I first met Michael Stephens when a bunch of us from ACPL went to St. Joseph County Public Library in South Bend, which is where he was working at the time. (It resulted, among other things, in this infamous picture).
He's very charismatic and very convincing. If you have the chance to see him at 10:30 today (Dec. 14), you should go. Here are a few points from his 8 am presentation:
A book he recommends is The Cluetrain Manifesto.
He points out Ann Arbor District Library, which has a totally blog-based web site.
One of the best things libraries can do on their blogs is tell stories.
Libraries should be as transparent as they possibly can - letting the community know what you're doing and asking their opinion and help.
On social networking: people want to talk to each other. What about letting them comment on materials right in the catalog?
Go where the users are - the Digital Collaborative is always interested in figuring out how to put our institution in front of users where they are already - like MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, etc. Got any ideas?
How do you use social networking to promote the library, and why aren't we doing it already?.
Michael points out a lot of things that other libraries do that we're either doing already, or that we have plans to do. Go us!
"Are we failing to innovate because of fear?" "Throw out the culture of perfect" - meaning it doesn't have to be perfect before you launch it! It's okay to make mistakes and okay to talk about them. It's a gamer mentality - you make a mistake, you back up a little bit and go a different way.
Web/Lib 2.0 is open and participatory. It needs an atmosphere of trust. It's a cultural shift, not a new toy.
We should relate all the stuff that we're doing that utilizes 2.0 tools to our mission statement.
5 things you can do: be a trendspotter, try learning 2.0, create a what's new blog, explore presence, and okay, I missed one, he was going pretty fast.
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2 comments:
Definitely good stuff. From one of the people that Ian was victorius over in the aforementioned "infamous photo."
The "tell the stories" thing is what sticks with me the most, especially in the context of potential upcoming governance and finance restructuring. If we don't start telling our story -- why we're awesome, what people will miss about us if we go away -- folks who can impact those changes won't know they need to do so until it's too late.
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