com or its previous incarnation of Ask Jeeves very much. After reading Gary’s post, I spent a few minutes tinkering with the search engine. I didn’t spend enough time to give it a thorough review, but I’ll be sure to try using it a bit more in the future.  If you primarily use Google, Gary offer convincing reasons to use other services:

In many cases the more choices the better. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Clusty and others are high quality, first rate products that we all use regularly. However, that doesn’t mean that Ask.com can’t also be one and isn’t worthy of your attention and knowledge. A great reference collection is filled with many choices and options. A great reference librarian knows about many of them.

This is sweet! Librarycasting SE: Screencasts, podcasts, tutorials and titles for the sciences and engineering.

Librarycasting SE is a compilation of selected educational and information resources for the sciences and engineering, with a strong emphasis on new media and communication formats such as screencasts (pc screen video), video, and podcasts (audio). Resources covered include those produced at Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, the VCU campus community, and the extended sciences and engineering world community beyond.

A major goal of Librarycasting SE is to make available a range of brief screencast and podcast tutorials answering specific questions, and demonstrating specific techniques, relevant to the sciences and engineering. Conveniently access these resources at any time from your Firefox browser bookmarks or RSS aggregator, through the subject-specific, automatically updated RSS feeds provided at this site. These tutorials are in constant production at VCU Libraries, and your suggestions for new tutorials in this format are always welcomed!

Pete Kirlew, Ph.D., MLIS
Reference Librarian for the Sciences and Engineering
VCU Libraries

This truly is awesome, Pete. This serves as a great model for other subject specialists. It’s a blog, it’s a podcast, it’s a screencast. No, it’s super-duper subject librarian outreach!!! Fantastic! Makes me want to go out and make some screencasts of business databases. Thanks for the inspiration, Pete.  You’ve got me thinking of new ways to expand my Business Blog.
Link via Library Marketing.

In his keynote address on Monday at the ODCE conference, John Seely Brown discussed the idea that the world is becoming flat. Our world is no longer as divided by borders, time, or space as it once was, largely as a result of the technologies that we are using today. We have the ability to email, conference call, video conference, and IM with nearly anyone in any place in the world. While Dr. Brown was referring mostly to the globalization of world business, this could also apply to many of the things we are doing in libraries. This flattening of the world has a huge impact on how libraries provide services and how they define the communities that they serve.

During my IM presentation on Monday, one of the attendees asked about how we control authentication with the IM service. This is a very common question, and the answer is we don’t. We have no way of really knowing if a question is coming from an Ohio University student, or if the question is coming from someone in Wyoming. All we know is that bigbubba7236 is asking us a question, and we try to help him or her find an answer. That aspect of instant messaging scares a lot of academic librarians because many want to limit service to patrons at their own institutions. I can understand the factors that contribute to this attitude. The students who attend the university are paying tuition, and that tuition pays for a majority of the resources and services on campus. With dwindling staff resources and budgets, many academic libraries are finding it hard to keep up with serving their own patrons, so the fear of taking time to serve someone who does not pay tuition is legitimate. In the same sense, if a librarian is serving someone who is not paying tuition, he or she is essentially denying service (or providing lesser service) to someone who actually pays for the service. In the business world, paying customers generally demand the right to be served before — and be served better than — those customers who are not buying products or services.

While this argument may hold some water, I think it helps to take a larger view of the picture. If we base our service solely on who is paying for the service, then we have to question who is actually footing the bill. For most colleges and universities, a majority of the operating revenue comes in the form of tuition. However, public colleges and universities also get a large amount of financial support (although it is decreasing drastically each year) from the state. Because of this state support, it is very difficult to distinguish between a “paying” and “non-Paying” patron at a public university library. While the paying patron does pay tuition, the non-paying patron probably pays taxes. It’s a portion of those taxes that helps to build new campus buildings, fund acqiusitions budgets, and even keep the lights on.

It’s with that understanding that many academic libraries will serve both community members and tuition-paying students with the same level of service. Unfortunately, this argument is easier to rationalize when “service” means serving patrons in the physical library. But when “service” means “any time, any were,” then how far will the library go with serving both the tuition paying patrons and the community members. I think one of the concerns with IM or email reference is that with these technologies, it is incredibly difficult to define (or limit) the community that is served. With the world becoming more flat, a community member can be someone in your university, your town, your state, your country, or your side of the world. The question is, where do you draw the line about who is a member of the community you serve, and what lengths will you go to serve the community?

In some cases, this question is often answered by the availability of resources. Most database licenses limit the use of the resources to the current members of the academic community (faculty, staff, and students), so if the answer to a patron’s inquiry requires using one of those databases, then the database license defines the members of the community. However, if the inquiry requires using something like American Factfinder, then the community is no longer constrained by a third-party legal restriction. This can make the definition of the community seem artificial, because the members of the community may be determined not by those providing the service, but by those providing the resources. Even this definition of community can break down as well. What if a member of another university or community contacts you via IM or email, and he/she has the same resources available at his library? Will your library help this person, or refer him/her to their own library? If this person is in the same town, or state, do you consider that part of your community?

I don’t really know the answers to these questions. I suppose for now, the real answer is “it depends.” But “it depends” will need to be more clearly defined if libraries are going to remain viable and successful resources in the future. As the world if becoming more flat, libraries will need to find a way to broaden and define the communities they serve. Libraries will also need to work together through consortial arrangements and partnerships to extend the coverage of the community, and to provide better services to the community. I have no idea what these partnerships will look like, but I really think libraries need to think about how they can work together to serve large communities. How do you think these partnerships will look in the future? How does your library define its community, and are you looking to expand it?

In closing, I’d like to mention an IM question that we received last night. One of our overnight staff emailed me the synopsis of the transaction, and it is posted below:

Hi Chad,
I had a really interesting IM early this morning (12:30 am) from a university student in Malaysia(!). She was researching IM and virtual librarian concepts and practice and she was really interested in our service.
I was a steward for the IM and chat service and department, I can assure you, that the student left the chat with much more knowledge than she came to it with.
Just thought you would like to hear about it.

In this example, our staff member was providing a service. He did not limit the service based upon the patron’s location, even though he apparently knew that the patron was out of the country. As a result, the staff member was able to help someone with a research need, while broadening the concept of the library community. Do you have any similar success stories? What is your library’s concept of community? How is the flattening of the world impacting your library’s services? If you have any answers to these questions, or if you have more questions, please feel free to post a comment.

I got back from the Ohio Digital Commons for Education conference yesterday. It was a great conference that was attended by a mix of librarians, faculty, and instructional designers. I learned quite a bit, and I plan to write about some of the presentations in future posts. I’d like to thank everyone who attended my two sessions at the conference. You all had great questions, and I learned quite a bit talking to you. I also had several great conversations in the conference halls, and I appreciated the opportunity to share with a number of folks from a variety of backgrounds. The slides for my presentations are below, and please let me know if you have any questions.

Ohio Digital Commons for Education (ODCE). “Using Blogs and Wikis to Promote Information Literacy and Library Resources.” March 6, 2006. (PowerPoint slides).

Ohio Digital Commons for Education (ODCE). “IM A Librarian: Instant Messaging Reference in an Academic Library.” March 6, 2006. (PowerPoint slides).

Imagine if you could create and administer 200,000 WordPress blogs with one interface. According to the Lyceum Project, you will be able to.

Lyceum was originally conceived in a very different form 3 years ago as a community-blogosphere-insta-generator. Several staff and identity rotations later, we set forth in the middle of 2005 to make a powerful and easy to use multi-blog WordPress that could be used for installations with 2 or 200,000 blogs. Users will find the familiar WordPress features and interface that they know and love, and administrators will have the architecture and tools that they need to manage their blog service.

We’ve given a lot of thought to performance, security, and ease of managability. We are really proud of what we’ve come up with, and we are excited to show others.

I’m definitely going to look into this for our library, because every time a new release of WordPress comes out, I spend a good deal of time updating about ten different blogs. While Lyceum is not yet ready for production use, it’s definitely something to keep on the radar.  In another sense, imagine the community of bloggers you could create on your campus if you gave every student a blog. The library at the University of Minnesota and the University of Michigan are already doing this. Way cool!

Links via Creative Librarian and Library Stuff.

In a recent post, Bill Drew tells booksellers, “Don’t call us, we will call you if we want your publications.” When I first read the post, I agreed wholeheartedly with Bill. However, after a little more reflection, I realized I had a slightly different view of book sellers and vendors.

Most days, I happen to agree with what Bill said. As a matter of fact, I get pretty frustrated with cold calls from vendors. It’s as if they’re thinking that I have all of the time in the world to talk with them about the latest issue of a serial, a new reference book that we’ve got to have, or a database that I’ve got to trial. However, when I talk to them, I try my best to be cordial, because they’re just doing their jobs. I never hang up on them, although I have been guilty of screening my calls.

Relationships with vendors can be a little tenuous. They want your money, and are going to keep trying to sell you products and services to get it. They don’t get paid or promoted if they don’t sell you anything. It’s capitalism at its best. Unfortunately for vendors, selling library materials to libraries is not like selling iPods to students. Libraries have very limited budgets, so it is often very difficult to talk librarians into parting with their money. Usually a large purchase means that the library will need to cut another subscription to free up the funds to pay for the book, journal, or database. In this zero-sum game, there will be vendors who win the new contract and others who will lose when the library cancels a subscription. Most vendors that I deal with understand this, and they know how hard it can be for libraries to cut sources to buy new ones. I try to talk with the ones that don’t understand this, so they know that our library doesn’t have a money tree in the backyard.

I’ve been able to purchase a number of databases this fiscal year, but I’ve had to cut my monograph budget in the process. Our business students and researchers are requesting more and more electronic resources, and I’ve worked to accommodate this shift in information needs. Believe it or not, vendors have helped in this process. I’ve had a couple of vendors who would call me or email me periodically over the past 18 months. Yes, at times I found it annoying when I would get calls out of the blue. However, these vendors were not overly pushy, and they seemed to have an interest in developing a business relationship. I kept telling the vendors that I was not ready to make a purchase, but they would check back periodically to see if my financial situation had changed. The good vendors are very persistent, and they know that a sale does not happen overnight.

Throughout the process, I was able to work with the vendors to get trials, demonstrations, and literature for their products. The grooming of this relationship probably helped somewhat in negotiating the prices of the products when I did decide to purchase the resources. And now that I subscribe to the databases, the role of the vendor has changed from a salesperson to a support person. Whenever I have a question about the products or have problems with our subscription, the vendors are very responsive to my inquiries. I’m convinced that if at any time I had been rude to them or had not followed the “golden rule”, my relationship with them would not be as good. If I was rude or had hung up on them, I’m sure that they still would have been glad to sell me their products, but I imagine they would be less enthusiastic about offering their support for the product.

I realize librarians are all incredibly busy people, and we all have bad days. If you’re like me and you wear many hats, it can be annoying when a vendor calls out of the blue and expects you to take 20 minutes to listen to their sales pitch. The easy thing to do is to hang up on them or tell them that you not at all interested in listening to what they have to say. I generally try to tell them that I can’t talk at the moment, but would be willing to set aside some time at a later date. These phone meetings take the pressure off of me, as I don’t have to listen to them while knowing I need to be doing something else. I generally tell the vendor to email me some information about their product to review, and that I’ll enjoy talking to them later. This gives me the opportunity to review the literature myself, do a little research on the product, and allow me to make a list of questions before the phone meeting. I’m then better prepared to talk to the vendor, and being an educated customer makes the meeting less of a one-sided sales pitch and more of a conversation. If at the end of the conversation I’m still not sold on the product, I will tell the vendor so. There’s nothing rude about this, as I’ve set aside some time to learn more from the vendor about the product. I did not hang up on them, and did not burn any bridges in the process. If sometime down the road I find that our library might wish to pursue the product, the vendor is usually more than happy to talk again, since he/she knows that he/she will be treated like a person whether or not they make the sale.