transform your library with technology

I went to the Saturday afternoon session of the President’s Transformation track with Alan Kirk Gray, co-Chair, Darien (CT) Library; John Blyberg, co-Chair, Darien Library; Lori Ayre, The Galecia Group; Casey Bisson, Plymouth State University, NY; and Roy Tennant, OCLC.

They talked about how we need to transform our services by using technologies. Some of the points they covered (interspersed with my own thoughts that i had as they went):

• We need to transform our spaces – use them in completely different ways. No more fortresses of services provided by librarians. We need to emphasize self service.
• We need to change the way that librarians interact with staff – not hiding behind desks and computer terminals.
• We need to transform the way that we deliver materials -
  • offer home delivery as a standard option. Orange County, FL found that it costs them $2.63 per item to mail items to their customers. This includes postage (to/from) and staff time. Fort Vancouver in WA also does this and does it well. It is enourmously popular
  • we need to expand our offerings of pick/up drop off boxes and kiosks to convenient locations. Our materials should exist beyond our branches.
  • explore buy/drop ship options over ILL. When someone requests an item that you don’t own, offer to buy it and have the vendor send it directly to the user first.
  • NCSU offers delivery of materials by Segway.
  • Offer delivery to customers (business, for example), charge for it if you have to. People will pay for services they want.
  • offer for people to return their materials by mail.
• Every Library needs a strong technology staff – distributed through all areas. Technology staff should not be independent from all other workings of the library. Your front line staff needs to understand and implement technologies. This is not optional. Reference librarians should be teaching technology classes and creating online resource guides and collection pages. You should not be not offering resources/services because your staff doesn’t know how to do it. Not knowing how to do it is not an excuse…Learn how to do it. It is important and should not be regulated to only the responsibility of a select few to know. It affects everyone, it should be shared by everyone.
  • Participation in technological innovation/implementation should be distributed throughout the organization.
• Don’t do twice what you can automate once. In our current technological landscape, ALL of our processes should be reconfigured to work more efficiently. This should not be prohibited by emotional attachments to old processes. The user is suffering so that our staff is more comfortable. This should not be okay.
• Your library is more than books
• Your library web site is NOT A MARKETING TOOL. It is not a tool to drive people to your physical site. It is a SERVICE POINT and should be treated as such (staff and $$ commitment to this is essential). Nobody cares about your web site, they care about what it can do for them.
• Libraries need to revise their operations to provide access to what users want they want, how and when they want it.
• You need to think about what jobs you want to accomplish with the technology available to you. Don’t just implement a technology to implement it. Plan for it to solve a need of your users/staff and to make your library more effective.
• Do not try to serve the needs of your users by using the processes/technologies of your current system. Use new systems to solve these problems. Do not force your users to conform to your way of doing things.
• Re-evaluate every process in your library. What can you stop doing so that you can begin to do something else. If your library has been doing something for more than 2 years it needs to be re-thought. EVERYTHING.
• Get the right people -
  • These people should be able to learn constantly – all the time. learning as breathing.
  • They should have technological experience
  • innovators/innovation should be rewarded – your innovators will leave if you don’t treat them well. You NEED them.
  • those that loiter (i.e. unwilling to learn and to change and to support innovation) should be punished.
• Administration needs to make a commitment to supporting change/innovation in your library. This means giving it staff and money and the means to accomplish the tasks that it needs.
  • Budget creation is priority setting – if your technology does not have a budget your administration is not making it a priority (no matter what they say).

Technology is relegated to a single department with only one librarian that has anything to do with the library’s web presence with no budget or distributed support for this work. Libraries should have people at the subject level and the branch level that are creating content for the web site. Directors should be blogging. The youth services librarians should be blogging and maintaining facebook/myspace pages. Librarians should be podcasting and videocasting about the things that they do and the things that they offer to our users. The (hypothetical) subject librarians should be blogging about new resources and tips/tricks for using information in that area. IM reference available during all of our staffed hours. This should be staffed at reference service points (which should be transformed from desks to more flexible spaces). These changes to start at the philosophical level. The way that technology is treated in many library needs a revolution.

 Slides from Lor’s presentation

Slides from Casey’s presentation