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

You don’t like the “2.0” moniker? So what. John Blyberg reminds us that “if we’re arguing over semantics, we’ve been derailed.” And Stephen Abram is said to have cautioned us: “when librarians study something to death, we forget that death was not the original goal.”

John Blyberg, Jenny Levine, Stephen Abram, lib20, library 2.0, library20, library, libraries, future of library, go get evolving, evolve

Message from Jenny Levine: opportunity knocks. Some people hear it, others claim it’s just squirrels on the roof.

tags: jenny levine, opportunity, opportunity knocks, squirrels

Jenny Levine alerted me to the Pew Internet & American Life Project report on teens as both content creators and consumers.

It turns out that teens, and teen girls especially, are highly active online IMing, sharing photos, blogging, reading and commenting on other’s blogs, and gaming. An especially strong trend in this group is the use of web technologies for collaboration. Interactivity, increasingly, is being defined by the teen’s ability to ask questions, comment, or contribute. Take a look at this quote, (found via this BBC report):

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.

Jenny calls this the “4Cs,” for conversation, community, commons, and collaboration. Clearly, services that allow those 4Cs are preferred over those that don’t. Competitively, where do you stand? How well have you embraced the 4Cs in your online services.

tags: 4cs, collaboration, commons, community, conversation, interactivity, internet, jenny levine, pew internet, pew internet & american life project, pew internet project, social internet, social software, social web, teenagers, teens, youth

Jenny Levine, over at The Shifted Librarian, is telling the latest chapter in her long-running struggle with DRM.

Now, I’ve installed a lot of Windows software in my day, so I feel pretty confident in my ability to double-click on an installation file. However, when I try to install [Yahoo Music Engine], I get three screens into the installer (oh the joy of accepting the license agreement over and over) before I get an error message that says, “The file c:\downloads\ could not be opened.” That happens to be the folder where the file is located, so I find it odd that the installer can’t find the folder it’s located in, let alone the file. I’ve tried rebooting the computer. I’ve tried redownloading the file. I’ve tried lighting a candle and chanting. Nothing seems to get the installer to, you know, install. The computer meets all of the system requirements and then some. So either I’m just not destined to live the happy, DRMed life the entertainment industry waxes on about, or our house is built on an ancient technology burial ground. While I readily admit there is a lot of dead technology in the basement, I’m leaning towards the former.

Previously: DRM stories at MaisonBisson.

tags: ancient technology, drm, entertainment industry, error message, jenny levine, music engine, problems, windows software, yahoo music

Jenny Levine is talking about an example of The Perfect Library Blog over at The Shifted Librarian.

The posts are written in the first person and in a conversational tone, with the author’s first name to help stress the people in the library. The staff isn’t afraid to note problems with the new catalog, the web site, or anything else. Full transparency — nice. You can feel the level of trust building online. They respond to every comment that needs it, whether it’s a criticism, question, or suggestion. And some of the comments are fantastic. Users are even helping debug the new catalog.

Jenny quotes some examples, go look.

tags: blog, blogging, communication, corporate blogging, institutional blogging, jenny levine, librarian, library, library blog, organizational blogging, suggestion, the shifted librarian, transparency, trust building

I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, most recently in a comment at LibDev.

In the old world, information companies could create value by limiting access to their content. Most of us have so internalized this scarcity = value theory that we do little more than grumble about the New York Times’ authwall or similar limitations to the free-flow and linking of information.

Jenny Levine wrote recently about OCLC/LJ’s short-run (though not yet ended) experiment with authwalls. Jenny concludes that the move might have sold an extra subscription here or there, but completely killed the online linking that made LJ’s articles so authoritative in search engines.

Roger at Electric Forest struck to the heart of this recently:

…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible… [Open and accessible resources] will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.

In this new world, value is measured by search engine rankings, which are largely a measure of the number of links pointing to a resource. Because it’s impossible to link to things behind authwalls, or to material that isn’t online at all, Google et all have turned that scarcity = value equation on its head.

Today, in order to be relevant…in order to gain value, material must be available, linkable, indexable, and usable. Over the long haul, the best way to increase your Page Rank is to create outstanding content and make it freely available to everyone.

This is (part of) what got Zach blogging and it’s exactly what make’s Google’s non-hierarchical world work. Soon to be very related: social bookmarking as made famous by del.icio.us, now Yahoo! feature.

tags: accessibility, accessible resources, authoritative, electric forest, google, google economy, information, jenny levine, new york times, oclc, scarcity, scarcity = value, search engines, the shifted librarian, value, value equation, value theory

I think I’ve been avoiding commenting on this issue for weeks because it hits so close to home. First I read it in BiblioAcid, then Jenny Levine picked it up, then Richard Ackerman picked it up at the Science Library Pad: library catalogs are broken, and there’s no amount of adding pictures or fiddling with colors that will fix them.

I nibbled at the edges of this in my IUG conference presentation, but I didn’t say it as well or as clearly as Roy Tennant did in his widely quoted April 15 Library Journal column:

Recently I viewed a library catalog redesign before it went public. This was the first major change in many years, and it turned out to be quite an improvement to the look and feel of the system. But despite this, it still sucks. Badly.

I don’t know how much time was spent on this cosmetic facelift, but until the deeper problems that plague this system are addressed, users will remain poorly served. Librarians appear to be afflicted with a type of myopia. We see only minor, easy-to-make corrections instead of changes that will truly affect the user experience. We ask our vendors to tweak this or that to make our lives easier, while the users are left to founder on an interface that only a librarian could love.

Thing is, we’re about to go live with our own much updated OPAC, the first redesign in many years, and Roy’s points are right on. I’ve had complaints about the limitations of our OPAC and the reticence of the vendor to support customers who are seeking to address the problems identified by Roy and others, but now I find it nearly impossible to continue “polishing the turd.”

Little things always crop up just when you think you’re done with a project, but increasingly I want to say: put this in perspective, we’ve got to cut the line on this and go live with what we’ve got now so we can invest our time into fixing the real problems. Our students are using Google not because they’re dumb or lazy, but because we are. The limitations of the OPAC and our inability to think beyond what the vendor offers us is leading to a narcissism of small differences where we argue about where to put the cover art for an item in an attempt to make it look like Amazon, but forget that we need to make it work as well as Amazon or Google.

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