[WEB4LIB] Re: library marketing (long, but with an on-topic point)

[K.G. Schneider]

Interesting discussion. Several thoughts, and I apologize for the length:

Kickbacks for links to Amazon: I don't know how much these "kickbacks" are,
but I am probably in league with many other bloggers who keyed in the Web
developer ID of the people who wrote the Amazon API so that in the rare
event that anyone bought a book through their blog the nickel would go to
them. This is not a lucrative enterprise, and making money from this model
is not why any sane person provides links that way. We do it because it's
available, it's free, and it works. If librarians think this is a
money-maker, then as I suggested before, it would behoove libraries to
create their own developer user IDs and suggest bloggers use these IDs in
their Amazon links. Many churches do that, I've noticed. 

Yes, let's look at demographics, but as someone with public library
management experience, I know we should project into the future, because
wise managers know they are as good as next year's tax bond. Tomorrow's tax
base (and increasingly this generation's tax base) lives in a Googlized,
SMS, blogging, interactive, fingertip world. These people are not in your
libraries right now. They are off being teenagers (who in large numbers do
not use library services), and then they are off being college students (who
as Geoffrey Nunberg reminded us this weekend sit in their dorm rooms
Googling half-baked information even though librarians hundreds of feet away
may be sitting at a desk wondering where the people are), and then they are
off being twenty-somethings (who are also not in your libraries). If you do
not begin adapting your services to these people, when they are taxpayers do
not expect their support. 

For some time those of us on the technical side of things (and I consider
myself systems middleware, not a coder but a manager) have been told all too
often that technology is a caboose, often an unwanted caboose, on the "real"
work of librarianship. We have been told that even as we have watched how
people interact with the information world change more dramatically than any
time since the advent of the printing press. We have been told that even as
content moves to digital formats we are slow to deliver (so that by the time
a format becomes popularized its users are elsewhere). We have been told
that even when traditional library services have become near-relics because
however good we are (and that goodness has always been up for examination),
increasingly people do not think about library reference services when they
have a question, let alone drive across town or even walk to the next
building or pick up the phone or send an IM to ask a question. 

We have been told that even when we saw a trend truly developing, a trend,
not a fad, and we who follow trends recommend we ride it like a wave instead
of being next year's adopters. We can own a technology and build our user
base through it, the way the rest of the world operates, or we can ignore it
until the commercial forces have coopted more users and by the time we do
adopt it people are asking where we have been with it. "My users won't
understand it"--in the early 20th century, in the Social Work movement,
librarians went out of their way to help immigrants learn the ways of the
New World. That is what we do. That is who we are. Books are just one quiver
in our bow. Besides, in many cases, by the time librarians get around to
adopting some newfangled trend, their users already well understand it. Just
because I do not game does not make it unimportant, and the same is true
with RSS feeds. The growth in this one small technology is boggling. I tell
you that the users for the digital library I manage understand it just fine,
and are running toward it in droves, even though they are not a technical
audience, just an information-friendly audience. 

We can always point to the exceptions and the stellar examples, the
heartwarming personal anecdotes, the current data, but given the radical
changes to the information landscape, if we decide that what we are "good
at" is doing business the way we've always done it, we are going to be in
the same pickle as the railroads (q.v. Andrew Abbott's discussion in "The
System of Professions" of how railroads saw themselves in the rail business,
not the transportation business). In watching some of the recent tax bond
battles, I wonder if we aren't already there. It will take more to regain
ground than simply being the technology centers of last resort. I know that
is an important role, though in too many libraries I would hate to be that
person waiting on line for an hour for my slurp at the digital trough. We
have to regain our ground, to feel our way forward, even when we trip in the
dark, even when we follow the wrong hallway. 

I have even heard librarians say libraries should be slow to adopt major new
information technologies, which is not only poor strategy but inexcusable
from a social justice point of view, as well as slightly self-indulgent
(look how wise I am--I'm taking ten years to offer Internet access!).
Charles McClure said in the 1990s that in addition to being a place of last
resort, the library can be a place of first resort, a place people want to
go. When it does that, the library, oddly enough, becomes more just in its
service to the poor, because it is offering them services they would
otherwise have no access to. That is real justice; that is an ethical
approach to information services. 

Then, when a library spends money on information technology, it often pours
most of its resources into what we quaintly call "library automation," which
is basically providing a not-handily-searchable index to the print book
catalog, and leaves but a few trimmings for anything that either makes
"library automation" tastier and more nutritious or that goes beyond
offering up a few machines for the public or that, God forbid, trains its
librarians to be the savvy leaders of a new technology. 

I am not writing off books. Like many librarians, traditional or otherwise,
I am a biblioholic. I use and love libraries on their own quirky terms--even
the local library that scatters its biographies throughout the collection
rather than pulling them together in a section because, I was told,
they--note, they, not their users--prefer a "subject-based" approach (which
means I get my biographies from Amazon or the local bookstore, where I can
browse the genre)--even the library a little farther north where I once
tried to work for an hour or two but could not because they block instant
messaging, which we use at our job, even the urban library that has a web
page that looks like a ransom note written out in inscrutable librarian
jargon. But can anyone look at the information landscape today and seriously
say that in fifty years libraries can and must look as they do now? 

If we decide that we are in the same business we have been since the early
20th century, then we are defining ourselves by the formats we deliver and
the buildings we inhabit, and we will be the cobblers of the 21st century. I
believe in a vision of librarianship broader and more permanent than that, a
vision of librarianship that flexes forward to provide services and champion
values for many generations to come. We must reach our users where they are,
as Anne Lipow so often said, and to do that we must become librarians
unbound. 

Off soapbox, for a day at least... and I'll end up blogging a version of
this, I guess. 

Karen G. Schneider
kgs at bluehighways.com