Frustrated

I gotta say ... I've been working on an article for Library Journal's netConnect issue on Community information and it's getting to me. Don't get me wrong, I've seen a lot and I've learned a lot, and basically I'm glad I'm writing it, but it just gets me that we're not where I'd like us (www.jocolibrary.org) to be.

Don't know if you've seen Kansas City Public Library's page (www.kclibrary.org), but they do some cool things ... things we've talked about, but haven't pulled off yet. I know (vaguely) the guy over at kclibrary, and I guess at Internet Librarian (in Monterey) he talked about what I've been saying (though mostly to myself) for the past few years -- that we gotta stay away from trying to describe the Internet, and should focus on creating, managing and delivering high quality content that is locally relevant. That's going to be the bread and butter of the future. I don't mean that we won't be doing the book/AV thing, or even that we won't be providing leased digital content ... but I think that local content is our niche, and if we don't find it, we'll be SOL, because someone else will do it and libraries will be standing there saying ... "hmmmm ... you know, we could have done that."

Of course, we've done some good local content. I was just re-examining our JoCoFamily (www.jocofamily.net) page tonight. It was developed to help youth-at-risk, their folks, and their service providers with information about the Johnson County juvenile justice system -- basically it was supposed to be a tool to help them stay out of the legal system or to get through easily and quickly. It has some good stuff there, but it's on a system we can't easily manage, so it'll need to be forklifted ... it just seems to take so long to get stuff done.

Would love to hear what some of the rest of libraries are doing ... guess I need to take this blog more public.