LibraryTechtonics

Yesterday I received an update from SirsiDynix about an upcoming webinar (they’re webinars are generally really good, and, best of all, free), which kinda reads as half helpful infomration, half infomercial, on their OneStop “all-in-one self-service solution.” OneStop reads as a Swiss army knife of circulation tasks, handling check in, check out, fines, computer sign-up, printing payment, and information updates.

I proceded to have mixed feelings about it.

See, at my library, we don’t have fines, except for the Express items, which are free for the first two days, and $0.25/day after that. We don’t do computer sign up, because while our computers are often occupied, we’ve never had a problem with making sure everyone has a computer when they need it. Printing costs $0.10/page, but we collect that at the circulation desk, and while we’ve pondered the use of a print management system, it’s not something we could put in the budget until next fiscal year, if we wanted to pursue it. As for patron information updates, we can do those at reference or at circulation, and most people ask us to do that in passing, or by logging into their account in the catalog system.

So while I know that there are libraries that use *all* of these features, and would probably love a OneStop as an easy consolidation of tasks and processes, I couldn’t bring myself to be interested in it, even conceptually. After some pondering, I thought that maybe the infomercial aspect of the webinar really bothered me. I mean, it does make perfect sense that SirsiDynix would use a free webinar to do a little sell on one of their own solutions, given that so many of their other webinars cover other interesting topcis in librarianship, and are so generously free. And I’m sure the webinar would be immensely helpful for libraries that want more information but can’t physically go to such a presentation, even at a regional level. I think maybe it would interest me more as a comparison presentation, how the OneStop measures up to other systems like it, as a starting point to compare and contrast the solutions.

Further ponderance revealed that I was also bothered by the idea that this was touted as a tool to “empower the users with self-service.” As far as users are concerned, they are empowered with self-service without libraries or fancy library tools. Users are empowered by their own curiosity (”I wonder what happens if I click on this…” behavior), their need to just get things done (the “How do I just…?” questions we get all the time at my library’s reference desk), and their ability to perform independent online searching even on a basic, button-mashing level (”I just typed it into Google…”), and are becoming moreso all the time. They may not have the *best* information, they may not get the answer right the first time on their own, but they are more than able and *willing* to make a go at serving themselves.

I’m not sure how much libraries can empower users if we can’t get ahead of the societal learning and knowledge curve, as well as the societal innovation curve (not just in technology, but in the way people think about processes and their philosophies on what constitutes “customer service.” Libraries have spent a history telling people how to do things and how things are generally done (the process and usability nightmare that is the philosophy of library cataloging is a case in point), as opposed to asking them what they want or following how the way people are doing things changes, and changing with them, so the concept of patron empowerment, to me, is more of a necessary philosophy change profession-wide, and not a hardware fix like a self-service kiosk.

Don’t get me wrong, I know where SirsiDynix is coming from. I know their just promoting the OneStop as a tool that lets patrons help themselves. It’s catchy, and strong, and effective, and evokes positive feelings of productivity. But in a profession where libraries have been captive (or have let themselves *be* captive) to vendor ideas and methods, it just makes me think that it’s not acceptable to let little bits of marketing like that go unnoticed.

Tags: librarianship
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