Friday, July 15, 2005
The Choir
The kickoff event for the Ohio library "One Book, Five Landscapes, Six Partners, Endless Possibilities" project was held yesterday at the Kilgour Theater at OCLC. 144 people had signed up to attend one of the two sessions, to listen to George Needham outline the 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan and begin a discussion of the future of library services.
I love events like this. I love it when libraries come together to imagine their grand futures and the immediate steps they can take to get there. Mark Mabelitini of Westerville Public Library noted that George was preaching to the choir -- "We should all be wearing robes," he said -- but don't we all enjoy a really good choir performing at its best?
The main highlight for me was the recognition that Google's mission statement, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," is a library mission statement. So what does that mean? So many people think it puts libraries in competition with Google. That is a bad strategy. We can't compete with Google: we will lose and we will lose bad.
So what do we do instead? We put our services where the people are. That's what OCLC did. They put found a way to put WorldCat into the results list of the popular Internet search services. What other services do libraries provide that can be put into Google results, or plugged into the workstations and daily workflows of users? That's only one of the questions that will be posed and turned over and reworked and brainstormed over the next couple months on the "One Book" discussion board at WebJunction. Check it out.
[And while you're waiting for the discussion to get started, read Library Geek's take on the event].
I love events like this. I love it when libraries come together to imagine their grand futures and the immediate steps they can take to get there. Mark Mabelitini of Westerville Public Library noted that George was preaching to the choir -- "We should all be wearing robes," he said -- but don't we all enjoy a really good choir performing at its best?
The main highlight for me was the recognition that Google's mission statement, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," is a library mission statement. So what does that mean? So many people think it puts libraries in competition with Google. That is a bad strategy. We can't compete with Google: we will lose and we will lose bad.
So what do we do instead? We put our services where the people are. That's what OCLC did. They put found a way to put WorldCat into the results list of the popular Internet search services. What other services do libraries provide that can be put into Google results, or plugged into the workstations and daily workflows of users? That's only one of the questions that will be posed and turned over and reworked and brainstormed over the next couple months on the "One Book" discussion board at WebJunction. Check it out.
[And while you're waiting for the discussion to get started, read Library Geek's take on the event].
