keynote

"Jenny's talking about instant messaging now, and one of the librarians at my table just said 'can't they just call?' That's pretty much what my staff think about meebo, too. Meebo is something I have set up for my library, and I'm starting to get more and more questions on it. Yes, people could call, but they don't want to. We have to go to where our users are... We have a Google calendar, too, and I'm happy to say that at my last knitting program, 2 people came after seeing the event listed at our on-line calendar." [Sturm Haus]

I wanted to highlight this paragraph because I think it's important to recognize that not everyone communicates the way we do. In this case, it's important for librarians to realize that there is a group of their users out there who prefer methods of communication that we may not.

Personally, I'm right on the edge. It took me a while to warm up to instant messaging and texting, but now I prefer them to email and some types of phone calls. I used to think these preferences put me on the front of the bell curve, but lately I'm realizing that's not so much true anymore. I'm noticing how others are using these and new tools for communication and feeling not quite there myself.

For example, if you're instant messaging (IM) buddies with Jessamyn West, you know how great her away messages are. She uses them like updated voicemail, like an in/out board on steroids. When we were at the Massachusetts Library Association conference last week, we made plans to have breakfast the next morning. Now that she has a cell phone, I said, "I'll text you when we're up." She said, "I might not see that, so just check my IM status and leave me a message if I'm not up yet." How many librarians think of IM in general, but particularly IM away messages, as this type of communication tool? Do we automatically think, "Can't we just call?"

I also had an interesting conversation with a 21-year old college student this past winter. Since she's about to graduate and head off into the real world, I asked how her communication habits were changing. When she was in high school, she was on instant messaging a lot, ahead of the adult bell curve. When she started college, though, she had a cell phone and she and her friends moved to texting as a primary method of communication. I asked if she still IMs as much, and she said, "No. Why would we IM? We have Facebook now."

Which took me a while to grok, because I just don't use Facebook in a way that I would even link those two methods as being equal.

So in this sense, it's important to do the cliche and "think outside of the box" of how we ourselves might view communication. Even when we do focus groups or informal surveys, it tends to be with library users, who might not be that different from us. Therefore, we might miss patterns like these that show a shift in how the outside world communicates.

Does it mean libraries have to use every possible method of interacting with patrons? Of course not. But we can spot some trends and be ready when they hit a critical mass. Certainly we are at this point with IM, and we're at or approaching one with texting (which is one reason I continue to find Twitter interesting as a trend indicator for libraries). Maybe we'll end up saying that libraries don't need a presence on sites such as Facebook and MySpace, but there's certainly a large number of users who view this as a communication tool, so how will that expectation evolve for them? Where is the potential intersection that shifts our services to where our users are, rather than expecting them to adapt to us?

I think this is a key question when evaluating any new technology, tool, or format, and I am glad to see so many librarians (especially bloggers) scouting for this on the horizon. It's a valuable service you provide, and hopefully it will help others in our profession turn the "why can't they?" question around to "why can't we?"