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March 03, 2008
Why free is the future for businesses, and libraries
The Wired issue from a week ago featured a story by Chris Anderson about why "free" is essential to new web business. As the library is one of these lovely "free" services, it behooves us to read this article to find out why "free" is so important to our users and then use that information to market and publicize our services appropriately. We have a lot of stuff. And it's free. We're situated pretty nicely, according to the author.
There is something to this though. Just anecdotally think about what you use online - is it the for pay services or the free ones, even if the free ones don't have all the features that the for pay services have? What about people you know; what do they do? What about for the library staff computers - is there a lot of free stuff on them (like Firefox, SpyBot Search & Destroy, etc.)?
Just read the article and see what you come away with - see what you can apply to your job. You'll find at least one thing - trust me :)
March 3, 2008 | Permalink
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Comments
Whoops! Thanks Ruth. The link has been corrected.
Posted by: Sarah Houghton-Jan (Librarian in Black) | March 5, 2008
Your link has too many https to work!
Posted by: Ruth | March 5, 2008
I agree that we give our stuff away for free... sort of. The problem is that many of the transactions with our patrons are structured as if they were pay transactions. To get access to Databases or to place holds, patrons have to type in patron ids just as if they were using credit card numbers to buy something.
Of course, we are selling our patrons something. It's just that they have already paid for it (with their taxes) when they try to access it. So, in a way, we are more like the companies selling something really cheap that are competing against something free (like Google).
Posted by: Liam Hegarty | March 4, 2008
