“There is the greatest temptation to simply endure incompetent employees…. As a result, a lot of incompetent, obstreperous, intractable, and dysfunctional employees hang around forever to terrorize their organizations. Often times, these toxic employees are actually rewarded for their incompetence. They are put into cushy jobs in which their interactions with other human beings are quite limited. The resulting irony is that the productive, socially normal people end up working twice as hard to make up for the dysfunctional employees who are protected by employment laws and employment lawyers. [Source: Will Manley, “Fire!” Booklist, January 1 & 15, 2006, page 26]

...When I was growing up in Newark in the forties, we assumed that the books in the public library belonged to the public. Since my family did not own many books, or have the money for a child to buy them, it was good to know that solely by virtue of my municipal citizenship I had access to any book I wanted from that grandly austere building downtown on Washington Street, or from the branch library I could walk to in my neighborhood. No less satisfying was the idea of communal ownership, property held in common for the common good. Why I had to care for the books I borrowed, return them unscarred and on time, was because they weren't mine alone, they were everybody's. That idea had as much to do with civilizing me as any I was ever to come upon in the books themselves.

If the idea of a public library was civilizing, so was the place, with its comforting quiet, its tidy shelves, its knowledgeable, dutiful employees who weren't teachers. The library wasn't simply where one had to go to get the books, it was a kind of exacting haven to which a city youngster willingly went for his lesson in restraint and his training in self-control. And then there was the lesson in order, the enormous institution itself serving as instructor. What trust it inspired - in both oneself and in systems - first to decode the catalogue card, then to make it through the corridors and stairwells into the open stacks, and there to discover, exactly where it was supposed to be, the desired book. For a ten-year-old to find he actually can steer himself through tens of thousands of volumes to the very one he wants is not without its satisfactions. Nor did it count for nothing to carry a library card in one's pocket; to pay a fine; to sit in a strange place, beyond the reach of parent and school, and read whatever one chose, in anonymity and peace; finally, to carry home across the city and even into bed at night a book with a local lineage of its own, a family tree of Newark readers to which one's name had now been added....

As the digitization of library collections and services has gained momentum, many libraries have found that their digital library collections and services have a user base far outdistancing how the library traditionally defines its core user population. During the same period, funding for libraries has remained quite localized. Geographically, the actual user population is much more dispersed than the source of funding.

6 major consumer trends that impact everyone...including libraries:

1. Convenience (fast food, delivery, concierge services)
2. Community ("I want to belong"; grassroots, collaborative economy; "Bowling Alone"; Maslow's hierarchy)
3. Control ("I want to learn it and do it myself"; the era of empowerment; [examples of] empowering brands: Nike, Google, Home Depot - "You can do it, we can help")
4. Choice ("I've got to have options"; the Age of Abundance; [institutions as] choice maximizers"; [examples of] choice-maximizing brands: Google, eBay, Amazon, Netflix)

   Convenience and Choice are things that people are willing to pay for. They'll tell you Free is important--but when push comes to shove, I'm willing to pay.

5. Experience ("Wow me"; word-of-mouth marketing - you'll listen to your friends, but not to advertising; your actions are your marketing; commoditization: the Internet has commoditized information but it cannot commoditize an experience: taste, touch, smell, sight, service; [engaging] the senses in your library...put a fountain in?; [examples of experiential brands: Starbucks, Dave & Busters, Niketown, Borders; edu-tainment
6. "Trendy" - great brands are trendy.

• A website that compares the hits - and the priorities - displayed by Google and by Yahoo for a given search inquiry. The resulting graphic comparison shows, among other things, that these two search engines are not interchangeable.
  
  
• A website that displays side-by-side results from Google and Yahoo without your having to open two browsers and type in your keyword(s) twice.

[T]he young are hardly alone in turning away from newspapers. Nor are they alone responsible for the dizzying growth of the so-called blogosphere, said to be increasing by 70,000 sites a day (according to the search portal technorati.com). In the first half of this year alone, the number of new blogs grew from 7.8 to 14.2 million. And if the numbers are dizzying, the sheer amount of information floating around is enough to give a person a serious case of Newsheimers.

Astonishing results are reported when news is passed from one blog to another: scores if not hundreds of thousands of hits, and, on sites that post readers’ reactions, responses that can often be more impressive in research and reasoning than anything likely to turn up in print. Newspaper journalists themselves often get their stories from blogs, and bloggers have been extremely useful in verifying or refuting the erroneous reportage of mainstream journalists.

Spend your money on content and user outcomes, not on practices developed in the nineteenth century for dead-tree catalogs. Work toward a single-search-box approach. Most of all…we must change, and change quickly. We can't afford our old practices.

I like [the report] most of all for acknowledging that the user is not broken. The user is quite smart, in fact, and is not to blame for the shortcomings of search in library applications. Library and information science has, for the most part, failed to address the limitations of its own tools with serious user-centric analyses and solutions. But the user has a hero in the team that wrote this brave report.

[Library] Information Technology departments (if you had one) were traditionally support mechanisms that kept the cogs turning behind the scenes. Increasingly, they are becoming an important part of the decision-making process and have more influence over how the public perceives your organization. As such, the type of people you hire into those positions changes because the requirements are very different. L2 is going to require a great deal of inter-departmental integration. In order to be adept at navigating L2 waters, the old fiefdoms need to disappear. L2 requires drastic and sweeping changes to our internal cultures and will require some form of institutional enlightenment.

Many libraries still operate as if they were monopoly operations. I have walked into wonderful libraries, yes, that enticed and amazed and satisfied, but I have also walked into too many libraries where the mise en scene had all the charm of a prison waiting room (complete with scowling attendants and long lines of people waiting to be allowed egress), where the regulations governing usage were more complicated than the legal action in Bleak House and where plenty of signs and pamplets informed the library with an unpleasant "eat your vegetables" undercurrent.

Libraries have powerful competition from other directions, from Amazon to Google Book Search. Whether libraries provide an important service is irrelevant if they provide it in a manner that drives their users away, particularly the users who vote.

Recently a public library director told me that he "hates" emailed courtesy notices because "they set up customers' expectations that the Library will help manage their accounts." Yes, sir, indeed they do, just as we expect our banks, stores, universities, HMOs, and other organizations to provide us information that makes navigating our complex worlds that much easier. Treat me well--21st-century style--and I am far more inclined to vote for the library bond act rather than commit the same money to buying used books on the Web for less than it costs to drive cross-town to your cathedral of information. [The recent flurry of discussion in the biblioblogosphere about "Library 2.0"], among other points it makes, tells librarians to hurry up please, it's time: grasp the importance of embracing comfort and life-management services, or be prepared for extinction.

• Dept. of Elaborate Public Library Fundraisers Posted September 29, 2005
• “Desperate Librarians" Pose for Fund-Raising Calendar Posted September 20, 2005
• Specialty License Plates Benefit Libraries (Elsewhere) Posted April 25, 2005; revised April 26, 2005
• Longtime Virginia Library User Leaves $2 Million to Public Library Posted April 25, 2005
• Nifty Library Fundraising Idea Posted March 24, 2005
• Library Fundraising Alert Posted March 15, 2005
• Another Reliable Funding Source for Public Libraries? Posted October 6, 2004
• Seattle PL Raises $80 Million; Atlanta PL Raises Zilch Posted March 25, 2004
• $$$ for Old Books = $$$ for New Books Posted December 3, 2003

Even in the silent reading rooms of our modern libraries, a kind of quiet collaboration takes place among readers, librarians, and authors. There is a tacit sense of community, and a reassuring solidity in the shared physical space that seems to provide an antidote to the specter of loneliness. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the emergence of the Internet has coincided with a doubling of public library attendance?

• that it's apparently possible to trademark an advertising campaign.
• that ALA vastly overestimates the uniqueness (not to mention the allegedly threatened effectiveness) of its "Read!" posters.
• that ALA will embarrass library workers everywhere by having sicked its lawyers on this tiny little private company.
• that ALA officials don't have much of a sense of humor.

“How easy is it to get to your library? Is it in an area where there is a lot of parking or is parking sometimes a problem? Is it close to stores that most people go to or do they have to make a special trip to visit the library? Is it close to public transportation for people who don’t have a car? A library that is not conveniently located is just putting up another barrier to potential patrons. For some people, if they can find a reason not to go, they won’t. We need to give them more reasons to visit and fewer reasons not to. Having a library in a popular shopping center is the easiest you can make access to the library without literally parking yourself outside their house.”

"Libraries have to be one of the most incredibly amazing institutions of the civilized world. For minimal or zero fee, you have access to troves of the most wonderful substance on Earth: books. Freely yours is the most ancient and modern art, literature, knowledge, and thought, ranging from the sublime to the odd. Somewhere in those shelves is a book, or a video or DVD or tape, on any subject your heart desires, or a masterful work of fiction or poetry that may change your life forever. I hope heaven has a library."

"It takes guts to create libraries that support the needs of all our students. It takes even more guts to support collections that may attract fierce opposition. But that just happens to be our job."

“Tales of terror and woe that shall include--but will by no means be limited to--a fish tank of death, geriatric security guards, underwear in front of the catalogs, teens in need of dosage adjustments, unclaimed porn on the printers, breaking and entering, restraining orders, brush fires, projectile vomiting and the Four Horsemen of the Reference Desk.”

"For the 237th straight year, Fimoculous will be aggregating all of the year-end lists. Lists are now being added at the rate of about 20 per day, so check back often."

“In libraries where we’re often answering as many questions about the rest room as we are about collections, policies, and public access, some of us simply don’t have time to be the tech-savviest star in the sphere. We should be able to ask each other questions, without apology, without hesitation, and without embarrassment. We should be able to depend on our colleagues for answers that are helpful, informative, and delivered with kindness…. To make a real difference in our communities, we need to keep talking to each other.”

“…The 1947 report [Public Use of the Library and Other Sources of Information] by Angus Campbell and Charles A. Metzner (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, 1950)], like the [2005] OCLC report [Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources] asked people to make suggestions about what libraries could do to make themselves more attractive. In several cases, the answers given in both surveys are exactly the same: advertise more; have more current materials; be open longer/more convenient hours.”

“Signs need to be grounded in a hierarchy of what they’re meant to do (navigate, advertise, educate, label) and then imstalled where users can see them, read them, and use them. The hierarchy should include a design template (e.g., all navigation signs look the same) and description of the kind of information that must be included (e.g., all navigation signs include area names and arrows that direct).”

• Barnes & Noble's Top 100 Bestsellers for 2005
• Amazon.com's Editors' and Customers' Picks of the Best Books of 2005
• January Magazine's Best Books of 2005

"Let's get something straight from the get-go. The First Amendment is sacrosanct. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of thought, the whole ball of wax -- it's the DNA of the United States, the stuff America is made of. You don't mess with it, ever. Without it, we're North Korea with a few shopping malls."