CLA 2006: Stephen Abram Master Speaker Keynote

Stephen Abram's presentation was titled Libraries: Questions, Questions, Everywhere: Getting Our Share.  As usual, Stephen's presentation super high energy and focused on change and the need to adapt to all the new things that are coming down the pike to our profession.  CLA was very fortunate to be able to have Mr. Abram here to talk to us.  I wish they would have put him on Saturday or Sunday, since more people would have been able to hear his inspiring and thought-provoking talk.

He talked about some of the scientific innovations happening--real world things.  Sending light to the future and the past, sending light with data on it, transporting light from one place to another.  Information moves fast through light.

We need to play, adapt, and be ready for new information.  Libraries' core skill is not delivering information.  What we do well is to improve the quality of the question.  See how much use you get through your virtual branch (website) and consider reorganizing around the usage you see.  We need to acknowledge that users that come in to our virtual branches have different skills and different needs than the people who come in to your libraries. 

Stephen talked about anegnosis--that we don't want to admit that things are changing, a resistance to new knowledge.  He talked about the fact that we need to focus on the overall user experience with our online resources.  Our comfort with the catalog doesn't matter.  The users' comfort does matter. 

He talked about the fact that we can't compete with Google--Google's strength is search.  Our strength is not search.  We can't compete; that battle is over.  What does matter in libraries, what we are good at, is community, learning, and interactions.  Are we doing this on our website?  How many of us have as many reference questions answered online as in our physical libraries?  Can they contact live humans online from your library?  You have to have IM, e-mail, Skype.

He quoted Karen Schneider's famous line: "The user is not broken."  We are trying to turn our users into little librarians.  We should not market "information literacy" -- we are calling users illiterate before they come to us for help.  That does not begin that person's experience in a good way.  Over 40% of online users create their own content for the web.  They are online.  Where are we?

He recommends that we put up photographs of ourselves on our websites.  Other professionals (lawyers, doctors) do that.  But we remain a faceless institution.  We need to market our human factor.  Borders has books.  Databases can be purchased online on an individual level.  What we can do is provide our professional information-seeking skills to our users--that is what we need to advertise and market. 

Libraries are being built in ways that create community space, collaboration space, places for connections on a human level.  This is a strength.  We should capitalize on this. 

Google,  Yahoo!, and MSN know where people are--they know where your computers are coming from and customize your experience as a result with the information they push to you (read: ads).  How can libraries do this?  How can we customize our users' local experiences?

The U.S. is about 7 years behind technologically from the rest of the world.  Stephen recommends that you do not ally with Google, not link to Google Scholar, not link to Google Book Search, not send your materials to Google's librarian project because they want information from you--it's a one-way exchange where we lose.

Google Book Search and the Open Content Alliance are making huge headway in eBooks.  200 years of the Wall Street Journal are already in Google.  The book is not at risk.  Reading is up at all levels, sales are up, publication numbers are up.  Libraries should not invest money in protecting the book.  Most internet use is browserless.  Amazon can deliver books cully cataloged.  Virtual delivery of items will drive the price of items down (look at what's happened with songs in iTunes).  Google harvests data from their users through installations of their toolbar, usage of Gmail, etc.  Stephen has set up a false identity through Google as a Civil War professor, sent himself e-mails about the topic, did a bunch of searches, and now if he types in "ford lincoln" and doesn't get the car information, but rather information about how Lincoln was shot in the Ford Theater.  Your search experience changes, if you have the Google toolbar, based on what they've observed of your past search habits.  He talked briefly about Google Docs and Spreadsheets (word processing, spreadsheets, calendar, etc.)--basically, Google Office that is free. 

He talked about advertising.  Google's biggest customer is advertisers, and that is who they are beholden to.  Whose needs are they meeting?  The advertisers', not ours.  95% of people can not identify an ad on Google (according to a PEW study).  The moral of all of this is that librarians need to teach people how to realize that the results they are seeing are skewed by ads, skeevy search engine optimization, and "personalization."  To teach our users how to sort through all the chaff.  (Sarah's note: I don't think most librarians realize that this is happening, so how can we even begin to teach others until we ourselves gain knowledge about this phenomenon?)

65% of distance students are single moms.  Stephen talked to us about how we need to make spaces and services to accomodate these single parents, instead of chiding them for dropping their kids off with us for storytime and moving upstairs to find the books they need for their classes.  If you tie in classes for the single mothers at the same time as the storytimes happen, you will make that group of users very, very happy--and improve their quality of life.

We need to reorganize around this next generation of learners.  Large companies that we care about (Gale, Thompson Ed, NetG) have been put up for sale.  How will this change how these companies rovide services to our libraries? 

He talked about millennials, and how their thinking patterns and values are very different than the current generations'.  They have more friends, are more dviverse, have balanced lives, are confident, more politically inclined, achievement oriented, adaptive, optimistic about the future, multi-taskers, gamers, are format-agnostic (doesn't matter how the info comes in, as long as it's coming in).  He discussed how millennials look at pages differently.  Kids see the doughnut, while most of our pages are framed as an F-frame.  Have majojr navigation on the left, identity at the top, secondary navigation on the right, and major content in the middle.  All websites should follow this map, otherwise you create a learning curve for your user. 

He talked about the differences between the games we played (Pong, PacMan) and the new games like Everquest, Halo, etc.  Video games can be, and are being, used for educational.  Only 10% of video game production and 15% of video game sales are for violent games.  Most games are experiential, social, and educational--not based on blowing things up and hurting things.

He talked about Aaron Schmidt's experience of having 50% of all of their reference questions at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library come in through IM.  IM allows users who are otherwise shy or socially-disabled to communicate with us and use our services in a method that they are comfortable with.  E-mail is for old people.  IM is about conversations, while e-mail is just about sending letters faster than the postal mail.  Pennsylvania State University and uNB put their most at-risk students on IM and messaged them with research help from the library.

Stephen mentioned ChaCha, a site where you start a search and there is a guide who will help you through your searching process.  There are three big revolutions right now: blogging, podcasting, and streaming media.  He tralked about Podzinger, Spiral Frog, Podscope, YouTube, LimeWire, Kazaa, etc.  Why don't we incorporate some of the video content from these sites, like movie trailers, into our own websites as a way to advertise the materials we have in our libraries.  The strength of podcasting is portability and time-independent listening.  "YouTube is not just for fun anymore."  Harvard and Yale are using YouTube.  Use SingingFish to search for audio and video content.

He talked about ePaper, which is coming soon.  There is a new device that looks like five pens that fit together to build a complete projection system for a computer.  There is a small projector the size of a sugar cube.  He talked about the Sony Reader eBook device.  He showed some device that was a full web browser on something the size of a credit card (but I don't know where it came from or its name--sorry!).  He talked about how libraries need to reformat our web content for these portable devices and small screens.

We need to be very careful to keep our webpages simple so that users can find the information we have.  MySpace is huge and libraries need to be in this space.  They get 15 million daily users.  The average user is 31.  Our major market in libraries is for people in the community.  He showed Hennepin County's MySpace page--with a disclaimer about the ads showing up on MySpace, a catalog quick search that users can copy and paste into their own pages, links to their blogs, their events, etc.  He talked about holding a class like Aaron Schmidt's "Pimp Your MySpace Page."  And not only teaching cool happy stuff that are fun for the kids, talk about how to block the creepy people, why you don't want to post risque photos, how to safe on the web in MySpace and other places.  Stephen said that Aaron Schmidt is his favorite librarian, hands down.  Charlotte and Mecklenberg County's Library requires that kids have a library card to be the library's friend on MySpace, which is specifically geared as a safe place for kids and teens.  At the university level, 80% of students have Facebook accounts.  Facebook and MySpace are sustainable social networks...consistent places where people can share and connect.

He touched briefly on Second Life and the library on InfoIsland.  Harvard Law, BBC, Reuters are all using Second Life.  Courses, classes, and events are held in this space.   The blog to track is InfoIsland.org.  He talked about a few other tools--Rollyo, Google Custom Search, Wikis, Folksonomies, RSS, Personalized Alerts, Open Access, Screencasting, Photos, IM, Rankings and user-driven reviews, Personalization, Socially-driven content--all elements of Web 2.0.  We need to let people to contribute to content on our websites--leave comments on our blogs, talk to us, and give us the information that we do, indeed, want from them.