AkLA 2007 – Where People and Libraries Intersect

For the next several days, I’ll be posting about events related to the 2007 Alaska Library Association conference being held in Juneau.

The next few entries will relate to the OCLC Western User Group Meeting for Alaska that was held February 21st. If you have a chance to go to one of the remaining meetings, I’d strongly recommend it. Don’t let the title of “Mapping the User Centric Environment” keep you away.

The first session I went to was the keynote presented by OCLC Western Executive Director Pamela Bailey. Ms. Bailey is an extremely engaging and funny speaker. And very well informed and thoughtful. If you’re organizing a state conference, you might consider inviting her to speak on user issues.

The session was called “People and Libraries, where do they intersect.” Ms. Bailey used a quote about the “curse of knowledge”, namely “when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it.” This causes problems that Ms. Bailey used her MySpace using daughter to illustrate.

Patrons and libraries intersect at the point of need. Libraries need to cater to individual preferences and deliver results in formats that users want.

Who are these users? Book lovers, digital immigrants and digital natives. Digital natives are people born after 1980 who have not known a time without the Internet, cell phones, etc.” Digital immigrants are folks like me and possibly you who use technology to get what they want. Ms. Bailey cited her eBay using mother as an example.

Ms. Bailey offered a then and now perspective on libraries:

THEN
resources scarce
attention abundant
visible mediation
can’t count on visiting library

NOW
attention scarce
resources abundant
self service, invisible mediation
can’t count on visiting library web site

Another major theme of Ms. Bailey’s talk was the idea borrowed from someone I don’t remember, that libraries need to synthesize, specialize and mobilize.

The idea is to pull resources together from inside the library and out, then localize your service, then offer the results in many different formats and methods.

She offered the example of the UK National Library for Health.

1) They synthesize diverse resources.
2) They specialize by selecting content, they direct users to appropriate service and present content locally.
3) They mobilize by delivering their resources via Word, RSS, e-mail and other formats.

The rest of the presentation focused on Open WorldCat. Ms. Bailey noted that Open WorldCat would be worthless without good detailed cataloging that facilitated faceted browsing, among other things. She suggested that we should kiss a cataloger. I did make a point of thanking my cataloger, but no kissing was involved.

One of the more interesting Open WorldCat facts was that 102,000 users reached library catalogs and library pages via search engines as a result of Open WorldCat. And that was just in January 2007. Usage has been similar for the past seven months or so. I really like seeing traditional libraries integrated with the open web in this way.