Speaker: Dave Hesse & Brian Pichman
They used a Lazer Tag like system to set up “Hunger Games” nights in the library. They also used a bunch of interactive tech toys for different kinds of game nights.
They’re mounting tables as shelf labels that show the range in sleep mode, but when activated will display reviews and other information about books in the range, as well as other interactive multimedia.
Speaker: Sarah Houghton
Cutting stuff. Cutting lots of things out of the budget, services, etc. All of these things we learn about take time and money, and we can’t do all of them. She’s making everyone in her library earn their pet program. It has to show some sort of ROI (not specifically financial). Make business decisions about what we do and why.
Q: What did you cut that you didn’t want to?
A: Magnatune deal — really wanted to do it, but didn’t have the staff time and a negative amount of money to dedicate to anything.
Speaker: Ben Bizzle
We are doing a really poor job of marketing ourselves to our communities, and we’re wasting money on old methods and tools to do it. There are more cost-effective ways to do this, particularly for public libraries. Facebook is a really cost-effective way to market to your community over and over again, and running ads to get people in your community to like your Facebook page has been shown to be very effective. Be part of the stream without being disruptive. Facebook events invitations are disruptive and ineffective.
Next big things from the audience:
- Would like to have a better way to provide remote authentication for users from anywhere, regardless of the speed of the connection (i.e. 3G mobile phone or a hotel wireless connection).
- Focusing on programming that brings the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking communities together.
- Integrating local self-published creators’ content within the rest of the library’s electronic content.
- Trying to find better metrics to measure success for ROI.
- Developing community investors from FOL and active volunteers.
- Giving up paper flyers/posters and moving to digital.
- Moving social media effort to marketing department.
- Looking at duplicate efforts and winnowing them down.
- Learning how to code.
- Hiring part-time and hiring non-librarians.
- FRBR. RDA. Say no more.
- Advocacy. Facetime with politicians and other sources of funding.
- Would like to hear more from public libraries on ‘bring your own device’ initiatives that could be applied in the academic library setting.
- Gamification of library resources and services.
- Wikipedia – we should be creating more content there.
- Better relationships with publishers.
- The next level of life-long learning like Coursera and making the library a hub for it.
- Downloadble database of music by local musicians.
- Copyright, curations, folksonomies, and other issues of creating communities.
- Podcasting.
- Digitization projects that engage specific communities.
- Keeping my head above water. Migrating to a more self-service model while maintaining a high level of service.
- Moving to a new ILS. Proprietary or open source?
- Reaching out to atypical non-users. Running ads in local for sale magazines.
- Lock-in gaming nights.
