Aaron Schmidt writes:
Taking A Pass On Passivity
We need to stop focusing on giving away free content and do something different—something no other institution, civic or commercial, is doing.
This is where user experience and design thinking come into play. We spend a fair amount of time idly discussing what the future will hold. But this is a fool’s errand. It is this passivity that got us squeezed out of the containerless content game in the first place. Our time would be better spent observing the core needs of our communities and thinking of exciting ways to meet them. And here’s the kicker: while access to information seems likely to be a core need for some time to come, checking materials in and out of a library may not.
There’s not necessarily a single way forward as libraries transition to being less reliant on circulating content. But we can learn from how successful libraries are transitioning and, to the extent that our communities are similar, experiment with mimicking their efforts.
Read the whole column here: http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/ljinprint/currentissue/885299-403/the_user_experience_services_before.html.csp#mce_temp_url#