Uncategorized

What kind of “better than free” is your library service?

Uncategorized

A week ago, I asked “what kind of free is your library service?“, in response to Chris Anderson’s Free – why $0.00 is the future of business (published 25 February 2008).

At the end of the post I wondered what we should do now that we have competitors who are offering “free” – which was traditionally our domain. I vaguely touched on the “reputation economy” being a marketplace where the library has value, and the “attention economy” being maybe a marketplace where we should ensure we have value.

Kevin Kelly in his post, better than free (published 31 January 2008) in his The Technium blog talks about eight qualities that are “better than free”. These are things with:

intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.

At the start of the post, he discusses how the “previous round of wealth” was built on scarcity – that is people were willing to pay for things that were not readily available or had no copies. Now that the Internet is one big copying machine, this model is undermined. He draws an interesting conclusion:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

He then goes on to list nine intangible qualities that have become more valuable in a “copy saturated world”. These become valuable when attention is what is now worth money:

money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.

I’m going to look at each of these intangible qualities (which he calls “generatives”) and think about some questions that we may ask about our library services. I’m not suggesting that we start charging for some services that have these intangible qualities – rather that we appreciate and promote these, and make sure our funding bodies know about them.

Trust : Kelly uses this as his starting example to elaborate how these generatives bring customers (which=$$)

Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust.

In our libraries: Do our staff treat our users with respect? If a user contacts us, can they get the material / service they seek in a timely manner … and are they pointed to other sources if we can’t help them?

Immediacy : This is why people still pay for hardcover books and go to the cinema, even though cheaper versions (paperback, DVD) copies will soon be available.

In our libraries:
For items at the start of the demand curve, those “smash hits” not in the Long Tail, we seem to have a disadvantage – with a market that often prefers to buy from their local bookstore or Amazon. We have journal articles in our databases, but they are often embargoed and not available immediately.

What about items in the Long Tail – that are no longer readily available on shelves or journal articles that have been published for a while? I’d argue that these are where we should focus our efforts with Immediacy. Do we have a varied enough collection that users can get the older books they want quickly ? Are our databases readily accessible on our users’ desktops and easily searchable so they can instantly find the older articles they want?

Personalization : Can a free copy be tweaked to suit the consumer exactly? Do they feel like they have personal investment in the business carrying on?

In our libraries:
Here Readers Advisory becomes important. What do you have that will suit me? Is there room for a “Personal Buyer” approach in our libraries- maybe as a income generating extra service to the able-bodied but time poor- where busy users pay to have material chosen and delivered to them.?

Do our staff establish personal rapport with walk in, telephone, IM customers? If users contact us, do they get better than a call centre or an automated voice following a pre-written script?

Are our catalogues able to provide enough information that users can evaluate for themselves if something suits them? Do our users feel like they can help create the library – by commenting on our blog, serving on committees, volunteering, suggesting purchases, rating items or tagging or adding reviews in the catalog ?

Interpretation – To quote the article ” As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000 ” .

In our libraries:
Are our reference services staffed with people trained to refine and add value to the question asked? Do information literacy classes and old fashioned “Finding Aids” have a place here? Are we able to add a layer on top of the morass of resources available that suggests which resources are most useful, and arranges these resources in ways that are more easily understood?

Authenticity – Some customers are very concerned with having “the original” or something authorised by the creator. Kelly gives the example of something with an artist’s signature, or an authorised Grateful Dead recording as opposed to a bootlegged one.

In our libraries:
Here is a role for our archives and for our repositories.

Accessibility – For Kelly, this is specifically where someone else maintains, organises and tends the stuff that you could manage for yourself – if you had time and inclination. The key is that you can access it using almost any device whenever you want.

In our libraries:
How about allowing our users to keep a reading record and then export that up to somewhere like Library Thing? What about promoting ourselves as a place that stores the books people want so that their houses don’t get cluttered? How about hosting blogs on behalf of our parent institutions if they need something in-house? Helping community groups set up Flickr pages and Facebook groups?

Embodiment – This is live concerts vs audio recordings. Author talks vs books. Books vs pdfs. Sometimes format matters, and users can’t personally own all formats. Sometimes being with other people is important.

In our libraries:
Books! If you want your information that way, we have it. Book clubs? Book discussions? Author visits? Events? Real people who will exchange pleasantries with you, who you can use as human “sounding boards” to work out what information you need? We have them. The physical feeling of browsing the shelves, as opposed to searching online is a joy to many. I think we could use this aspect better in our publicity, as sometimes our bookstock is the “elephant in the corner” – everyone knows it is there, but no-one talks about it.

Patronage – People want to pay creators. They want to reward what they think is worthy – but it needs to be easy to do. This is the principle behind shareware.

In our libraries:
Do we make it easy for those of small means to show their appreciation in money or kind? Should we? Sometimes patronage can be a problem for libraries – as parent bodies sometimes simply cut the budget by the amount coming from the other source. Do we have mechanisms to get around this? Do we have mechanisms for acknowledging benefactors?

Findability – Again, quoting straight from the post – “…unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable”.

In our libraries:
Are there access points to our catalogue in places other than our home page? In places where our users are online? What do we do really well, that no-one else does? (see points above for some ideas) . Are we shouting this from the rooftops? From the right rooftops? Do our opening hours, physical locations and online presence match the current lifestyles of our users? Are our staff visible in our communities outside of our libraries ? Can we promote our abilities to find what people want? Is it still reasonable to expect our users to come to us?

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

One of the reasons I became a librarian was because I wanted to work somewhere that didn’t have as its sole aim directly making money, or a purpose that I found morally hard to swallow. I’ve always muttered to myself vaguely about libraries being worth funding because they increase social capital – but like fairies, not everyone believes that social capital exists.

Ultimately our services cost. I think Kevin Kelly’s analysis is a starting point to better articulate how our costly (to our funding bodies) free (to our users) services have value to both.

Michael Stephens’ visit

Uncategorized

Michael Stephens gave a rocking good workshop in Perth this morning.

He’s posted details of his Hyperlinked Library talk on Tame the Web, including the slides use in the Australian version of his presentation and LINKS from the presentation. Michelle McLean gave a great summary of the Melbourne session, The Hyperlinked Library – a presentation by Michael Stephens.

With such rich information already on the web, this post instead talks about a couple of questions raised by the audience, and a few of the take-homes I got from the presentation.

Two audience questions

Web presence and employment

Michael showed a job advertisement for a senior library position that asked for links to the candidate’s “online presence”. Lutie Sheridan from ECU raised the concern that cases like this may unfairly bring a candidate’s private life into their professional arena. We temporarily went off on an interesting tangent about the effect of an online presence on employment – including images/comments about someone published by third parties.

Being too seamlessly in the user’s space ?

After the presentation, Lucia Ravi from the State Library of Western Australia asked what would happen to our funding if we used Web 2.0 so well that we became invisible to our funding bodies. What if we go so far into the users’ space, and are so successful at making the experience user-centred, that the user doesn’t even notice that it is the library brokering the connections to the information they need? (I hope I paraphrased the question right ???)

I think the question is a really interesting one – and that the answer probably lies in promoting our reputation as a reliable, unbiased, easy to use resource …. so that when users are linked mysteriously to the information they need, they look to see whether Brand Library was involved.

“Take-homes” for me

Presentation style

Michael wasn’t frightened to simplify or go back to first principles. He had obviously worked very hard to strip his talk of jargon and any buzz words that would make people glaze over. He was able to build from simple ideas and then keep the audience with him as he elaborated. They trusted him and were prepared to listen because his choice of words and attitude made it clear that he wasn’t going to do anything to make them feel dumb.

Makes me realise that when I am presenting, I often miss out essential basic information because it feels like I am insulting the audience by presuming that they don’t know things. Unless I am very, very well rehearsed, I have a tendancy not to give enough background or explanation of an idea before I try to elaborate on it.

He also slipped in story telling and audience participation (“who here does x?”) in a very subtle and effective way.

Hivebrarian, Twitbrarian

When Michael go to the bit in his presentation where he asked “does anyone here twitter?”, I was actually twittering someone to tell her she had just been quoted in his talk….. continuous partial attention and all that …. Anyhow, I mentioned Amy Kearn’s great “in-the-shower” idea from a couple of days ago.

She’s exploring how to capitalise on the fact that there are librarians on twitter 24/7 , and maybe creating some kind of “the librarian is always on” volunteer reference service. If you want to find more information, it is here at Amy Kearns’ wiki . Various folk have been working on the idea via twitter, including playing with channels and XML feeds. Cindi, Joshua and Robin have all added to the discussion.

My final note
The last sentence on my notes of the session is:

Re-evaluate KPIs!!! Need to do this – re-evaluate KPIs!!!!

I guess I’ll be thinking about Key Performance Indicators and what constitutes meaningful and relevant evaluation of our services in 2008.

What kind of free is your library service?

Uncategorized

Chris Anderson wrote about the Long Tail in Wired magazine in 2004 , encapsulating in economic terms one of Ranganathan’s laws of library science “Every book its reader” . The market for the small number of highly demanded – or “smash hit” – widgets (books, CDs, DVDs) is less than the total market of lower demand items in the latter part of the demand curve (the Long Tail). When you run a business with low inventory and distribution cost, for example Amazon.com with no need for shelf stock, then you can make profit by providing access to items in the Long Tail.

Last week, Chris Anderson published an article in Wired that is forerunner of his next book – Free – why $0.00 is the future of business . It looks at how incorporating some services that are at no cost to the consumer can lead to a healthier bottom line for a corporation. It shows how free can become mandatory to survival if others in the same business are providing services for free.

“Free” is an essential component of our traditional library brand. For the last 6 months I’ve had a question on my Facebook profile for others to answer: “Should libraries still promote as their core brand “a building where there are books loaned for free”?”. I asked it because it is obvious that “building”, “books” and possibly “free” are being redefined.

I had 13 answers – all but one from the library community. There were quite a few yeses, quite a few nos, but many of these in their extended answers said a similar thing – the traditional brand should be a springboard to show people all the other things we offer.

I hadn’t really thought hard about “free” and that it might have a number of models. I thought free was simply free – no charge, end of story.

Here’s Chris Anderson’s “taxonomy of free” – situations where at least some consumers get their service for “free”, even though some others may be making heaps of money elsewhere as a result. The article is rich with references to follow up.

Freemium
Most users get the service for free, but some pay for extra features, thus subsidising all users. Library example: Bestseller Rentals at City of Canning where users pay $5 to immediately access bestsellers, with their pooled funds paying for extra copies that benefit everyone.

Advertising
Businesses pay the organisation to put their name or message where consumers can read them, thus subsidising extra services. Library example: An insurance company sponsoring the National Library of Australia’s Treasures of Australian Libraries travelling exhibition.

Cross subsidies
A product is sold at a very, very low price or given away, but associated consumables are then sold at a high price. Library example: The company Liblime provides free Open Source Library Management Systems like Koha, but then charges for installation, maintenance and support.

Zero marginal cost
Through advances in technology or generosity of the producer, there is virtually no cost to a consumer to consume a product. Library example: Access to items in the public domain via Project Gutenburg .

Labor exchange
To access the service, you do something that increases the usefulness of some other part of the service. Pseudo Library example: Google image labeler . To have the “fun” of playing a game where you see whether you can better describe images than your opponant, you add tags to Google’s image search.

Gift economy
This is often made possible by technological advances that provide zero marginal cost. Some reason other than the monetary economy drives the decision to provide a no-cost service – often altruism. Library Example: The Library Extension Program of the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Libraries already do some of these kinds of free. Should we be looking at these models to extend or change some services so we can continue to provide other services for “free”? Would it make sense to ask people to write a book review before they can access book reviews in our catalogue, for example ?

I’m no economist, but I’m very interested in a couple of shadowy ideas toward the end of the article, where Anderson suggests that “reputation” and “attention” may have a scarcity that will give them great value in the future.

Libraries traditionally have a fantastic reputation as trustworthy and reliable places – but are we translating this message into the online realm? Will we attract enough of that scarce attention stuff now that other businesses are encroaching on our traditional brand and are all starting to do “free”?

CAVAL courses – one each month

Uncategorized

CAVAL is an Australian consortium owned by universities. It provides “shared services to the information and library sectors throughout Australasia” .

They offer an excellent and varied training program around Australia. I’m going to rave about two upcoming seminars and give a plug for a third one.

At the start of March, there is still time to get tickets to see Michael Stephens, of Tame the Web fame, talk about the Hyperlinked Library in Adelaide (Monday 2 March), Perth (Wednesday 5 March) and Brisbane (Thursday 13 March) . From Michelle McLean’s account of the Melbourne seminar, it looks like THE training seminar to go to this year.

At the start of April, Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist from Talis, is talking in Perth (1st April ) and Melbourne (3rd April) . His topic is Web 2.0 – Where Next ? He’s looking beyond Web 2.0 toward the Semantic Web. I’ve been following Talis’ Panlibus blog for a while now, and I’m finally beginning to understand their concern with freeing up our library data, providing mechanisms for sharing it and manipulating it into more retrievable bundles.

At the start of May, I’m giving a CAVAL seminar called Exploring Second Life . (this is the plug bit). I’ll be in Sydney on Friday May 9th and Melbourne on Monday May 12th. I’ll take people through creating an avatar, how to navigate Second Life, how to use its tools, how to stay safe and discussing some of the institutional concerns with providing training or managing property in Second Life. I hope we get time to do a bit of building and scripting too. ..that’s the really fun stuff. With just 10 in the course, I’m planning to tailor it specifically to whatever the participants want, so if you have registered, please feel free to contact me and tell me what you’d like covered.

Are your sources relevant? Are you ?

Uncategorized

A 5.3 magnitude earthquake hit the UK around 1am their time today. ( Earthquake felt across much of UK )

Within 3 minutes of it happening, I received this message from one of my Twitter friends. “BREAKING NEWS – Reports of an earthquake in London streaming into the BreakingNewsOn center. working to confirm. Stay for Coverage “ It came from a profile based in the Netherlands called BreakingNewsOn.

twitter-breakingnewson_1204105522546edited.png

Being an old-fashioned net-citizen, I checked out Google and then Google News. Not a sausage about any London earthquake – although 16 hours before, Lloyd’s of London had predicted that Israel was at risk of an earthquake:

earthquake-london-google-news_1204078870343edited.png

So – I turned to my new favourite tool, Tweet Scan (thanks Sue) – which searches posts (tweets) to twitter. Searching on “earthquake”  retrieved an instant snapshot of how it was affecting people in the UK, including the poor guy with the really old property who believes that God hates him personally.

  real-time-twitter-search-tweet-scan_1204078848546edited.png

Google doesn’t have the instant goods. Blogs don’t. And the next edition of my local newspaper – once the most up-to-date news source available – won’t be distributed until about 12 hours after the earthquake happened.  

As librarians, we need to be familiar with the way information is created and transmitted – and how this is changing. We need to know how to use new tools to mine these new sources. We need to ask questions about the accuracy of such sources, and try to work out where archiving fits into this.

I’m wondering how many librarians would pick up the inherent weakness of Tweet Scan as an information tool. Tweet Scan only indexes those Twitter accounts that are public, not accounts like mine, which only my friends can read.  If you’ve been on the inside, in there playing with Twitter, you’ve probably worked this out. If you’ve been watching from the outside, you probably had no idea.  

Of course, my earthquake search is a great illustration of how the information rich live. Twitter can only be accessed by people with skills and time – both time to spend twitterwatching and the type of day with the leisure to be constantly interrupted by twitter. To me, this makes it even more important that librarians understand how this works and are able be a conduit to the information poor .

If you are in an academic library, your clientele probably includes some of the most information rich – and young and privileged- people around. I love this videoclip that provides a glimpse into the way these kids are changing.  Bear with it for the first minute or so, and you will be rewarded with some very interesting perspectives on print, email and wristwatches. Are you  relevant? (found via Stephen’s Lighthouse )

Meme – Passion Quilt

Uncategorized

Slowing down on blogging for a bit because I have something in common with a Barbie doll. My right elbow isn’t really opening more than about 150 degrees. It’s a bit wobbly too. I suspect it is self inflicted – either the triceps track on Body Pump or too much mousing. I hope that anti-inflammatories will fix it and I’ll be back on track within the week.

Mattel 1156 uploaded to Flickr on March 9, 2007 by Patrick Q

Anyhow, I’m taking this chance to follow up a meme that Jude O’Connell tagged me for . The idea is to take any image ( under Creative Commons of course) and then caption it to show what I am most passionate for students to learn.

This sums it up for me:

rainbow-ladygreencaption.jpg

Rainbow uploaded to Flickr on December 31, 2006 by yewenyi

3 Simple Meme Rules:

  • Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
  • Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.(Although not specified in the rules, I’ve traced it back to this post)
  • Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

Tagging

I’m tagging these educators:

Aurora Leadership Institute one year on – looking inward.

Uncategorized

It’s been a year since I attended the Aurora Leadership Institute . This post looks inward at what I got out of it personally. Previously I posted about what I learned about leadership Aurora Leadership Institute one year on – looking outward.

One year on, I’m much less concerned about making mistakes and more motivated to improve. Aurora gave me a toolkit to see when I’m veering from a productive and useful path, and techniques to self correct.

I still talk over the top of people. I still seek to understand people more deeply than is necessary. I still try to make personal connections when it’s better to step back. I still tend to ask people questions and then tell them what their answer is before they have a chance to open their mouths.

Probably I do this less than I used to. I am now much more aware when I do it. I forgive myself much more when it happens. Instead of cringing and beating myself up about it and withdrawing from a situation where I’ve embarrassed myself yet again – I try to self correct, shut up a bit, listen a bit more, back off a bit and stay in the ring to see through what I need to see through.

I’m trying little things too. Like slowing down and talking more slowly and clearly. Like trying hard not to rant and rave and blurt out everything I know about something. Like reminding myself that it is OK not to always let people know what I think, and that it’s OK to not contribute sometimes. Neither mean than I’m being deceptive or not pulling my weight. Sometimes other people need space and will not get cross or think I’m not being honest if I keep myself to myself. What a relief !

I’m trying to keep all my internal processing on the inside instead of thinking out loud quite so much – this is the hardest, as when I get passionate or excited, I still blurt – and being carried away, I don’t realise until afterward.

“Strategic Few” has become a bit of a mantra. I’m trying to tease out the most important few points of anything I have to convey and just focus on communicating these. I look for the few tasks likely to have the most effective impact and focus on completing these. “No” is entering my vocabulary.

I found out that I’m extremely people-focused, and I’ve been exploring how I can use this as a strength. Before Aurora I thought I didn’t really give much of a toss about other people. Now I see that I spend a lot of energy trying to find out whether people are feeling OK about what is happening, whether they feel a part of what is going on, whether they feel like they have some kind of choice or control about what they are doing.

Aurora was designed to help remove blocks that were stopping us from being leaders. Many of mine were personal to do with grief issues. Aurora motivated me to seek counselling, which took up a lot of energy and rather shattered me for the first six months of the year.

The most valuable part of Aurora was observing the other participants and the mentors and how they “did” leadership. Each person had such a unique blend of strengths and competencies that I realised that maybe not fitting the stereotypical “Leader” mould was OK.

Aurora also gave us a specific framework for looking at people and their behaviour, which before Aurora I had dismissed as psychobabbly mumbo jumbo. I have used this framework almost every day, either to understand other people’s motivations or to understand whether I am working from fear, or the desire for perfection, or to please others etc.

A library leader I spoke to at VALA accidentally called Aurora an “intervention“. I like the description – it definitely shook me up, helped me to see myself, my profession and my path in it more clearly. It set off a continuing process that will hubble and bubble for quite a time to come. Thanks to everyone who gave me this gift.

Want to learn from an 8 year old ?

Uncategorized

Last year I raved about Al Upton and the Minilegends – a Year 3 class in Adelaide where the teacher is using blogging and online games in his classroom, ( Happy Blog Day from Kathryn ) . The minilegends were also responsible for a small but pleasurable addiction by my household to the online artwork and gameplay of Samarost 1 and Samarost 2 .

This year there is a new batch of minilegends, and they are seeking blogging mentors from around the world. All you need to do is drop in on the Minilegends homepage, choose a kid and leave positive comments on their blog during the year. It’s worth doing – easy, fun, gives you a warm fuzzy and helps a kid.

I’ve been matched up with Eloise, who like me has one brother and no sister. I expect to learn a lot from her in the year to come.

Aurora Leadership Institute one year on – looking outward.

Uncategorized

This time last year I recorded my thoughts about Leadership before I attended the five day Aurora Leadership Institute , designed to “assist future leaders in the library and associated cultural and information industry to maximise their leadership skills and potential”. Leadership Thoughts. (Looking back, I see I also speculated about it in November 2006 when my application was accepted ). It’s been one year, so time to reflect on the experience.

The next post is about what I got out of Aurora personally. This post is more external – what I think about Leadership now and how I fit into it.

Since Aurora, I’ve had a pretty amazing year professionally – trips interstate, speaking gigs, creative and interesting projects, a new position and many opportunities to have interesting discussions with established and up-and-coming library leaders.

I’ve watched as my Aurora classmates from last year have moved to more appropriate jobs, done very creative things in their existing jobs, published, acted in secondments with huge responsibility and arranged events and seminars for the profession.

Would it have happened without Aurora ?

Maybe we would have done all this stuff anyway, but I’m 100% certain that we would have done it differently.

I would have been less mindful. Less able to see what was effective. Less able to understand and consider the strategic impact. Less able to accept that what I was doing was leadership.

Aurora has taught me that one can truly lead from any position. I now place a higher value on mentorship than I did – and understand how I can be a mentor. Before Aurora I thought I was too lowly, too new in the game to think of mentoring anyone else. Now I realise that it’s not about being extremely wise and venerable and passing information on in some kind of master/novice relationship.

Mentoring can be about encouraging others, providing opportunities for them to shine, acknowledging fantastic efforts, spotting the dreams they might have and reinforcing that they are on the right path, or suggesting new ones… and even being brave enough to step out of my comfort zone and have a word when I think that someone may be damaging their career.

At Aurora we spent time with mentors who are leaders in our field. I now understand that they have no superpowers and are very human and very individual. This has made what they do seem more within the reach of us regular folk. It also makes what they do seem all the more remarkable – without magic fairy dust they are able to keep large organisations functioning or contribute substantially to our professional organisation – super effectively using the same 24 hours that we are all allocated for each day.

Instead of magic fairy dust, they all seemed to have a strong and certain commitment to what they do. They all seemed to masterfully work out what was the most important thing for them to do at any one time, and then focus on doing that. They were all comfortable in the role of leader. They all obviously actively engaged with the world outside their institutions, and bought that knowledge back to strengthen their home institution.

After Aurora I understand how crucial it is to keep an eye on the future and on trends. I won’t know whether what I am doing now is the most effective use of my time if I don’t have a context or vision about how relevant it is to the future. What I am doing today is shaping that future, so I really need to know where I am going.

Back a year ago, I wondered whether

Aurora will persuade me that their are rewards for moving up the food chain and losing that contact with the ground?

In some ways it has. I understand much more about how teams work and how strengths can complement each other. I am reassured that I don’t have to be good at every aspect of my job (Yes, before Aurora I did think that I had to be). I understand now that it can be about selecting the right people around me and actively looking for people with strengths that complement mine. I understand now that it’s up to me how out of touch I become with the ground, whether or not I move up the food chain.

After all that, I still feel like I am only “half baked” from the Aurora experience, and like there is much more growth to come as a result of those five days last year.