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Being BTF: immediacy & personalization

May 12, 2009  ♦  Categories: Advocacy, Change Management, Technology
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As a sellable quality, immediacy has many levels. [It] has to fit with the product and the audience.

Personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user. It is deeply generative because it is iterative and time consuming. You can’t copy the personalization that a relationship represents.

From Better than Free by Kevin Kelly.

The internet has made it easy to receive immediate updates on world and national news, sports scores and stock prices, weather forecasts and even the daily activities of our favorite entertainers. What’s harder to obtain online is timely information about what’s happening in our own backyards.

Each day, our public librarians are exposed to a dynamic flow of information that reflects our individual preferences and community characteristics. They circulate newspapers and town documents, interact with town departments and local businesses, work with school kids, observe the community’s content consumption and talk with folks around town.

Wouldn’t it be great if they could take the lead in creating an effective online town commons to help make this rich experience available to the rest of us?
Read full article.

Being BTF (better than free): intro

May 11, 2009  ♦  Categories: Advocacy, Change Management, Technology
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The role of libraries in an increasingly digitized culture is a hot topic among librarians, educational institutions and industry groups.  A mention in LibraryBytes piqued my interest about a ChangeThis manifesto by Kevin Kelly.

Better Than Free describes 8 hidden values for companies to bring forward in a digital marketplace filled with free products. Kelly writes “In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values.” These values “must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured” they “cannot be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced.”  Further, they are “generated uniquely, in place, over time.”

Kelly believes that “in the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.”

Kelly’s manifesto has lots of resonance for public libraries and I’ll explore it a bit more this week.
Read full article.

*Original graphic by Caribou Coffee

The internet, literacy & access to knowledge

May 8, 2009  ♦  Categories: Advocacy, Technology
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A reader sent a link to the video below with a flattering note: “I’ve seen this YouTube video a couple of times and thought you might be interested in cogitating on the implications…” Me, cogitate? Why, make me blush…

The popular video by Fisch, McLeod and Brenman serves up statistics on the information age in compelling, rapid-fire fashion. The worldwide growth of info and data transmission in the past few years is truly astonishing.

Equally astounding are statistics from the American Human Development Project on Access to Knowledge in the United States for the same time period.

  • 14% of the population – some 30 million Americans – lacks the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks like understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.
  • 12% of Americans lack the literacy skills to fill in a job application or payroll form, read a map or bus schedule, or understand labels on food and drugs.
  • More than 1 in 5 Americans – 22 percent of the population – have “below basic” quantitative skills, making it impossible to balance a checkbook, calculate a tip, or figure out from an advertisement the amount of interest on a loan.
  • In 2006, 4.5 million young people ages 18-24 were not in school, not working, and had not graduated high school.
  • Nearly 1 in 6 American children lives in a family whose head didn’t graduate high school.
  • Only three-fourths of American public high students graduated on time (within four years) with a regular diploma in 2003-2004.

We can do better — lots better — and public libraries are a key component of our success in this area.