David Lee King - What Special Things Can We Do at Digital Branch?
Photo by chotda via Flickr
David has a neat blog thread going about crafting the library experience and Doing Stuff at the Library’s Website. He's followed it up with a new post, Doing Unique Things at the Digital Branch based on a comment I had made.
I left this comment on the David's post but thought I'd share it here too.
I guess I'm a bit of a "what if" thinker. I see so many possibilities - some silly and some with merit (I hope) for digital library services. There's so much to be tapped into online and we've just started. Here's a few of the ideas that come to mind.
Doing It Online with a Twist
First, some libraries are already doing similar things with an unique twist. For example, we offer reference in the branch but online if we want to do it 24x7 it makes sense to partner with others so that's a bit of twist. It's not your "local" librarian who answers and it's round the clock.
User Contributed Books
User contributed content is a hot trend online and what if we could marry the real world and digital world to do more for our communities. I wonder if any libraries are doing this yet? Letting users "tag" - "I own this book too and I would lend it"? This would really help with the bestseller lineups. Or add items they have the library doesn't. Imagine your book and magazine collection. A community library added to by the community.
It'd be hard to do this in the real library -- a) you'd run out of room b) end up with 5000 duplicates etc etc. Virtually it could be done and for "user contributed books", it could have software to generate a "request" to borrow that would email the book owner. A fancy system would print out a "Community Contributed Book Slip" that could be dropped off with the book at the nearest branch. This _COULD_ be done in way that the Lender and the Recipient remain anonymous or not depending on what is preferred.
Organization Contributed Content
If the thought of users contributed book holdings is mind boggling, what about other organizations? What if organizations in your community that have special libraries around autism, cancer, etc. could add their collections to the library catalogue and people could request items to be picked up at a branch close to them?
Visualizing, Merchandising, Clustering and Packaging
Libraries could also create unique visualizations - coverflow of the new books or the items on the return cart or last 50 items checked out. These mimic the real world but we could literally have hundreds online and all kinds of them. There's literally hundreds of different ways to visualize books/collections.
-Coverflow - new knitting books
-Coverflow - last returned mysteries
Data Mining to Create New Services/Content
University of Pittsburgh library does this with Yahoo Pipes, a mashup too. They parse some of the licensed article databases to identify new articles by their "faculty" and then show that as ticker on the site. Yes you can see it in the building if you're using the web site. But it's something we can do online much easier than in the physical library. But what if we also built a page of cover art - books published by our faculty that showed up all year. For public libraries - books published by authors from our community or that are set in our community (from there you of course leap to a Google Map Mashup and from there to a Community Walk - book/walking tour)
Or what if we alerted our faculty every time we discover one of their works in a licensed db and say this is available now via our library in our "licensed" collection. Academic libraries are looking for ways to inform users that we pay for the licensed databases that they use, so this could be service and educational moment.
Take a Chunk of our Library with You to Remix and Publish
What if we allowed our users to take a chunk of the library to their own sites -- post this feed on their site or a segment our collection on it - the sociology reading room... Amazon let 100,000 web sites rebundle their content and covers starting about 10 years ago.
Redesign the Library
Has anyone let people re-arrange / redesign their library like those decorating tools? Much easier digitally? Submit a new floor plan.
Here's one student who write about at Tropical Paradise at the Library.
Photo by blhphotography via Flickr
I'm sure there are libraries that had users participate in designing Second Life spaces and in a virtual world many many things are possible that one could never do in a real library. After all reading in a water fountain doesn't turn out too well.
Some libraries let you "rearrange" the library web site by offering personalize options - that's a bit tricky to do in a physical branch - some have areas where you can move the furniture but not most don't let you shift a lot of things around and share your ideas.
Sometimes, the Simplest Ideas Work Best
Sometimes simplest ideas work best. Let your library users take a photo of their library and share it on the site. Let folks vote for their favourite ones. They do garden tours in the summer for gardening enthusiasts - not so easy to tour people's homes and see their libraries. Book lovers love to see other book rooms.
What other "what ifs" can you think of?
Please feel free to comment here and leave new ideas at David's post.
Tags: digital branch | library | library 2.0 | library experience | library mashup | mashup
