The success paradox

An article entitled "Study: Public Awareness Gap on Ebooks in Libraries" in the July/August 2012 issue of American Libraries reports that 62% of Americans polled did not know if their library (presumably their local public library) lends ebooks. This statement was followed by a quote from Molly Raphael about how libraries should increase public awareness of their services. I would naturally be inclined to agree with her except for the other statistics that were cited: 56% of those who do borrow ebooks were unable to borrow a particular book they were seeking, and 52% had encountered wait lists for books.

Given that data, you have to wonder what the results would be if libraries did make the public more aware of the availability of ebooks.

An institution with a fixed budget cannot afford to be too successful, or at least not successful in the sense of encouraging more use of its services. The more successful the institution is, the more it will fail its users because demand will overwhelm its ability to serve them. As we see in the ebook example, libraries are failing to serve well even the minority of people who are aware that they have ebooks to lend. What if everyone was made aware of the availability of "free" ebooks from the library? The ebook lending service would be worse from the user's perspective.

Where each purchase of the book makes money for the bookseller, each demand of the library results in a cost rather than a revenue gain. This is because the library is on a fixed income and the basis of the library's budget is only tangentially related to the number of 'customers' it serves. A library with an annual budget of, say, $500,000 has that amount to spend even if use of the library increases greatly during that year. Such an increase of use does not guarantee that the library's budget will be increased when the next fiscal year's budget is decided on by the governing authority (such as city, state, or college). In fact, as we have seen in these hard economic times, increased use and decreased budgets can go hand-in-hand.

Because the library's model is to get more use out of a limited number of books (and DVDs and other items) by lending them sequentially to patrons, the direct result of high demand is an increase in the failure of the library to meet the demand, evidenced by long waiting lists for the book and patrons who are unhappy with the library's service. My local library in the city of Berkeley today has nine copies of "50 Shades of Grey" with 70 holds. This is in a small city with a population of about 120,000. The library of the city of Santa Clara in Silicon Valley, which is similar in size to Berkeley, also has nine copies, but 119 holds. New York Public Library has "Holds: 1657 on 131 copies."

In this sense, success -- that is, many people turning to the library with their desire to read a highly popular book -- is in fact the cause of failure; the failure of the library to meet that demand.

I come around to these thoughts when I find myself frustrated at the reluctance or inability of libraries to promote their services despite obvious opportunities to do so. Then I think about what it looks like inside a branch of my local library, with fewer and fewer staff available and the obvious strain, as evidenced by cart after cart of books that have been checked in but not yet returned to the shelves, by long lines to use the public computers despite the fact that those now take up a significant amount of floor space, and shelf after shelf of sadly worn trade paperbacks on topics that were fleeting fads a decade or so ago.

Really, why would an institution so stretched in its resources want to stimulate more demand?

Libraries, of course, are not the only such institutions; few if any inner-city emergency rooms would consider it a good idea to stimulate the arrival of more patients. I've been in a higher end hospital emergency room in my town (fortunately very seldom) and even that had patients on gurneys in the hallways because every more appropriate space was filled. Again here, high demand promotes failure.

Libraries from their beginnings developed in response to scarcity. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that the library model based on scarcity is not well suited to the current climate of media abundance. Yet, any public institution that would base its services on scarce but rarely sought goods is on a suicide mission, especially in today's economic and social climate.

Is there a solution to this dilemma? In a perfect world (obviously not the one we live in) government and institutions of higher learning would recognize the value of a well-stocked, vibrant community information space. Instead, library budgets are being sharply cut, and library services are not perceived has having high value. If libraries have lost support among their traditional communities, it may have something to do with the current measures of success: number of items checked-out being the primary one for public libraries; number of volumes owned for research libraries.

Whatever success looks like in the future, it simply cannot be based on increasing the number of holds on materials or on providing services that you hope only a few people will discover and make use of. Circulation figures should not be the main measure of the library's value; we need not only new services but new measures of the library's worth to the community. There is a pressing need for actual information services, not just the storage and circulation of items.There is also a desire for participation, as evidenced by social information networking like Wikipedia, LibraryThing, GoodReads, and others. Perhaps the answer lies in asking what the users can contribute to the library so that use adds value as well as incurs costs. Perhaps the library of today should serve its users by giving them a means to crowd-source solutions to their information problems, with the library contributing knowledge organization skills, its awareness of community needs, and a commitment to quality information services. Maybe the library of the future should be less about circulating books and DVDs and more about helping people make sense of the information glut that we live in; less about keeping up with global bestsellers and more about learning with and within the community.

Then maybe success can be success, not failure.

WIsh list: dump the desk

When I worked for the University of California we moved our offices a number of times, and sometimes into space that was being newly renovated. During each of these moves we were given diagrams and asked to choose a configuration for our cubicles or offices. One of the configurations, at least for offices, was the option to be sitting behind a desk rather than having the desk against a wall. In executive offices, the "behind the desk" configuration is de riguer. Its purpose is to put a solid barrier between the occupant and the visitor, and it symbolizes the power of the person who sits behind the desk.

At my public library, all of the available staff (except the shelvers) are located behind desks. There is the information desk, the reference desk, and the circulation desk. In this case, the desks do not make the person look powerful; in fact, they make the person look unavailable and powerless. The people behind a desk cannot (easily) leave the desk, they are stuck there. If a person asks for help the staff member can point but can't go with the person and help. Admittedly, some of the seated staff give the impression that just being asked to stand up is a burden.

The desk creates a physical space between the library user and the staff. Think about how it feels to be talking to a person who is behind such a barrier compared to being "corpo a corpo" next to them with no barrier. The social distance created by the desk is huge.

The desk sets up an inequality between the user and the staff member because the user has to go to the staff member, the staff member cannot go to the user. If you ask a reference question, head off to the stacks, then discover that you aren't finding what you need or have thought of another question, you have to go back to the reference desk. In a large library, that can be quite a trek. Do that a couple of times and you are likely to quit asking since it's too much trouble.

I want my library to be more like the Apple store. I want there to be staff visible in the library space but not sitting at desks. I want them to be, for example, near the catalog or at key entrances to the stacks. I want to be able to identify them as staff so I can approach them if I have a question -- it just takes a colorful T-shirt to accomplish this. I want them to be mobile, not glued to one spot. I want them to be in the same space as I am, not separated out to staff-only spaces. I want them to have their tools with them, perhaps a tablet where we can access the catalog and various resources together, right where we are. Even the shelvers could be equiped with the ability to send an SMS to the reference staff and either queue the person up for help or get an answer directly.

Some staff need to stay put, for example the circulation desk staff (note how we call it a desk, almost always?) Even having staff at open "pods" rather than behind desks would give a different impression.

So this is my wish: a library that feels like it is staffed by real live people, who walk and talk and mingle with the users. Wow. What a concept.

An easy, online, social library catalog

One thing that I learned in my short visit to Kosovo is that there are many libraries there, and I'm sure in every region and in every country, that are small and have no catalog. (There are also large libraries without catalogs, but the solution for them is more difficult than what I am proposing here.) I went online to see what software might be available for these libraries, and came to the conclusion that 1) the software they need does not exist and 2) there's no reason for catalog creation to be as complex as we've made it. As a matter of fact, if we look around us there are many online systems that are free to users, or nearly so, require no training, and that function on a fairly large scale. What I'm proposing here is actually no more complex than most social networking systems, but with a library bent. Here's what we need:

1. A social networking site where the society members are libraries, not individuals.
2. The ability to capture copy cataloging from other libraries or create cataloging on the site itself.
3. Full Unicode support, both for the interface and for the data.
   
4. The ability to capture and create records using a MARC-compatible format.
   
5. The ability to export the library catalog records in MARC format.
6. A reports function that could print off the results of searches or even the library's inventory, so it could be used off-line.
   
7. The creation of groups of "library friends," that is other libraries whose data should be included in searches and displays. This will facilitate sharing and also will serve users in areas where resources are scarce and scattered.
   
8. A search and display interface that looks like a modern library catalog
9. It all has to be easy to use with no training required, and not require any technical support on the part of the library.
   

Sound impossible? Hardly. Essentially, I'm thinking of a cross between MySpace and Librarything, with a user interface that looks something like Scriblio. It could also be called a Worldcat with an easy cataloging interface and very, very low user fees. It may benefit from some of the features of the wiki world, with shared editing of bibliographic data, so I guess I should add the Open Library into the mix.

There are many people encouraging libraries to use Open Source systems like Koha, but the libraries I'm talking about here have no capability to run software, much less Unix-based software. They may have only one computer, and it has to be used for everything: Internet access, office applications like document creation, and, if they have the capability, the library catalog. For those that do have at least part-time Internet access, the ideal system would be run online, with no technical requirements on the library's part.

The MARC requirement is an important one. The system does not need to support the full MARC record, but support for a standard minimum record means that the libraries can use each other's data for copy cataloging, and that some time in the future they may be able to contribute their records to library systems or to regional union catalogs. The ability to form networks between libraries is essential to overcome the incredible scarcity that exists for people living in rural and under-developed areas.

We already have many of the parts of this system, and I'm confident that the technology is no problem. We need the organization and the sustainability. Please send along any suggestions you have for how we can get this done.

Wish list: Pimp my hard drive

I can't believe that it's 2007 and I'm still staring at nested displays of little yellow folder icons, which then open up to show me, of all things, file names. Or I can get little thumbnails that tell me no more than I know from the file name extension.

Shouldn't we be beyond this? Here's what I want to see when I look at my hard drive:

Titles. Most of the documents on my hard drive have titles. Some of them even have those titles coded in some way as titles - such as the html files, and files in various word processing formats. I'm sure that it is possible to make an algorithmic guess at titles (or at least first lines) for just about any file with text.

Authors. OK, it won't really be authors, but if nothing else I should be able to distinguish files I created from those created by others. There are automated (and frequently erroneous) "owners" in files, but that ownership is often a good clue as to the provenance of the file. I want to see that. (Meanwhile, I'm going to start storing what I write in folders apart from what I have downloaded. No, I don't use "my documents." I hate that folder. I renamed it once and really screwed things up, so I have my own top level folder under c:.)

Snippets. Is there any reason why I shouldn't be able to see snippets from my own files as I browse a folder? An opening line or beginning paragraph would be fine. I shouldn't have to manually open every file to see what's in it.

Most used. The "recent documents" function in Windows is useless. OK, pretty much useless. I want to be able to see the files I have most frequently (but not necessarily recently) opened. I can't tell you how much time I've spent hunting for local copies of certain files.

Tags. I want to tag my files, and I want the tags to be available external to the files themselves, a kind of delicious for my hard drive. (And don't tell me to get Windows Vista -- that's not what I want, in more ways than one.) I want to see tag clouds and tag lists.

"Like." This may be pushing it, but I really want to see clusters of documents that are like each other. This will be the usual statistical reliance on the imprecision of language, but it would reveal connections in the documents that could be useful.

Folder names. I'm not sure I can explain this one but... I have a folder named "FRBR" and a folder named "MARC". When I want to look in one of those folders I don't want to have to go through the hierarchy of folders to find them -- especially because I never can remember where I've put them. Why can't I just type "MARC" and see the folder or folders with "MARC" in the name? Why do I always have to run through the whole hierarchy? (If you have found a way to do a folder name search only on Windows XP, please let me know.) Or maybe folder names could be treated as tags, once tagging is working.

There are undoubtedly many other things I could wish for, but basically what it comes down to is that there needs to be a better interface to the hard drive. Some of this can be found in google desktop, but I have found it unsatisfactory, generally.

Wish list: ONIX records

There are things that I wish existed, but don't, so I'm going to start posting my wishlist here, one piece at a time. Some of these things might not be possible for various reasons, and some may already exist but I'm just not aware of them (but I hope you'll clue me in). For those that could be done, let's talk about how we could make them happen.

The first one that I'm posting is a desire for a database of available ONIX records.

A few years ago I looked at some ONIX records that were being created for e-books and I have to say that they were so poor as to be almost unusable. Recently I've been reviewing some ONIX records received at the Internet Archive for the OpenLibrary project. There are only about a half dozen publishers represented there, but it's obvious to me that they are producing useful data. The basic bibliographic data is there, plus there is data that fits into the "book promotion" realm: blurbs, author bios, subject categories. This is data that is sent to online booksellers and to bookstores. It would be useful for libraries and for anyone else keeping data about books. But I don't know of anyone who is aggregating it, much less making it public.

What we need is:

• a database that receives ONIX feeds
• that keeps the records up to date
• that has a z39.50 capability and an API for retrieving data
• that can output in a couple of different common formats

It seems that this could be a great companion to CoverThing, a project proposed by LibraryThing creator Tim Spaulding (and perhaps in the works?) In any case, it's like there's a bunch of bibliographic data that is being created and then flushed down the drain. Let's find a way to save it and use it. (And I sure hope the publishers feel this way, too.)