Improving Web Presence

Sarah Houghton-Jan, author of Librarian in Black, shares in a recent post the slides from her latest workshop, The Broke Library's Guide to a Better Web Presence (PDF).  The workshop is constructed around twenty free and low-cost tips to improve library websites.  The tip that I found most useful was the operational planning advice about plotting out a hierarchy of technology needs to provide the basis for a three-year plan.  Technology needs are sorted into a pyramid chart (think USDA Food Pyramid), which seemed like a clear and concise way to advocate technology improvements to the folks in control of the budget.  I'll certainly think about incorporating such a schema into the technology memo project due at the end of the semester.

Another tip I liked was the creation of dynamic and interactive employee recommendations, perhaps in a blog format to invite user feedback.  I've always been a big believer in employee recommendations although, truthfully, they've often been a letdown as I find myself championing a service that my coworkers are reluctant or slow to participate in, or that just winds up looking like books dumped on a shelf, or that doesn't really speak to the needs of the customers/patrons.  So I like the idea of it being interactive and easy to update, and particularly, the idea of allowing patrons to review books on the site (i.e. farming out some of the work!).  I'm not sure that putting the program on the web will necessarily solve the problem, but it wouldn't cost much to give it a shot.

Something that was new to me was the idea of improving OPAC functionality with enhancements like Library Thing for Libraries to allow for library 2.0 interactive features without having to replace the ILS.  Brilliant!  It's not free, or necessarily even cheap, but it's a way to vastly a product that you might be stuck with for awhile.

Some of the other tips involved getting the most out of free services like flickr, blogger, and various mash-ups and image generators.  Some of these suggestions very much oriented toward attracting teenagers to the library, which is certainly a noble goal but not a particular area of interest for me.  Call me stodgy, but I do think that library 2.0 goals can err on the side of being too informal, too trendy, and too compromising of the profession.  I will not answer reference queries via some web-generated avatar-- not if I have any say in the matter.  I just don't believe that it sets the right tone for the kind of professionalism I strive for.  Furthermore, it seems like there's a lack of discussion about the idea of keeping a healthy distance between librarians and patrons and between librarians' private and public web personae.  Still, there's an awful lot of good advice to experiment with in this presentation, and I'm glad to have been given some new ideas to research.