For a while now, I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing a series of web-based courses for library staff. I’ve taught traditional courses before in classrooms, and I’ve taught courses over web conference as well, but they’ve always been on the behalf of professional library organizations. What I have in mind is similar, but a bit different.

I’ve taken a few web-based courses from photographers and lifestyle bloggers in the past, and while I’ve had mixed success with some of the courses, but that was more about me and the my struggles with depression and anxiety than the courses themselves. Yet no matter how I did in the course, I often leave them wondering whether a similar course delivery method would work for delivering continuing education/professional development for librarians.

If you’re not familiar with how these courses operate, have a look at Karen Walrond’s Gratitude 2012 project and Vivienne McMaster’s photography e-courses. What these courses seem to have in common is that they’re delivered electronically, there’s generally a low registration cost, there’s a fair amount of introspection, self-improvement, and self-directed learning involved, and, especially in Vivienne’s courses, there’s often a social component as well, as participants gather in a central online space to share their work and build community.

The reason these courses are so attractive to me is that there’s a low barrier for entry. Participants wouldn’t need to be a part of a professional organization, and they wouldn’t need to pay hundreds of dollars to participate. I’d intentionally keep the prices on the low-ish side — under $100 for some courses — to make them more attractive.

Ideally, the courses would be offered asynchronously so that participants could complete the lessons at their own pace. If desired, they can share what they’ve learned with me, but the idea here is to get participants to go through the tasks as designed on their own. If participants wanted to share their work with others in the course, I could make sure that a central online repository/discussion space was available where they could do exactly that. The great part about this (for me) is that the participants wouldn’t only be learning from me, we’d all be learning from each other.

I’m not certain whether there’s a lot of demand for these kinds of courses for professionals, but I know there’s a cottage industry of independent bloggers/photographers/communities of practice where this kind of instruction is going on. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking at this as potential revenue stream as well. Yes, I could absolutely use the money, but more than that, I’m interested in delivering courses independent of professional organizations, so that more people can benefit from the information being made available.

Is there any merit to this? If you’ve delivered a similar course — whether it’s related to libraries or not — what things should I consider before taking this on?

I know that a fair amount of the folks who stop by here on a regular basis aren’t librarians or information professionals, and as a result, I’ve mostly kept the library-related posts here to a minimum.

Today I saw a slide deck that I wanted to share with those of you who don’t use libraries, or whose idea of what libraries (and library staff) are capable of may be a bit out of date. Yes, there are 87 slides, but you’ll go through them pretty quickly, I promise.

In May 2012, it’ll be seven, no, eight years since I graduated from library school. The things I was interested in – content creation, blogging, using emerging technologies, and usability – weren’t a huge part of the curriculum when I started back in 2002. A huge shift has happened in a relatively short amount of time, and more than ever, librarians are talking about user experience and customer experience. Librarians have always hacked information, but it seems to me that a lot more of us are interested in getting our hands dirty with code and making stuff more awesome. People from outside the profession with an interest in open data are looking at us and pointing fingers, asking us why we still keep our information locked away in proprietary silos.

I’m encouraged. I’m excited.

But I still want more.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine was looking to make a career change, and I suggested that he think about going to library school. The profession needed more people like him – gregarious, outgoing go-getters who bring a new perspective and a different face to the profession (this profession needs to racially diversify like whoa, but that’s the subject of another post). He’ll be graduating this spring, and he’s already working as an academic librarian in Louisiana, and if I can be completely self serving for a moment, I couldn’t be more proud of him.

Libraries need more people like this — more people like you – to work for us. I’m not going to beat the drum for an LIS education, because I have my own issues with the diploma mill mentality, churning out graduates into a market where the jobs are few and far between. What I would like to see, however, is more community partnerships where tech professionals volunteer to build applications for cash- and resource-strapped libraries: something like Google’s Summer of Code, or Code for America, but just for public libraries.

Libraries can make this happen by becoming more open than we’ve ever been before. Not only in terms of space (although that is really important), but we need to identify ways that we can remove whatever roadblocks exist between us and community partners who are ready and willing to help us take on our technological challenges. If there is a community organization that teaches computer courses that target a particular demographic, bring them in on a volunteer basis and let them teach your basics courses for a while. It’ll free up library staff to focus on other things (like community engagement, for example) and to get back to much needed professional development. If we could be guaranteed 10 hours a week to work on a fun project of our own, I believe we would see some truly innovative service models, programs, and technological solutions.

But what’s the best way to reach out? That’s something I’ll be trying to suss out over the next little while.

We interrupt the bikey posts for a brief message….

Yes, that’s me on stage behind Colleen Harris at the Internet Librarian conference that is taking place in Monterey, CA. Colleen is an academic librarian in North Carolina. Y’all know I’m a public librarian way up here in Vancouver, BC.

How’d it come about that Colleen used a picture of me in a presentation at a library conference? Social media — Friendfeed to be exact.

Colleen and I got to know each other thanks to the Library Society of the World, an “un-organization” of library workers that likes to take the piss out of more formal library associations. The LSW has an active community on Friendfeed, and whenever I have a question about library work and the profession in general, I turn to the LSW.

I post ego-stroking pictures of myself taken with my iPhone camera or the iSight camera on my MacBook to my Friendfeed account from time to time, and a few weeks ago I posted the one seen here and labeled it “Cheeto Walrus”. Colleen asked later that day whether she could use the photo, and I didn’t hesitate to give her permission.

About a half hour ago, Kendra, a librarian at Berkeley who runs the awesome Library Attack! blog, posted the photo of Colleen on stage at IL. I very nearly spit Coke Zero on my screen.

We can talk all day long about how social media enriches our professional lives, and how technical competencies for librarians are key to our continued relevancy. All of that is important, but I think I’m more interested in how a loose community of practice like the LSW has nearly replaced the need formal library associations and memberships in my life. I feel very fortunate to know so many inspiring, amazing, accomplished librarians. They make me want to up my librarian game and contribute more to the profession.

Plus, it’s just hilarious to see my big ol’ cheeto walrus face blown up on screen. I can’t stop giggling.

Does your library have a social media strategy, or are you, like us, flying by the seat of your pants?

There’s something to be said for experimentation, but eventually your organization will reach a point where you’ll have to decide whether to commit to social media as part of your public service mandate, or to drop it like so many other “emerging technologies” that have gone before (social bookmarking, anyone?). MPOW has decided to bank on social media, and I’ve been given the responsibility of coming up with a guiding policy. Here are a few questions I’ve asked myself along the way that may help you create your own policies:

1. Who are you? There’s a concept in the business world called the “elevator pitch” in which you have to pitch your idea or brand in the time it takes to go from one floor to another in an elevator. When thinking of social media, you’ll need to be able to give your pitch in 140 characters or less.
2. What’s your point? Are you trying to build awareness of the library’s services and collections? Are you trying to build loyalty or improve the public perception of the library? This next suggestion will be hard but I’m going to make it anyway — choose one, and stick with it for awhile. Don’t spread your message too thin, and focus your efforts. Targeted messaging is easier to measure.
3. What does your audience think of you? What kind of relationship do you have with them? Do you practice customer-centered service, or do you still make decisions without talking to the people? Find out what your audience thinks of you by holding focus groups, conducting surveys via social media (twtpoll is a great tool), and asking people to tell you about their experience with the library.
4. What face will you present to the public? Will you be authoritative and aloof? Professional but personable? Human or robot? Or perhaps you’ll strive for a balance between these choices? Either way, be consistent. If your library has a website style guide, include a section on social media messaging that covers tone of voice, language use, and authority. If you don’t have a website style guide, what are you waiting for? Stop reading this and go write one!
5. How will you measure success? This may be the most important question of all, because unless and until you know what sort of return you’re getting from these efforts, you might as well be shouting in the dark. Up until now, we’ve mostly relied on page views and follower counts to tell us how well we’re doing, but going forward I think we’ll be rolling out targeted metrics that are aligned with specific library publicity and fundraising campaigns. We’ll also be poring over analytics data to help us measure patron success and failure rates on our website, and will be trying to tease out the story of how well our engagement methods are working for us. Exactly what we’ll measure and how we’ll measure it is still rolling around in my brain. Watch this space for more details.

You may notice that I haven’t mentioned tools at all. There’s a good reason for this — remember MySpace? Mm-hmm, exactly. Audiences shift. Web users adopt and abandon tools regularly, and as such, information organizations should focus on strategy, not tactics. We often get so hung up on a particular tool that we’re reluctant to abandon it when it’s no longer working for us. Stop the madness. Be willing to follow your audience when they leave Facebook or Twitter for The Next Big Thing. Read sites like Mashable and Guacira Naves’ The Online Strategy House, and keep abreast of the changing landscape so your organization won’t be caught by surprise when the shift happens. With your goal in sight, the plan of action will take care of itself. Answering these questions can help shape your goal.

So, am I off the mark with this? What other areas should I consider when developing a strategic plan for social media? Leave feedback in the comments.

OK, the title of this post is on the hyperbolic side, but I do have a point. But first, a little light entertainment:

Does your library put a Bridge of Death before your customers? Oh, I’m sure you don’t have a Bridge Keeper who requires patrons to answer “these questions three” before approaching the desk, but we do keep patrons away from the information/reference desk in some subtle ways. One of the most subtle and pervasive ways we do this is by placing directional signs in front of the desks.

I was curious to see how my own library handles directional signs, so I stopped by before the library opened and walked around the building. On just about every floor of the building, we’ve placed signs at the escalator landings to ostensibly help patrons find their way to our collections. How many of you have seen signs like these?

These signs predate my time with the library, but I can only assume they were created to cut down on the number of directional questions. Questions like these are repetitive, and speaking for myself, I know I sometimes get a little tired of answering them. Yet the types of questions that are most asked by the public – the “where’s the bathroom” and “can I check this out?” kinds of questions – weren’t always answered by the signs at MPOW.

When thinking about the usage life cycle – the stages that a person goes through when they use a product or service – the point of first contact is the most important point and is one of our last chances to make a good impression. It’s in that point of first contact that we have the opportunity to begin building a relationship with the customer, to leave her with the impression that this is a service that she likes to use, that she chooses to use, not one that she uses because there is no other alternative.

By the same token, learnability is an important aspect of usability and user experience. As designers (and make no mistake, librarians who organize physical spaces are acting as designers in that moment), it is our responsibility to take into consideration how quickly a patron can learn how our system works.

The sign from the Science and Business division is a little more successful in this regard, as they convey their message simply and clearly, with bold graphics and large text that is easy to read at a distance. The sign from the Literature and Social Sciences division, on the other hand, presents the user with many choices in a smaller, more difficult to read font size. Instead of being able to glance at the sign and quickly gain an idea of where they should be going, the user is forced to stop and spend time with a sign, time that could be better spent finding what they’re looking for, or by asking library staff at the front desk for assistance.

While messaging is important, we should also consider where we place signs like these and what message the placement sends to our visitors. I held the camera at chest height and took the photos – I didn’t intentionally place the camera at a lower angle just to prove a point. In both instances, half of the reference desk is obscured by a sign. More often than not at MPOW, we have two or more people staffing the information desk at a time. When half the staff is conveniently hidden behind a sign, we’re sending a subtle message to the patron that there aren’t enough people around to help him find what he needs, so the patron will either go off on his own and try to find what he wants. But let’s get back to the bridge keeper analogy.

In the Python clip I posted, the bridge keeper stops King Arthur and his Knights and asks them to make a decision before they proceed. By placing these signs on the escalator landing directly in front of the information desk, we’re telling the public that in order to get help from us, they must complete an initial stage before proceeding. We’ve introduced a hurdle, albeit a small one, to the patron’s successful completion of their task (to get information and ask for help).

When talking to library staff, one of the common complaints you’ll hear from us is that the patrons don’t use the information desks anymore. Patrons approach us timidly, saying “I didn’t want to bother you” when their frustration reaches a level that they’re forced to ask us to help them find what they need. We’re often baffled by this, and many library staff will say that they don’t know what to do to make people come over to them and ask for help.

Here’s a suggestion – try removing signs like this for a couple of weeks and see whether the public approaches us more often. Sure, we may see an initial increase of the kinds of questions that these signs are intended to cut down on, but I’d venture that if we make it easier for people to approach us for simple things, that they’ll learn that it’s OK to approach us for more serious information requests as well.

I’m in the process of organizing a social media workshop for librarians and library staff. I know what works and what doesn’t at MPOW, but to be honest, our initial forays into social media weren’t exactly formal or supported by a social media strategy. While we knew we wanted to enhance our (then) new website with social features that would encourage patron participation the actual execution of these ideas has been slow in coming.

I know a fair bit about social media; I’m also pretty honest about what I don’t know, but I digress. I know what we did and what our lessons were, but I’m struggling with coming up with a structured workshop to teach others how to make their static web presences more social spaces. So far I’ve come up with this basic outline:

Day One

• Understanding Social Media – What is it?
• Monitoring Social Media – What are they saying about us?
• Developing a Social Media Strategy – Should we do this?
• Using Social Media Tools – Hands-on workshop
  • Setting up a blog
  • signing up for social media services
  • putting yourself out there

Day Two

• Using Social Media Tools, cont’d.
  • Know your users
  • Develop a learning culture
  • Solving problems with social tools
  • Improving communication with library customers
  • Highlighting library collections, services, products, staff
• Assessment – How are we doing?
• The Social Workplace – Using social media to collaborate with staff
• Going Beyond – Network building, transparency, and maintaining your social media presence

Is this too much? Is it not enough? Are there areas I’m leaving out? If you were attending a social media workshop, what sort of topics would you like to see covered? What about “homework”?  Is it a good idea to give an assignment for participants to work on between sessions?

As always, comments, suggestions, and feedback are appreciated.

The New York Public Library recently unveiled their new website design, and I must say that I’m very impressed by the amount of user research and testing that went into seeing this project through. The site is lively, colourful, and eye-catching, and the information architecture, labeling, and information flow all seem to have been designed with simplicity, ease of use, and findability in mind. Of particular interest is the “Getting Oriented” sections of the site that are tailored to new library users. They even made a video tour of the new site available to the public:

In looking at this video I was struck by one thing: the language used to describe some of the features is pretty technical and sophisticated, which leads me to think that either NYPL users are smarter than the average patron, or that this video is really meant to introduce the site to other librarians and library workers. For example, the narrator talks about how the site was developed to assist with “serendipitous discovery” and extols the site’s “digital galleries” and “archival materials”. The video even mentions that the site was built using the Drupal open source content management system. While these are fascinating details to me (because I work in web services and knowing about these things is part of my job), I wonder just how relevant those bits of information are to the average NYPL user.

It could be that the NYPL serves an audience that has a great deal more technical knowledge than most public library users, and if that’s the case they’re fortunate.

Does your library’s floor plan or system of organization match the conceptual model of your users? MPOW doesn’t (not always) and this fact has never sat well with me, ever since I set foot across the library’s threshold as an employee.

A conceptual model, in case you don’t know, is a collection of thoughts and information that we use to help us figure out how something works, because the parts of the object are visible and the implications of the object are all clear. For example, if we look at a bicycle, our conceptual model probably tells us that this is a self-propelled vehicle that should be operated by a seated human being. The clues come from the seat, the pedals, and the position of the wheels, seat, handlebars, and pedals in relation to each other which suggest the proper position of the body when operating the vehicle.

At MPOW, the division I work in was once called Newspapers and Magazines (it is called something else now, and I’ll get to that in a bit.) By giving the division this label, we’ve set the expectation that leads our patrons to think that if they come to level 5 in our building, they will find all the newspapers and magazines we subscribe to in one section. We’ve helped them form a conceptual model of how the library organizes its collection.

Except that’s not really how we operate. We do keep newspapers in a newspaper reading gallery on this floor, and we also have a few magazines, but other magazines are scattered throughout the library in their subject divisions. If I wanted to read Popular Photography, for example, rather than coming to the Newspapers and Magazines floor, I’d instead have to go to the Fine Arts & History division to find it.

The division is now called Online Information & News, a name that was selected (I assume) because it gave more prominence to the library’s electronic resource collection, which is quite extensive, even with the cutbacks we recently made. I remember thinking when the new name was announced that this wasn’t necessarily a step in the right direction, because by putting the word ‘online’ at the beginning of the phrase, we’re now telling the user that all of our information (whatever that means) can be found online. This causes a great deal of confusion for those users who come to our floor expecting to be able to walk over to any computer and pull up a digitized copy of The Vancouver Sun from 1928. Guess what? They can’t. This collection isn’t online.

And did I mention that we also keep closed stacks items from the Fine Arts & History division on our floor?

I wish I knew the right answer to this labelling problem and could come up with a name for the division that matched the user’s conceptual model and expectation. It would make sense to me that if we are called “Newspapers and Magazines” that all magazines the library subscribes to should be found on this floor. I know other libraries are moving toward a hybrid system of organization that keeps the best part of subject-based organization while experimenting with organization schemes that are more in line with bookstores.

This isn’t a brain dump that has answers. Rather, it’s an attempt for me to focus my thinking on the importance of suggesting or creating an experience that closely matches the user’s expectations. These kinds of mental models work best when the operation at hand is clearly observable, and when the visible parts of that system are consistent with the system image (the labelling).

It’s our job as librarians (the designers) to make sure that our design model matches the user’s mental model. Typically, the only way designers and users can communicate is through the system image (the library design), so we should ensure that everything about our product is consistent with the patron’s expectations. Users get all their knowledge about a system from the system image, and if that system image doesn’t match their expectations, they’ll be frustrated. Or they’ll do what I’ve seen dozens of times: they’ll take a step back, look at the sign on the wall, and look at the person behind the desk as if they’re a crazy person.

We’ve made our library harder to use than it needs to be. We’re making our users tense, and when people are tense, they aren’t willing to or capable of learning. They get tunnel vision and become more rigid, and start seeing us as the problem, rather than the solution.

Earlier this morning, I saw a tweet from Jennifer (@typealibrarian) where she announced the new logo for her library’s Twitter page. What I saw there made me smile.

If you’re not a library type, you might not see anything all that unusual about this page, but as a public librarian, seeing a library that chooses to put an actual name and a face to their public library is — to my mind — a very rare occurrence indeed. By putting a name and a face to the library as a whole, the library is saying to the community that they are interested in building a more personal relationship with the community they serve.

Furthermore, in making this move, they’ve introduced a level of accountability to the exchanges they make with their (online) patrons. Once you attach a name and a face to your organization, you provide your public with an easily-identifiable channel for interaction. It’s a customer service tactic that we’ve seen from companies before, take Zappos for example, but it’s not something we typically do in public libraries. Academic libraries seem to be more open when it comes to attaching names/faces to library services.

Even at my own library, which is considered a leader in social media among City of Vancouver divisions, we use a generic all-in-one account for Twitter. We have several people who post on the library’s behalf, and we made the decision that people it was more important for people to connect to the organization than to any one individual. But seeing what the Columbus Metropolitan library is doing is making me rethink that strategy.

It is important for libraries to make a connection to the communities they serve; I don’t think anyone can safely argue against that position in this day and age. But being out in front of the public, being willing to give up some degree of privacy in exchange for helping people build a more personal connection with the library as a whole seems to me to be a worthwhile trade.

Well done, Columbus Metropolitan Library.