ROI vs. "Meeting the user where they are"

January 23rd, 2008 Stewart

Marketplace: Second Life’s economy slows down, too

It was some time ago, nearly two years I believe, that my friend Jim Milles introduced me to Second Life. Libraries were jumping on board in significant numbers as part of the Library 2.0 movement, an effort to meet the user where they are. But several things struck me as being a bad fit for libraries with Second Life:

• Second Life is a proprietary platform. While a 3-D VR web might open up some interesting venues for libraries to explore eventually, doing it all through one particular “game world” is limiting.
• People don’t go to Second Life’s virtual world to do research. (They go to Google.)
• Second Life costs real money if you want to play in any substantial way. Now that false economy is failing (see story above) and users are leaving Second Life in droves.

For pretty much every library, only a very small percentage of your primary users are on Second Life. For others to join, they’ll have to download proprietary software, build an avatar, and learn how to navigate in a 3D environment. And in the end, the librarian will still be pointing the patron to old-fashioned 2D resources. To be blunt, I never saw the point of all this.

Compare this with, say, Facebook. For a college or university library, it’s safe to say that a large number of your students, as well as some alumni and faculty, are already members. Setting up a business page on Facebook costs nothing, takes relatively little time to set up, and you can load search apps and forms for your most often used resources like the catalog and Google Scholar.

Meeting the user where they are is a very worthwhile goal, and libraries that pursue it should be innovative in their approaches. That said, as we continue to do more work with fewer resources, we should carefully consider our return on investment before taking the plunge with services like Second Life.

Posted in library 2.0, library reference, second life | 1 Comment »

Why sales reps should take lessons from reference librarians…

May 29th, 2007 Stewart

This Memorial Day weekend I began work on a home improvement project that quickly ran into a snag. My wife and I live in a 1925 American Foursquare that we’re always fixing up and this weekend we started installing a ceiling fan in one of the bedrooms on the second floor. After I removed the existing light fixture, we found a small pancake box mounted directly onto the lath underneath the ceiling plaster. While this is fine for supporting a two-pound light fixture, it’s wholly inadequate for a thirty-pound ceiling fan.

Ordinarily, a common adjustable bar hanger can be mounted between two studs to support the fan, but that requires access from the attic above, and this one part of the attic is sealed off. I started looking into my trusty Reader’s Digest home improvements book (a tad dated, but still a very useful manual) and found a page about installing an offset bar hanger from below. Better Homes & Gardens has a page about it as well.

So this morning I began calling electrical suppliers and lighting specialists to try and locate said offset hanger. After my third call, I was getting frustrated — No one had even heard of such a thing, and most of them seemed to be in a hurry to get me off the phone.

My last call was to the good folks at Shanor Electric Supply, a local business. First, the sales rep told me that he’s familiar with the offset hanger, but that they don’t keep them in stock. He then asked me what I was trying to do, and I explained that I needed to install a ceiling fan but had no access from the attic. He asked me a couple more questions, this time about the hole I’m working with and the space between the beams. He then tells me that he thinks he’s got a better solution and describes the patented Westinghouse Saf-T-Brace that can be installed from below through a 4-inch opening.

I drove 20 minutes out to their shop and he had the item pulled from their stock, on the counter, and ready to be rung up. I was out the door in less than five minutes.

For reference librarians, the lessons here are obvious. There’s always a question beneath the question. Diagnosing the “real” question means listening well, and developing a better understanding of what the customer needs are in any given transaction. In this case, I thought I knew what the best solution was; I didn’t know there was a better solution to be found until he told me about it.

I now have my Saf-T-Brace and I’m looking forward to installing it (and the new ceiling fan) tonight!

Posted in home improvement, library reference | 2 Comments »