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.

We started talking strategic planning today. I was pleased. From the first moment it was about truly assessing user needs and not just kind of making up user needs as they fit librarians’ perceptions of them. This “reality check” seems to be at the heart of Nelson and Garcia’s method; they have created a strategic planning methodology that is intended to work as an idiotproof piece of user-centered design. Take the philosophy that popularized with 1990s interaction design, substitute in the word “community” for the word “user”, consider a complex service ecology of stakeholders ranging from trustees to homeless folks sleeping at the library, use that image to replace Donald Norman’s teapot, and you’ve got a match. Hm. That was a long sentence. Still, you come to the same conclusion: user-driven design principles that were adopted by late 90s web designers but born of mid-20th century ergonomics seem to have crept their way into the way we plan and go about business at the library. Would Nelson and Garcia say that design is the future of (library) business?

Maybe I’ll be able to answer that question with a feeling of certainty by the end of the week, but for now I believe it is a sound assertion. Before anyone says I’m wrong, consider one of the eighteen potential Library Service Responses they define; this is one of the newer responses that is meant to address contemporary concerns associated with “library 2.0″.

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.

Stay tuned, its gonna be a great week!