1. Public Libraries:
Expect More
Stephen Abram, MLS
County of Los Angeles Public Library
Los Angeles, CA
August 9, 2012

2. Change
These slides are available at Stephen’s Lighthouse blog

3. We Only Get So Many
Once-in-a-Lifetime
Chances To Do Great
Things

4. Black & White

9. Recognize key shifts

10. News Flash
“The Internet and technology have
now progressed to their infancy”

13. 2 parts

15. Academic Libraries:
Central Michigan University
Grand Valley State University
Public Libraries:
Clinton Macomb Public Library
Howell District Library
Kent District Library
Portage District Library

17. • Goals?
• Who are your potential partners and potential
funders? (Who, What, Where, Why, When and
How to reach them?)
• GO AFTER STORIES!
• Get the whole story (permissions)
• Test your Story (brief, succinct, complete,
upbeat, appropriate, personable, actionable)
• Get your story out!

20. Facebook.com/CanadianOutcomes

21. The Present The Future
The Past
Letting People Letting People
Building Libraries
Know About Know What We
and Collections
Them Can Do For Them
It’s All About Numbers It’s All About Marketing It’s All About Outcomes

22. So how must library
strategies change?

23. Conclusions Up Front
1. Prioritize Programs not Collections
2. Drive ‘Reference’ with Data and Know Your Top
Questions
3. Balance of Physical and Virtual
4. Invest Time in Demographics
5. Put Technological Tools in Context
6. Build Recreational Reading Away From Effort and
Get Real About the eBook Issue
7. Homework: Deal With It
8. Transliteracy is a Key Opportunity
9. Partnerships are about everything

24. Specific Challenges
1. Setting Priorities and Making Sacrifices
2. Innovation Culture, Pilots and Diffusion
3. Program Hiatuses, Scalability
4. Backroom and Front Room Balance
5. Alignment with Goals
6. Measuring the Right Stuff
7. Organizational Structure and Governance
8. Investing in HR Development & Cross-training
9. Sacred Cows (desks, books, …)
10. Promotion, Marketing, Communication, Advocacy

25. Change can happen very fast

26. Sensemaking

27. What is an EXPERIENCE?
What is a library experience?
What differentiates a library experience from a transaction?
What differentiates public libraries from Google/Bing?

28. The Evolution
of Answers

29. Why do people ask questions?
Is your library experience conceptually organized around
answers and programs?
Or collections, technology and buildings?

30. Why do people ask questions?
 Who, What, When, Where
 How & Why
 Data – Information – Knowledge - Behavior
 To Learn or to Know
 To Acquire Information, Clarify, Tune
 To Decide, to Solve, to Choose, to Delay
 To Interview, Delve, Interact, Progress
 To Entertain or Socialize
 To Reduce Fear
 To Help, Aid, Cure, Be a Friend
 To Win A Bet

31. What are your top 10-20 questions?
What is the service portfolio model
that goes with those?

32. The Baker’s Dozen: LVA Top 13
1. Health and Wellness / Community Health / Nutrition / Diet /
Recovery
2. DIY Do It Yourself Activities and Car Repair
3. Genealogy
4. Test prep (SAT, ACT, occupational tests, etc. etc.)
5. Legal Questions (including family law, divorce, adoption, etc)
6. Hobbies, Games and Gardening
7. Local History
8. Consumer reviews (Choosing a car, appliance, etc.)
9. Homework Help (grade school)
10. Technology Skills (software, hardware, web)
11. Government Programs, Services and Taxation
12. Self-help/personal development
13. Careers (jobs, counselling, etc.)
14. Readers Advisory was 14th

33. Top 12 Patron Hobbies
Recreational Reading
Cooking & Recipes
Computers
Movies & Film
Exercise, Cycling & Walking
Traveling, Tourism & Vacations
Top Hobbies?
Music
Top Homework Questions?
Pets Top Travel Destinations?
Gardening
What do you know?
Television Shows
Arts & Crafts
Knitting & Needlecrafts
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

34. News Flash
News Flash
Tech Shift Happens

35. Seth Godin on Decisions (June 8, 2011)
o Which of these are getting in the way?
o You don't know what to do
o You don't know how to do it
o You don't have the authority or the resources to do it
o You're afraid
o You believe that money matters most
o Once you figure out what's getting in the way, it's far
easier to find the answer (or decide to work on a
different problem).
o Stuck is a state of mind, and it's curable.

37. What Are Libraries Really For?
• Community
• Learning
• Discovery & Access
• Progress
• A welcoming community space
• Research (Applied and Theoretical)
• Cultural & Knowledge Custody
• Economic Impact

38. What Are Librarians For?
• Expertise
• Relationships
• Transformation
• Professional Service (not servant)
• Vision
• Leadership
• Economic Impact

39. Columbus, Cook, Magellan and Libraries:
Searching for the corners of the earth, the edge of the
oceans and discovering dragons ...

40. Columbus, Cabot, Cortes

41. Magellan Columbus Cook

43. Questions for Libraries Today:
1. Are our priorities right?
2. Are learning, research, discovery changing
materially and what is actually changing?
3. What is the foundation of future library
success . . . Books? Meh…
4. What is the role for librarians in the real
future (that is not an extension of the past)?

45. Grocery Stores

46. Grocery Stores

47. Grocery Stores

48. Cookbooks, Chefs . . .

49. Cookbooks, Chefs . . .

50. Meals

51. Let’s chat
What is a meal in library end-user or education
and learning terms?

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

55. Chefs, counsellors, teachers, magicians
Librarians play a vital role in building the
critical connections between
information , knowledge and learning.

56. Programs
What are the components of a program focus?
What lifts PL’s beyond the foundation?

57. You have the tools.

58. Stop Making it So Hard!

60. Trans-Literacy: Move beyond reading & PC skills
 Reading literacy  News literacy
 Numeracy  Technology literacy
 Critical literacy  Information literacy
 Social literacy  Media literacy
 Computer literacy  Adaptive literacy
 Web literacy  Research literacy
 Content literacy  Academic literacy
 Written literacy  Reputation, Etc.

61. Steal
This
Idea

62. List of content farms and general spammy
user generated content sites:
 Experts Exchange (experts-exchange.com)
 All Experts (allexperts.com)
 eZine Articles (ezinearticles.com)
 Answers (answers.com)
 Find Articles (findarticles.com)
 Answer Bag (answerbag.com)
 FixYa (fixya.com Helium (helium.com)
 Articles Base (articlesbase.com)
 Hub Pages (hubpages.com)
 Ask (ask.com)
 InfoBarrel (infobarrel.com)
 Associated Content (associatedcontent.com)
 Livestrong (livestrong.com)
 BizRate (bizrate.com)
 Mahalo (mahalo.com)
 Buzle (buzzle.com)
 Mail Archive (mail-archive.com)
 Brothersoft (brothersoft.com)
 Question Hub (questionhub.com)
 Bytes (bytes.com)
 Squidoo (squidoo.com)
 ChaCha (chacha.com)
 Suite101 (suite101.com)
 eFreedom (efreedom.com)
 Twenga (twenga.com)
 eHow (ehow.com)
 WiseGeek (wisegeek.com)
 Essortment (essortment.com)
 Wonder How To (wonderhowto.com)
 Examiner (examiner.com)
 Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com)
 Expert Village (expertvillage.com)
 Xomba (xomba.com)
 )

66. The nasty facts
about Google &
Bing and
consumer search:
SEO / SMO
Content Farms
Advertiser-driven
Geotagging

67. Strategic
Analytics

69. What We Never Really Knew Before (US/Canada)
 27% of our users are under 18.

We often 59% are female.
 believe a lot
29% are college students.
that isn’t
 5% are professors and 6% are teachers.
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.

71. Emboldened Librarians hold the key

72. So how must library
strategies change?

73. Books

75. What is Changing?
1. Evidence-based Reference Strategies
2. Experience-based Portals: The New Commons
3. Personal Service on Steroids
4. Quality Strategies: Consumer vs. Professional
Search
5. Social Networks and Recommendations
6. Trans-literacy Strategies
7. People-driven Strategies
8. Curriculum and Research Agenda
9. Service and Programs

76. Recommendations
 Strengthen Your Personal Brand
 Reposition the Library and Librarian
 Don’t Tie Yourself directly to Collections or
Physical Space
 Network with Your Users Socially
 Measure, Don’t Count
 Engage in partnerships
 Know
 Take Risks

77. Technology Context
 Cloud (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS)
 Laptops and Tablets
 Mobility / Smartphones
 Bandwidth (Wired, WiFi, Whitespace)
 Learning Management Systems
 Streaming video and audio vs. download
 HTML5 and Apps – the battle
 Advertising auction models and ‘product’
 New(ish) Players (Amazon, Apple, G, B&N, Uni’s,
states/provinces/nations)

79. What Changes with Mobile?
Everything and Nothing

80. What doesn’t change?
 The User
 User needs vs. user context
 Content (versus format and display)
 Questions and improving the quality of
questions
 Creativity and human progress
 Stability = fossilization

81. What changes with mobile?
 The Ecosystem
 Communication devices move increasingly
from feature phones to smartphones
 Personal computing moves to a hybrid
environment of laptops and tablets (plus a
few power desktop anchors)
 In libraries the dominant mobile task
environments are based on answers,
communities and e-learning

83.  Pilot and experiment with mobile social
cohorts in the library
 Clubs
 Classes (mobile training or extended learning)
 Reading cohorts and book clubs
 Associations
 Fundraising
 Meetings
 Teams (business or sport)

84.  Actively lobby and educate to ensure that the
emerging mobile ecosystem supports the values
and principles of librarianship for balance in the
rights of end users for use, access, learning and
research.
 Support vendors and laws to be as agnostic as
possible by ensuring that, as afar as possible
your services and content offerings support the
widest range of devices, formats, browsers, and
platforms.

85.  Design for frictionless access using such
opportunities as geo-IP and mobile ready
websites
 Test everything in all browsers – mobile or not.
 Invest in usability research and testing and
learn from it and share your learning.
 Watch key developments in major publishing
spaces – kiddy lit, textbooks, e-
learning, fiction, etc.

86.  This is an evolution not a revolution
 The REAL revolution was the Internet and the Web.
 The hybrid ecology is winning in the near term for
operating systems and content formats.
 This is good since competition drives innovation.
 Engage in critical thinking not raw criticism. Be
constructive.
 Critical thinking is not part of dogma or religious fervor
or fan boy behavior.

87.  This is an evolution not a revolution
 Perfectionism will not move us forward at this
juncture.
 Really understand the digital divide and remove your
economic and social class blinkers
 Get over library obsession with statistics and
comprehensiveness.
 Get excellent at real measurements, sampling and
understanding impact and satisfaction.
(Analytics, Foresee, Pew)

88.  This is an evolution not a revolution
 We need to revisit the concept of
preservation, archives, repositories, and
conservation.
 Check out new publishing models like
Flipboard.
 Watch for emerging book enhancements and
other features that will challenge library
metadata, selection policies, and collection
development.

89. ‘Reading’ trumps print books . . .

90. Be More Open to the Users’ Paths -
Filtering

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

93. A Third Path

98. Smelly Or
Yellow Sex
Liquid Appeal?

99. Considering the Whole Experience

102. COMMUNITY
IMPACT
Discovery
&
Learning

103. Stephen Abram, MLS, FSLA
VP strategic partnerships and markets
Cengage Learning (Gale)
Cel: 416-669-4855
stephen.abram@cengage.com
Stephen’s Lighthouse Blog
http://stephenslighthouse.com
Facebook, Pinterest: Stephen Abram
LinkedIn / Plaxo: Stephen Abram
Twitter: @sabram
SlideShare: StephenAbram1