Smartest Card: George Needham, VP Member Services, OCLC
June 30th, 2005 by Andrea Mercado
George Needham talked to the Smartest Card crowd on Friday, Jun 24 about how environmental scanning – examining and evaluating your current culture and methods, and those of the competition – is key to forming a marketing plan. George also reported extensively on OCLC the report titled “2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition“, an environmental scan of the library landscape. Google is part of the competition and currently may be giving us a run for our money, but environmental scan can help us learn from them, to figure out what we should be doing to compete, and even win.
Here of the OCLC environmental scan of libraries that he shared:
Social
Librarians have been doing what campus builders do with sidewalks. But information consumers have shown us that there’s a huge difference between how we do things on the Internet, and how consumers do them. Instead of paving the paths that have been tread by Internet pedestrians, we need to start making those sidewalks for users. As it is now, by the time libraries and librarians have those sidewalks down, users made new paths already, and learned how to pave them themselves.
Information has followed Moore’s Law, and the way that consumers handle information has followed Moore’s Law. Consumers don’t care about our rules. The serendipity of walking into library and browsing shelves has been replaced by RSS feeds and blogs, because these info delivery systems give the same serendipity.
Economic
Redefinition of the public good has impacted libraries in the wallet. Tax changes like those in CA a few years back and now in OH, can change what kind of money a library can get, and it can happen anywhere, so libraries need to be prepared for turbulence in even in the smoothest economic atmosphere.
Technology
Flickr. del.icio.us. Furl. The key to these online services is that they allow people to bring their own structure to information (see Social above where “consumers don’t care about our rules”). Libraries need to be able to roll with these punches. Especially because the distance between “I can’t believe you have this” and “I can’t believe you don’t have this” has gotten to be much shorter.
There’s also a crazy dynamic between digital rights management (DRM) issues, “socking down user rights to data and applications, even when they really don’t exist”, in parallel to the open source movement, where the rights are as open as humanly possible.
Research and Learning
The “proliferation of e-learning” is changing how libraries can contribute to life-long learning. Now, community “continuing education” is an even bigger part of the role of a public library, or at least it should be. Some are even looking to libraries to become the DSpaces of the community, not only depositories of local history content, but aggregations of locally created content.
Libraries
In performing this portion of the scan, OCLC talked to librarians, users, trustees, to get a sense of what was going on in libraries today.
Whoah, nelly, the staffing issue, and the “graying of the profession”. Average age of library staff at the Library of Congress is 58, and so many of them have such institutional memory value, they can’t be replaced. Non-librarians are being hired to perform functions that are non-traditional to libraries library, especially technology.
The library is becoming “The Third Place” that was the buzz phrase of the conference this year. Not home, not work, it’s the place “to reinvent yourself”, an “intellectual center, community center”. Public libraries are ahead of academic libraries in this respect; think of how so many acadmic libraries are creating “the information commons”, or redesigning their libraries to create the same effect.
The definitions of the collection are changing, and how we fit into the change in relation to those collections. And collaboration is becoming strategy instead of just cool a thing to do.
So the big questions become:
How do we fit in the self-serve world?
As librarians, our job is not to present “old things in new and more frustrating ways” using technology, it’s an opportunity to improve upon the old way, to reinvent with technology. Self service is not taking the librarian out the loop, it’s giving customer control, instead of telling them how to do it in a way that doesn’t make sense to them. George recommended that “The Toll of the New Machine”, a Fast Company article by Charles Fishman, be required reading for every library worker, especially to drive home the concept that automation is really about changing roles, not eliminating them.
Disaggregation- what do we do now if our job is to aggregate?
There are fewer intermediaries between information and the user of that information with the rise of blogs and RSS feeds — including librarians. We need to help people understand, on their terms, how to use this information and these tools as they find them, not dictate what to use and how to use it. Libraries can really step up into the role of teaching how to judge authority and usefulness in a more found-information world. The idea is to not make our patrons jump through hoops to find what they need, and once they find it, not make them jump through hoops to get it.
Why is collaboration so important?
Collaboration is an intagible asset. Even companies that were once rivals are now working together in development projects. That’s how insanely prolific collaboration has become. And librarians are finally learning that collaboration works.
Patrons are really becoming natural collaborators, since so much of the technology interaction today is really about how people are *socializing*. Email, blogs, communities, wikis, RSS feeds, IM. Tivo is watcher’s advisory. I actually know someone who told me, “It took my Tivo only 2 days to figure out I was gay,” as a crack about how well his Tivo knows what kinds of stuff he likes to watch. As librarians, we need to do it, too, for our patrons, and internally for ourselves, in order to learn how to do it.
Besides, it’s just so much easier to get everything done, and to find everything, if it’s all connected.
Wanna do your own scan?
In order to do an environmental scan, you need to know your community, be willing to stick your neck out and ask the tough questions, and get with the changing landscape program. Basic steps from his presentation include:
“- Develop a list of the key influences
Identify your leading power players
Develop a list of questions to ask them
Ask them
Compare the answers and connect the dots
Share the results and adjust as needed”
There are books, articles, and sites out there that can help you develop an environmental scan for your library landscape, and examples of environmental scans out there to look at (like the OCLC report). These can help you understand your library and your patrons better, and in turn help you successfully market your services to your community.
Tags: ALA2005, conferences, PLA, Smartest Card
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