Saturday, October 11, 2008
Evolution to Revolution to Chaos? Reference in Transition by Stephen Abram
Searcher magazine article:
¶ 10/11/2008 
Well, to me, the ultimate point is this:
"Aligning technology with user behavior no longer suffices to ensure success. We need to understand, and understand deeply, the role of the library in our end-users’ lives, work, research, and play. This is critical to our long-term success, and failure is not an option."
fyi, Abrams works for Sirsi Dynix now.
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Ron,
I think you were right on in your thoughts below. Abrams says "we have to put ourselves in all of the spaces inhabited by our users." If we did that, we would understand and work to overcome the frustrations that we present for them in accessing our resources.
MB
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Sally - I haven't looked at the article yet, but did spend some time thinking about your "ultimate point" quotation - "..understand, and understand deeply, the role of the library.." At first, I thought along the lines of survey - we need to do one. But then I thought, what are my subjective impressions of what our users want/need. And I came up with the following, which I decided to put down and then read the article. Some of this I've probably heard at CIL or other conferences and its just now bubbling to the top...
Users want one entrance point to all that the library has to offer. We need to work with all of our vendors to come up with the ability that users sign in/log on once and only once and from that point on, can access all of the many services and resources available on our site: library account; all subscription databases; NetLibrary ebooks and eaudiobooks; Overdrive titles; the proposed video downloads, etc. Having to access each one individually is frustrating, both for users and staff that spend a large amount of time walking users through the different steps to use our resources. Yahoo, Google, Microsoft are set-up that one sign-in gives their users access to all of their resources, many of them customized to their site. This is what our users expect and we should be pushing to make it possible. Again, as per the quote you pulled, "This is critical to our long term success.."
Now to read the article!
ron
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