shiny new toys @ your library
Over at ACRLog, Steven Bell’s latest post opens with a question: “At your academic library is there a feeling, perhaps an underlying pressure, that new technology should be leveraged to a greater extent than it is?” The question, I think, has to do with the notion that perhaps we’re implementing Web 2.0 technologies (like blogs, rss, wikis, etc.) for the sake of the technologies themselves and because they’re new, cool, and we mistakenly believe that our users want them when, as Bell says, perhaps all they want is “just what we’ve always delivered – the books, journals, research help, user education, interlibrary loan, and other traditional services that for them define the academic library.”
An interesting thought. I’m not overly fond of the term “technology evangelist”, but I guess I do a lot of that, both at my institution, and as part of the Web 2.0/Library 2.0 talks that I do at other institutions. But for me, and I suspect for a lot of other people in our library world who have been talking about these technologies for a while, the really crucial question I encourage people to ask themselves first is “what need is this going to fulfil or what problem will this fix?” When we implemented a blog at my institution two years ago, it was to fulfill a couple of really specific needs:
- we needed a better way to archive our news stories
- we needed to provide more people with an easy way to add news content (without having to know html)
- we needed an easy way to repurpose news content on the rest of our site
So, yeah, not hard to guess that a blog would fulfill these needs. We went through the same exercise before we implemented our IM reference service last year: we knew that a large number of our users worked virtually, yet we had limited services to assist them (e-mail only). We also knew that most of them were on MSN (as evidenced by a glance at any given public workstation in the library!), so IM reference just made sense.
You can probably see where I’m going with this. There certainly is a cool-factor associated with these “shiny new toys”, but implementing them for the sake of their “shininess” makes no sense. If your library’s cool-factor goes up as a result of implementing any of these tools, that’s a nice incidental benefit (by the way, I don’t think my library’s cool-factor budged when we implemented our blog/rss feeds. When we implemented our IM service? Through the roof. If that means our users like it and will use it, I’ll take it. Is that why we implemented it? Of course not).
1 Comment