1. Expect More!
At the Heart of Libraries
Innovation, Community, Success
Stephen Abram, MLS
Fort Bend County Libraries
Staff Development Day
May 10, 2013
2. These slides will be up on Stephen’s
Lighthouse and Slideshare tonight
I’ll link to it through my Twitter (@sabram)
and Facebook pages too.
I’ll stay through the day to have any
conversation you might like …
3. Every Day in every way libraries are
throwing pebbles
5. 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 library strategies 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
7. Library Megatrends
It doesn’t take a genius to see librarian
skills and competencies applied to the
trends and issues in library
communities in very strategic ways.
8. Public Libraries
• Recommendations (Bibliocommons, LibraryThing
for Libraries / Book Psychic)
• Community Glue
• Economic Impact and VALUE studies
• Programs on steroids aligned with collections and
space
• Bi-directional Partnerships
• Education and Learning – REALLY committing to
learning and credits / diplomas / certificates
• A volatile supplier space
• Renewed advocacy moves to Influencing and selling
9. Consortia & State Licensing
• Consortia level the playing field
• ALA & 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
15. 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
24. A Verb . . . an Experience, enlivened for an audience
25. A Noun . . . A foundation but not sufficient with professional animation
26. Retail Sales Down?
Teen Reading Down?
Titles Down?
Circulation Down?
Reading Down?
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
Focus on the REAL Issues
Not BOOKS! The experience
32. 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
33. 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
34. 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
• Virtual and in-person
• In the Library and reaching out with partners
35. 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 and program dissemination
• Citation and information ethics
• Content and repository archipelagos
• Strategic Analytics
• Value & Impact Measures
• Behaviours, Satisfaction
• Economic and strategic alignment
36. 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 question domains? Start there.
• Don’t go it alone. Build scalability and sustainability.
• Look for replicability – every neighbourhood
38. 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?
• What courses to you offer or recommend? (TED, Khan
Academy, etc.)
39. Up Your Game
• Understand the new Common Curriculum (esp. 6-8 and 9-12)
• Home schooling (Millennials and their kids) NextGen users
• Understand Pedagogy in the context of student experiences and
educational goals
• Understand human development from early years through teens
• Connect across developmental stages, link
• Consider partnerships to put teachers in the library
• Consider coaches and tutoring partnerships
40. Up Your Game
• The strong ‘library’ brand – adding dimension
• Personal branding – Who are your stars? Promote them.
• Program branding
• Take risks for attention (AIDA)
• Embed your brand beyond the library walls and virtually
41. Up Your Game
• Grow collections investments in strategic areas (for example
economic impact, jobs, early years, hobbies, political alignment,
homework, …)
• Develop hybrid strategies that are consistent for digital and
print and programs
• Be obsessive about recommendations and advice
• Integrate virtual and physical - hybridize
42. Up Your Game
• Outside the library is still the library
• Entrances and gardens
• Complaints often center on fines, washrooms, etc.
• Customer service best practices training (Starbucks,
Nordstrom, Marriott, Ritz Carlton, Disney)
43. 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
• Focus on future not protecting the past
84. 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)
85. • What are your goals?
• What are their goals?
• Is there a difference?
What are the goals?
105. 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.
106. 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
107. Walled Gardens or Infinite Access
• ILS
• CMS
• Cloud(s) and cloud metadata
• 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?
108. Learning Object Diversification
• NextGen Textbooks
• Experience portals
• 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
109. 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.
110. 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
111. 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
115. Black and White
• The polarization of discussion
Dogmatic vs. Professional positions on:
eBooks, access, copyright, etc.
Political and social value systems in conflict
121. 121
• 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.
122. 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
125. Are we going to support a totally
build it yourself world?
Imagine IKEA merging with GM...
126.
127.
128. What is a meal in library end-user community or research, education and learning terms? Are you focusing on scale?
Let’s think
Think: Are you thinking food, courses,
days, weekly plan, or nutrition overall?
130. What We Never Really Knew Before
27% of our users are under 18.
59% are female.
29% are college students.
5% are professors and 6% are teachers.
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.
We often
believe a lot
that isn’t true.
