Agreed. Libraries are mostly in a "pre-Cluetrain" era, especially in
their web presence.
Down on the street everyone knows Jack the librarian. He's personable
and well liked—an important part of the community and a friend to all
booklovers. They know he has a puppy, Rupert and enjoys hockey. But on
the web he's reference_at_townlibrary.gov and if there's a blog post it's
got nothing personal in it and it's by "library."
I think that's one thing LibraryThing has going for it. We're more
than five people now, but all our content has a personal tone (with
jokes and oddities like the feature with a French name), we use our
names in email addresses, blog posts and so forth. Some of our
competitors have only one person, but everything on the site is the
official we with stuffy impersonality of tone, and the email address
is "contact@." How alienating.
Tim
On 8/3/07, Mitchell Katherine A. <kaamitch_at_jeffco.k12.co.us> wrote:
> I love this! No, really, we should use it. One thing Google has that
> many libraries/library catalogs don't is a sense of humor. I think that
> sense of humor translates into the feel that the resource has some kind
> of personality, that there's someone on the other end the user is
> interacting with. Some may dismiss it as branding, but I think that
> kind of personality cuts way down on the intimidation factor. In my
> experience, one of the major hurdles for getting (especially) undergrads
> to use the library is that they perceive it as intimidating.
> Intimidation=fear=not being able to or wanting to learn how to use the
> tools. Gosh, if it were fun, lots of people would want to use them!
>
> Kathy Mitchell
> Cataloger, Jeffcat
> Jeffco Public Schools
> 1829 Denver West Dr.
> Golden, CO 80401
> 303/982-5934
> kaamitch_at_jeffco.k12.co.us
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> > [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Ranti Junus
> > Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 6:10 PM
> > To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
> > Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Elitism in libraries.
> >
> > I suddenly got the impression that there would be three kind
> > of user interfaces available:
> >
> > "I'm feeling lucky"
> > "I've used this stuff"
> > "I totally pwnd this stuff"
> >
> >
> > ranti.
> >
> >
> > On 8/2/07, Michael Fitzgerald <mike_at_jazzdiscography.com> wrote:
> > > At 11:34 AM 8/2/2007, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> > > >Instead, it's having systems that meet the users where
> > they are at,
> > > >that work for the high school students AND the faculty AND provide
> > > >the 'ladder' to move from one to the other.
> > >
> > > And the 'ladder' is bibliographic instruction. It might (partly) be
> > > computerized, adaptive, and transparent or it might be (gasp!) an
> > > actual human librarian who has teaching skills in addition to a
> > > thorough knowledge of the relevant tools. You don't get from 'high
> > > school students' to 'faculty' without education. Just
> > adding pizza and
> > > waiting six years time doesn't do it. Pretending that
> > people will get
> > > smarter by using the lite version of the tools doesn't make
> > sense to
> > > me. And trying to make the lite version give you everything
> > that the
> > > real deal does simply avoids the issue. Academic libraries,
> > at least,
> > > ought to be creating power users who can use the real deal
> > effectively
> > > to squeeze the maximum out of the catalog. College seniors who are
> > > still always using the single search box (for
> > > research) have not learned what they ought to have.
> > >
> > > Mike
> > >
> > >
> > > mike at jazzdiscography.com
> > > www.jazzdiscography.com
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Bulk mail. Postage paid.
> >
>
Received on Fri Aug 03 2007 - 08:32:40 EDT