Well I took a few days to reflect on our Staff Development Day held all day last Friday. This was a really important day because all of the libraries were closed for the entire day and all staff from pages to librarians were encouraged to attend. The impact on the community was potentially huge. Did anyone notice? They sure didn’t complain. I worked Saturday and Sunday and didn’t hear it mentioned once.
The day opened with Joan Frye Williams as the keynote, speaking on “the future of libraries, matching innovation with expectations.” Her main points made so much sense. She started by warning us that library traditions may conflict with our customer’s expectations. It’s funny because librarians really do create and define library service as functions of tradition and training instead of users needs or wants. Three of her five main points (24/7 Convenience, Info to Go, Virtual Community Building)focused on the libraries need for improved web services in line with what customers expect from the real world.
We had an ice-breaker and team building exercise. I actually met some folks I hadn’t met before which was pretty cool.
One of the highlights was, Hot Tech Trends with Sarah Houghton. Not that much of it was new to me but it was just great to hear it out loud and see people listening (maybe not getting it but listening). I’m still pushing the web based applications using AJAX for delivering basic applications on customer workstations: Writely for word processing, NumSum for spreadsheets, Meebo for Chat, Google Earth. They’re not all ready for primetime but they’ll have their day. The best part was I got to hang in the back row with two of my favorite librarians, Kelly and Emily. Yay!
After that I went to the Future of Reference hosted by Joan Frye Williams. I got the sense that about a third of the librarians were pretty defensive from the get go, a third were pretty enthusiastic, and a third weren’t sure what to make of it all. The truth is that in the public’s eye, librarians do books well and would rather go somewhere else for their information. Reader’s advisory is still important, deep, broad and well maintained collections are still important, clean, comfortable spaces to read, storytimes, book-clubs are all important. What does that mean for reference? We need to deploy our staff appropriately, spend the time on the part of the job that people think and know we do well, question our reference service from the ground up. We need to build tools to do our job better and anticipate information needs, spend our time connecting people with Consumer Reports, MorningStar, AncestryPlus. We need to make sure that people don’t need to be trained on our catalog or our databases. How many people need “training” on NetFlix or Amazon? If NetFlix needed to “train” people to use their catalog, they’d be out of business. Really.
This is just my opinion. I’m not one who says that we need to get rid of librarians or hide them. I really believe that people still want to ask questions and always will, but the librarians’ role is more about connecting and communicating than being a receptionist. It’s about developing tools to navigate and mitigate user needs. Doing that requires a very high level of skill that crosses a lot of disciplines.
One of the recurring themes included reaching out with MySpace & IM and meeting the users where they are.
The day wrapped up with some words from our County Librarian about where the library is going, wireless, new phone system, automated check-in and sort. And finally a skit about Summer Reading Club.
