DIY Librarian

Steven Bell wonders what we should call the people who use our libraries. “User” is degrading, says Don Norman in his essay “Words Matter”. “People”, as Bell points out, just sounds odd in a lot of contexts (although my library’s user database is called people!). It is also not specific enough; we design libraries and services for people who visit the library or use our services, or those who might potentially do so, but not for people in general.

As customer service becomes more and more important in non-retail settings, I have a feeling we are not the only profession struggling with what to call the people we serve. I did a quick PubMed search and came across an abstract for Patient, consumer, client, or customer: what do people want to be called? (Health Expectations, December 2005). The conclusion? “Care recipients” felt that alternatives like customer, client, and consumer imply a market relationship that they find objectionable. They prefer to be called patients.

I wonder if libraries should consider a return to patrons. Despite our desire to be like Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, or some other commercial enterprise (certainly a worthy desire if it improves the library), libraries are not commercial enterprises, and I don’t think most people expect to be treated the same way at Barnes & Noble as they do at a library.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that more students named the library as an important factor in enrollment than named dorms, according to a survey. The difference isn’t huge—about half compared to 42.2%—but I think it’s significant that students still value the library as much as techology and classrooms when making their college decisions. The article, Facilities Can Play Key Role in Students’ Enrollment Decisions, Study Finds, is online but requires a subscription for access.

Update (6/5/2006): The Chronicle article requires a subscription for access, but you can read a summary of the research project in the March/April issue of Facilities Manager. [via ACRLog]

If you followed the link to the APLIC-I conference program in the previous post, you may have seen a presentation authored by yours truly and two colleagues about my library’s blogging project, News from the PRI Library and Data Archive.

The blog may seem overwhelming at first—we have a lot of categories and a lot of posts—but we are primarily encouraging our users to subscribe to the particular categories that interest them and using the feeds to provide content for other web pages. For instance, we’ve included the feed for the library categories on my library’s home page.

We think the majority of our users are not currently using feed readers, so we’re introducing this gradually. We do already have a few people subscribed to our feeds, though, and all four of our staff members are posting regularly to the blog

Via the Creative Commons blog, free symbols for use in “airports and other transportation hubs and at large international events”, from a collaboration between AIGA and the US Department of Transportation. Some of these could probably be used in library signage, but wouldn’t it be cool to have a collection like this for libraries? (If such a thing exists, please let me know!)

In “Hustle and Flow”, his March 15, 2006 column for Library Journal, Roy Tennant makes some comments about blogs that I’ve taken the liberty of tweaking:

Blogs Newspapers are tailored to maximize the power of flow. The only blogs newspapers that are read are those that post publish new content regularly. This new content is streamed seamlessly to the reader’s favorite current awareness tool subscriber’s doorstep.

Users tend to focus solely on the new, and although blogging software the newspaper format makes it easy to assign posts articles to topical categories of the blogger’s editor’s own invention, it’s not clear that readers use those categories for much of anything old business sections for anything other than birdcage lining.

Tennant’s conclusion still holds true, however:

Current awareness is a useful goal. But being able to locate something you’ve seen before can be important as well. So we must collect, organize, provide access to, and preserve the best of this information and content flow.

Really, we’ve been doing this for a long time. The only problem is that with the ease of publishing on the Internet, there is so much more information flowing past us. And, as we’ve seen with newspaper indexing and preservation efforts, it’s not always easy to know what will be useful to the scholars of the future.

I’ll be giving a talk about a blogging project at my library on March 28 at the APLIC-I 39th Annual Conference in Los Angeles. If you’re interested in population libraries and will be in the area, come to the conference! We are waiting to get our new web server installed before making the blog fully public, but I’ll post more details here when that happens.

Library @ Your User: A Case Study Using New Technologies to Extend the Reach of the Library

Tara Murray, Jennifer Darragh, & Kiet Bang
Population Research Insitute, Penn State
March 28, 2006
APLIC-I 39th Annual Conference
Westin Bonaventure, Los Angeles, California

Nylink is sponsoring a survey on open source software in libraries. [via librarian.net]

I filled out the survey, partly because I’m interested in whether many other special libraries use open source software. I was surprised both by how many open source library applications were included in the survey that I had never even heard of (obviously this stuff is catching on somewhere!) and by the number of open source applications I use every day without even thinking about them (Firefox, Linux, etc.).

After reading the “Managing by Numbers” series of articles in the Winter 2006 issue of netConnect, I started thinking about the increasingly common idea that libraries should be run more like businesses.

The netConnect articles do not make that case; in fact, they provide a nicely balanced picture of library assessment when read together. However, the comparisons to corporate ways of doing things got me thinking. It sounds good to say that libraries should strive to be more efficient, like businesses, but we have to remember that libraries have very different missions from most businesses.

I don’t really need to elaborate on this, though, because folks over at ACRLog have made the same point in responding to a different piece. Lorcan Dempsey’s comment in particular gets at the heart of the matter.

After the flurry of year-end lists, you probably thought you were safe for a few months, didn’t you? Not so, my friend. Blake over at LISNews.org has posted 10 Blogs to Read in 2006, along with descriptions of the blogs and his reasons for including them. Somehow this approach seems more positive than the typical year-end best-of list.

The Cerritos Library in California has launched its very own comic book, The Time Team. For more about the comic, and other cool things Cerritos has done or is planning, see the Library Journal interview with the director and deputy director.