Internet Librarian 2008: U.S. Public Libraries and Web 2.0

Internet Librarian 2008: U.S. Public Libraries and Web 2.0
Zeth Lietzau

Zeth is the Associate Director of the Library Research Service, a unit of the Colorado State Library.  He did a study of Web 2.0 use in public libraries in the country, which you can download from his blog post on the LRS website.  Who are the libraries who are really using Web 2.0 technologies?  Are there firm statistics that show success from these tools?  They directly observed over 600 library websites to see what was being used.  They did not do a survey because the respondents are self-selected and not representative of the library world and the response rate was likely to be low.  The limitations of the observatino method were that they possibly missed uses of  technologies that they could not find through libraries’ websites.  Also, it’s a “snapshot in time” – about 6 months ago.  New things have come out since then of course.  They also couldn’t get in to see “My Account” features that required a library card.

They sampled public libraries in different population levels throughout the U.S. and also looked at all Colorado public libraries.  They had to define Library 2.0 – and used the definition in Wikipedia.  They wanted to set a list of what Library 2.0 technologies were – they did some brainstorming, created an in-house survey tool, asked library-world experts on Library 2.0.  For the purpose of the study, they defined the following Library 2.0 technologies: website, online catalog, personalized library account, blogs, RSS, virtual reference, wikis, social networking, and podcasting. The Results
Websites and Catalogs – Most libraries had websites and catalogs,but fewer than half of libraries with populations under 10,000 have an online catalog.
Online Library Cards – very few libraries offered the ability to apply for and use an online library card.
Blogs and RSS Feeds – Blogs did not follow a steady downturn depending on the size of libraries.  Smaller libraries and bigger libraries had blogs.  The same trend occurred with RSS.
Virtual Reference – A lot of libraries still don’t offer email reference – less than 1 in 4 libraries serving under 10,000 people offer email reference.  Chat reference numbers were even lower.
Social Networking – More libraries have MySpace and Flickr than have Facebook.  MySpace pages were largely found on the teen portions of the library’s website.  Very, very few small libraries offered any social networking presence.
The study looked at the numbers of libraries nationally that would, based on this sample, be offering these services.  They also looked at how many people would actually have access to the various services through their libraries, which shows higher numbers since the bigger libraries tend to offer more Web 2.0 services. They set up a 29 point scale to determine a list of libraries that are early adopters.  The top libraries in the various population ranges were the Hennepin County Library, Lincoln City Libraries, Benicia Public Library, Rocky River Public Library, and the Lena Public Library.  What are the characteristics of these early adopters?  They have higher staffing levels, more funding, more electronic resource expenditures, more programming, more electronic users per capita, had bigger collections of media, more in-library visitors, and more public access computers.  More money and more staff = more of everything else.  Libraries that have traditionally been successful with their services have funneled resources into Library 2.0 and that is their next area of targeted success.

IL2008