Deborah E. B. Keller, Librarian (Engineering), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Humphreys Engineer Center, Support Activity Library, shares her insights and experiences regarding Web 2.0 technologies, libraries, and change in this article: Putting Web 2.0 in your Toolbox for Library Outreach.
This article was originally published in the 2008 Best Practices for Government Librarians: Web 2.0 in the Workplace and Beyond. The 2008 edition includes 70 articles and other submissions provided by more than 40 contributors from libraries in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders, LexisNexis Consultants, and more.
Read on...
Web 2.0 technologies are celebrated for their ability to bring people together. Indeed, the advent of social networking sites, file sharing programs, and collaborative software creation initiatives involving wikis, mashups and open source code have revolutionized the way that many of us make friends, communicate, and collaborate with others who share similar interests. Librarians and other information professionals have been among the early testers and adopters of these technologies since our business is, inherently, about communication as much as it is about information.
Like many librarians, I’ve tested out a number of Web 2.0 tools and integrated some into my daily activities. It is now much easier to read the news, follow both personal and professional areas of interest, and talk to friends. Unfortunately, I haven’t felt this same revolutionary improvement in how I’m able to do my job. As I pondered what to write here, I felt slightly overwhelmed by the challenges that these new technologies seems to present rather than the improvements that it brings.
Nonetheless, I am committed to bringing new technologies, including Web 2.0 into the way my library does business. Why? As the saying goes, the only real constant in life is change. If libraries do not embrace these changes, we will be seen as backwards and irrelevant. Closures, budget cuts, and staff reductions already threaten Federal libraries. Among our foremost responsibilities, then, is reaching out beyond our traditional library roles and convincing both our management and our users that we are still important, even necessary, to our organizations.
Be where the user is
In libraries everywhere, door counts are declining. This is true in my library, the Humphreys Engineer Center Support Activity Library, which serves the Headquarters of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as well as many other federal, academic, and even public libraries. Why? Users will tell you that “everything” that they need can now be found on the web.
Like most librarians, my immediate reaction is to scream, “That’s just not true.” I’ve spent hours explaining the difference between subscription databases and free sources, educating patrons about scholarly and authoritative sources, and preaching about the enduring value of library resources. But, it is simply easier for patrons to do a quick search in Google or some other search engine, compare a web page or two, and feel satisfied that they have “something” which answers their question or supports their position. I’m frankly getting tired of fighting this never ending battle. In addition, my library’s geographic separation from a large part of our user community leads us to adopt the strategy, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”
Our users are primarily executives who spend much of their day answering e-mail and attending meetings. They don’t often have time to visit the library’s website and may not be able to find it on our agency’s homepage. They may not know which of the library’s subscription databases contain articles that are relevant to their field of interest. We’ve already adopted strategies of delivering books and journals to the users desk’s as a way of overcoming the distance between them and the library. For us, Web 2.0’s “push” technologies seemed to be a natural extension of this trend.
In October 2007, the reference librarians started blogging. In response to patrons who were used to seeing a list of new books appear on our website periodically, we began to write short reviews of our new books on a blog branded to blend into our library website. We advertise our blog on bulletin boards, in library education sessions, and even bring the content to the splash page of our library catalog using RSS. Our site, http://hecsalibrary.blogspot.com, contains the name of our library and is hosted by Blogger. It is seemingly easy to find through Google if users add the term “blog” to their search or to look beyond the first page of results. Yet, six months into this initiative, our subscribers only number in the single digits.
If you build it, they will come
Like Kevin Costner’s character in Field of Dreams, I was convinced that the minute our library had a blog, people would start reading it. Clearly this has not been the case. Thinking back, I think we’ve made several false assumptions.
People are always looking for information, so they must also be looking for the library.
In the early days of our blog, we assumed that just being on the web would lead people, both our users and others, to us. As I’ve already suggested, listening to our patrons has gradually told us that this isn’t true. Our agency has had libraries for decades, but as we started to visit our patrons in person to market our services, over and over we heard them tell us, “I didn’t know we had a library!” Quite obviously, if they don’t know that we exist, they won’t look for us. Instead, they will, and have, learned to rely on Google and the internet in general to fill their information needs.
We’ve advertised our service, so users will check it out.
Marketing ourselves and our services is a challenge for many librarians. We feel that our services have value and are convinced that patrons will want to use them. However, it isn’t clear that users are paying attention to the posters that we put up or notices that we post online. I’m just as guilty of ignoring advertising—television commercials, ads on websites, and even the posters in the METRO stations—as other people. In response, we’ve started speaking to our patrons in person, one at a time. This is a tremendous investment in time and effort on our part, but it has allowed us to be sure that our messages are getting through to people. We can combine awareness, marketing of new services, and user education in one visit. This has also given us the opportunity to hear directly from them about what we can do to better serve their information needs, and gives us a chance to follow-up or reach out to other potential library users by tapping into their office networks.
We’re trying something new, so it must be an improvement.
Society has conditioned us to believe that something new is always better than what we had before or what we’ve always done. I think this is a risky assumption for libraries. For years, we’ve been hearing about the coming of a paperless society, but it just hasn’t happened. There are, in fact, some indications that we are moving in the opposite direction. Many of my colleagues now keep BOTH paper and electronic copies of their documents. I’m also beginning to see the indication that people are reading more books, both in the professional literature and in the growing popularity of Amazon.com. Please don’t misunderstand me, though. I do think that our book review blog is an improvement. We’ve added reviews to what used to be just a list of book citations. We post entries almost daily rather than sending out a list every month or two. Our blog also allows people to receive the entries in an RSS feed reader, personal iGoogle or MyYahoo page, or in their e-mail rather than coming too our website to look at a bibliography. However, all of these are changes. Whether we’ve done something better or not, we are now asking our users to change their expectations and perhaps even their behavior. This will simply take time.
Technology is cool. People will rush to learn to use it.
I’m interested in technology, as are many of the librarians that I know. However, this assumption isn’t true of all librarians, much less of the entire population or my specific user group. In talking with them, I’ve discovered that some of my users are quite technologically savvy. They are never without their mobile phones, carry mp3 players or iPods to entertain themselves while they commute, and even contribute to the collaborative workspaces for their project teams. When I talk with them, however, I often hear the questions, “What is a blog? What does RSS mean?” They aren’t anti-technology by any means, but they’ve only learned to use the tools they NEED. E-mail is a job requirement. Getting your news—whether from the Washington Post or from the library—by RSS is still optional.
Know Your User
Over the past few years, the professional literature has been full of research studies and discussions of the learning styles and communication behaviors of Generation X, Generation Y, and Millennials. These studies indicate that generation groups tend to be full of individuals who begin their research process with a search engine, conduct library research from their desktops rather than physically going to the library, and expect that their research results will be ranked by relevance, regardless of the source, like search engines do.1 These findings seem to be confirmed by the recent report on the so called “Google Generation.”2 Both studies indicate that young people clearly associate “libraries” with “books,” rather than information in general, and that they have preferences for interactive rather than passive technologies. What remains unclear, however, is the degree to which these research behaviors differ from those of preceding generations.
These two academic studies, while informative about the trends concerning research and communication behaviors of library users in general, may not be tremendously useful for those of us in Federal Librarianship. According to the most recent statistics available from the Office of Personnel Management, 40% of the Federal civilian workforce serving the Executive Branch, where the Department of Defense and my agency sit, is over the age of 50. An additional 30% are over the age of 40.3 In addition, employment trends for the last decade indicate that these Executive Branch employees are, in general, getting older.4 This 70% majority falls outside of the generations who have been studied recently.
Does this mean that earlier generations are not using technology, specifically Web 2.0 technologies? Certainly not! However, they may not be already using the same technologies as their children, the ones who have received so much recent attention. A considerable number of library users that I’ve spoken with have expressed considerable interest in technology, particularly when it is framed in a way that “makes their life easier” or “helps them collect information faster [or] with less effort.” These users simply need some help understanding the new software and integrating it into their current research behavior. User education, then, has shifted from being one focused on content or search to one focused on teaching about the techno-tools.
Most of the interest that we have seen among our users can be grouped as “push” technologies. Accustomed to having print journals routed to their desks, many users are excited when an alert can be set up in a full-text database such as those offered by Ebsco. During individual desk-side appointments, reference librarians currently assist users in setting up searches customized to their work areas and research interests. At this time, most of these users prefer to have the alert sent to their e-mail, a technology that is familiar and a tool that they are using already. We are beginning to see a similar warming to our library’s book review blog. Users seem comfortable bookmarking the blog in their internet browser or subscribing to an alert that will be sent to their e-mail.
While adoption is slow, even these tentative steps offer the librarians an opportunity to educate the users. The Washington Post, for example, is perhaps more appealing to many of our users than information being produced and pushed out from the library. However, once the user becomes comfortable reading the Post at his desk through an RSS feed rather than glancing at it over the morning oatmeal and coffee, it will be much easier to add library-generated content to their daily serving of information.
Producing a library blog and serving up database or other content using RSS will have higher payoff for us in the long term, however, than in the short term, so we can and should be patient when looking at the results of our efforts. For one thing, we are generating content continually. Indeed, many experts argue that information is growing exponentially. By using a blog structure as we generate information from and about the library, we are simultaneously making the information easier to retrieve over time and preserving it to be accessed in the future. Perhaps more importantly, time is on our side. As the Baby Boom generation retires from Federal service, they will be replaced by the younger Generation X, Generation Y, and Millennial workers whose information gathering and communication preferences have developed around technology. Simply put, libraries who integrate technologies will become increasingly more relevant as generational shifts occur among their users.
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[1] Barbara Costello, Robert Lenholt, and Judson Stryker, “Using Blackboard in Library Instruction:Addressing the Learning Styles of Generations X and Y,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 30, no. 6 (Nov. 2004): 452. WilsonSelectPlus: available at http://newfirstsearch.oclc.org(accessed 19 Mar 2008).
[2] Joint Information Systems Committee, Information Behaviour of theResearcher of the Future: A CyberBriefing Paper (11 Jan. 2008). Available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/reppres/gg_final_keynote_11012008.pdf(accessed 15 Jan 2008).
[3] United States Office of Personnel Management, Federal Civilian Employment Distribution within Selected Age Groups, Executive Branch Agencies, Worldwide, September 30, 2004. Available http://www.opm.gov/feddata/demograph/table11mw.pdf(accessed 12 Mar 2008).
[4] United States Office of Personnel Management, Federal Workforce Overview: FY 1994-FY 2004. Available http://www.opm.gov/feddata/Workforce_Overview_Brief_1994_to_2004.pdf(accessed 12 Mar 2008).
