What I love about where I work ... or Our Strategic Plan

Okay ... this will sound weird ... the three things I'm going to talk about are from the preposed revisions of our strategic plan ... normally. that'd be enough to make anyone nod off, but do me a favor ... read on ... 'cause this is cool stuff ...

We started with the outcome ...

“People benefit from Johnson County Library’s role in the community.”

The first of three strategies was ...

"Proactively create a culture of engagement within the library."

As you can probably guess, this was our way of saying that engagement starts at home ... we need our staff, across all dimensions of the organization, to think of their work as community engagement ... to that end we need to go to “engagement school,” or as we’re planning on calling it, the Ambassador Coaching Institute. This staff development activity will better prep our people (who were probably hired to provide utterly different services 10+ years ago) to more easily and ably deal with the library’s challenges of today and tomorrow.

In addition to our informal approach to readying staff for engagement, we also said that we’d need to establish formal liaisons to other organizations, institutions, and community groups focusing on neighborhood and niche service development. We’ve kinda kicked that off already, as we’re hired a youth services librarian to liaise between the county’s school districts and us. She’s only been on staff for a few months, but her presence has already brought us closer to the schools. Formal liaisons to county agencies, NPOs, and even industries can only be a positive as we try to lock in engagement networks across subdivisions, neighborhoods, cities, and the county.

We recognized that this shift to engagement would mean a shifting of resources ... so we’ve stated that we really need to examine the needs we’d have with regard to people hours and skills to create this engagement stuff ... I can’t tell you for sure what it will look like when we’ve done it, but I can guarantee it’ll be different than what you see now ...

Isn’t that cool!?!?! .... more later on the next two strategies ...

Public Agenda online

I imagine some are already aware of this site ... Public Agenda is an pollster site that (in their own words):

"has been providing unbiased and unparalleled research that bridges the gap
between American leaders and what the public really thinks about issues."

I didn't spend a ton of time on the site (I'm rooting on the Wichita Shockers right now!), but I did find this item about Internet Speech and Privacy ... it's kind of dated ... be interesting to see more recent info ...

Rewarding Our Users

I wanted to comment on something I read recently in Red Herring magazine ... "Sites Reward Good Users" talked about companies that encourage “web users to contribute content in exchange for a stake in its success.” Basically, it works this way ... a site asks users to contribute content (photos, stories, music, video, ... you name it!), and then the users receive some percentage of revenue taken in for the sale or use of the content. To some extent, the site becomes the middleman or agent for the citizen content provider ... the sites (or service providers mentioned were:

Gather.com (blogs)
Newsvine.com (newsite)
Wurldmedia.com (peerimpact.com – music/video)
Revver.com (video)
Scoopt.com (photos)

Mentioned in the article is the fact that some of this is not new ... it was there before the so-called bubble burst at the turn of the century ... but according to Anil Dash (of Dashes.com), back in those days “there weren’t enough people online.” With the ubiquity of digital cameras, podcasting tools, and the willingness of people to share content, it seems to me this approach might find some legs this time around ... and of course, we’ve seen something like this before ... it’s called eBay ... it’s just that this time what’s for sale is digital content.

I guess there are two things that I see as relevant to libraries ... the first is that we should be out there encouraging our patrons to contribute content to library-run sites so that we can serve it up back to them as part of the collective local experience. We can use the model talked about above by managing the digital rights for our patrons and paying them back for use based on certain types of usage.

My second thought on this is that – whether our patrons choose to share their home-made content through our systems or through commercial providers – we need to figure out how to zero in on all those really cool local content chunks held disparately across the face of the earth and make them available to our users. That may seem pretty obvious, but we haven’t really done too much of it ... When was the last (or the first!) time you saw a library catalog or collect a list of locally created blogs? Now with the proliferation of locally relevant web pages, images, videos, audios, blogs, etc., we have more information about our patrons and their environs than ever before.

The concept of citizen journalism is being extended to all aspects of life, and we can and should be the connection that brings the authors closer to their readers. Our role will be more than that of indexers and archivists ... we will be publishers ... promoters ... and connectors of people and their stories to others whose lives will be changed by our work.

Because remember ... it’s all about ...

... Answering the questions ...
... Inspiring the next questions ...
... Interacting to create understanding, and ...
... Engaging to change lives and build communities.

My Pirate Name

I've heard that sailors are fickle, unreliable, and capricious ... well, according to this "scientfic" analysis brought to you by fidius.org, I might be an exception to that rule ...

My pirate name is:

Dread Pirate Read

Like the famous Dread Pirate Roberts, you have a keen head for how to make a profit. Even through many pirates have a reputation for not being the brightest souls on earth, you defy the sterotypes. You've got taste and education. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.