Walking Paper

Rick Roche writes:

We are breaking with our past at Thomas Ford. One thing that you could always count on was that the reference books were here on the shelves. As good as that was in the past, the problem now is that the reference books are here on the shelves, but no one is here using them. They are just sitting. So we are liberating them. We’re going to let them out to anyone with a card, just like other books, magazines, CDs, and DVDs.

The primary objection I have heard is “What if a book from a set doesn’t return, isn’t the set ruined?” This is a possibility, maybe even a probability in time. Still having books sit idle seems a greater sorrow in a public library focused on current utility and not archival conservation. I think the greater good will be served by this service. I look froward to seeing some smiles when I let someone take a volume of Contemporary Literary Criticism or The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

I’m continually impressed by this library’s focus on making its services and resources as convenient and useful as possible.

Over at our INFLUX blog Amanda and I have been writing a series of posts about easy to do website improvements. Here are the first three.

#01 Wrangling Content
#02 Navigation & Wayfinding
#03 Online Card Application

137 years of archives now available via Google Books.

Majorly distracted over here.

My latest column is up at LJ’s site. It is called Learn by Asking and here’s a snip from it.

Empathy and preferences

As I discussed in the January 2010 LJ (p. 28), if we want to make deep connections with our communities, we must figure out how people feel. I don’t mean in the narrow sense of sending out a survey. Surveys can be useful for getting a sense of people’s stated preferences (often different from their actual preferences) but rarely go deeper. In fact, relying on surveys and market research techniques alone can actually be harmful, setting up a consumer/producer dynamic that doesn’t let us recognize our patrons as individuals.

Let’s say that half of your library’s renewals are made by telephone. If you know this, you’ve deduced a preference. But what can you really do with this information? There are a number of reasons people might show this preference: they could lack computer access; the online renewal process might not be obvious; or they could enjoy interacting with librarians. What’s more, the response is likely to vary depending on the motivation.

How can we recognize patrons as people and learn about their motivations? As in any good relationship, we can listen to them.

By the way, LJ has created a feed for the series. I’ll likely keep linking from here too.

The DCPL has a decent following on Twitter. It is especially good considering the rather laissez faire approach we’ve taken to promoting our account. Time to make an effort to remedy that, I think. To get started with the promotion: You can follow us at @dcpl.

The fact that we have over 1500 followers is good only in that it increases the chances of us having meaningful conversations with people. This is important because many of our followers are actually people in DC.

I was impressed with an exchange I noticed the other day and would like to show you.

Twitter user Tamikalashelle registers a complaint that she couldn’t find some info on our website and has a library question:

A DCPL twitterer (there are a few of us) responds in a pretty much classic “we’re here listening to you on Twitter” way:

This response evidently worked for her. She went from having a gripe with the library and saying negative things to being excited about the library and a vigorously retweeteing our stuff:

I’m not quite sure how to measure the effectiveness of a library’s presence on Twitter but as long as I keep seeing people communicating with the library and helping to amplify our voice it seems worth our time.