Walking Paper

Intriguing blog title. When I saw it, my first thought was that for the library to become better with use, was that basically the more you use the library, the better it works for you. This is basically personalization, auto-customization of some kind, the library starts to know what resources you tend to access, anticipates your collection requests etc.

The “Library made idea” is really interesting. Reminds me a little of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/Elsevier white paper http://libraryconnect.elsevier.com/whitepapers/0108/lcwp0101.pdf , where they try to link the use of library resources (citations) to successful grant proposals

Aaron – Thanks for linking to that paper. I’ll look at it today. Regarding personalization: I think that could be part of it. Comparing libraries to jeans works again here. Five year old jeans are certainly more personalized than new ones. Thanks for helping me refine this.

We’re looking forward to fleshing out the concept of the life of a record on Open Library. It won’t have much to do with circulation (since we don’t hold any books ourselves but merely point to them).

What some people may not know is that Open Library is a) an open, editable library catalog and b) has a Wiki back end, which means we have all the benefits of being able to see the history of edits to our records.

Right now, it’s a bit tricky to see a record’s history, but this is something we want to make far more prominent. It will be interesting to see how more visible levels of activity will affect the catalog itself, if at all. Stay tuned!

Oops – forgot a link to Open Library! That might help :)

http://openlibrary.org

Here’s an example of the current view of an edition’s history:

http://openlibrary.org/b/OL7695143M/The_Library_at_Night?m=history

As you can see, pretty dry.

Fabulous post. I love that you call library statistics to the mat. We really need national and state organizations to rise to the challenge of measuring what matters in our libraries–not, as you say, the cheap-like-Chinese-goods circulation statistics. Thank you for writing this.

You raise some points that I’ve written about a number of times in various articles and blog posts. How do libraries demonstrate the contributions they make to academic and life success beyond traditional input and outputs. Here is an example of one that mentions a new ACRL project aimed at demonstrating library value beyond inputs and outputs:
http://bit.ly/7k54Vz

I also like this idea of the library growing on patrons and being more than a one-shot, get-it-over quick, “i am being forced to do this” experience. I see you are getting more interested in the idea of a user experience. In this post at DBL I laid out what I thought were three things we could be doing to promote ourselves as being about people rather than content:
http://bit.ly/4Gvwd

I think if we can deliver on building relationships that create meaning for people – and paying attention to the totality of our operation – we will create a service and resource organization that will help achieve your goal of getting better with time and use.
-Steven

Great post. I don’t think many managers believe in HAPLR or Library Journal Statistics. It was a discussion on PUBLIB and most directors were very displeased with this. Before Library Journal getting into starring libraries, the trend was strategic planning.

Instead of having a standardization, the strategic plan was to see what the community wanted, then meeting their needs. Statistics are a good internal indicator, but it means nothing to everyone else, particularly reporters. They want to hear the human stories of how libraries are helping their communities.

Lastly, libraries resting on their laurels with statistics aren’t likely to change or improve what they are doing. They are already successful so why change?

Great post, Aaron. Thinking about reference, we are just about to have our best year statistically at our library (you know the one), but it somehow seems slower than the past because many of the question are so easy, like just identifying bestsellers. I wish we had a measure of making-a-difference-in-someone’s life. That could be hard to quantify without violating privacy. Maybe we could create some categories: “helping with job search,” “saving client money,” “helping student make the grade,” etc. But in many cases, we do not know the good we have done. Perhaps the novel read helped with a relationship problem. Also, there could be some embarrassment if the client saw us putting a scratch mark on “made lonely person feel better.” How do we measure?

I’d love to see businesses with this Library Made symbol, and people’s business cards (when they got a job/professional eduation w/ lib resources, or decided on a career because of them), and yes, if sucessful grant proposals have this symbol, then why not the park, animal shelter or monument or arts organization the resources in the library enabled the grantee to indirectly create. I’d love to see it everywhere as a mark of pride, like a “we’re green” symbol…

I wish we had a measure of making-a-difference-in-someone’s life. That could be hard to quantify without violating privacy. Maybe we could create some categories: “helping with job search,” “saving client money,” “helping student make the grade,” Yes indeed, Rick, If I had a reliable way to capture this data, my reference staff would come out tops every time.

Perhaps this post is too delayed to spark a response and perhaps my clumsy suggestion is too exotic. First of all there is a great article which discusses stats versus stories in “American Libraries” “Gathering the Stories Behind Our Statistics,” Sandra Singh. American Libraries, November 2005, Volume 36, Number 10, pp. 46-48.
I did not note in the posts on this thread that stats–whatever their value–are what funding agencies and Boards want. Whatever their value. The case is made in some of these posts that the stories are invaluable. But only question is: who in authority will take the time to read them. My “exotic” suggestion is this: I am a fan of Edward Tufte who broadly speaking believes that one picture is worth 1,000 words. His favorite example of graphic representation is Minard’s March to and Retreat from Moscow (in “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.”) Is there anyone out there in libraryland who is a skilled graphic artists or who has friends who are skilled graphic artists that can blow away overly clever / typically dull annual reports with one powerful graphic that an attentive and overwhelmed and perhaps un-interested funder can understand at one glance: who, how, how many lives libraries transform. And I’m not talking reference questions. (I apologize for being murky about this, but I am only feeling my way with this notion.)