It’s taken a long time for them to release this, but OCLC has finally made their Shar­ing, Pri­vacy and Trust in Our Net­worked World report avail­able for free on the web.

“The prac­tice of using a social net­work to estab­lish and enhance rela­tion­ships based on some com­mon ground—shared inter­ests, related skills, or a com­mon geo­graphic location—is as old as human soci­eties, but social net­work­ing has flour­ished due to the ease of con­nect­ing on the Web. This OCLC mem­ber­ship report explores this web of social par­tic­i­pa­tion and coöper­a­tion on the Inter­net and how it may impact the library’s role, including:

• The use of social net­work­ing, social media, com­mer­cial and library ser­vices on the Web
• How and what users and librar­i­ans share on the Web and their atti­tudes toward related pri­vacy issues
• Opin­ions on pri­vacy online
• Libraries’ cur­rent and future roles in social networking

The report is based on a sur­vey (by Har­ris Inter­ac­tive on behalf of OCLC) of the gen­eral pub­lic from six countries—Canada, France, Ger­many, Japan, the United King­dom and the United States—and of library direc­tors from the U.S. The research pro­vides insights into the val­ues and social-networking habits of library users.”

I’ve heard OCLC staff say they don’t believe they asked the right ques­tions for some of the top­ics, which I agree with, so I think we have to take the data with the prover­bial grain of salt. You’ll be able to order a 280-page paper copy start­ing Octo­ber 28, which is how I’ll read this if I can get my hands on a copy. I couldn’t totally resist, though, so I did jump ahead to the con­clu­sion (PDF) and already I’m intrigued.

“In the 18 months since the pub­li­ca­tion of the Per­cep­tions of Libraries and Infor­ma­tion Resources report, the use of search engines and e-mail has grown by more than 20% over what were already enor­mous par­tic­i­pa­tion lev­els. User par­tic­i­pa­tion in basic Inter­net ser­vices, such as search­ing and e-mailing, is approach­ing total par­tic­i­pa­tion. More than twice as many respon­dents are using blogs now as then.…

Inter­net use has not sim­ply increased, it has infil­trated our lives, offer­ing more and more ser­vices at more and more ser­vice points. Use has grown for almost every Inter­net ser­vice we mea­sured in this survey—well, almost every service.

The per­cent­age of Inter­net users that have used a library Web site has decreased. Library Web site use declined from 30% of respon­dents in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. in 2005 to 20% of the gen­eral pub­lic in these same coun­tries in 2007, a 33%
decrease.…

The more intrigu­ing ques­tion is—what are the ser­vices and incen­tives that online libraries could offer users to entice them to come back or to visit more often or even devote some of their own time to help cre­ate a social library site?…

If con­ve­nience does trump qual­ity, then it is the librar­i­ans’ job to make qual­ity con­ve­nient. If shar­ing will trump pri­vacy on the social Web, it is the librarians’

On the social Web, the library brand must go from insti­tu­tional to personal.…

The social Web is not being built by aug­ment­ing tra­di­tional Web sites with new tools. And a social library will not be cre­ated by imple­ment­ing a list of social soft­ware fea­tures on our cur­rent sites. The social Web is being cre­ated by open­ing the doors to the pro­duc­tion of the Web, dis­man­tling the cur­rent struc­tures and invit­ing users in to cre­ate their con­tent and estab­lish new rules.

Open the library doors, invite mass par­tic­i­pa­tion by users and relax the rules of pri­vacy. It will be messy. The rules of the new social Web are messy. The rules of the new social library will be equally messy. But mass par­tic­i­pa­tion and a lit­tle chaos often cre­ate the most excit­ing venues for col­lab­o­ra­tion, cre­ativ­ity, com­mu­nity building—and trans­for­ma­tion. It is right on mission.…

The new Web is a very dif­fer­ent thing. Libraries need to be very dif­fer­ent, too.”

Now, I give full credit to OCLC for run­ning, ana­lyz­ing, and pub­lish­ing (espe­cially freely) this report (I so wish MPOW pub­lished this kind of won­der­ful data this freely), but I have to dock them points for the way they invite feed­back on this report. On social net­work­ing. And shar­ing online. And pri­vacy concerns.

Where do the points come off? The only way to sub­mit feed­back is via a form that has your name and email address as required fields and which sends the mes­sage off into the ether instead of post­ing it online. No dis­cus­sion at all on the report’s site. Given the social efforts OCLC is mak­ing else­where (World­Cat, Web­Junc­tion, etc.), I have to believe they have some­thing in the works that just wasn’t ready yet, but this cer­tainly does fill the belly of the irony beast.

Update: And indeed, the online com­mu­nity is now live via open com­ments on what appears to be a blog. Dis­cuss away.

There were many rea­sons I hosted the ALA Tech­Source Gam­ing, Learn­ing, and Libraries Sym­po­sium this past July, not the least of which was to share with oth­ers the breadth of gam­ing ser­vices libraries can offer. The fact that I got to meet some of my heroes (like Henry Jenk­ins and James Paul Gee), as well as meet new peo­ple doing inter­est­ing things around gam­ing, was rich and tasty gravy.

Two of those peo­ple were Mark Engel­brecht and Mar­tin House from the Pub­lic Library of Char­lotte Meck­len­burg County, who received a $69,000 LSTA grant to study gam­ing for adults last year. There’s a rea­son we talk so much about the kids and the teenagers when it comes to gam­ing in libraries, but we can’t for­get that there are valid gam­ing ser­vices for 20somethings, 30somethings, fam­i­lies, par­ents, boomers, seniors, and pretty much every­one else who enjoys games. So their ses­sion at the Sym­po­sium was high on my list to hear but as it turns out, when you host an event like this, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll actu­ally get to see much of the pre­sen­ta­tions. So I missed almost all of their talk, and unfor­tu­nately we didn’t have video of it. There is audio, which you can grab to lis­ten to here, and I highly rec­om­mend you do that.

But now, you can also read (and sub­scribe) to Mar­tin House’s new blog Tech­naeum, where he will be post­ing excerpts of their research and data from the grant. I’m thrilled about this, because it solid­i­fies 2007 as the first year we started get­ting actual num­bers of any kind sur­round­ing gam­ing in libraries, and just like Scott Nicholson’s data, PLCMC’s num­bers are fascinating.

Gam­ing and Libraries: Ref­er­ence Ain’t Dead

“As an indi­ca­tion that ref­er­ence really ‘ain’t’ dead, I would like to share some research with you from an LSTA Inno­va­tions Grant. The library received $69,000 to cre­ate gam­ing pro­grams for adults and study the impact of these events in terms of their library use. What we found is that the sin­gle biggest rea­son patrons cited for com­ing to the library was ref­er­ence, or an infor­ma­tional need.…

…libraries today are still faced with the age old charge, being ‘The People’s Uni­ver­sity.’ If my research is any indi­ca­tion of this, libraries are more needed than ever due to people’s needs to have knowl­edge­able pro­fes­sion­als guide them through the world of infor­ma­tion over­load — oh and bad infor­ma­tion too boot.

There is also a very good indi­ca­tion that patron who attended the gam­ing pro­grams fre­quented the library more in sub­se­quent months.”

Be sure to read the rest of Martin’s post and to check back or sub­scribe to his blog, because he will be post­ing about their research reg­u­larly. Thanks, Mar­tin — this is a huge con­tri­bu­tion to the profession.

I’ve been wait­ing for Michael Wesch, the Kansas State pro­fes­sor who cre­ated the viral The Machine Is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Stu­dents Today videos, to do one that more directly addresses libraries. Last week he did just that. Hope­fully it will help spread David Weinberger’s mes­sage from Every­thing Is Mis­cel­la­neous (which you need to read if you haven’t already). Is your library part of this new r/evolution, or are you still fac­ing the future with only a 20th cen­tury ser­vice orientation?

Infor­ma­tion R/evolution.

Bonus link via Paul Pival: Jon Udell on Remix­ing the Library
. Can your patrons remix your library?