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Jamie LaRue Speaks
March 16, 2007: "Steal from the Best"
Submitted for Publication in the Douglas County News Press on March 21, 2007
"Stealing from one person is plagiarism. Stealing from many is research."
One
of the jobs of leadership is to keep an eye on the competition.
Librarians, as I've written before, tend to be very open about what
has, and has not, worked for them. So word gets around.
Library experiments fall into a couple of broad divisions. They are interesting, or they are useful.
Into
the interesting category fall things like eBooks. In theory,
particularly for a tech savvy audience like the folks in Douglas
County, this seemed like a shoo-in. Surely people would flock to
download electronic texts to their computers, probably at 2 in the
morning.
But
it didn't happen. We bought several hundred e-texts, and they've hardly
been touched. People don't want to read books on their computers. They
want to read them on their iPods. (It hearkens all the way back to one
of my favorite sentences: "Read me a story, daddy.")
Then
there are things that are useful. Two experiments, mostly in the
Pacific Northwest, have transformed the way we do business.
One
of them was the self-check library. Particularly combined with two
other innovations -- Radio Frequency ID tags (RFID) and aggressive
bookstore-type displays of popular materials -- self-check has greatly
expanded both the capacity and the use of public libraries. Materials
move faster, allowing us to have a bigger stock. We can give more space
to materials because we need less space for big desks.
A
second experiment has been the reference contact center. Advances in
telephony have made it far less expensive to set up a countywide
central switchboard, allowing us to concentrate on answering a question
quickly, with a minimum of transfers. This has allowed us,
paradoxically, to put even more librarians on the floor.
I've
never been interested in innovation for innovation's sake. The true
base of our services remains largely untouched: the public wants and
expects books from us. But not just books.
According
to our most recent statistics, our checkouts break down into rough
thirds. The first third is children's books, mainly picture books. The
second third is books for grown-ups -- adult fiction and non-fiction.
The third third lumps together things that are not books -- music and
movies, mainly movies.
Reference
services -- real people answering questions -- continues to grow in
Douglas County. Online reference may yet take off bigtime. To try this
out yourself, just click on "Ask a Librarian" from the main tabs on our
website.
But right now, we still have way more traffic going to reference people face to face than via computers.
Over
the past several years, we've spent a lot of time and attention growing
our program offerings. All of this helps us to make libraries into
places that are even more fun to go to.
We've also detected, and have tried to plan for, an increased interest in public meeting space generally.
You
may have noticed that most of our libraries now function as art
galleries -- bringing a much-appreciated focus to the creativity of our
patrons.
I
have another innovation that, as near as I can tell, very few libraries
address: answering the community reference question. I'll talk about
that next week.
But
for this week, consider this column a call. The people who read this
column travel far and wide -- and have a tendency to shop the local
libraries. So I'd like to know. What library innovations have you seen
that strike you not just as interesting, but as genuinely useful?
Email them to me at jlarue @ jlarue.com. Or call me at 303-688-7656. Don't think of it as stealing. Think of it as research.
©
2007, James LaRue. |
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