PLA Blog

Sorry for posting this so late… As soon as I got home from PLA I collapsed with some kind of bug. So come with me back through the mists of time as we return to Friday afternoon in Minneapolis:

After another good lunch at The Newsroom (both Thursday and Friday, it seemed to be the only place without a long wait) with library school friends, I hit the convention center refreshed and recharged. For the 2pm slot, I decided to go check out What’s the Big Idea?

This session was the first major presentation in the U.S. about the paradigm-shattering initiative undertaken by one inner-city borough in London. I’d read about this project about a year ago while taking a course called “Designing the Public Library of the Future” — but I wanted to hear them talk about the process they undertook. Basically, a poor borough in the East End of London saw that their library usage rate was about 20%, compared to the national average of 55%. So they decided to do something pretty radical, which was to shut down all 19 existing libraries and adult education centers and replace them with new joint facilities called Idea Stores, which would draw heavily on retail atmospheres. The driving force behind this transformation was the data they collected from a comprehensive survey.  They (or a firm they hired) identified a cross-section of 800 houseshold that mimicked the demographics of the community and was statistically significant. Then they conducted 1 1/2 hour in-home interviews with each household! That’s a pretty costly survey to do, but armed with that data, they were able to get buy-in from the decision-makers and went ahead. The key outcome of the survey was the centrality of the concept of life-long learning to the community, so that the new facilities would not simply co-locate libraries and adult education, but bring them together so that they were totally intermingled spatially and conceptually. An element that was glossed over a bit was how they paid for the impressive new buildings, but that’s a hurdle to any kind of change.  I won’t summarize the rest of the presentation — but I recommend checking out their web site and some of the articles about them. It’s a radical departure from the standard model for a public library, but one well worth entertaining. They noted that systems in Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands have had them come over to consult on their versions of the same concept.

After this was a session put on by the Columbus Metropolitan Library about their transformation of the reference desk. This is an idea I am 100% behind and always have been — I never got the whole “reference desk as bunker/fortress” mentality, but I see it constantly from people I work with. Personally, when I’m on duty, I’m out on the floor circulating as much as possible. They discussed how they had several branches redesign their reference desks to be less imposing — on the whole, these weren’t that impressive. I sketched up with a better version (based on the service points at Ikea) while listening to the sesssion. One of my big questions with the model is how to handle phone calls. Their solution was adopt a central call bank, so that a lot of patron calls are triaged that way. They also use Vocera devices and headsets, so that calls can be patched through to wherever the librarian is. As a part of all this, they took a very hard look at the “off-desk” work being done, and questioned how much of it is necessary. The guiding question here was whether that work was adding value to the patron experience, and in many cases the answer was “no”. They found that a lot of the off-desk work was being done because the librarians liked to do it, not because it was really that beneficial. This is a rather strong and controversial attitude, but one I tend to embrace — and one I suspect will be gaining more and more traction in the field. For Columbus, the central point is that “you are here for customer service” and anything that detracts from that needs to be eliminated.

So, two sessions full of unconventional thinking and ideas — just what I like!