The first conversation was with my former roommate’s father-in-law. We were in Oak Park (Illinois) celebrating the third birthday of my roommate’s son. It was a warm July day, and the father-in-law and I were hiding in the shade with cold drinks. He is a researcher at a medical school at a major research university in the Chicago-area. Even though he and I are in very different parts of higher education, we always enjoy talking shop—budgets, grants, students, publications, research—always interesting conversation.

Naturally, our conversation turned to libraries, and I have to say I was a bit surprised when he asked, “So, will there even be a need for libraries in the future?” He asked it in a way that assumed there would not be. My shock must have shown, because he fumbled a bit and tried to say something reassuring.

I asked him if he used his library, and he said to me that he couldn’t remember the last time he had actually been in a library on campus. I asked him if he had used the library’s website. He said, “Oh, yeah. All the time. I search it constantly. Probably once a week at least.” For him, it seemed that the building was something different than the website, which were both something different from librarians.

To answer his question, I assured him that libraries were stronger than ever, virtually and physically. I told him that the articles he accesses in his office did not just magically appear out of the ether, but that there were people who had to make tough decisions about what to purchase. I also promised him that there were absolutely librarians on his campus who were dying to give him more help than he could possibly imagine. One phone call, one email, one visit and he would find the best research partners imaginable. I told him that he just needed to take the Pepsi challenge and give his librarians a call. He chuckled at this, and I am sure that he has not contacted anyone from his campus libraries.

I have thought much about this conversation over the last month. I have played it back in my head.  I am struck by the apparent disconnect in his mind between physical space, website, and library services. To me, these things are all critically intertwined into an essential service at the heart of the academic machine. To him, these are loosely connected entities, most of which he did not need since he had the convenience of the PC in his office. He did admit to me that he preferred to research in his office as opposed to home because “things just seemed to run smoother on the campus network.”

A few weeks later, my family went camping with some friends. Two of whom are researchers. One is an economist fighting his way through the tenure process at a major research university in the St. Louis-area, and the other is an atmospheric chemist who is an independent contractor that works closely with several university researchers. I asked them about their library use. They both agreed that the information they access regularly is not available for free on the web and that libraries were absolutely vital to their work. In fact, the chemist sheepishly admitted to me that he gets campus log in information from friends so that he can still get to expensive databases for free. However, they both agreed that they hadn’t spoken with a librarian (besides me) since they first entered graduate school. They assumed that librarians were on campus to work with undergraduates. I told then that was only part of our work.

Now, I am sure that libraries are not going to close up shop anytime soon, but I do think that there is cause for concern by those of us who hope to work in this profession for the coming decades. This concern was captured by Rick Anderson in his editorial when he said, “Eventually the term ‘library’ becomes an honorific attached to a building, rather than a meaningful designation for what happens inside it” (p. 290) For us, we offer services that we believe complement each other and provide a range of support for researchers. But, our patrons do not necessarily see it this way. As Anderson also said, “Value that is not valued is not valuable” (p. 289). Obviously, it is on our shoulders to continue to advocate and reinvent libraries to better serve our users. But, frankly, that’s what I feel like I’ve been doing for the last decade.

————
(By the way, you can read Gary Price’s response to Mike Shtzkin here, http://infodocket.com/2011/04/07/the-globe-and-mail-mike-shatzkin-in-montreal-libraries-dont-make-sense-anymore/.)

Troy A. Swanson is Teaching &Learning Librarian at Moraine Valley Community College. You can follow him on Twitter at @t_swanson.

Eva Norling at the BTH Library tells me they are showing the video in the library now and the Web version will include music.

Clearly there is a reliance on technology with this conversation.  I’d like, however, to hold off on this until a bit later.

Our core values in librarianship revolve around providing information services and we do that quite well.  Cecily Walker comments on Mick’s post:

While we may know a great deal about the organization of information and how that relates to information architecture, and while we understand user behaviour and user needs, the fact remains that web development isn’t really a core competency that is stressed in most LIS curricula at this moment.

Cecily points out that we already have the skill sets in place, sans web development, and as I interpret it we’re some of the most qualified professionals to enact such proactive web initiatives.  I’ve stated in conversations that, yes, I do believe that web development does need to become a core competency in LIS education, but just because it has yet to become so does not mean that we don’t have LIS professionals or students willing to take up the mantle or teach their professional colleagues what it takes.  If anything, librarianship is a teaching mob – a scan of Twitter conversations, LIS blog posts, and e-mail lists shows how much we like to teach what we know and share our ideas.

There is a concern that becoming an online community organizer or website developer adds yet another hat onto our heads to wear everyday.  This is true from a certain perspective.  Speaking from my own, the roles I am handed and those that I volunteer for are always of a hybrid nature.  Refusing the hard and fast allows me to think collaboratively, work uniquely, and experience more in my career.

Reflect on your collective arsenal of skill sets.  If you and your library choose to create and host community websites, and Mick and I so hope you do, take stock of what your staff can and cannot do.  Be honest with yourselves about what you feel can be accomplished and supported without denying the opportunity to learn more.  As with any project, assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of hosting community websites.

Mick and I understand that offering professional grade web development services will, for nearly all libraries, be unattainable.  Creating web applications, iPhone and Android apps, and mesmerizingly beautiful community websites is not what we’re after.  And if he and I are honest with ourselves we would state that this train of thought about hosting for the community is in reaction to the current state of the Web.  We both recognize that (and here comes the technology…) content management systems like Drupal and WordPress now offer easy, secure, and pleasing ways to create quick and usable websites.  Hosting, as well, takes little to no knowledge to create subdomains and register new domains with intuitive web-based dashboards and panels at a low cost for initiatives we’re talking about.

As a profession we have most, some have all, of the skill sets in place to successfully serve our communities, the organizations within, and their information needs in new and unique ways.  We hope you see this opportunity in the same light we do.

—

TTW Contributor: Kyle Jones
@thecorkboard / thecorkboard

Well – that one location is Libsite.org.

Libsite lets users contribute their own site (or even others) for screenshot viewing, rating, and commenting.  So go register your site and get some feedback.  Oh, and while you’re there give this site a good once-over.

~Kyle Jones~
TTW Contributor

Jeep:

The rectangular information boxes nicely animate in and out upon click of the left or right arrows allowing for new information to nicely slide in to place.

Apple:

Apple’s start page uses the accordion effect to hide and show its content in the sidebars. Simply hover over, say, “Top Songs” and a top ten list shows up.

Vimeo:

Vimeo, a social networking site about sharing video, smoothly scrolls in new videos that users like every couple of seconds on their “Right Now” page.

I’d venture to guess that a lot of us don’t even think twice about some these nice effects that we engage with during our daily browsing. But we have to recognize that they add to our experience, our “likability” of the pages we view. Understandably, library web pages need to be focused on presenting accurate, useable content; however, we can do these things and still not dismiss the opportunities we have to organize our information in aesthetically pleasing and engaging ways.

One of these engaging ways that I have been very intrigued by is the use of Cover Flow to present resources. If you don’t know what Cover Flow is, take a look at your iTunes library in Cover Flow view by choosing “View” and “Cover Flow View – it looks like this:

It’s easy to make the jump from collections in your iTunes library to the collections in your actual library website. A couple folks around the ‘Net have been thinking the same thing I have and have commented about it:

• Superpatron (who was way ahead of the curve)
• The Shifted Librarian
• The Corkboard (me)
• and I’m sure a few more I’m missing…

To my pleasant surprise, Lee (fellow TTW contributor), led me to an excellent implementation at Villanova University’s Digital Library.

VU uses Cover Flow to display photos of some of their digital collections in a highly interactive way. While I personally had no reason to look further into their collection, the fact that I was able to engage with the collections by browsing intrigued me enough to look further at their collections. This “doorway,” so to speak, is an excellent way to get more views at different collections by catching the user’s eye from the get go.

Not to be outdone by academia, Cambridge Public Library in Canada has also put together their own version of Cover Flow for over 20 different categories of their collection (nice!).

You can choose your category at this screen:

and are given a nice Cover Flow output when you click on the purple icon:

Some of these fancy, schmancy animations and graphics do take some more advanced knowledge of Javascript or other coding languages, but luckily enough most of these tools have such a great following by web designers and wannabe’s like myself that there is a plethora of resources created to help you whip one up. I’ll admit that I have no experience with Javascript but was able to create a couple really nice accordions like within Apple’s start page. If some of the creators of these excellent Cover Flows are followers of Tame the Web, I’d be really interested to read what you used to create your tools and the effort that went into it.

Some Javascript libraries of note for further research:

• Mootools
• jQuery
• Yahoo UI
• Scriptaculous

Posted by Kyle (TTW Contributor)

http://infonatives.wordpress.com/

Ten great things an online academic library can do:

1. Communicate with the academic community
2. Get proper subject librarians who know their stuff to generate the content for the library website!
3. Provide high-quality, easy to use tools to put the content the users created online in various formats (see 4)
4. Keep the content updated
5. Provide consistent interfaces, preferably a single consistent interface where possible
6. Present users with the resources they use, making things one click away
7. Structure information, making it customizable where this is appropriate
8. Make sure that everyone in the library is on the same page regarding services, ensure that users are getting the course offerings they want/need
9. Provide a library toolbar
10. Evangelize!

And Ten brainless things an online academic library can do:

1. Not actively talking (listening) to the academic community
2. Cut away the subject-specific angle and quality assurance in favour of a “streamlined”, centralized appearance
3. Go static
4. Implement technologies that help administration, but not the user
5. Bolt bits on the old design to make it two-oh
6. Federated search, but no training
7. Cut away the OPAC in favour of ancillary systems (for example eJournal and database repositories)
8. Rely on third parties with whom you have no trust relation to store important information
9. Focus on what’s new/important/good rather than what’s being used
10. Aquabrowser
11. [BONUS] Providing five databases when one would have sufficed

Well said. PLEASE click through and read the explanations for all of the points. I would urge academic library folk to look at these very seriously in a staff meeting.

In my book, this is gold:

… if you’re not actively working with the academic communities you serve — and I mean really listening to them, helping them do their work in their way — you’re not going to do a good job. Libraries and librarians are mostly good at librarying, unfortunately the rest of the world isn’t interested; stop it.

The same might be said for instructional support in many institutions. <cough> Firefox <cough>