On Jul 30, 2011, at 10:00 AM, James Weinheimer wrote:
> On 30/07/2011 14:46, Joe Hourcle wrote:
> <snip>
>> On Jul 29, 2011, at 7:48 PM, john g marr wrote:
>>> This image also chracterized around half of the electorate (pretty important people who run all of our lives and budgets), who simply do not understand the issues or the complexities of political rhetoricbeyoind sound-bites.
>> Um ... electorate == people who can vote.
>> Most of 'em don't vote, and most of them don't consider library funding to
>> be the main issue when electing delegates.
> </snip>
>
> While I certainly have my own political viewpoints, in these kinds of discussions I feel that political statements are more divisive than anything else. In the case of libraries and their future, it goes beyond politics: be they free market capitalists or state-planning communists, anarchists or monarchists, it would seem that all have an equal need and desire for reliable information that they can access easily and quickly. As Joe points out, it is a part of public education and community development, which is in all people's interest along the entire range of political beliefs.
>
> Attached to this however, is the need to build tools that people want and need. This means finding out what those users want and need so that you can build those tools. People have never liked to be confronted with: this is the product/service/whatever that we make and you have to use it or do without. The only time this "works" is when people are dealing with a monopoly, since their only choice is to literally do without. Libraries had a "monopoly" for a long time but that monopoly went away.
[trimmed]
It's not enough to build it. If you want people to know about it, you need outreach.
Yes, it's basically advertising, but libraries spend a lot of money on electronic
databases and stuff that people don't know about and so don't use.
I've gotten my local public library to put signs up in the relevant sections --
attached to the shelf for car care manuals is a sign telling people that
the full range of manuals is available online, etc. Of course, this only
helps out those browsing -- that online catalog, that people can search
without even going to the library? Unless you're willing to insert
dummy records in there, or have some federated search that searches
both the local catalog and records from each of the databases, I just
don't see it happening.
It doesn't even need to be true federation ... you could have something
like Google Search's presentation where instead of showing ads above
the results, it does a check against the search terms and presents
recommendations for other databases available.
...
And as for the need for reliable information ... unfortunately, we have
things like wikipedia which satisfice most people's needs, as they
value speed over reliability in many situations..
-Joe
Received on Mon Aug 01 2011 - 08:24:56 EDT