Library 2.0-Why Our Customers Still Need Us (Week 6: #15)

Dr. Wendy Schultz's article called "To a Temporary Place in Time" was very good. I think her statement about tour guides is important to remember. It may seem that librarians are no longer needed but that may be more media hype than fact. It appears that many teens, twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings know about some online tools and services. Usually, they know a enough to get whatever they want done. Those wonderful blogs, websites, podcasts we see online are created by a small number of people who really understand a certain tool, have an idea and combine both. There are millions in this country and billions of people in this world. Compare those numbers to the number of Second Life users or Facebook users and you will see that most people are barely involved. That will change-especially if someone takes the time to inform people about what's available and what meets their needs. The library offer information services like some companies offer their products. Instead of giving the same book or website to answer a certain question, we should help customers to tailor the information to their needs..



Think about an ordinary reference interview, a customer in the seventh grade asks for a book or a website about energy. It's an assignment several of the schools in the area give every year. You give the customer the same book or website that you have given twenty other customers in the seventh grade that day. What's wrong with that? Nothing-except why is the same book or website appropriate for all twenty customers? Among those twenty, one may be visually-impaired, another may read on the level of a third grader, and one may attend a magnet school for engineering. The format of the information needs to be adapted to the specific needs of the customer. What if you could suggest a library database or website that had an avatar that was interactive. The avatar could ask the customer the type of format they would like-audio or visual. The customer could specify how loud the audio is and whether a female or male voice is used. The customer could also change the text color, size and font without messing with toolbars or having to use the Accessibilty Options in Windows. What if the customer could tell the avatar that the information is hard to understand and click on every word they want defined. A small pop-up would appear above the word with a simple definition or synonym. Tagging, embedded video, podcasts and visual search engines would help those would want more information. Many of these things exist as separate tools now. But what if one day, when you guide a customer to information that all of those tools are automatically a part of the package. That would really be something to see!