The consultation paper includes 30 essays offering different views of what the important issues are, from people including authors Tracy Chevalier and Michael Rosen; Random House Chair and Chief Executive Gail Rebuck, Starbucks MD Darcy Willson-Rymer; and many others. It also poses a series of questions upon which the DCMS seeks views from as wide a range of people as possible including the library and publishing community.
According to The Guardian, elements of the paper could become policy early next year, and it is obvious that Hodge believes libraries in Britain require a radical shift in their priorities if they are to survive.
The incredible rise of easy internet access and use means that libraries simply have to compete and perform more effectively if they are to justify the public investment they need. Sleepwalking into the era of the iPhone, the eBook and the Xbox without a strategy, runs the risk of turning the library service into a curiosity of history like telex machines or typewriters.
Here is a thought provoking presentation by John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of The Rocky Mountain News. Founded in 1859, The Rocky Mountain News was Colorado’s oldest newspaper. However, it published its final edition on February 27, 2009. It was the first major paper to close after the economic crash and Temple outlines the events that led to the paper’s closure, many of them related to the paper’s inability to deal with new technologies. He believes that the lessons he learned can be broadly applied, and I am sure librarians can draw insights from his presentation to help us understand our engagement with both emerging technologies and our users.
Temple’s ten lessons are as follows;
Know what business you’re in.
Know your customers.
Know your competition.
Know your goal.
Have a strategy and be committed to pursuing it.
Measure, measure, measure.
Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old.
Let the people running a new venture do what’s best for their business, regardless of the potential impact on the old.
To compete in a new medium, you have to understand it.
Imagine if your catalogue looked like Amazon Windowshop. Would this make you happy? Would it make browsing easier for your users?
We’ve taken out the text and created an immersive experience to help you lose yourself in exploration. Trailers for bestselling movies. Insight into the hottest TV shows and video games. Track samples from Tuesday’s new music releases. Audio reviews of books you should read. Amazon Windowshop lets you get a taste of many titles. They’re here – in one place – and all you have to do is move a few keys to zoom in on whatever flips your switch.
I am now an official TEDx licensee and will be organizing a TEDx event in Ontario for librarians in the fall of 2009 called, strangely enough, TEDxLibrarians.
If you would like to help or have any suggestions, please contact me. If you are on Twitter and would like to spread the word, the hashtag is #tedxlib.
Agora is a movie directed by Alejandro Amenábar about Hypatia, (who may or may not have been) a librarian in the Great Library of Alexandria. Judging by the final few seconds of the trailer, and what we know about her life, I’m guessing this film does not have a happy ending…
