Welcome to Our Lady of Perpetual Beta - Thing #15

I read all the articles, trying to find the one that resonated with me. As a result, I don't have a cohesive response to the whole group. In short, these articles made me say, yet again, that we need to remember that our users are not monolithic. Our resources are not monolithic. And, thankfully, the future is also not monolithic. We can take multiple paths, backtrack if we have to, and see what the future holds.

Some quotations I think bear repeating from these articles:

"...it no longer makes sense to collect information products as if they were hard to get." Rick Anderson

I agree, at first. Lots of our materials are not at all difficult to get, and we should simply be aiding access to these materials, rather than storing them up in our own special silos. We should not forget, however, that not all information products are easy to get. Embracing the fact that many of our materials are easy to get should free us up to be able to get our hands on those materials that are hard to get.

"But if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons." Rick Anderson

I think Rick Anderson's comment on this aspect of Library 2.0 has two prongs: he seems to be commenting on sources as well as services. When I first read this, I definitely read it to mean "sources" because I blurted out, "Yes, but we are not always faced with 'fixable' sources!" He says that users shouldn't need to be trained to use awful search interfaces, but what about the awful search interfaces that aren't under the control of the librarians? Is this another case of fixing the things we have the most control over so they free up our time to deal with training users on the sources we can't fix?

"At a minimum, this means placing library services and content in the user’s preferred environment (i.e., the Web); even better, it means integrating our services into their daily patterns of work, study and play."

Yet again, I feel the need to point out that not every single person in the world wants to live online. Our users may have a preferred environment that is 3-D, and cannot be replicated by Second Life. We need to respect that too, just as we need to respect the users who want us to be savvy online just like them.

Collect user intelligence - Another key lesson that O’Reilly emphasizes is the notion that “users add value.” Chip Nilges

I like this one! treating your catalog or your website or any other online service as an ongoing focus group sounds fantastic. Let people help. tag this, review that - help us put the library in context.

"Perpetual beta" Michael Stephens

This is my favorite, hands down. Ok, maybe a quick second is his whole paragraph that says "Librarian 2.0 controls technolust." :) We are always experimenting. We are agile. This is a good thing!