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?

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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.