I like one thing John Blyberg said in the blog post Meredith linked to (the one where he talked about the failure of tagging in the Ann Arbor online catalogue)
"... when we use technology, it should be transparent, intuitive, and a natural extension of the patron experience."
For years I have been thinking our catalogue should be so simple we shouldn't have to teach people how to use it. Knowledge Ontario should be that simple. OverDrive downloadable audiobooks should be that simple.
It's not.
But is that the REAL problem? I don't think so.
I think the real problem is that we don't know how to tell people about the great tools we already have. Heck, at least 2/3 of the people who live in our area never use the library.
And the reason we don't know how to tell them about these great things is because we don't know what they need or want. We are so stuck in the approach of "you should do this, you'll love it, I know what you need".
I wish I could do what Pat Wagner says: leave your library, get out and talk to our users, figure out what they want, then start to build it. Her talk "Marketing as if your library depends on it" is the essence of 2.0, in my books.
I just wish I had the guts to toss the other things on my "to do" list aside, and just be Pat Wagner.
Another idea I liked:
The comment from Dale about the 70 year old librarian in the 1980s who figured out that non-standard call numbers and pasting reviews in books would work for her library's user group. Totally 2.0, without the technology.
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You're right on there. I used to go to Wordsworth in Waterloo and love the sticky notes that said,
"Maria recommends this."
It would be great if it were all intuitive, or if we could somehow link all email people to Library Elf automatically, I love that service. In my small circle of people, toddlerworld really, people say they don't go to the library because they can't keep track of what's due when, they get the books mixed up with their own or that the kids love it so much that they want to stay for 2 hours and no one has 2 hours because skating and dance and swimming are more important than reading, argh!
Even I thought before I worked there that the only DVDs would be installing tile and learning French, I never dreamed I could get Sex and the City at the library.
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