They don't need us

[Joe Schallan]

Hello list,

I belong to a mailing list for opera fanatics, and this appeared
on it this morning.  The poster had been searching for information
about the Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds:

>I spent an hour searching Italian Web servers without success. Then I
>remembered a new search engine that does a better job of finding the kind
>of sites opera listers care about. I found the info about Spoleto quickly . . .

>To reproduce this search, use the Northern Light search engine:
><http://nlsearch.com>. I entered the search string: <spoleto italy festival
>two worlds>. The results took me there immediately. This engine organizes
>the results into folders, and also indexes 1800 online journals that other
>search tools do not. One of them is Opera News. There is a small charge for
>access to some of these journals.

As a literate human being and an opera fan, I take great joy
in the poster's success -- here an information need was quickly
and conveniently met.  It's nifty.

As I librarian, I'm shaking in my boots.  Our expertise obviously
makes us valuable people in this information-saturated age,
yet I don't think we're going to be able to demonstrate our
usefulness by doing things as we've always done them, or
even by doing nice library web pages, for that matter.

If we are to survive as something more than a marginal warehouse
for books, the key will be our ability to help citizens find, sort,
understand, and use information.  This means, yes, customer
service, a concept that has been surprisingly *not* at the
forefront of library concerns.  We've been too busy focusing
on hardware and software gizmology.

What I'm driving at is the use of library websites as channels
of communication, as a means to establish two-way
communication with customers.  Active pages, not static ones.
I think there's huge potential for using websites as a means
to serve our clientele in new ways.  Electronic reference
springs to mind.  What else?   Your thoughts, please . . .

Thanks,
Joe Schallan
Glendale (AZ) Public Library
jschall at glenpub.lib.az.us