Adding Value: Getting to the Heart of the Matter

Editor's Notes

• #3: Definition - adding value is accomplished by using the talents, skills and expertise of staff members using a set of processes to produce a product or service. Technology is a means to an end
• #5: Similar to Orr’s Input-Output-Outcomes model
• #6: Value-Added Processing in Information Systems- 1986
• #9: The user built workflow around the library
• #16: There is a collective wealth held hostage by redundant operations and collections in academic libraries
• #17: Library as wagon wheel – the center of the universe – rather than a node in a network
• #20: Pew Internet research studies
• #21: What has changed?The library is an institution scale while many of its users operate at network scale
• #22: What has changed? Libraries are redundantly managing local infrastructure which creates little distinctive value.
• #23: Assisting customers by reducing or eliminating the need for access and retrieval so that they can making better decisionsSatisficingNow: Attention scarce, resources abundantNow: The library must build its services around user workflowNow: low transaction costs distribute activities across the networkNow: moving apart in network environment(Dempsey, 2008)
• #25: The 5 Cs – Community, Content, Context, Connection, Co-Creation
• #26: Reach more of your community
• #27: Building New VirtualCommunities
• #28: Building New VirtualCommunities – EXPAND the size of the pie
• #29: The traditional content of the library is increasingly becoming available from several competitive sources. Google Books, Google Scholar, Internet Archive, Libraries can provide access to unique content in the form of historical photos, diaries, movies, and so forth. Many libraries have digitized some of their unique “special” collections and made them available on the Net. Should a library digitize special collections on their own? Expertise, equipment, space, and …Consortium, outsource
• #30: Special collections
• #35: Aggregation sitesSearch engine optimizationUse commercial firms to digitize content
• #36: 2nd C - Context
• #38: Richard Wurman – 5 ways to organize informationFlickr Photo by tine negus Latch
• #39: OpenStreetMap.OrgOpenMaps.EU,Open.MapQuest.Com, OpenCycleMap.Org, and others
• #41: Alphabetical order is perhaps the most frequently used method for organizing information, especially in libraries. Consider the fiction is organized in most public libraries (alphabetical by author’s last name), words in a dictionary, a telephone book, an index, and so forth.Subject headings in a catalogFlickr photo by madeBYwake library card catalogFlickr photo by noricum DictionaryFlickr photo by termix Icelandic Telephone book
• #42: Timeworks especially well when a series of events have happen over time. Thus, exhibitions, museums, histories utilize timelines to help orientate the visitor. Time is a well-recognize framework from which to observe and compare changes. Timelines are particularly useful for studying history, as they convey a sense of change over time. Wars and social movements are often shown as timelines. Timelines are also useful for biographies. Examples include:Chronology of Shakespeare's playsTimeline of the American Civil Rights MovementTimeline of European explorationTimeline of Solar System explorationTimeline of United States history (1930-1949)Timeline of World War IOpen source timeline – timelineJS http://timeline.verite.co/ Another open source timeline http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/
• #43: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png
• #44: Category is another effective means of organizing information or physical objects. Types of materials usually organize retail stores and libraries. Category is often reinforced by the use of colors.Flickr image by Deciter Interactions Social Media Categories
• #45: Showing categories and their relationships to one another using an information visualization tool
• #46: Library Subject HeadingsFlickr photo by djfianderH365/17 having my own personal copy of the LCSH amuses meFlickr photo by Phil Shirley BooksFamily trees Flickr photo by mweitkamp
• #47: Maslow Hierarchy organizing items from least expensive to most expensive, by order of importance, by magnitude from small to large, and numerical order. A synonym for hierarchy is continuum when comparing things across a common measure – highest to lowest, best to worst, first to last. Hierarchy is created through superordinate/subordinate or parent/child relationships. We typically look at this type of information from left to right or top/down organization. Flickr image by aymansarhan Maslow Hierarch of Needs
• #48: Application icons www.iconarchive.com
• #49: Flickr photo by USC Upstate Habitat for Humanity of Spartanburg
• #50: Organizing content based on your audience’s needs is a best practice by task or serviceGoogle images Audience wererolling.blogspot.comYou should use various means to analyze your audience, including: Web analytics: With appropriate steps to protect privacy, Google Analytics and similar tools can give you a wealth of information about the people who use your website and the tasks they try to complete on your site. For example, how did they get there? What page did they first visit? Where did they go from that page? If they used your site search, what page were they on at the time? What terms did they use to search for what they were looking for? Usability testing: Usability tests begin with a short series of questions about the participants’ background, needs, and familiarity with your website. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from a real site visitor. Use open- as well as closed-ended questions to get to know them well. Learn more at the Usability Testing section at Usability.gov or our own Usability Testing page. Customer satisfaction surveys: You can include questions to ask about your visitors’ occupations, why they come to your site, and what they want to accomplish. Read more about Customer Satisfaction Metrics. Focus groups: Even with a few participants, a focus group can tell you what some typical visitors think about your site. Use focus groups to get information about general impressions and ideas for new and useful features. Don’t ask participants what they would do. Instead, use usability testing to get that answer. Market Research: Many polling firms, media research companies, and nonprofit and academic research centers collect and analyze data about web users and their behavior on the web. See the section below for a list of those organizations. Web server logs: Server logs can provide some data about your visitors, such as country of origin. Email, phone calls, letters, and other contacts with the public: Find out the top requests and complaints coming into your agency by phone, email, and in-person service centers. If you have a central agency phone number (such as a 1-800 number), get regular reports from the operators to find out what your audience is asking for and who they are. Anticipating customer needs: To determine what your customers want on common types of web pages, review Users' Questions and Guidance for Common Types of Web Pages (PDF, 88 KB, 8 pages, April 2009). Input from other web content managers: Touch base with your colleagues at other agencies. Are you serving the same audiences? If so, work with them to make sure your websites complement, but don't duplicate, each other. Search data: Find out the terms your visitors are typing into your search engine. Determine which types of users they map to. Make sure the terms they use are the same terms and labels you’re using on your site. And make sure the most requested items are easily accessible from your homepage. Commercial products that provide demographic data about your website visitors: There are a variety of products that will collect and analyze demographic data about your website visitors.
• #51: National Archives of Australia – generous interface
• #52: Adding more context by showing the links between various segments of the collection
• #53: Tagging Flickr photo by ralph58 Tag CenterReviewsRatings Flickr photo by MoHDIharsh_review
• #54: Tagging
• #55: Tap people power
• #56: Contextualization – adding contextual knowledge to objects by telling stories, identifying the names of people, places and dates.Image of the Earth rising over the Moon from Apollo 8This view of the rising Earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts as they came from behind the Moon after the lunar orbit insertion burn. Earth is about five degrees above the horizon in the photo. The unnamed surface features in the foreground are near the eastern limb of the Moon as viewed from Earth. The lunar horizon is approximately 780 kilometers from the spacecraft. Width of the photographed area at the horizon is about 175 kilometers. On the Earth 240,000 miles away, the sunset terminator bisects Africa. Credit: NASAThe three-astronaut crew — Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell, and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders — became the first humans to travel beyond low Earth orbit, the first to see Earth as a whole planet, and then the first to directly see the far side of the Moon. The 1968 mission, the third flight of the Saturn V rocket and the first manned launch of the Saturn V, was also the first manned launch from the John F. Kennedy Space Center, Florida, located adjacent to Cape Canaveral.Orbited the moon 10 times and a Christmas Eve television broadcast in 1968
• #57: The 4th C – Connection Embedded librarianWandering librarianTeam memberUnderstand the needs of the user betterBetter understand how to communicate with the user
• #58: The 5th C – Collaboration
• #60: People seem to get involved in a crowdsourcing project for the underlying immaterial reward, combining egocentric and altruistic factors. Simon Winchester’s The Story of Everything – history of the OEDCrowd funding – KickStarterMicrowork – Mechanical TurkInducement prize – Netflix (10%); DARPA balloon experiment – 10 balloons (MIT less than 9 hours);Implicit crowdsourcing – reCAPTCHA ensure a response is from a human being anti-spamCitizen science – GalazyZoo – 170,000 volunteers, over 50,000,000 classifications – type of galaxyKey ingredients in this mix include: satisfying curiosity, seeking challenges, earning status and getting recognition within a community, intellectual enrichment, belonging to a group, working for the public good, or simply having fun. Collaborators not users, contribute to real research, don’t waste people’s time
• #61: All of these sites get 1 MILLION hours / year of community effort
• #62: Transcription – while reading digitized materials people can transcribe the content so that it can be then included in a full text index of the library’s content. Noteworthy projects include the National Library of Australia’s Trove site where people can transcribe early newspapers, the National Library of the Netherlands, the New York Public Library’s project to transcribe historical restaurant menus, the National Library of Finland’s Digitalkoot, and several others.
• #63: Since 2008, 93,072,150 corrected lines of newspapers has occurred (as of April 2013)
• #65: University of Iowa libraries
• #67: Indirect transcription1.1 billion users helped digitizing books using reCAPTCHA to date resulting in 2 million digitized book annually
• #68: DigitalKoot = Digital Volunteers Digitized more than 5 million pages of 18th to 20th century textsMole Hunt – are two words the sameMole Bridge – Spell correctly the words on the screen – to build the bridge
• #69: Georeferencing – allows people to “anchor” or align one or more points of a digitized historical map with a current map. Users can then see all of the maps that encompass a particular place.
• #71: A plan of the town of St John's on the island of Antigua, drawn in 1788 by Surveyor General John Killian. Overlaid on modern mapping online, image [copyright] 2013 Digital Globe, [copyright] 2013 Google.
• #73: Edinburgh City Library – Edinburgh Reads and Around the World in 80 DIs
• #74: Complementing collections – active pursuit of additional objects and content to be included in a (Web) exhibit or collection.
• #75: Classification – gathering or correcting descriptive metadata related to objects in a collection using social tagging, user generated metadata, and folksonomies.Civil War Faces, Library of Congress (USA) The Library of Congress is calling on the crowd to help identify peopleand photographers in the Liljenquist Family collection of ambrotype and tintype photographs from the Civil War.
• #76: Co-curation – using inspiration and expertise of non-professional curators to create (Web) exhibits.Engaging a community so that they become excited about the library and its services can lead to collaboration so that the experience for everyone is greatly enriched.
• #77: Pinterest – Civil War
• #80: Achieve goals the library would never have the time, money or staff resources to achieve on its own
• #81: Achieve goals in a much faster timeframe than the library would be able to achieve if it worked on its own
• #82: Actively involving and engaging the community with the library and its other users and collections
• #83: Tap into the knowledge, expertise, and interest of the community
• #84: Adding value to a resource by the addition of comments, tags, ratings, reviews
• #85: Improving quality of the content – text or catalog corrections that result in more accurate searching, finding more content of value
• #86: Making library resources discoverable in new and different ways, tagging
• #87: Gaining insights about what is valuable from the customer’s perspective
• #88: High level of community involvement is another way to demonstrate value
• #90: Obvious Questions
• #92: Letting go of Tradition
• #94: Through consortiums
• #95: Create new tools – tools that will assist the library in helping people be more productive or more innovative in their jobs - meeting the goals of its own organization