It’s all about variety
I’ve been away for a few days (a fabulous little birthday/anniversary vacation in CT and NY with The Husband), and sick for about a week before that, so I haven’t really been up on the news or anything. Catching up with my work email my first day back at work (today), I saw a link to the Boston Globe article “Libraries move with times, discover niches” from Monday, October 22.
While the photo for the article highlights the latest craze in gaming, reading the article reveals the true secret to success in libraries these days: variety.
It’s not just about bringing in teens with gaming, or using the latest technology in every way, shape, and form possible. It’s expanding into the various niches available to us in all age groups, really understanding the community, how it uses stuff, and how we can be a part of that. It’s video collections and ILL that rival justifying the monthly cost of Netflix, it’s Playaways (we just got a bunch of these, and they’re *awesome*) that make portable audio so very easy and completely solve the iPod/not-iPod dilemma, and events at the library that really make it feel like a real night out and not like an embarrassing place to be seen. A little something for everyone, depending on who your everyone is. It also highlights that libraries that depended on books as their mainstay actually ended up reducing hours and closing this past year.
Sometimes I think that these things go without saying, but other times I feel like librarians need to reminded that not only is change good, it’s a necessity. I confess that do see the changes happening, but just making the effort at change, or just making progress, sadly, isn’t good enough. We need to be in it for the long haul, and our profession and professionals need to be flexible enough to not just make changes, but to be in a state of evolution.
Librarians: What is your library doing these days to evolve? Are there particular problems that you or your library are facing going beyond “making a change” into flexibility? What kind of help do you forsee needing to get over the hurdles, or what tips can you share with others? Have you done a survey lately to see what your patrons really want in the library? What are they asking for? How is it different from what you do now, or is it (perhaps a more subtle evolution is in store for many libraries)?
For all the patrons out there: What evolution is do you want to see in your libraries? What are your libraries doing well, and what could use improvement? Are the changes in your library obvious to you, and what can libraries do to make the changes more obvious to you?
Tags: culture, feedback, public libraries
