recap of the week, part 1 and 2

I had a crazy busy week and I wasn’t able to blog all of the fun stuff that’s been going on.  Here is an attempt at catching up.

Recap Pt. 1

1)

On the User Experience tip, I’ve been rereading Donald Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things”.  He might be talking about objects and products, but it is not too much of a leap to apply the concepts to entire service ecologies like the public library offers.  I haven’t yet read his book “Emotional Design”, which I believe will have a good bit of insight into how we can create “empathic-driven” services (a snazzy way of expressing our need to really identify our user’s feelings that I picked up on here).  I have also been thinking more about the guys Live|Work in the UK and their service design practice. Theirs appears to be the only comprehensive, forward thinking service ecology analysis practice out there and I think libraries could learn a lot from what they are doing.  Further, on the emotional design end of things, I’ve revisited the work of Christian Nold after I was introduced to it at Rhizome’s NextCity event.  Nold is engaging in bio-mapping, in which he attaches a sensor to a human and as they walk around the human generates datasets that correspond to their mood at any given time.  The data can then be mapped geo-spatially and you can determine where along their journey an individual was having positive and negative experiences.  Imagine how this could be used to reconsider service points or an entire architectural program.  Sounds like sci-fi now but I suspect it’ll be commonplace in the next 10 years.

 

2)

Had coffee w/ Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware and Prof. of Urban Computing @ NYU ITP.  Great conversation that really dealt with a lot of the usability issues I just mentioned, but we spoke more specifically about technologies in the library and how we use them.  We walked through the Williamsburgh Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and talked a good bit about the library catalog and different ways we could make it more fun to interact with.  Imagine a giant, projected catalog interface that used some of the tactile computing technologies that exist now, like the multi-touch screen?  Adam showed me a Youtube video of the Bloomberg Ice in Tokyo, as well as some interesting interface possibilities.  It also reminded me of something the Playful Librarian showed me:  the National Institute for Play.  He and I agreed that we’d like to see public libraries embrace some of the ideas that the NIP defines as their core mission.  Check out their shtick:
 

The National Institute for Play believes that as play is woven into the fabric of social practices, we will dramatically transform our personal health, our relationships, the education we provide our children and the capacity of our corporations to innovate.  We see play as an un-realized power that can transform our social and economic lives.

Adam and I also talked at length about the idea of creating an electronic device made specifically as a service point for libraries.  According to the Pew Internet/American Life study, 2/3 of public library patrons come to use the computers.  How can we ignore that?  I’ve already ranted about how foolish it is for libraries to try to use the Amazon Kindle as one of their service points.  I don’t think we need to create an ebook reader for library patrons.  I do think that if we could provide patrons with internet access, or a device that simulated connectivity by updating firmware and caching viewed pages every time you were within a library wifi zone, we would essentially have created a municipal wifi work-around and THAT is useful to everyone.  More on this topic soon I hope- I know I didn’t really spell it out completely here. 

3)

On Thursday I went to Cooper Union and hear Steven Holl give a lecture.  The guy is building some absolutely phenomenal stuff in China, I really suggest taking a look.  He is living the architect’s dream: he’s got clients who believe that everything he does is right on, and they have an unlimited budget.  I hesitate to criticize the guy, I imagine that if I had unlimited resources to make public libraries super-wicked-awesome-enormous I’d have an awful lot of fun doing it and I wouldn’t apologize for a thing.  At the end of the lecture there was a Q&A and Holl was asked if he thought that any of the poetry was lost in his work, since it has become so massive and since much of what he does now comes off more as a feat of engineering than as thoughtfully considered, beautiful architectural, um, “poems”.  I was disappointed that Holl kind of defended himself instead of just saying straight out “I am building big, awesome buildings and having fun doing it.”  It seems pretty clear that’s what it is all about, I wish he would have just said so.

I’m not going to go too deep with it or anything, but that did give me a chance to think for a little while about how a tight budget forces innovation and creativity.  It is sort of a glass-half-full way of looking at things in public libraries as we move into this trend of “design thinking” and “user-centered-design”.  Desperate times drive us to innovate, create new service models, re-think our tired ways. 

Recap pt. 2

The other things worth mentioning from this week:

1)

On Friday I served as part of an alumni panel at Pratt.  Students from the School of Library and Information Science had the opportunity to question two public librarians, an academic librarian, a corporate librarian, and an art librarian about how we got our jobs, what we do, and anything else that came to mind.  It was a remarkably well attended event considering it took place at 5:30 on a snowy Friday.  The question that I found the most interesting and the one I’d like to expound upon a bit now came from Judy Nylen of Pratt’s Career Services.  She asked each of us to describe what part of our skillset gave us the most opportunity to innovate and have creative influence in our fields.  As an advocate of this design-thinking movement in libraries, I take that question seriously, and I believe that the most important skillset for anyone interested in implementing change is to build their communications skills. 

NOBODY is going to care how good your ideas are if you cannot convey them in a concrete, legible manner, using the mode of communication that the audience is most comfortable with.  Sometimes, despite the fact that Powerpoint sucks, you will have an audience who is used to receiving information that way and so you will have to use Powerpoint.  Sometimes you’ll send an important email to an individual 5 times, never get a response, and then realize that the only way you can communicate with that person is by phone.  Don’t talk about XML and APIs with people who don’t understand them.  Don’t bother to use a wiki to organize a project if 3 out of the 20 people on your team actually know how to communicate and collaborate that way.   Think of communication skills as internal user-centered design if that helps, similar to the way large companies have internal customer service practices between their departments.  Always know your audience, always know the best way to address them so that they feel comfortable, listen a lot, and shut up when you don’t know what you are talking about. 

Admittedly, I don’t always shut up when I don’t know what I’m talking about.

2)

Another question came up on Friday at the same panel that needs to be addressed. Toward the end, a gentleman stood up and asked: “What do you think of John Berry’s controversial Library Journal article, in which he wrote about the deskilling of librarians, and what do you think of the reaction and fuss surrounding this article?”

The briefest possible answer: I thought the article was off base (but not ENTIRELY), and rather than add to the already three page long list of comments I wrote John directly and told him a little bit about why I was “disturbed” by the whole thing.  First off, I am an advocate of the “new” service models we are seeing pop up all over the country and world.  I’m not sure that I look at the circulation desk as the service point at which the core competencies of librarianship are being or should be practiced, and because of that I really have no problem with self check machines augmenting and *not replacing* that part of library operations.  Further, I think it is important to recognize that the “classic” public library is based on an archaic definition of literacy.  Literacy is no longer about just reading text in books. We live in the “information age”, a time defined by complex cultural and media literacies.  We need new buildings and new service models to address the new literacy needs of our patronage and our potential, unrealized patronage.

Look for a full blog entry in response to this LJ article soon.  It may be late to compete with all the hype and hubbub surrounding the article now, but the issues will remain important even once the noise dies down.  Thanks to John for writing me back and being willing to engage in further argument.

3)

There was an article this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education about Aaron Swartz’s project, Open Library.  Open Library is basically a wiki-style, WorldCat / LibraryThing hybrid, so “while librarians maintain WorldCat, the public would maintain Open Library”.  Pretty sweet. 

Obviously OCLC is sweating this:

“Should all those connections (Wikipedia, Internet Archive, LibraryThing, and anyone else who donates their records to the project) help increase Open Library’s holdings close to the 72 million unique book records in WorldCat, Mr. Swartz’s enterprise could upend the way libraries maintain records. Librarians could choose to bypass WorldCat and contribute catalog data to Open Library, jeopardizing OCLC’s membership of more than 60,000 libraries and threatening a big chunk of its $235-million annual revenue.

It would be an amazing feat, especially since, at the moment, Open Library is struggling to get libraries to contribute.”

My thoughts?  Go Open Library!  Information wants to be free, right?  I’d love to see public libraries all over start contributing to this.  I’d love to see more of our records and material visible on the web, for free.  Again, libraries need to start recognizing and promoting their roles as educators and facilitators of knowledge in a new era of media literacies rather than the definition of literacy associated with Ye Old-Tyme Book Shoppe.