A library should be a Living Organism

A library should be a Living Organism

In another new development the Palm Beach Atlantic University library 'will have a cafe, an outdoor patio, more than twice the number of books, and 653 study spots, up from 115. Students will be encouraged to take their coffee and pastries throughout the library, apparently an important perk for collegians. '

Findley, who is designing the library said. "A library should not be a rusty, rigid and boring place. It should be a living organism."

The impact on us is we have to embrace continuous change.

Public Libraries Going Private

Public Libraries Going Private

Very interesting development from the US concerning the privatization of public library. Do you think we can do this here? What is interesting about this is that they have bidders/proposals from their current outsource service providers already. Below are the reasons that gave.

• Private management brings solid corporate business thinking to the table. That means working hard to find the most efficient way to do things. It means looking for innovation and finding ways to get more productivity out of existing resources. It means knowing how to get the most out of every dollar spent. Corporations know how to do this.


• LSSI brings significant library management experience to the table. It already operates four public libraries in Tennessee and about 50 nationwide. It operates some very large public library systems such as in Riverside County, Calif. It also does work for the Library of Congress and for the Smithsonian Institution.


• Corporate management of the library will bring new resources to the library. LSSI has a nationally known advisory board including some of the top library officials and library science educators in the country. These resources will be at our disposal.


• Successful corporations know how to manage change. Change is difficult, but those who don't change with the times fall behind.


• A private management contract would be performance based. Benchmarks and performance standards would be set by the board and agreed to by the contractor. If the goals are not met, a management change could again be made. LSSI has an outstanding record of meeting its performance goals for the public libraries it manages.


• The LSSI proposal is reasonable and includes taking quick action to open a North Jackson branch, something that has only been talked about for too many years.


• Corporations understand the concept of living within their means. LSSI has been successful at finding new non-taxpayer sources of revenue in other libraries it manages

What I am interested to find out is their business model.

Librarian's Blogs

In the recent CONSAL in Manila a Filipino Librarian presented a paper on Blogging 101 for Librarians. The librarian cited few well known examples out of the US but what surprise almost nothing form this region. Well, it could be there are somewhere but not traceable or we do not blog down here. Is that means we do not write as well? I dreaded to ask ‘do we read’? Do not get me wrong I am not celebrating technology for the sake of it but it si the issue that we are always late at embracing technology to be an effective part of our daily being. Technorati is tracking around 3.3 million blogs now and although most of them a personal opinions a lot of these personal opinions are opinions that matter. Simply because these blogs are written by prominent people in their field. Blogs are no doubt a good reference sources now. I love to see a lot more of us to start to blog. One interesting blog by a librarian, he said he is, that I have discovered is Munmon’s Stories as I see it. Having a blog doesn’t mean that you have to update or write everyday. Once a week will do and it would be meaningful if you write something more pertinent. Of course some of you are blogging already but hiding under different names. Come out!

Information Sharing through Blogging

I am quite disappointed that almost nobody blog the recent CONSAL XIII. Is this means that not many librarians blog in this region. The reason I am disappointed is the fact that not many people could be in Manila and blog is one of the best way to make us ‘attend’ the conference. Sort of extended conference. So many people are doing it now at various conferences. The other best part is of course someone could comment on what presented immediately and also could seek feedback from their colleagues or anybody else online. Probably technically it was not feasible to do but a few hours late should be ok as well.

More on social software

The cover story Putting The We in the Web in the latest Newsweek is a nice read to explain what I have written about social software before. Again to me in the end the question is how can we make these tools relevant and useful for our organization and us? We can look at them from two perspectives, firstly, as tools to enhance capability and capacity among us and secondly enablers to enhance our services my incorporating them as part of our service to value add our offering. If you want to discover what other libraries in the west have done with these technologies. Read the latest blog written by Sarah Houghton commenting on a paper presented at PLA 2006 conference Community Building On Your Website: Library Blogs and RSS Feeds There are several examples mentioned that could trigger us to think of something new for our users.

Social Software and Networking

Sarah Houghton is right when she says most librarians forget about the Social Networking sites like blogs as one of the resources for librarians today. Blogs are mostly written by passionate people on certain subject. Most of them are also experts in their area. The usefulness of blogs is not only because it is written by somebody with the subject domain expertise but also almost always written with the right context. Hence understanding the subject matter is easier. Also the kind of comments and discussion took place sometimes are valuable to the understanding of the issue at hand. There are numerous blogs written and if you use Technorati, which to date search 31.1 million blogs, you practically could search on other topics. To make it even useful and searchable most of the blogs writers would Tag their blogs according to specific topics which you can also track and search by. Another useful social networking tool or site is wiki. A free collaborative online encyclopedia. Although not many Malaysian librarians aware of the potential of these tools it is not too late for some of us to strategically think about them as part of our service offering. I would love to see more librarians to blog. In fact librarian could easily use these tools to collaborate among themselves.

Library 2.0

To me in the world of libraries any new development has almost always been evolutionary. I believe deeply we have to continuously align, change and leverage technology and the new way of managing information to our users requirement. And I also believe to give something extra to provoke our users to use new technology and thinking in using our facilities – services, products and the place. So far I have been trying to do that. That is why I was glad that I stumbled upon the debate/discussion on the concept of Library 2.0 in the west. I admit I am already late on this one as there were bunch of discussions on it and so far it was best captured by Walt Crawford in his Prologue Library 2.0 and “Library 2.0”. In the end he just confirmed my thinking about the whole thing. Blogs, wiki, Technorati, del.li.cious, Flikr, Fotopages, Podcast and RSS are no doubt great technologies and concepts but what matters to us is how we best apply them for our environment. First we need to know what they are before we do anything. The thing is we have to continuously learn and keep abreast with the new development around us and find the best way to apply them to improve ourselves and our library to serve our clients better. I plan to do a series of blogs on all the technologies I have mentioned above separately.