PLA Blog

The other day I stopped by my favorite little bookstore, Spoonbill & Sugartown, and found a great book called New Graphical Symbols for Many More. New Graphical Symbols for Many More is “a (Swedish) national development and standardization project aimed at making public symbols more uniform and more serviceable in keeping with the concept of Design for All.” What really got me excited- one of the symbols that all 124 competitors had to create for the contest was a symbol for a public library. I’ve posted scans of all of them below for preview and for educational purposes only.

In my last post I promoted the creation of ‘pictotags,’ user-assigned icons that can help describe characteristics of a book or media object. In the case of that post, the images described the physical location of an object, but I anticipate them being more descriptive in the future. Visual literacy is embedded in cultural histories and mores, so naturally the winning pictograms presented to the Swedes by the competitors will have to make sense to people who live in and visit public places in Sweden. In the age of the inernet and simplified global communication via graphic user interfaces, it becomes more and more challenging to create standards that will translate internationally. How does the designer account for the visual vocabulary of every tourist that might come through Stockholm, and should the designer in the age of global communication be accountable to every possible user?

Creating visual standards is analogous to creating a controlled vocabulary. Can one create a global, visual, controlled vocabulary? It has been attempted before; it was part of Otto Neurath’s ‘isotype‘ vision at the Bauhaus. Arguable, progenitors of the field of infographics like Ladislav Sutnar were striving for the same kind of thing. Will librarians work with graphic designers to make these decisions? How will visual literacies determine the structure of information and information retrieval in the coming century?

For me, this provoked a lot of thought about library identity in the eyes of our users. Enjoy these icons. I’ll be away for the Thanksgiving holiday. More posts after the holiday.

Winning Library pictogram:

The rest of the entries:

A few years ago I presented a new service model for urban public libraries that I called the Library Outpost. The Outpost is a small, storefront library space in a busy retail environment with no local, physical browsing collection. It is a space that assumes an increasing number of library users are happy doing their browsing on the web, and that they can have materials delivered to this convenient location for pickup. You can read about it in detail here.

The Outpost service model still remains unrealized in its purest application. It has been a few years since I first proposed it, and in that time GPS and the mobile web has really taken off. In this post I am sharing my sketch of a greatly abbreviated experience prototype highlighting the ‘parking’ feature of a library app for mobile devices. The ‘parking’ system is a shelving arrangement for materials in a Library Outpost. Its organization is based on user-assigned pictogram tags on both the mobile app and in the signage at the physical location. Currently, the user-assigned pictotags (yep, I just made that word up) don’t describe the materials themselves in any way other than their parking location. In a future version, it would be interesting to get users to assign a more descriptive pictotag that could contribute to item level metadata and power some kind of social element, but for now words remain the best tags. Still, I’m proud of the way these pictotags connect virtual and physical information spaces.

Again, this is a mockup, beta, version 1.0, whatever. I invite your commentary and criticism.

Here are the three most important components of the app, as I see it now:

• Because your mobile is connected to the internet, you can just as easily be linked to an electronic version of the item, be it an e-book, a video, a song, whatever.

• GPS takes advantage of your location at the time of your search, so if you do want a physical copy, you can get the physical copy nearest to you and have it sent to the place nearest to you.

• The parking system creates a visual standard linking library users physical and virtual experience.

Link to a large image of the whole thing here, or just scroll down the rest of this post for screenshots.

Below is an image of the shelving with corresponding pictotags.

After strategic planning BootCamp last week, I’ve had Nelson and Garcia’s 18 service responses on my mind non-stop.  It’s a significant step to drill down the services we can offer at public libraries to 18 clear bullet points.  My last post on this blog offered a few anecdotes advocating for simplicity in the communication arts.  Having 18 concise service responses for public libraries to choose from is a great starting point as we strive for simplicity.  The next piece of Nelson and Garcia’s process requires that a library creating a strategic plan pick only a few of these 18 responses as priorities.  My assessment of the current climate is that public libraries have had a really hard time spelling out their mission and vision in the digital age, and that is one of the reasons we have wishy-washy statements of purpose.  A little while back Wendy Lukehart of the DCPL wrote a great piece about “Mission Envy” on the Urban Library Council’s Foresight 2020 discussion board.  I republished it here a while back on my old personal blog and it’s a really nice piece.  Read it, and consider how you might clarify your library’s mission.

Still, I keep coming back to my favorite service response offered in the 18.  It is a rather new service response, one that likely does not land high in the priorities at my library.  I suspect that at this point it is not the highest priority at many public libraries at all, but its one that I am interested in and hope to see more libraries embrace in the near future.  Without further ado, it is:

Express Creativity: Create and Share Content

Residents will have the services and support they need to express themselves by creating original print, video, audio, or visual content in a real-world or online environment.

It is easy enough to imagine tackling this priority at your library with physical-world activities.  You probably already do so via arts and crafts programs, poetry slams, or any collaborative activity that results in a finished product like a mural or an exquisite corpse drawing or a work of fiction.  It’s a little harder to figure out how that creative process can be facilitated by a library in virtual or networked setting.   I’m aware of two tools/projects that become activities supporting this initiative, no doubt there are more. I thought I’d share the two I’ve been looking at and invite people to post similar projects.   As I find new things I’ll do my best to keep posting them to this blog as well.

1) Available at Cleveland Public Library, and perhaps at other libraries: Scratch.

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

2) Currently in development at IIT Institute of Design: ThinkeringSpace.

ThinkeringSpace is a system, made of both physical and virtual environments, that aims to promote creative and critical thinking skills for the 21st century. Celebrating the book, it presents opportunities for doing things together, sharing ideas and authoring in new ways. Focused on school-aged children in libraries, the project is part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

It would have been a standing room crowd at 21st Century Library Design today if the rules allowed standing around the walls of the room in the Minneapolis Conference Center. Because of the municipal rules, dozens of people were asked to leave. They missed a program on library space utilization that included many good and challenging ideas.

Kimberly Bolan of Kimberly Bolan and Associates and Marc Ciccarelli of Studio Techne Architects began the session with a discussion of trends. Ciccarelli said changing needs in society pressures libraries to remodel their public space. It is space that people love because it remains uncommercialized in a very branded society. Bolan said the space often needs a makeover based on customer needs. She then proceeded to discuss Ten Things About What People Want:

• Comfortable places (soft furniture, fireplaces, lights)
• Meeting rooms and study rooms
• Supported services (self-check out, drive-up windows, outside pick-up lockers)
• Food service (Vending is more practical than coffee shops)
• Multi-functional children’s areas (with special sized doors, murals)
• Teen friendly areas
• Retail-oriented merchandising (bookstore-like open face shelving)
• Technology (unobtrusive stations, wireless patios, RFD checkout)
• Good way finding (more than just good signs - good paths)
• Sustainable environment (energy efficiency, green materials, pollution free)

Bolan said libraries should consider swapping reference and teen spaces. She also said that libraries need several children’s spaces, as what serves preschool children does not serve third graders well.

Pamela Vander-Ploeg and Michelle Boisvenue-Fox of Kent District Library, Michigan (you need a compound name to work at KDL) told about the extensive remodeling of their systems branch libraries. Much of their portion of the program was show and tell and included some interesting ideas:

• Buy trendy inexpensive furniture and plan to replace it to keep a contemporary feel
• Have teens go on a buying spree at a music store to update the CD collection
• Put neon open signs on the library so people can see whether it is open before parking and getting out of their cars
• Make your reading areas into living rooms, dens, conservatories. Have comfortable seats and lots of greenery.
• Have lots of electrical outlets.
• Have book displays on side tables. Train various staff members to make book displays to get maximum staff input.
• Watch HDTV for design ideas.

Cathy Hakala-Ausperk of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library, Ohio (even the library has a compound name) was the last speaker. She told what her library did with its expanded 40,000 square feet (it connected to a YMCA that it took over). (I hope I got the size right - it was humongous.) It is beyond what most public libraries have even considered:

• Sign information is incorporated into murals.
• All the display cases are movable and reset in new locations to change patterns.
• The reference desk is gone. Reference librarians rove and have small computer stations.
• The circulation desk is gone. Staff help people learn self-checkout.
• There is an office supply vending machine with pens, writable CDs, etc).
• Vending machines have only healthy items and the library gets a share of the profits.
• There is an ATM in the library.
• Besides programs and organization meetings, the meeting rooms can host birthday parties, weddings, and funerals.

This was a very thought provoking program. I know I want us to get neon signs. I have to think about some of the rest of this.