"What if they don't care about the library?"

"What if they don't care about library?" For me, this is one of the biggest questions of Participatory Librarianship/New Librarianship.

Based on my old America/China dichotomy, American libraries shouldn't have this problem, because libraries here have a much bigger user base. But after I came here, I realized that this was actually a problem here. I even heard this question in IST511 given by Professor Lankes.

But even so, this is a larger problem in China.

I heard a lot about how Chinese people don't care about libraries, public or academic ones. For example, some people just complain about why the libraries cannot offer some very specific resources, which, in fact, are offered by these libraries. This case is far from the worst. What's worse is that a huge number of people have no idea what a library is; they come to the libraries to buy books. Or worse, they don't know anything about a library.

Chinese libraries are doing marketing, in various ways. But even the best examples may not work effectively, because, guess what, people don't care. That's what I heard from some librarians from Tsinghua University Library, which is one of the best libraries in China and just won the 10th IFLA International Marketing Award earlier this year. Moreover, a large number of Chinese libraries are using Sina Weibo as a way to promote the libraries. Except for few ones, most of these libraries are suffering from either "echo chamber effect" or meaninglessly few followers. In this term, I definitely agree with Dave that marketing itself cannot make a difference.

Back to 511. In class, when one of my classmates asked Dave what if library members don't care about the library. I think Dave made a good point that we should try to find a way to make them care, either by working harder, or by finding what they need or care about, beyond libraries. So here comes the boundary of 511, since it's only about the worldview rather than any real world skills needed by a librarian, I still don't know how to actually make members care, but at least I know there is a direction that may work. That's why I look forward to the "Library Planning, Marketing, and Assessment" class next semester.

Library personas

I have always been saying that I am a fan of eBooks. I mean, I AM, except for few cases. For example, I subscribed to the print version of Library Journal. After making the decision, I thought it may not be the best idea I have ever made, because, first of all, I assumed that all the articles you can read in the print version of the journal can be found on the website; moreover, after getting the first two issues, I found that most of the contents were book reviews. (I cannot stop wondering, is acquisition still that important nowadays?)

But on the other hand, I did read an article that was not published on Library Journal's website from the October 1st issue. This is Aaron Schmidt's Persona Guidance, which is a very interesting article, and  I failed to find it in his column on the website

I read about Europeana's seven personas years ago. I was really excited about it. Clearly, it's a useful way to design and assess your library's services. After a second thought, compared with general user interviews, I think designing library personas can be a more systematic approach to research your members. (But I do think massive user interviews are one of the sources to design library personas.)

In the article, Aaron mentioned a number of the components of a library persona profile, namely, members' names, photographs (even though all the personas are fictional depictions), goals, quotes as well as the ages.

In the real world, Europeana's personas include each user's personal information, interest, media use, searching strategy as well as his/her relationship with Europeana. HathiTrust's personas are very similar with the one of Europeana, maybe because that both of them are digital library projects. Certainly, they are different compared with a "general library". So I felt it interesting to find the library personas designed by Cornell University Library. The library identified three group of library members: faculties, graduate students and undergraduate students, compared with the more general user groups of Europeana and HathiTrust. And for each of the users, there are personal background, library interactions and transactions, key experiences as well as luxuries, comforts and necessities.

However, all these examples seem to fail to consider the goals of the library members, which was mentioned in Aaron's article. It's understandable that it's hard to summarize members' goals into patterns, but as Aaron stated in the article:"A persona's goals are probably the most important piece of the puzzle ... because user motivations and goals should be a focal point, so you need to ensure that the goals of each persona are realistic."

It reminds me of OCLC's “Geek the Library” project, whose focus is actually on library funding, but the value the libraries transfer to the community is "What's your hobby/geek? And no matter what it is, the local library can support it." The whole project is a collection of the personal narratives of library members, which is not a portfolio of personas per se, but is similar with that (in terms of its focus on individuals), and has a stronger focus on members' passionate.

Library persona sounds like an interesting way to think about the library members to me. So, I am curious about what other libraries are using this method besides the above examples.