There are a number of things I’m slightly busting at the seams to post about. I must say that it has been an inspirational day.
David King talked to a room packed with people about an excellent way to frame a library’s website: a user targeted design. It was a full and rich presentation, but I’ll try my best to sum it up in one sentence. A user targeted design has updated content (generated in house and other), directed to a specific user groups.
To make it clear, user targeted design is niche marketing, making web pages for specific audiences. The reason I like this idea so much (and plan to make my library’s site more than half-way user centered) is because a user targeted approach also seems to be user centered. A really good tidbit from his talk was about promoting user targeted websites. King’s approach is to match other (targeted) materials with URLs of the targeted page. For instance, on a ‘Romantic Reads’ bookmark, he puts the URL of the matching content on the KCPL website. He also mentioned telling local community organizations about content on your site that is relevant to them.
Earlier in the day, Clifford Lynch gave an interesting overview of the past twenty years of libraries and computers. He didn’t spend much time talking about the technical innovations, but rather what these innovations had on data.
I spent some time reflecting on how much data there is today, how long it may or may not last, and what a huge change this is from the past. We’ve moved from a “scarcity of information” in the 80s to an abundance now. As the amount of data continues to grow, so will our methods for finding it.
Then in a session this afternoon, Stephen Abram brought up his “Internet as acorn” simile and mentioned that so far we’ve been in a period of slow growth. The oak tree will be much larger, and it will shoot up much faster than the germination period of the acorn. As is the trend, the changes that Lynch spoke about, impressive in their own right, are going to pale in comparison to what we see in the next twenty years.
Another topic that both speakers covered was images on the web. Lynch noted how images are quite standard now, freeing physical objects in a way. Pictures are now a part of discourse. These visual surrogates are important for all of the visual learners in the world (i.e. the people that learn in ways different than the 20% of us that are text-based librarian-type learners). The underlying implication is that libraries should be involved with this trend and involve visualization in their repertoire. Perhaps part of virtual reference systems of the future will be a full replication of your library’s physical space and your own avatar to use to interact, communicate, and collaborate with your patrons.
Now I’m going to run through my ‘Dead Technology’ presentation. A bit of jocularity tonight is going to be a relief for everyone I’m sure!
