Collection Development for My Random Life.

My Maverick Bar: A Search for Identity and the “Real Work” of Librarianship | In the Library with the Lead Pipe.

My colleague Kim has written a great reflective piece on what it is to be an academic librarian today. Her personal take is to connect libraries with Knowledge. Yes, Knowledge with a capital “K”.

“I see no work in librarianship more real than the collection, protection, and dissemination of Knowledge, and the empowerment of others in means to acquire it”

For me, I feel that librarians would fine great value in undertaking more deep reflection like this. I have heard more often then I would like to hear that there is no need for theory in librarianship… that there is no such thing as a philosophy of librarianship. I think to some degree we, as a profession,  have lost sight of what it means to be a librarian and what it means to do the work of a library. Instead of simply the management of resources, personnel, access points and budgets as the constraining influences which provide the direction a library should take, we definitely should dig deep and figure out what the purpose of library is, and should be, even if this goes against the prevailing thought of “keeping up appearances” or “return on investment”. Not only should we make libraries relevant… or perhaps Relevant (with capital “R”), we also need to make libraries meaningful… er… Meaningful.  This Meaning is not only to the individual patron, but to the community, society at large, as well as the profession and discipline of librarianship. One of the only ways I know to tap into that is to be reflective and truly philosophical in order to provide the truest insight into the direction of a library and the meaningfulness of the work and activities that occur within its purview.

Kudos to Kim for a great post.

Wow. Trials and tribulations getting to Corvallis this morning. I kerangged! my toe on the metal frame of the bed I am sleeping on before I left. I think blood is pooling my shoe as we speak. I will have to check on it after the conference. But if you are reading this at the conference and you want to see me in person… just look for the limping guy. Actually it is probably just a tiny scratch but it still is bothersome.

Traffic in Eugene got crazy for a bit. Reminded me of my good old days in California. Then I almost missed my gas is extremely extremely low light. Luckily I caught that in time and filled up but it totally destroyed my carefully timed itinerary

Finally, I almost caused a traffic accident right in front of the conference venue when I couldn’t figure out the traffic flow around a stop sign. Oh well, I am here in one piece… mostly (except for my toe).

Listening to the keynote speaker Brandon Schaur from Adaptive Path talking about user experience. Right now he is point is that we need to be strategic to make user experience best.  I will just type some bon mots from the talk:

• There is also no such thing as 100% usability. Good point.
• Need to know your core audience and develop toward that.
• Applications should be understandable.
• Simple tasks should be simple.
• Need to know audience or else you will develop the entirely wrong experience. Waste of time and effort (and money!)
• What is the chance of “realworld” success?
• Four experience hacks:- 1. “Get empathy in your organization” – YOU ARE NOT THE USER – spend time with your user, look at their behaviors and motives.
• The “experience is the product” -
• “Tell me about that last time you used the (thing you want to know about)”.  - Get rich data

<working on a activity for user empathy. I am using our University 106 Library course as my example. The idea is to look for intersections between needs of users and organization as well as effort is a good fit>

• 2nd hack – Define the experience a user will have.
• What works for one product might not work for another
• Brand = Mission – How should you look/feel/talk/style guidelines… very little brand/mission talk about how you interact (i.e. “experienced principles” based on brand/mission)
• Experienced Principle: Is it memorable, is it ispira inspirational tional, is it differentiating (yours is different and recognizable)
• people remember the highest or lowest experiences (good/bad) and how it ended.  - Let them leave happy. End strong and be strong at what you are good at
• 3rd Experience Hack  - Have lots of ideas. <well I am good at that >
• Book recommendation: Myths of Innovation by O’Reilly
• How to let go of the 1st idea — being willing to move on to find better ideas to solve issue. Make multiple drafts… each different.  This would be good to do with websites. Let go of original constraining frame.

<Our activity now – Redesign Facebook  for our organization>

• Watching a ball move back and forth helps connect your left/right brain?  (need to find this psychological study)
• should prototype what you know least about – not what you already know – that is what you need to test after all
• go right to the problem you don’t know
• Experience Hack#4:  return to the user’s context. often
• book recommendation: Diffusion of Innovations by Rogers
• user, your solution, and user’s context need to intersect
• make it a “reversible pilot” project – try it out and see
• dry-run-of-one – bring user in to try it out

Lot’s to digest here. Good stuff.

Like many libraries we are struggling with how to make books more subject-oriented in a context that patrons can understand easier. Information Aesthetics has a post about putting more visible labels on books that also are coordinated by colors. See below for more..

informational book labels – data visualization & visual design – information aesthetics
information aesthetics