Notes on Lorcan Dempsey's talk at King Library

Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC, Vice President for Research and Chief Strategist

Date: November 16, 2007, 9:00 am to 10:30 am

Topic: Libraries in the New Network Environment

Lorcan Dempsey highlighted the fact that in the Network Environment “discovery happens elsewhere”—researchers often don’t start their research on the library web site. So libraries must build service around the user’s workflow (we need to go where the users are). Since attention is scare and resources are abundant, we have to compete for attention by taking our services to our users.

Dempsey also discussed people as “entry points” to information as opposed to institutions. Examples are people’s Facebook or Myspace or Delicious or Library Thing pages. What about librarians as entry points?

How do we deliver our network into the integrated local user environment? How do we increase our library’s web presence?

Through: Personal workflow (rss feeds, toolbars, tagging)
Institutional workflow (portals, class management systems)
Network level workflow (search engines, online presence)

Providing better “discovery environments” means integrating the management environment (library web site, ILS) with the user environment.

Users want a search followed by rich navigation like Google Booksearch (citations, maps, related content, context) and Ask.com. Both search environments offer a richer view of the world and information in context. Users like to share, give and receive recommendations, review, and rate items. They are looking for enriched data in a catalog (similar searches, related items, user tagging, etc.).

Discovery Happens Elsewhere:

• Putting your catalog elsewhere
• Social networking sites
• Places links in Wikipedia entries to library special collections
• Syndicating services (putting them elsewhere): RSS (catalog or subject feeds from it); Portlets; Integrate into course management systems

Providing Better Discovery Environments: (A few ideas)

• Library presence in Blackboard by class and subject area
• Library Del.icio.us page with suggested links and tag clouds for subjects (see Stanford’s page: https://www.stanford.edu/group/ic/cgi-bin/drupal/delicous)
• King Library Facebook page with services embedded in the profile (catalog, subject guides, reference help, etc.)
• Library Blog for FAQs or comments