ALCTS Sym­po­sium, ALA Mid­win­ter Meet­ing, Jan­u­ary 14, 2010

John Yemma — Going Web-first at The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Monitor

The CSM reports the news but also tries to help find solu­tions
“The Econ­o­mist with heart“
like every news orga­ni­za­tion, they’re strug­gling
mov­ing off the CS Church sub­sidy in five years and have to cre­ate a sus­tain­able model
moved to only one day print
3 pub­li­ca­tions now — the daily news brief­ing (2000 sub­scribers), print, web
the news­room now feeds all three of these prod­ucts, but feeds the web first
have boosted their traf­fic 50% year over year
now that they’ve bro­ken out of the print design par­a­digm, all of their efforts are decou­pled from print and assets are put directly against the web (SEO, more timely news moment-to-moment)
new con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem facil­i­tat­ing all of this
when you move to web first, you have to democ­ra­tize con­tent cre­ation (not just HTML so that non-technical peo­ple can pub­lish on the web)
build­ing a strong com­mu­nity strat­egy, par­tic­u­larly on Face­book
do a lot of online research, feed­back research
they’re essen­tially on a weekly news­magazine sched­ule (big shift for a for­mally print news­pa­per)
mov­ing to a harder news approach
new mar­ket­ing effort for the Daily News Briefing

the web is not just des­ti­na­tion web­sites, repli­cas of print prod­ucts
the dig­i­tal gen­er­a­tion we know isn’t liv­ing on des­ti­na­tion web­sites
dis­ag­gre­ga­tion is the world we’re deal­ing with now
we’re also at the end of the inter­net growth area, which means it will be a strug­gle since the bar­ri­ers to entry are so low
very dif­fi­cult to put gen­eral news behind a pay wall
every­one is a jour­nal­ist; the glory days of jour­nal­ism are gone (which is good in a way)
thinks rules should be relaxed to let news­pa­pers own a cable chan­nel
it’s an inter­ac­tive pub­lish­ing medium now and adap­ta­tion is the only way to go

Tom Cor­bett — Col­lec­tion Devel­op­ment in an all Dig­i­tal Age

when he shows kids you can increase the text size on the kin­dle, they look at him funny and don’t get it
they’re doing a lot of recre­ational read­ing on the kin­dles
started his job at cush­ing acad­emy and then got on the roller­coaster of hav­ing his efforts labeled as “the end of read­ing“
the deci­sion had already been made to make the library dig­i­tal before he started (although he did agree with it)

Ann Wolpert — Is There an App for that? Dig­i­tal Natives and the Infor­ma­tion Commons

she’s look­ing for­ward to the day Tom’s stu­dents get to MIT and looks at the com­plex struc­ture of ser­vices and asks “is there an app for this?”

no longer have clear answers about how we define “the library” any­more and what it is
now we’re faced with the chal­lenge of cre­at­ing new definitions

3 things that are pro­foundly dif­fer­ent because of the inter­net than what we’re used to in the past
1. net­works (the inter­net) moves con­tent from the cen­ter to the edge
2. fun­da­men­tal changes in the way peo­ple assess and value infor­ma­tion; the per­cep­tion that if it’s not on the inter­net, it doesn’t exist
3. lets libraries cus­tomize the ser­vices they pro­vide to their con­stituen­cies; our model used to be we build it and you come to us; for the first time, the inter­net gives us the chance to ask who our patrons are, let them come to us over the inter­net, and lets us design ser­vices for this

every gen­er­a­tion is dif­fer­ent and the same
infor­ma­tion seek­ing behav­ior is learned (MIT says that learn­ing now comes from Ama­zon and Google & other com­mer­cial enti­ties who have their own mod­els and pur­poses)
remem­ber the heated debate about using cal­cu­la­tors in the classroom?

peter drucker said of not-for-profits that the pri­mary pur­pose is to attract cus­tomers; you have no rea­son to exist if that’s not your goal

those aspects which are dif­fer­ent deserve our cre­ative atten­tion
– dig­i­tal natives will live in online com­mu­ni­ties
– expe­ri­ence with tech­nol­ogy will be amaz­ingly var­ied
– expo­sure to norms of schol­ar­ship like­wise pla­gia­rism, source eval­u­a­tion, and rigor
– naïve users equate appli­ca­tions facil­ity with advanced exper­tise in all domains

what a good infor­ma­tion com­mons will be mission-based:
– librar­i­ans are edu­ca­tors who part­ner with other edu­ca­tors in the process of instruct­ing a com­mu­nity, both for­mally and infor­mally, about infor­ma­tion and how you use it well
– libraries are service-providers; tech­nol­ogy is com­pletely insuf­fi­cient with­out con­text and sup­port
– good polices are essen­tial; have to also remain flex­i­ble and adapt­able (now switch­ing to a finan­cial model)

(then I spoke about gam­ing in libraries)