Are All You can Read Services like Oyster a Threat to Libraries

I was just reading a post from Gary Price on InfoDocket regarding this article on Publisher's Weekly about how librarians feel about ebooks in 2013. In that article Michael Kelley describes a mood of 'mild optimism and lingering concern'.

These concerns are commonly talked about - the technological barriers forced on library patrons through DRM, above market pricing for libraries and restrictions around concurrent use or number of loans - all of which you can read about in many other places.

Gary Price added some of his own comments and one idea in particular grabbed my attention.

He suggests that one of the threats to libraries from subscription based services like Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and now Oyster and Scribd, is not that it makes the use of ebooks harder for libraries and their customers, but rather that they…

"take mindshare away from the library as a source for all types of content and overall, promote the idea that libraries and librarians are not relevant"
Gary Price: “E-Books in Libraries, 2013 Has Been a Year of Small Victories and Bigger Battles”. InfoDocket, November 2013.

Digital Engagement in Public Libraries

On Friday, 6 September I gave a presentation to staff from the State Library of NSW titled Digital Engagement in Public Libraries. I wanted to make the point that I believe there is a difference between experimentation and engagement when libraries are using social media.

Google Analytics - More than just visits and pageviews

OK library folks, hands up you have Google Analytics installed on your website?

Leave them up if you only ever report your numbers for Pageviews and/or Visits to your management?

If you still have your hand up, Stop it.  Now!

Google Analytics will serve you much better if you use it to answer questions you have about how your site is used. The answers you can get from analytics will allow you to make better decisions about improving your site.

From conversions to task completions | Gerry McGovern

Converting people is really hard. It's much easier to allow the already converted to do what they came to your website to do.

Let’s say you’re running the website for a local church. What should your core focus be? Should it be to get new converts for your church or to help those who are already converted?

Converting people from one religion to another is really hard. In fact, the whole idea of conversion has an archaic, almost medieval feel to it. What a good church website will probably do is have opening times, times for the next services, contact details. Basic functional stuff that meets the needs of the already converted members. Interestingly, while meeting the needs of members it also meets needs of non-members who might like to visit the church and see what a sermon is like.

As libraries create their future with new programs and services, spaces and collections, we may be well served to keep this idea in mind. We should keep an eye on making it easy and enjoyable for our existing members to use the library and ensure that we do not alienate our biggest fans.

Read the whole article, From conversions to task completions by Gerry McGovern

Progressive Enhancement for Library Catalogues

I've just been reading Progressive Reduction, a post on LayerVault about a technique they use  when designing web apps.

The principle goes something like this...
When new users start with the app the interface has lots of helping hands; signposts showing how to do things. For instance, the buttons might have an icon and a label.  As people use the app more and more those signposts start to recede out of the design. After you have used a feature a number of times, for example, maybe the label drops out and the button only has an icon. Keep using the app and the icon might subtly change to be less obvious. The idea being that less clutter on the interface allows users to be more productive, but only once you know how the app works.

I started thinking about how this design principle might be implemented in library catalogues.

The Inside Out Library

I've just been reading a recent post by Lorcan Dempsey that I wanted to share. Discovery and discoverability, go read it...

Two sections particularly resonated with me.

If I want to know if a particular book exists I may look in Google Book Search or in Amazon, or in a social reading site, in a library aggregation like Worldcat, and so on. My options have multiplied and the breadth of interest of the local gateway [ie. the catalogue] is diminished: it provides access only to a part of what I am potentially interested in.

Essentially, discovery increasingly happens outside the library, especially for public libraries for whom the stock in trade has been recreational reading. So where does that leave the future of public libraries?

The challenge is not now only to improve local systems, it is to make library resources discoverable in other venues and systems, in the places where their users are having their discovery experiences.These include Google Scholar or Google Books, for example, or Goodreads, or Mendeley, or Amazon. It is also to promote institutionally created and managed resources to others.

This is what Dempsey is calling the inside out challenge for libraries.

And this is where I see a real opportunity for libraries;  in unique local collections - material that is unavailable elsewhere and that has particular interest to people with connection to our location and community.

Don't get me wrong. Supporting recreational reading and learning needs as well as local groups and events will remain the major focus of public libraries for some time. But we need to be looking at making our local collections accessible to the network. This is our niche market. Something that we have that can't readily be satisfied elsewhere. 

This means digitisation programs and associated metadata creation.  I don't mean MARC records either. We need to look at making collections available on the web with high quality metadata that can be easily indexed by network discovery tools.  We need to embrace high quality web design, search engine optimisation and open data.  

Let's move away from entrusting the creation, indexing, hosting and discovery of our records to 3rd party commercial services simply so we don't have to do it ourselves.  Let's engage partners to help build these digital collections in ways that allow libraries retain control over the structural design, the quality control and the licensing of the content.

Let's build these collections with APIs and open feeds that allow the content to be harvested into our catalogues and discovery layers, and make it possible for them to be discoverable by Google. Let's encourage others to mash them with other data to create cool new things that we can't even imagine.

That's the future library I want to see.