Drawing from John Blyberg’s ILS Customer’s Bill of Rights and
The Social Customer Manifesto, Jenny Levine offers this Online Library User Manifesto:

• I want to have a say, so you need to provide mechanisms for this to happen online.
   
• I want to know when something is wrong, and what you’re going to do to fix it.
   
• I want to help shape services that I’ll find useful.
   
• I want to connect with others that share my interests.
   
• I want to use your services on my schedule, not yours. I don’t care if it’s noon, midnight, Sunday, or Christmas Eve.
   
• I want to know how your library works.
   
• I want to tell you when you’re screwing up. Conversely, I’m happy to tell you the things you are doing well.
   
• I want to interact with institutions that act in a transparent and ethical manner.
   
• I want to know what’s next. We’re in partnership…where should we go?
   

The basis of this, is of course the critical mass of users who are making online services a part their everyday lives. And it’s not just the millennial generation, as it turns out that it’s the 35 to 44-year olds who are most likely to buy movie tickets online, just as one example. But a recent Pew Internet Project study on millennials does reveal an interesting trend, one that the above manifesto seeks to address:

These teens would say that the companies that want to provide them entertainment and knowledge should think of their relationship with teens as one where they are in a conversational partnership, rather than in a strict producer-consumer, arms-length relationship.

And if that isn’t clear enough, take a look at the message in the marketing world.

collaboration, commons, community, conversation, interactivity, millennials, manifesto, jenny levine, social software, online library user manifesto, library, libraries, future library, future of libraries

Take a look at this editorial by Jerry D. Campbell, CIO and Dean of University Libraries at the University of Southern California:

Academic libraries today are complex institutions with multiple roles and a host of related operations and services developed over the years. Yet their fundamental purpose has remained the same: to provide access to trustworthy, authoritative knowledge. Consequently, academic libraries — along with their private and governmental counterparts — have long stood unchallenged throughout the world as the primary providers of recorded knowledge and historical records. Within the context of higher education especially, when users wanted dependable information, they turned to academic libraries.

Today, however, the library is relinquishing its place as the top source of inquiry. The reason that the library is losing its supremacy in carrying out this fundamental role is due, of course, to the impact of digital technology. As digital technology has pervaded every aspect of our civilization, it has set forth a revolution not only in how we store and transmit recorded knowledge, historical records, and a host of other kinds of communication but also in how we seek and gain access to these materials. [empahsis added]

The editorial continues, but I couldn’t help but see some similarity between this piece and the Patron’s Perspective on Library 2.0 piece I ran previously.

library, libraries, future of libraries, jerry campbell, jerry d campbell, opinion, library 2.0, lib20, library20

I hadn’t seen Ryan Eby’s post at LibDev that connected ILSs with WordPress before I posted that library catalogs should be like WordPress here. It connects with a my comment on a post at Meredith Farkas’ Information Wants To Be Free. My comment there goes in two directions, but I’d like to focus on the technology side now.

Our vendors will inevitably bend to our demands and add small features here and there, but even after that, we’ll still be stuck paying enormous amounts of money for systems that remain fundamentally flawed. Technology marches on, and inevitably we’ll find some new way to use our catalog data. John Blyberg is talking about this in his ILS customer bill of rights post, and that’s what I was getting at when I say the catalog should be like WordPress.

Meredith asks for more programmers, but as a programmer, I’m asking for her help in demanding smart software design from our vendors.

tags: future of the opac, catalog data, coders wanted, future, future of libraries, future of library catalogs, future of the ils, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalog, library catalogs, library technology, library20, opac, programmers wanted, smart software, software design