Point A: John Blyberg’s ILS Customer Bill-of-Rights.
Point B: Dan Chudnov’s The problem with the “ILS Bill of Rights”
Response: John Blyberg’s OPACs in the frying pan, Vendors in the fire
While there’s some disagreement between John and Dan, I can’t help but see a strong concordance between their posts: Both are an attempt to educate potential customers. [...]

Posted June 20, 2006 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: conversations, customer, free market, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, markets, purchase decisions, purchases, vendor. 7 Comments.

I loved this quote from Dave Young when I first found it, and I love it more now:

Talk to the customer in the language of the customer about what matters to the customer. Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product or your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how your product or service will change their world.

Read that again, but replace the relevant bits with “user” or “patron” and “your library” or “your databases.”

The point of all this in a post from Jessamyn about understanding what users understand.

Posted March 21, 2006 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: communication design, customer, dave young, future libraries, john kupersmith, language, lib20, libraries, library, library 2.0, targeting, taxonomy, terminology, user expectations, user knowledge. 7 Comments.

My friend Joe Monninger is perhaps a library’s favorite patron. He’s an avid reader who depends on his public library for books and audiobooks and DVDs, and as a writer and professor he depends on the services of the university library. But he doesn’t work in libraries, and though he listens patiently to my work [...]

Posted December 13, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy. Tags: customer, evolution of libraries, libraries, library, library 2.0, opinion, organizational evolution, outside opinion, unsolicited advice, user, user centered design. 17 Comments.