Posts In my second last post, Getting Deeply Local at our libraries, I suggested that libraries should focus on their deep human knowledge of their local communities and local data to provide services that cannot be provided by generic suppliers like Wikipedia or a supermarket offering bestselling books. In the post before this, Like a Virgin , I gave the example of the German National Library’s Personennamendatei project working with Wikipedia to put their locally collected authoritative personal name data into Wikipedia.de .
What Wikipedia has that libraries do not is reach. It is the seventh most visited site in the world. Information there is far more likely to be found by the world – and probably our local communities – than on any of our library web sites.
Here lies a quandry to me. If we want our local data to be more accessible, then populating larger, more accessed sites with greater reach will be the best service to our communities. But if we do this, and the data does not have Brand Library written all over it, how do we make sure our libraries continue to be paid to do this?
Look at the Big Diary online service offered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I found out about it while watching Sunday’s the Einstein Factor. The tagline is:
An independent listing of events from around Australia. Explore, join up and contribute.”
The events in the city where I live, Fremantle, in the next seven days are less comprehensive and quite different to our local library’s community information service, Freinfo. But – which one has a more intuitive user interface and more awareness among Fremantle citizens? Today? In 12 months’ time?
This is not a criticism of Fre-info or the Fremantle City Library who do an excellent job and are well-regarded by our community. Fre-info is a service that plays to one of our potential strengths – collecting local data for our local communities.
So what does a service like Fremantle City Library do? Does it populate the Big Diary with its clean, authorative data? Would that provide a better service to their community? It would probably be more findable and promote Fremantle to the rest of Australia more effectively. But would ratepayers then go to the Big Diary, not Fre-info? Does this matter? How would they justify continuing to fund a service that is now less used?
What does an academic library do when it has local clean data in a reusable form that would enhance entries in Wikipedia about local geography, or climate ? Is a Special Library doing the best thing to maintain funding if it actively shows users how to set up the library link resolver in Google Scholar – when there are so many more relevant resources available from the library web site?
I don’t know. I do know that libraries that want to both serve their communities best, and survive to do so, will have to come up with some answers.
The bigger question is how many people actually use the information in those on-line guides… and does this relate to the libraries target audience..? Currently the majority of rate payers would probably check out the hard copy information in the local paper or ring to find out about event (or check the local website if desperate). You put more effort into direct and local advertising where your audience is and only experiment with the on-line. If the the event is plastered everywhere doesn’t mean people will come regardless of the functionality of an “events” website.
I guess it depends whether you decide that your target audience is “people who use the library now” or “people in the group entitled to use the library”. I think that there is a huge number of ratepayers funding our libraries who never enter our buildings , but are also entitled to access our clean, authoritative data in a way that suits them best.
I disagree about the first place people look being the local paper rather than online – but I don’t know your target audience. Without knowing the newspaper and website usage of your community I can’t comment on which would be greater ..but one thing that I do know is that as a trend newspaper circulation is falling and website use is growing
According to the New York Times on 29 April 2009: ” The rate of decline in print circulation at the nation’s newspapers has accelerated since last fall, as industry figures released Monday show a more than 7 percent drop compared with the previous year, while another recent analysis showed that newspaper Web site audiences had increased 10.5 percent in the first quarter. Fall in Newspaper Sales Accelerates to pass 7% .
Given the 10.5% growth in use of newspaper websites, I think that there is probably a group of people who we don’t see in our libraries and who we can – and should – now try to reach.
Whether we conceptualise this as experimental or not it does not matter, but the popularity of services like the Flickr Commons and Picture Australia, where libraries and museums are using Flickr rather than their own websites for public access to their images, prove that there is a demand for our data to be put online now.
When we conceived of the Kete open source software we had some of these questions in mind. To me, communities shouldn’t have to forfeit discoverability to maintain stewardship of their data. In the initial version we built things to be allow the data to easily be reused for this reason.
I was going to reply with a grocery list of Kete features that can serve the goal of data reuse, but rather than be an advertisement for the open source software I work on I’ll mention a few nuances to the issues at hand.
First, I suspect a lot of content providers are using Flickr Commons, et. al, are actually putting up content in these aggregated discovery areas (a little libraries in concept) in addition to the data having a presence on their organizations own sites. It can be thought of as a tool to drive traffic of people interested in deeper research back to their own collections online.
I also think it is interesting that we are seeing services like Twitter step into to fill some of the discoverability holes by enabling every user to become a curator of online information to direct other users to areas of shared interest.
In all cases, I think it is important for libraries (and others) to take credit for their work. If the library is opting for allowing reuse of their data, they should try to get a link back to their material on an record by record basis. This isn’t just important for the library health, but for aiding those that would use the library records if they only new about it.