Comments on: It’s not all about the tech – why 2.0 tech fails

By: Pam MacKellar

Pam MacKellar — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:15:13 +0000

Hallelujah, Amen and all that! You are so right, Meredith. As dry and boring as it sounds, the only way a Web 2.0 (or any other) library project is going to be successful is if it meets a need in the community. Ideally, the need is addressed in the library’s plan – and there are goals and objectives attached to the need, which technology may help to accomplish. Grasping this basic concept is fundamental in doing our work. (I can see all your eyes rolling from here.) But really, I know there are librarians who copy templates and plug in some random unrelated information to create a strategic plan – just to get it over with and submitted to the state library on time. Little do they know, they are shooting themselves in the foot! Not to mention ignoring community needs. Staff don’t know what they are trying to accomplish, no less how to implement successful Web 2.0 projects.

By: Meredith Farkas

Meredith Farkas — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 19:35:19 +0000

I agree, Caleb, that both play does not preclude planning (nor planning preclude play). Dive right in and play, of course! That’s part of how we learn about the tools and determine whether or not they’d be a good fit for our library and population. We can always experiment with new tech behind the scenes first. And I certainly don’t believe in spending a year planning for the creation of the perfect blog, because tech implementation should always be seen as an iterative process where we put something out there and then improve it based on user feedback. But I do believe that technology should be implemented for our patrons (or staff) to serve a specific purpose/need and that requires us to know our target population and their needs. And even when we plan well, it’s always an experiment. We never know for sure that it’ll work until it’s out there. I implemented a service once based on a good understanding of my users (and what they’d specifically told me they wanted) and had it fail. Failure will happen sometimes, and that’s not a bad thing if we can learn from it.

By: caleb

caleb — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:42:44 +0000

Interesting, Meredith, because I think of you as one of the people who has encouraged us all to dive right in and play around with Web 2.0 tools, stuffy-slow-moving-strategic-planning-mission-oriented organizations be damned.

One way to embrace both approaches might be to say that librarians have a personal professional responsibility to explore, and an institutional one to plan.

By: Meredith Farkas

Meredith Farkas — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 12:45:13 +0000

Great points, Margaret! I remember one of my LIS students writing a research paper where she talked about how students these days use social bookmarking and RSS a lot. This statement was not based on anything but an assumption, which I think has been a common problem in our profession. We assume that our students are using tools that they may not be using (some they obviously are, but others we don’t know for sure about), and we assume that our students want us to deliver information to them using those tools. The fact is, every population is different. My students are not like the population of Darien, CT. Nor are they the same sort of population the Brooklyn College Library has engaged with their MySpace profile. It means that we need to form a clear understanding of our own population, what tech they use, and what they want from the library (rather than just trying to replicate what others have done). That was definitely a point I should have made in my original post, as it is a critical factor in the success or failure of a web 2.0 project.

By: Margaret

Margaret — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 23:00:47 +0000

I used to work at a library that served mostly undergraduate students, and mostly staffed by undergrad student workers. We wanted to create some 2.0 content that the student workers could update and would be useful to them, but would also be interesting for patrons. I set a Facebook group and a blog, and the blog ended up being a lot more successful. I think that’s because the blog required some initial training, and we ended up assigning blog posts to students as part of their regular duties, both of which made it easier to keep up. I’d envisioned the Facebook group as an easy way to announce changes in hours and programs, but that wasn’t helpful for the student workers, and it wasn’t relevant to how the students used the library.

I think sometimes jettisoning a failed project is ok, as long as you take the time to figure out why it didn’t work. It’s also important to recognize that one’s assumptions about how users use technology may not be valid– younger people may have no interest in following the library on Facebook, and older people may want to follow the library on Twitter.