[Web4lib] Skills for Library 2.0 Leaders

[dan at riverofdata.com]

----- Original Message -----
> a good portion of our profession is dominated by people who are a bit
> resistant to change. 

Yes, just "a bit".  The key thing is that "those in power" tend to be the "older librarians" and they have had less technological training, in general, than most of the "younger cohort".  We can only hope that will change as people retire and others move up.  But then there will be the question of whether things will indeed continue to change faster, and the "new punks in power" will become the "old punks who don't want to change from what they know".  I believe there is plenty of research indicating that, in general, people become more conservative as they age.  But that's a whole different shelf of books.

> Will members of the community participate in library services and offer
> feedback? I think yes. There are many sites that have demonstrated that they
> can generate traffic by creating participatory environments. 

But is "generating traffic" necessarily a good thing?  There are certainly some environments where it is a bad thing for one reason or another.  And, however we measure this traffic, what do the numbers mean?

Will all users
> contribute? No, of course not. 80% of the content will come from 20% of the
> people; the rest will just drive on through. I think we need to start
> focusing on who really uses the library; I'm talking about the people who
> explore the resources and rely on it heavily for their research needs, not
> the kids who have no desire to even do research. Focus on your dedicated
> user base and create a great experience for them.

This section above seems a bit contradictory.  We do indeed want to have a good experience for our dedicated users; that will help to keep them in "our store" and not moving on to "another store".  

But it seems that if you really want to generate traffic you need to reach out to many others, including even "kids who have no desire to even do research".  I know that on college campuses those "kids" (of all ages on our campus) may not have the desire until they're given an assignement.  But with proper service in the library many of them develop into "new customers for our store".  

I'm no business guru, but I know that a business that wants to prosper will market for new customers as well as working hard to retain the ones it has already.  

> If any one of the librarians were proactive in creating a blog, just to see
> what it was like, they would have had a chance to have an audience with the
> most important person in their institutions hierarchy. 

I agree that you need some people who are self-starters and proactive.  However, in many environments those people are already so overloaded that they may not be able to handle one more new thing.  Remember, "if you want to get a job done, give it to a busy person".  But even those folks have limits.  And we won't even start on funding issues, and we've already covered the "old geezer" issue.

cheers

dan