Library Revolution

Keynote: Lee Rainie from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

For full notes on the presentation, see the following excellent recap form Nicole Engard.

For more Pew Internet use information see the reports here and here.

He made some very relevant points during this talk, and there are a lot of conclusions one could draw from the statistics he presented. But here’s what stood out to me… forgive me for putting my own spin on things.

• Wireless Internet. Cell Phones. Pay attention folks. This is where we are headed, and libraries had better be ready to ask the necessary questions about where we fit in.
• Education level is a good predictor of library use. Should this make us worried that the people who may be the least likely to use the library may be those who need us the most?
• He spoke about community evangelism and the value of giving your zealous patrons access to and training in Web 2.0 tools so that your happy customers can sing your praises to the larger community. I often think that the only marketing tool more powerful than an happy customer is a happy customer given a voice and a platform for spearding the word!
• Lee Rainie: “Aspire to be a node in people’s social networks.” For everyone out there who is unsure about libraries becoming engaged in online social networking initiatives, I think this statement comes pretty close to pointing the way. Unless you work in a library, nobody’s life revolves around the library. But if libraries are there as part of someone’s social environment, they become a likely resource someone may turn to when a problem needs solving. I guess it was always that way… but now many of us have moved a good amount of our regular daily lives online, and libraries need to be part of that landscape as well.
• People who don’t use the Internet when solving problems usually don’t so because they aren’t really aware of what is there to help them. Are non-library users similarly unaware of what the library has to offer? I say hells yeah. Rainie suggests that “Gen Y” users are so much more likely to use the library when trying to solve problems in part because they have the most recent “forced” experience with what the library has to offer (through school).

There was a lot more food for thought in this session… and he started to get to a slide looking at different types of literacies (graphic, navigational, contextual, etc) when the session was brought to a close for time. But maybe all of this is fodder for another day.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.