NYPL Launches Direct Me NYC 1940
NYPL Labs has launched a website, Direct Me NYC 1940, which allows people to look up a person in the 1940 New York telephone directory and then to find that person in the National Archives’ recently-released 1940 Census. It’s a great idea and a wonderful example of how libraries can integrate existing resources to provide valuable information complete with context.
Direct Me NYC 1940
Even better: since they developed it themselves, this information didn’t cost NYPL a penny. If they had asked a vendor to build a tool like this, it would likely have involved thousands of dollars in licensing fees, months of meetings and an expensive support contract. By building and releasing it quickly and by themselves, though, New York Public Library has created a tool that gives people a fascinating look into our past and saved money, too.
Hopefully, this will encourage more public libraries to take a chance on building useful tools themselves instead of just relying on vendors for everything.
♦ Posted on Thursday, 26 April 2012 at 1:45 pm and filed under Reference.
Stop Blaming the User
This blog post by Jenica Rogers is a perfect example of the way more libraries ought to be thinking.
Money quote (emphasis mine):
The user is not broken in that our job is to fulfill the user’s needs, and the user’s needs are, while not always well-defined, possible to meet, or understood by either side, valid — so accusing the user of Doing It Wrong is counterproductive to our goals and needs, and should be avoided. This applies to space usage, reference inquiries, customer service, and use of our online tools.
I couldn’t have put it better myself. Libraries need to pay a lot more attention to how our patrons behave and start adapting our systems to the way our patrons expect search to behave. Our seemingly in-built desire to force patrons to search for things our way is counterproductive and ultimately damaging to our credibility and our profession.
If there’s one point that I’d like to add to hers, it’s that a big part of the problem is that very few libraries actually take real responsibility for the software that’s used to build their site. By relying on external vendors and not having in-house coders who can improve the system, many libraries pretend that any deficiencies in it are minor and/or not their responsibility. But everything that happens under your logo — whether it’s on your website, at the Reference Desk or how you organize your stacks — is ultimately your responsibility. That means that, like it or not, it’s your job to make things as easy and intuitive for your patrons as you can. As Jenica so wonderfully puts it:
We can sit back, all of us, in libraries and outside of them, and with smug self-satisfaction explain why our tools, websites, spaces, and services are just brilliantly perfect… or we can thoughtfully observe our environment, acknowledge that the user has needs and is showing us what they are, and adapt.
♦ Posted on Thursday, 15 December 2011 at 5:05 pm and filed under Customer Service • Reference • Search.
Use These Tools (But Don’t)
iPhone. Android. Flickr. YouTube. Delicious. Goodreads. Meetup. Formspring. WordPress. Bit.ly. Github. Dropbox. QR Codes. Creative Commons. Twitter. Facebook.
All of these things have something in common: they are all technologies that Chicago Public Library (as well as countless other libraries across the country) should be embracing.
I’ve gotten a ton of work done in the last couple of days on what’s going into the social media presentation I’m working on, for which there will be both patron and staff versions. I am particularly excited about the one for library staff, which will focus on how libraries can and should use these technologies to go where their patrons are and to innovate quickly and cheaply.
However, it has not escaped my attention that the City of Chicago has some fairly draconian policies regarding the use by staff of many of these very same technologies. That flavor of irony is particularly bitter.
Folks, when the Library of Congress has a Flickr account I think it should be understood that librarians should be allowed use social media. Because we have to special collections. The curated selections.
And one of our major raisons d’être is to catalog every single item in them to within an inch of its life.
Because that’s how librarians roll.
♦ Posted on Thursday, 20 January 2011 at 10:14 pm and filed under Social Media.
The Smart Firehose
I’m an unabashed Google user. I think Google has long provided the best search results on the Web and I don’t see any sign that’s going to change any time soon. The reason I think Google has so totally eclipsed its competitors like Yahoo!, Ask and Excite (remember them?) is that Google is the search engine that follows what I like to call the “smart firehose” principle.
Google spends millions and millions of dollars every year on tweaking their search results to make them better. Engineers at Google constantly ask themselves: How can we give people the information they want in as few clicks as possible? Can we add context-relevant information such as a map, movie showtimes or images in order to make the search results more useful? In other words, Google would rather just give you the information you need if it possibly can, instead of sending you somewhere else.
When you search for something using a standard Google search (that is, at Google.com or through your browser’s search box), the search engine doesn’t separate relevant results, forcing you to click various sections of results. Instead, Google just gives you a list of the best results, depending on what you’re searching for and regardless of what type of result it is; consequently, a Google search results list will include links to web pages, maps, images, videos and more, all in one list. This “smart firehose” model works well for Google because it gives good results and then trusts people to make the right choice.
Libraries, in comparison, are woefully behind in search. Catalog searches are almost always totally separate from research information, so in order to find good information about, say, diabetes, a user will need to do multiple searches; one for the library’s catalog and at least one for the research databases. Often, users will need to go into several different research databases and perform individual searches.
Library users need a smart firehose.
♦ Posted on Friday, 20 November 2009 at 10:05 pm and filed under Search.