Lucky 7 Idea Pilot Number 1

Ultimate Goal: Engage specific target audiences, teens and seniors, in the library and the community.

Transparent Goal: Happy users (just like always) – some of whom vote

Long Lasting Legacy: A digital vault of your community’s history and new positive relationships in the community.

Sneaky Unintended Consequence: Economic returns through tourist dollars!

The Pilot Plan: Facilitate having your teen users ally with your seniors group. This can be organized through your teen advisory council, genealogy club, library mailings, and Web site, etc. All it requires is access to a digital camera, the Internet, and a little imagination. Have your teens head out across town to take great digital photos of historic landmarks, statues, gardens, bridges, parks, and buildings. Then have the teens load these photos into Flickr or teach everyone how to do this. From there, it’s easy to comment on the photos, and this is where your seniors come in. Have them work with the teens (Don’t fret, they’ll get along!) and add comments and descriptions to each photo.

Go one step further and curate photo collections on themes – “Bridges of Our County,” “Who is that Statue?,” “Stately Homes of WhoVille,” “Heritage Farms,” etc. Do this through a photo blog (you can use Blogger for free) tied to your Flickr photos. Ask your community to comment too - you can easily add their personal photos as well. Before you know it, you’ve evolved from a static local history collection to one that is lively and engaging the community – one that spreads by Mom and WOM (word of mouth)! It also shows potential to become crazy busy – yea!

As a wonderful sidelight to this project, you can hook this local history project to your town’s tourism agenda. For instance, people can see the town through the eyes of its friendly citizens, pictures of the sights, and local color. Indeed, if you photograph and index the grave markers in your historic cemeteries, you can add your town to the huge trend in genealogical tourism. Libraries do have economic impact!

The Grown-Up Plan: Free Web-based services are not confidently sustainable, nor do they meet your needs to carefully preserve your town’s history. They also run risks through privacy concerns or inappropriate ads. However, they’re excellent places to prove the concept you’re seeking to prove. Now that you’ve made the concept exciting and engaging for your hometown, and know that it not only meets the library’s local history mandate but also can be positioned as a spoke in the marketing wheels of tourism promotion, you’re ready to professionalize the project.

SirsiDynix offers products and services that assist libraries in building digital archives: SirsiDynix Hyperion Digital Media Archive for use in tandem with the Unicorn® Library Management System, and SirsiDynix Horizon Digital Library for use in tandem with the Horizon Library Management System.

Going a step further, SirsiDynix also offers SirsiDynix Digital Heritage Rooms, a focused solution that's specifically designed to assist libraries in building and presenting local history collections.

Lucky 7 Idea Pilot Number 2

Ultimate Goal: Extend the reach of library staff to the home and not just the library’s digital resources, OPAC, and Web site.

Transparent Goal: To provide better service – especially to the homebound and Millennials.

Long Lasting Legacy: Library staff and your community are seamlessly endowed with next-generation skills preparing them for the future.

Sneaky Unintended Consequence: Crediting a library service with the foresight to prepare the community safely with the skills needed for success. Another consequence can be better collaboration between schools and libraries.

The Pilot Plan: It’s just too simple. Set up an instant messaging (IM) account(s) in AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, or wherever. Acquire an IM aggregator like Trillian or GAIM, or if you’re disallowed client software, then set up Meebo as a Web-based aggregator. Make some bookmarks with your address and give them to your target audience (school-age kids perhaps?). Have some fun – what do you think your library handle should be? Should it be different for different age groups or intentions? Do you have a fun mascot or other identity to use? Wait for questions to grow. Learn how to respond. Start to worry about the volume.

The Grown-Up Plan: Ideally, libraries must manage, track, and learn from our questions. A grown-up system, which allows for much needed flexibility and library management features, such as reference transcripts, co-browsing, and the ability to build automated answers and stock answer pages, advances the productivity of library reference staff. I believe that it’s essential for us to learn from these virtual reference (VR) transactions to rebuild our skills in this new world. It may be somewhat unnecessary to note that this is one of the top three communication modes (talking F2F (face-to-face), phone, and IM) for Millennials – our largest segment of users. Well managed reference and research service staff will review VR transcripts together regularly.

Of course, SirsiDynix offers virtual reference software through VRLplus. With Docutek VRLplus, reference librarians converse directly with patrons online in real time as they guide them through Web sites and other online resources. The system collects detailed statistics on system usage, such as number of logins, questions asked, and session duration. Docutek VRLplus also includes a complete set of email reference features that are fully integrated into all other Docutek VRLplus features, like transcript management and statistics reporting. Docutek VRLplus features full co-browsing, which enables the librarian and patron to share the same Web pages, including online databases and other services that require authentication. In Docutek VRLplus, it's easy for a librarian to assist a patron in filling out on-screen forms and to escort the patron through any online entry sequence. And with the click of the mouse, a librarian can send, save, and manage transcripts of conversations with patrons, and automatically build an expert system from online reference conversations.

Lucky 7 Idea Pilot Number 3

Ultimate Goal: To attract new users by being where they are. It is especially important to attract Millennial users (especially those in school) to the library and its resources and services.

Transparent Goal: To be cooler than cool, without being uncool, by having a MySpace or Facebook presence.

Long Lasting Legacy: The library learns a lot about how these new socially networked portals are evolving and the Web 2.0 technologies that underlie their operations. It starts to inform our thinking about how to build targeted portals.

Sneaky Unintended Consequence: We start to think about the role of the library card and the patron record as a node in the community social network. Hmmmm.

The Pilot Plan: Start to build our library’s presence in MySpace. Take a look at what others are doing. Be very aware that hard sell will not work here. Also, it’s very easy to take a misstep and look uncool, nerdy, or worse - too adult. Experiment and adjust. Here are just three SirsiDynix clients that are experimenting with trying to find the future in MySpace:

·         Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library

http://www.myspace.com/tscpl

Note that they have a video on their MySpace presence. Cool.

·         Hennepin County Library

http://www.myspace.com/hennepincountylibrary

Note they’ve managed to get their OPAC search box into their MySpace presence!

·         Albany County Public Library

http://www.myspace.com/acplwy

Note the school links and practice exams.

All these folks are trying. You can find more by searching the “L” words in the search box!

The Grown-Up Plan: Of course, it’s one thing to be where our users are and quite another to offer full-blown library resources and services online. This is another space, and it’s another place. Without going over the top, libraries also offer “safe” places to search and connect. SirsiDynix offers, and is expanding its range of offerings, to build portals and to create portlets that can exist anywhere in your community. Take a look at the potential in our portal solutions. SirsiDynix Rooms™, a powerful Web solution that empowers librarians to gather, organize, and present quality content from any source in virtual rooms, SirsiDynix Enterprise Portal Solution™ (in tandem with SirsiDynix Unicorn® Library Management System) and SirsiDynix Horizon Information Portal (in tandem with SirsiDynix Horizon 8.0 Library Management System) for information seekers seeking to discover resources and knowledge and SirsiDynix Corinthian Information Portal (in tandem with SirsiDynix Corinthian Library Management System) especially for students, faculty, and other researchers seeking resources and knowledge within academic and research libraries.

These are the first three of the “Lucky 7” ideas. Be sure to look out for the last four in the August OneSource.

Stephen Abram, MLS is vice president, Innovation, for SirsiDynix and the President–elect of SLA. He is an SLA Fellow and the past president of the Ontario Library Association and the immediate past president of the Canadian Library Association.  Stephen would love to hear from you at stephen.abram@sirsidynix.com.