my first official "shush"

Oh, glorious day! As of this moment, having just finished reading an article for Wednesday's Ya lit class, I am done with the semester. It certainly was a more intense semester than I had expected but well worth the hard work and effort. Not to mention the blood, sweat and tears. Man, what a great band.

All my crowing aside, I'm happy to have found the light at the end of the tunnel. I'll be using the time wisely, to finalize some wedding preparations, begin the process of looking for a job, visit family and friends in Indiana, and read a few good books. That doesn't mean I'm not hard at work, as I'm taking on extra hours to pad the wallet. And therein lies, ladies and gentlemen, the reason behind this post!

I've picked up an extra shift tonight, which is the day before finals for undergrads. The students are, understandably, both anxious and punchy--a regrettable side effect of the pressure they're all under. In this highly emotional state, many of the students have forgotten that two floors of the library are deemed "quiet" floors. You can't talk on your cellphone, you shouldn't be talking to your neighbor. That's all gone out the window now and it's up to me to put an end to it! And so I'll do, with a little humor. I found a couple of good pictures, so there'd be a little variation, and tried to make it as easily understood as possible. Can you tell me who the lady is? First one who gets it right earns a cookie!

flickr and books and tags, oh my!

So you may have noticed that I've added some new "thingies" to the right of the blog. I've been playing around with widgets (as they're called) to see if I could pimp my blog. It's all in the spirit of trying to make this blog feel more like it's mine--that and I see other people doing really cool things with their blogs, so I wanted to do it with mine. In the future I'm going to try and fix the page's code so it opens up the space a little more--you may notice that there's a lot of wasted space on the blog, with such wide margins. It's not my fault, it's the template that blogger provides. That'll all change, hopefully after the semester ends.

I wanted to just briefly mention what those widgets on the right are. I've already talked about the flickr tag--which is really awesome--but the three books listed from my library are just as cool. These are books that I've cataloged at LibraryThing--books that I own--and this widget is giving three random books from that catalog. There's a lot of cool ways that LibraryThing has been used. I'll save that for an upcoming post (let's hope!), mainly because I've realized I haven't been blogging about my profession at all. Shameful.

The other widget is what's referred to as a "tag cloud." It's a list of tags that I've applied to websites I've tagged on delicious. This widget takes those tags and aggregates them in a visual manner so that you can tell which tags are more often applied, judging from the size and shade of color of the tag. So, you notice the tag "folksonomy" is really big and dark. That's because I've applied the tag of "folksonomy" more often than other tags, such as "destination," which is tiny and lightly-shaded. Pretty cool, huh? If you're interested in learning more about these new Internet applications, I'd suggest going to the websites themselves. Links are provided on the widget itself--just look for the little blurb.

CRM @ the library - students respond

I had to give a presentation for my Reference course yesterday, which the focus was on improving customer service at the reference desk. Before going in, I was wondering if I should go into my idea of CRM @ the library and decided to include it at the end of my presentation. It was my idea that it could generate some feedback, so I could know better what the pros and cons were. My fellow students didn't disappoint me--there were enough people responding to my idea that the professor cut off the discussion, due to time restraints (and she even had some input on it as well).

The response I knew I would get was that some people didn't like the thought of the library knowing about their habits--the privacy issue. After the initial shuddering, someone made a great point--younger people are having trouble understanding privacy issues. Take, for example, the middle and high school students in Massachusetts who have recently been in trouble with the law, because they post pictures and discussions on MySpace about the latest party--where underage drinking was taking place, or a fight broke out. This can be contributed to either one of these cases: that they are ignorant of privacy issues, where information volunteered in a public space can be used against them; or they don't care, thinking it won't be found--an idea known as "security through obscurity." Regardless to say, the point that was made opened up a whole can of worms.

The professor made the point that she didn't like my term "opt-out" but preferred "opt-in"--this was my way of thinking about the program, but I was not using the correct terminology for it. Of course, it would be run as a pilot program that people could opt-in to.

Because of the lack of time available for the responses, I received more criticism than reinforcement--but that was what I expected. You have to get the knee-jerk out of the way before the brain can begin to function--politics speak to that. But the reinforcement I received was very positive, telling me that people are not only open to the idea but enthusiastic about it. So, I will go further into the idea in future posts, such as the technology that can be used to make this idea a reality. (Should I begin to copyright my thoughts?)

CRM @ the library?

This will be more of a reminder to me to blog about this idea later, but I'll give you a taste of things to come. Customer Relationship Management has been in the business world for years--it's becoming so entrenched that people are forgetting what CRM stands for. I've heard it referred to as the "customer really matters" by the VP of area operations when I was working in the hotel industry and, while that definition retains some of the flavor of CRM, it doesn't touch on how customer-intensive CRM can be. One of the ideas I've been kicking around is how CRM could be brought to libraries--government institutions are notorious for not adopting helpful business practices, and libraries are right there with them. There's an argument that's been going on for some time on whether to refer to library users as "customers," as opposed to "patrons" and it's very telling of how libraries view their support base.

One of the reasons I see further reluctance to adopt CRM is because one of the cornerstones of CRM is collecting information on your customers, so you can create personal levels of conversation with them. This is anthema to libraries, who have been railing against the Patriot Act and have maintained that privacy is one of their ultimate concerns. It can go as far as creating guidelines, to not mention a book that a patron might like, because you've noticed them checking out similar ones before. But are people really that concerned anymore about keeping what they've read private from an institution? Is privacy from governmental intrusion the same as institutional privacy? The millions of users of Amazon is an example of this idea chipping away at privacy, in order to obtain personalized service. If libraries were to institute a similar program, one where people could opt-out if they wanted to maintain total privacy, would they see an increase in use? I certainly think so, but a lot of my colleagues and fellow students cringe at the idea.