Stephen Abram gave an excellent talk to CISTI this afternoon. He'll be posting his slides on his site forthwith, but here are a few of my gleanings. Richard live-friendfeeded.
- "Let's put a calculator on everybody's desk and fire all of the F'ing accountants!?" - alluding to the silliness of the argument that because everything is online or available via Google that librarians/libraries no longer have value.
- Key-value for libraries: non-partisan access/management to information.
- Different people learn/interact differently. What's your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter presence as a librarian? Many, many researchers are on Facebook. Are you there?
- Interesting story about the founders of Yahoo having hired 65 librarians to make their portal sustainable by providing taxonomic expertise.
- Librarians have marketable skills that have proven (provable) benefits - taxonomies, ontology's, categorization for example.
- Stats on disadvantages of not having libraries in schools....
- Impressive stats on librarians impact in the medical field. Something like a 50% change in diagnosis and a 4% impact on mortality rates where librarians consulted.
- Librarians don't think/learn visually generally - but are text oriented - but many of the patrons think/learn differently... (SKA: what does that say about the current state of library interfaces).
- We cannot afford for libraries to be thought of as warehouses.
- Libraries will not go away - but they will be different.
- Target market for Google Scholar - 18-28 year old undergrads.
- How can we (libraries/librarians) maintain "day-to-day relevance". Bring the library to MySpace, FaceBook, etc...
- Need "water-cooler relationships with scientists" - be embedded in social networks.
- "Libraries protect reading and knowledge, not just books."
- The new normal:
- Integrated discovery mechanisms
- Single Core community service portal with branch customization
- Fully integrated electronic and hard-copy collections.
- Fully integrated physical and virtual strategies
- Instruction/coaching as core services
- Interesting slides/videos about messages about libraries, e.g.: say intelligence rather than information.
- See the SLA Alignment project videos for more...
- Librarians consistently undervaluing themselves.
- Promote vs defending value-driven benefits. e.g.: Don't say: "The library is not dead".
- Evolution, not revolution... because revolution isn't going to happen.
- Appeal to corporate executives.
- For public-sector:
- Good service is the key to long-term existence.
- Focus on citizens and social contract.
- Collaborative advantage is ideal.
- On Innovation:
- shorter projects with aggressive time-lines: 6 months instead of 3 years.
- promote culture of iteration.
- provide opportunities for "experiments", sandboxes, pilots, trials, skunk-works..
- put boundaries on it, without putting boundaries on imagination.
- management needs to be clear about the boundaries without being punishing.
- The digital divide is NOT with the users (it's with librarians/libraries).
Update: Stephen's presentation is now available online.
