I picked up the latest issue of Volume magazine the other day and found an interesting interview with Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. Sadly (and somewhat ironically in this case), the text is not online so I’m going to type out a rather long quote from Mr. Anderson. I think Anderson really nails this physical/digital transitional time we are in, and he puts it into the context of libraries. Check it out:
“There are two economies: the economy of scarcity, which is the physical world, and the economy of abundance, which is the digital world. Everything in the physical world gets more expensive and scarcer, while everything in the digital world gets more abundant and cheaper. So there’s a huge imperative, both in terms of economies and choice, to shift things to digital, and then once they become digital – once they’re in that deflationary world – they inevitably become free. Physical world things are going to get more expensive over time – I don’t just mean monetary cost, I mean also their externalities: carbon costs, ecological costs, everything else is going to become more expensive. Therefore, there is going to be a strong drive to shift from the inflationary to the deflationary economy, to make things digital if at all possible….
…I was recently in Seattle and had the chance to walk through OMA’s Seattle Public Library again. That’s a pretty good example of getting the balance right between abundance and scarcity. I think its profound that on the first floor, in the largest communal space, there are no books. The library is simply a place with portals into the world of abundance.”
For me, this speaks not only to architectural innovations but it also justifies the digital initiatives ‘labs’ trend that is appearing in some public libraries, like NYPL or DCPL. It also speaks to the fact that evaluating success by collecting materials circulation statistics is insufficient in this changing landscape. A more accurate means of evaluating success would be a combination of circulations stats, door count, wireless usage stats, web traffic stats, and presence in the social graph.
An example of an ideal library program used to be “do an arts and crafts project, and set up a book display of books related to that craft for the patrons to check out”.
Now an ideal library program becomes “do an arts and crafts project, and set up a book display of books related to that craft for the patrons to check out, and then create a gallery of the crafts people made on Flickr”.
That’s right folks, now we’ve got MORE work to do!
There are 10 Comments to "The transition from library consumer to library user continues…"
Lots more work, Nate!
The crossover b/w physical/digital space only provides more room for growth and adaptability between the two. Consumer trends (http://trendwatching.com/trends/offon.htm) can help show where the public space can benefit. By paying attention to the curve, you’ll see that the affect of digital on physical absolutely needs to run both ways as well. An ambient signifier for local users can inform you if the physical library is open, a book is checked in, etc as much as a digital exposition can inform the physical experience!
@tim
i’m with you on all that, but i’m leery of ambient signifiers like you speak of. bluetooth “push” style advertising creeps me out. it seems like that, along w/ a few other services, is all about giving library patrons an opt-in kind of scenario. perhaps in the future with the “always on, always connected” wireless internet it will become a cultural norm to get those pushes coming at you, but i suspect it’ll be fought back against by users in much the way pop-up blockers work now. what do you think, you agree?
but yeah… lots more work… that is for sure!
agreed, i think push advertising and other intrusive forms of content is already too pervasive, and i’m wary of it increasing—particularly in terms of its affect on our sensitivity to our own physical environments. as a designer, you always have to worry about signal-to-noise.
i think a user has to have explicit intent that can for the most part be addressed by designers, and the experience should always be context-sensitive and “calm” when it comes to digital-to-physical transitions. it seems to me that this is less of an issue when it comes to designing for the web, since the surface context will typically be the website you’re visiting.
let me be clear: the ambient signifiers i was talking about are those that ‘d integrate into a library website, not through pushing info to your bluetooth when you walk by the library. although with ubicomp growing, i’m sure there’s a going to be a good way to design for that. whether or not people are disciplined enough to deal with the info-streams themselves is another story.
I’ve never understood the “call them customers” edicts I got in (UK) public libraries, or the emphasis on “consumer” from research groups like UCL’s CIBER (all their URLs are about to be changed, so better if you find it through the usual ways for now…).
When UCL set up a Publishing course in their Information department, you’d have hhoped the emphasis was going to be on what that industry could learn from non-scarcity distribution models like libraries, archives, etc., but it seems the emphasis is still on how to increase loans-as-sales figures… At the same time, libraries (previously a godsend to publishers looking for a steady market for long-tail type products) a choking under chasing TV bookgroup short heads. And those heads are *super* short.
What’s needed is a new model of value.
There’s a very interesting article by Michael Jensen from last year about authority models based on information scarcity and information abundance (what, of course, we’re living in, even though, as the author puts it, “right now we’re still living with the habits of information scarcity because that’s what we have had for hundreds of years.” I love the food analogy (hunter-gatherer skills vs. chef skills).
I work practically in Nate’s backyard, in the Central Library’s Youth Wing at the Brooklyn Public Library. When I saw his program-to-material-to-digital chart I just had to write in because the Youth Wing implemented that very model quite successfully in a program we did over the summer. It was part of a summer camp for 7 to 12 year olds coordinated by a local cultural organization, the Heart of Brooklyn. The camp is named the Brooklyn Cultural Adventures Project (BCAP), and the camp involves kids participating in various activities at HOB’s partner institutions. At the Central Library we developed one activity where the kids created their own avatars. Another was based on Rube Goldberg’s cartoon inventions. For both programs, we drew heavily on both books and online resources (You Tube had some amazing video clips that the kids were just wild about). Anyhow, as a companion to these activities that we did in the library, we also created a Flickr site. On it we posted scanned images of the kids’ avatar drawings, as well short videos of domino chains we constructed as part of the Rube Goldberg unit. We have been very pleased with how the site extended and enhanced our programming. Kids like the idea of being a little bit famous, and being ‘published’ on the web gave them that opportunity. Moreover, it kept the campers engaged with the library and the camp after that day’s activities had ended, and it gave their parents and friends an avenue to be involved, too. Over the course of the summer, the site received hundreds of hits. Here’s the link to the Flickr site if you’re interested in checking it out (there’s a couple of un-camperly items on it now…we’ve been experimenting with using Flickr for other programs): http://www.flickr.com/photos/bcapbpl/
@Melissa: That is a great article that I had not read- thanks for sharing it! I also love the comparison with food authority models. Can’t give too many details yet, but look to the Bushwick library for a performance art piece/meal I’ll be doing with a chef friend of mine linking information/knowledge models w/ sustainable and local foods. It is sure to be an adventure if nothing else!
@Catherine: This is EXACTLY what I’m talking about!!! What a great program!!! Now, how can those photos be made discoverable and counted as a service linked to Brooklyn Public Library? Could they be tagged and somehow linked to through our site? Do they become a part of the library’s virtual web collection? Imagine the pride a kid would have if the library catalog had a drop-down or tab for “library user content” that searched flickr or wherever else and you could search the catalog by the patrons name… Each one of those images from your program is easily as valuable a demonstration of the library’s value as the circulation of materials.
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