“I went to my own public library the other day with my 11-year-old daughter and was horrified to see a television monitor running videos in the children’s section – not a kid in the stacks and all the rest lined up to play games at the computers. It was a library that had gotten everything exactly wrong.”
Librarian William Wisner doesn’t like what’s happening to libraries and urges a return to a role as “captains of the information superhighway”. Libraries are popular, he says, only because everything is free. But is that enough to survive in tough budget times.
Tools of engagement
As Clay Shirky said in his 2008 keynote at Web 2.0 Expo, media is a triathalon: people like to consume, produce, and share it. Media that is targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth watching. We might ask ourselves, in what ways are we engaging our audiences? How well do libraries help their customers to be a part of the picture?
Some ways that librarians can include others:
Make your website interactive with blogs, twitter, feeds from library-esq resources, etc. Some of the things we have tried may already be old school. What’s coming down the tube next? It’s pretty fun to at least watch and wonder.
Start projects that the public can have fun with.