Walking Paper

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.

Nothing library related, just some inspiration for a Monday morning.

By Slinkachu via unurth.

Speaking of nice graphical treatments, have you notice the new stickers on Chiquita bananas?

I’m not sure if I’ve eaten more bananas as a result of the effort but I did use the luchador mask sticker on a notebook. From Chiquita Banana Redesign:

Inspiration for the face idea first came from seeing what people did with the chiquita stickers after they ate the banana even before we put faces on them.

The takeaway? Start looking at the behaviors of your users and you can give them a nicer experience. This is essential to creating a user centered library.

This library awareness campaign from Sweden uses attractive graphic design. The design allows more people to connect with the clearly noble but probably not catchy to most “Sweden needs a national library policy” movement.

Read more about the campaign at Library Lovers.

“When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like idiots.”

Have a quick read of The Traffic Guru. It describes how removing traffic rules and signs in a small village prompted people to be more social and become better drivers.

“A year after the change, the results of this “extreme makeover” were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the ­intersection—­buses spent less time waiting to get through, for ­example—­but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third.”

Could such a strategy work in your library? Would you be willing to try?

My friend Antti in Helsinki writes:

Our library app is now officially @ App Store. It’s called iKirjasto. That’s iLibrary in Finnish. Check it out.

Link to App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/fi/app/ikirjasto/id349629673?mt=8&uo=6 [not downloadable in the US]
Our site: http://www.ikirjasto.fi

It’s the very first beta release of the app. So don’t be too harsh on it. It’s just a basic seach app with some special functions limited to Helsinki City Metropolitan Library (you can browse new book titles in cover images & a native client for reserving). It’s only in Finnish, but hopefully it’s clear how it functions. I posted some crude screen captures to our blog: http://labs.kirjastot.fi/?q=blogi/ikirjasto-app-storessa

There are currently 468 different Finnish libraries and 9 different library systems in the app. It covers almost all libraries in Finland. This made it a bit complicated to code, as you might imagine. This also delayed the project quite a while.

I like the fact that this app works for 468 Finnish libraries. We’re actually working on something similar for the next version of the DCPL iPhone app.

Less about reading and more about design work. Still an interesting perspective.