Just read an article in Wired magazine on the newspaper industry the really got me thinking about libraries. The article is mainly on what one company (Gannett) is doing to totally reinvent the newspaper business model. There two Big Ideas underlying the project are to involve the reader in every aspect of the process, and take a so-called hyperlocal approach to news coverage.
In a number of meetings lately, a common thread has been surfacing. That is to offer content that is relevant to the interests of the person using the library website. It could be a metasearch pre-configured with the most useful databases for the user's major, or an FAQ on the citation style used in the discipline, or a constantly updating list of the items recently added to the library's collection with the discipline, or an updating section on the latest news in the field. The hyperlocal approach may be the right way of implementing this approach. Maybe, in addition to the generic library website, we need to develop a set of discipline-specific websites, with every page and tool (as much as possible) customized for a particular discipline.
One of the (many) challenges would be how to create a site design and tool set that allowed librarians to focus on adding content without becoming experts in the tools being used, i.e., if every staff member involved in building the site has to learn how to build web pages, we'll never get there. There would, I think, need to be easy to use templates for each type of page -- templates that someone could dump content into without having to learn the underlying tools or technology.
There's the challenge. Can our new Drupal environment provide the tools needed to create an environment where we could quickly build dozens of 'hyperlocal' library websites? Let's play and find out!
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2 comments:
Your emphasis on local made me think about M. Leggett's Slow Library Movement http://tinyurl.com/ywkucn which emphasizes the local as well. Any thoughts on that?
Leggett is using the term 'local' in a very different way. From a post on 2/27/07, "Local: Small-scale and Granular - Whenever possible grow information services and resources using local talent." Legget is (in this statement) focusing on who is creating the resource, rather than on who the resource is being created for.
In the Wired article, they are using 'local' to refer to niche communities. In their context, it might mean single parents living in Fairhaven. In our context, it would mean creating content (e.g., web sites, help files, examples, etc.) that is different for different communities, e.g., people interested in business information vs. those interested in education information.
The issue of niche definitions becomes very interesting, but I think it must be grounded on how the communities self-identify, rather than a definition which makes 'logical' sense or is developed to minimize overlap with other communities.
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