What I Wish I Had Known

“I wish I had known that the solution for needing to teach our users how to search our catalog was to create a system that didn't need to be taught—and that we would spend years asking vendors for systems that solved our problems but did little to serve our users. I wish I had known that we would come to pay the price of our folly by seeing our users flock to commercial companies like Google and Amazon….

It's about the user, stupid. While we were focused on crafting integrated library systems that served our needs, our users got left behind. Is it any wonder that they can't understand why our systems aren't as easy to work with as Amazon?” [Library Journal]

Pew Internet Report: Search Engines Gain Ground

“According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities:

On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine.

Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes searching a library OPAC.” [MaisonBisson]

This badly.

<mini rant> Chris Deweese over at our sister Illinois system Lewis & Clark LS went and implemented yet another thing Kate and I have been talking about for months. Except he got beyond the talking stage because he’s a programmer. I hate that LCLS is doing a lot of the things I’ve wanted to do simply because they have someone on staff devoted to implementing this kind of stuff.  And I really hate the fact that Chris has started a new blog called “the lcls weboratory: from our minds to the web” at the URL http://labs.lcls.org/. “Labs!”</mini rant>

Okay, so replace the word “hate” with the word “love” in the above paragraph, but I still really want a programmer at work!