Libraries are facing many changes and challenges as technology evolves. Content is becoming more fragmented across different formats and devices. Users are also more diverse with changing needs and expectations. Librarians need to focus on improving user experiences and building communities through learning. They must be open to new ideas, partnerships, and removing barriers to fully support users in this shifting landscape.

1. Expect More!
At the Heart of Libraries
Innovation, Community, Success
Stephen Abram, MLS
New Orleans Public Library March 21, 2013

5. 5

6. 6

7. 7

8. 8

9. 9

10. 10
A metaphor for public libraries…

11. Every Day in every way libraries are
throwing pebbles

12. My son: Zachary

21. 21
It’s simple really, shift happens, gedoverit
• Users & Communities will continue to be diverse in the extreme
• Expectations around timeliness will increase
• We will have a foot in both camps for many, many years to come: digital
and physical
• Content will (is already) be dominated by non-text
(gamification, 3D, visual, music, video, audio, etc.)
• Search will explode with options and one-step, one box search is for
dummies
• The single purpose anchored device is dead as a target environment
• Devices will focus on social, collaboration, sharing, multimedia, creation
and successful Services will align with that
• Librarians will need to focus primarily on professional service(s) and
strategic alignment (reduced roles in organizing knowledge and
step&fetchit politeness)
• Service Professionals NOT Servants
• E-Learning, collections and metadata will go to the cloud massively

22. Deer in headlamps slide here.

23. 23
Who are you?

24. 24
What are you?

25. 25

26. 26

27. Library Megatrends
It doesn’t take a genius to see
librarian skills and competencies
applied to the trends and issues in
library communities

28. Libraries core skill is not
delivering information
Libraries improve the
quality of the question
and the user experience
Libraries are about learning
and building communities

29. People Have Seasons

30. Librarian Magic

32. Studying the
Future
• What are folks like?
Are they different
than us? Do their
needs change?
• What world will
they experience
and what skills do
they need?
• How can we make
a difference? (Very
different than help)

33. What are the goals?
• What are your goals?
• What are their goals?
• Is there a difference?

34. Building blocks
• Information
• Communication
• Media
• Social
• Numeracy
• Visual
• Literacies

36. What does
Sustainability
Mean?

37. What Does
Boundarylessness
mean?

39. • When something
needs to
change…
• Do it.
• Take
accountability.
• Delegate
responsibility.

40. Be More Open to New Paths

41. Be More Open to the Users’ Paths

42. Do You Feel Poor?

43. Are you locked into library mindsets?

46. Focus on the REAL Issues
Retail Sales Down? NO
Titles Down? NO
Circulation Down? NO
Reading Down? NO
Teen Reading Down? NO

47. Amazon
Chapters/Indigo
Barnes & Noble
BN BookBrowser
Borders
Suggestica
Inside a Dog (teens)
MySpace Books
Books We Like
OCLC's FictionFinder
All Consuming
LibraryThing
Next Favorite
StoryCode
Rating Zone
Hypatia and AlexLit
WhichBook.net
AllReaders.com
Reader's Robot
gnooks

48. Will Reading Matter?

49. Build in
Format
Agnosticity

50. A projector the size of a sugar cube

53. Everything’s getting smaller

54. Pay
Attention
to
Mobile

55. Being More
Open to
Comment

56. Being More Open to Criticism
and Feedback

57. Being More Open to
Recommendations

58. Support Aspiration

59. Be Creative and Attract

60. Your Career Has Seasons

61. Being More Open to Change

62. The Library as Sandbox

64. Support Your Team

65. Being More Open
Experimentation, Pilots and
Innovation

66. Being More Flexible

67. Being More Open to Risk

68. Being Open
to a Mosaic
of Solutions

69. Being Open to Ambiguity

70. Be
More
Open
to Social
Technologies
and
Unintended
Consequences

71. Being Comfortable with Speed

72. Being Open to New Ideas

73. Letting Go of Control

74. Remove the Borders Inside Libraries
Be the Change We Want to See

75. Remove the Borders In the
Library Community
Be the Change We Want to See.

76. Remove the
Borders Between
Libraries and Users
Be the Change We Want to See.

77. Remove the
Borders
Between
Libraries and
Influencers

78. Be Inspirational

79. Be Important

80. Know What Makes Us Different

81. Finding Our Voice and Using It

82. Libraries core skill is not
delivering information
Libraries improve the
quality of the question
and the user experience
Libraries are about learning
and building communities

83. 83

84. 84
Up Your Game
• Know your local community demographics
• Focus on needs assessment and social assessments
• Prioritize: Love all, Serve all, Save the World means nothing
gets done
• Priorities are SMART:
Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, & Time bound
• Look for partnerships that add value

85. 85
Up Your Game
• Align with Collections –every collection must be justified by programs
• Force strategic investment budgeting
• Look for partnerships that add value
• Don’t go it alone. Focus on large scale sustainable programs
• Connect to the longer process not just events

86. 86
Up Your Game
• Align with Collections – But add virtual experiences
• Look for partnerships that add value
• Ensure the program delivery person is embedded including librarians
• What are your top 20 questions? Start there
• Don’t go it alone. Build scalability and sustainability

87. 87
Up Your Game
• Start offering diplomas and certificates
• Look for partnerships that add value
• Offer real educational opportunities not just adjacencies
• What does your community need for economic advantage?

88. 88
Up Your Game
• Understand the new Western Common Curriculum (9-12)
• Understand Pedagogy
• Understand human development from early years through teens
• Consider partnerships to put teachers in the library
• Consider coaches and tutoring partnerships

89. 89
Up Your Game
• Personal branding
• Program branding
• Take risks for attention (AIDA)
• Embed your brand beyond the library walls and virtually

90. Smelly Or
Yellow Sex
Liquid Appeal?

91. 91
Up Your Game
• U of Alberta relationship
• Grow collections investments in strategic areas (for example
economic impact, early years, political alignment…)
• Develop hybrid strategies that are consistent for digital and
print and programs
• Be obsessive about recommendations and advice

92. 92
Up Your Game
• Dog, Star, Cow, Problem Child/?
• Reduce investment in successes
• Increase investment
• Look at TCO
• Look at all costs incurred and not just hard costs
• Review opportunity costs in soft costs

93. 93

94. 94

95. 95

96. Honest to G*d – Let’s
Encourage Fun

98. Every day in every way libraries are
throwing pebbles

99. Content Fragmentation
•Digitization’s real impact – non-fiction vs. non-fiction
•Format
• Print, ePUB, PDF, Kindle, etc. etc.
• CD, DVD, USB, etc. etc.
• Streaming
• Licenses, Open Access, Creative Commons, etc.
•eBooks, eJournals, eContent
•Games, Learning Objects, Guides, …
•Copyright Issues (NatGeo, Tasini, TPP, SOPA, AC, etc. etc.)
•Author Lawsuits, WikiLeaks
•Citation fragmentation
•Make no mistake, the legal framework for knowledge economy is
being built now.

100. Beyond Text, Books and Reading Literacies
• Text aloud and shrinking codex market
• Graphics & Charts
• Formulae
• Pictures, Maps
• Video & Audio
• 3D objects
• Gamification
• Deep Data Mining
• Assessments
• Community collaboration, cohorts, & social sharing
• The book model in your head is nostalgia

101. Walled Gardens or Infinite Access
• ILS
• CMS
• Cloud(s)
• Device dependencies
• Formats (e.g. Kindle)
• Discovery versus consumer search versus native
search
• 4 horseman to watch:
Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook (not Microsoft)
• Who controls reading and intellectual freedom?

102. Learning Object Diversification
• NextGen Textbooks
• eLearning (white label, proprietary, custom,…)
• Learning Management Systems
• Cohort Learning Environments
• Presentation Systems & Virtual Conference Environment
• Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)
• Collaboration Software as standard workplace
• MOOCs, e-learning, ‘distance environments’
• Open Access, scholarly publishing and deep aggregations
digitization
• The Academic Bubble is the next BIG disruption

103. End User Fragmentation
• Teens / Post-Millennials
• Millennials (gender, IQ, social)
• Aging workforce and tipping points
• Other demographics –
ethnicity, income, households, immigration …
• The new digital divide is not economic or aligned
with poverty
• Business versus Consumer
• The Device Divide
• Mobility
• Librarians’ relationships with cohorts are critical.

104. Search Fragmentation
• The new Algorithms
• Consumer Search
• Specialized Search
• Professional Search
• Semantic, Sentiment, Social, Suggestion Search etc.
• Mobile search
• Social search
• Work and personalized alignment
• Augmented Reality
• SEO & SMO & Content Spam
• Geo-location
• The ultimate search choice fragments

105. Technology Fragmentation
• Feature Phones die
• Smartphones dominate
• Tablets (Phablets?!)
• Laptops
• Desktops become rare
• Gaming stations as access
• Television as device
• E-Readers (e-paper versus plasma)
• Internet of Things
• Browsers lose dominance to apps and HTML5
• Fanboy behaviour is NOT Professional behaviour

106. Imagine
How do your skills apply to these
issues and challenges?

109. 109

110. Black and White
• The polarization of discussion
Dogmatic vs. Professional positions on:
eBooks, access, copyright, etc.
Political and social value systems in conflict

111. Black & White

116. 116
• Examples of B&W discussions
• These can sometimes lack professional perspectives, be politically
dogmatic and belief driven, and use death symbolic metaphors
• E-books versus Physical Books
• Open access versus Proprietary Content
• Free versus Fee
• Business Models versus Social Models
• Apple versus Microsoft PC
• Desktop vs. Laptop vs. Tablet vs. Phone
• Privacy and Confidentiality
• Make no mistake. I’m not saying the discussions are wrong or taking
sides, I just think professionals see colours and shades of gray.

117. Definitions
• Discovery
• Search – known item retrieval
• Topical or Subject Search
• Research
• Immersive Learning
• Assembly
• Two step discovery: discover, searching, finding,
use
• The pressure is ON for librarians to scale up their
information fluency training initiatives

119. 1,200,000,000
1,000,000,000
Double a penny every day for a month =
Over $1 billion in just 30 days
800,000,000
600,000,000
Series1
400,000,000
200,000,000
-
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

120. Recognize key shifts

121. 121
OMG – the digital book!

122. Trends Differ Slightly by Library Sector
•Public Libraries
•Academic Research Libraries
•Community College Libraries
•School Libraries
•Specialized Libraries
•Consortia
And so do the audiences, members, users …

123. Public Libraries
• Recommendations (LibraryThing for
Libraries, Bibliocommons, Book Psychic)
• Community Glue
• Economic Impact and VALUE studies
• Programs on steroids aligned with collections and
space
• Partnerships
• Education and Learning – REALLY committing to
learning and accreditation/ credits / diplomas /
certificates
• Renewed advocacy moves to Influencing and selling

124. Consortia
• Consortia
• CRKN, OCUL, TAL, CULC, Readers First, etc.
• Dealing with the small town mindset
• OCLC Linked Data, RDA and global metadata strategies
• DPLA
• Library Renewal
• EveryLibrary Advocacy PAC
• 3M e-books (CALIFA / Douglas County initiatives)
• Dark literature, orphan works, etc.
• Cloud initiatives

125. So what is the answer?
Where are the real pain points?

127. Grocery Stores

128. Grocery Stores

129. Grocery Stores

130. Cookbooks, Chefs . . .

131. Cookbooks, Chefs . . .

132. Meals

133. Are we going to support a totally
build it yourself world?
Imagine IKEA merging with GM...

136. Let’s think
Think: Are you thinking
food, courses, days, weekly plan, or
nutrition overall?
What is a meal in library end-user community or research, education and learning terms? Are you focusing on scale?

137. The new
bibliography and
collection
development
KNOWLEDGE
PORTALS
KNOWLEDGE,
LEARNING,
INFORMATION &
RESEARCH
COMMONS

138. What are the real issues?
• Craft versus Industrial Strength
• Personal service only when there’s impact
• Pilot, Project, Initiative versus Portfolio Strategy
• Hand-knitted prototypes versus Production
• e.g. Information Literacy initiatives
• Discovery versus Search versus Deep Search
• eLearning units
• Citation and information ethics
• Repository archipelagos
• Strategic Analytics
• Value & Impact Measures
• Behaviours, Satisfaction
• Economic and strategic alignment

139. What We Never Really Knew Before
 27% of our users are under 18.
 59% are female.
 29% are college students. We often
 5% are professors and 6% are teachers. a lot
believe
that isn’t true.
 On any given day, 35% of our users are there for the very
first time!
 Only 29% found the databases via the library website.
 59% found what they were looking for on their first search.
 72% trusted our content more than Google.
 But, 81% still use Google.

150. Be More Open to the Users’ Path

151. What Would You Attempt If
You Knew You Would Not
Fail?

152. Get to where the user is.
eLearning, Mobile, Dis
tant, Virtual, Workflo
w

153. Choose

155. A Third Path

157. Don’t study the issue to death.

158. Focus on the Whole Experience

160. Until lions learn to write their own story,
the story will always be from the perspective
of the hunter not the hunted.

162. Stephen Abram, MLS, FSLA
Consultant, Dysart & Jones/Lighthouse Partners
Cel: 416-669-4855
stephen.abram@gmail.com
Stephen’s Lighthouse Blog
http://stephenslighthouse.com
Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr: Stephen Abram
LinkedIn / Plaxo: Stephen Abram
Twitter: @sabram
SlideShare: StephenAbram1