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“Strategery”

Strategery! Roy Tennant has written a very cheeky, open letter to ILS vendors over at tech essence warning them that, in the face of growing competition from the open source sector, they ought to be abandoning their business-as-usual tact.

I’ll tell you, I sure as heck wouldn’t want to be a vendor right now.

But then again, what if libraries received an open letter warning against the same complacency that plagues our ILS vendors? Remember this open letter in the Lawrence Journal World?

What if our users decided that the $80-$100 allocated to the library from their property taxes would personally serve them better if it were spent on a Netflix subscription? After all, DVDs constitute the largest percentage of circulated items at our library. Yet, compared to Netflix, our selection is lousy, availability is a joke, and distribution methods? Ha. That’s just one example of many instances where our users are not getting the ROI they may be looking for.

The reality is that public libraries are not in a position to compete with power houses like Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes. We’re even getting our hat handed to us by the pirate movie and MP3 scene. So when I read Roy’s letter, I thought, yes he’s dead-on, but that pendulum swings right back at us. Roy sums up some of the advice given by a Business Week article about the Eastman Kodak company:

Watch for treacherous shifts

Get your best people behind the program

Give your new initiatives room to breathe

Make painful breaks with the past

Don’t confuse what your company does with how it does it

Sage advice. We ought to take it. I’m personally much less concerned about the fate of our vendors. They’ve made their bed, and we no longer have to sleep in it with them.

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What if our users decided that the $80-$100 allocated to the library from their property taxes would personally serve them better if it were spent on a Netflix subscription?

Indiana residents thought just that and decided to take the school system with ‘em: Indiana’s “Circuit Breaker” Law

(I’d link to the local paper, but the articles only last for a week, then you have to pay for it.)

Perfect example, Maire. Thanks.

What if our users decided that the $80-$100 allocated to the library from their property taxes would personally serve them better if it were spent on a Netflix subscription?

Wow, what happy planet is this? Property owners in my county pay an average of $28/year. According to the ALA, this is about typical, maybe a little better than average. Let me tell you, as a collection manager, I am doing EVERYTHING I CAN to stretch those tax dollars in every way possible. We constantly get variations on the theme of “wow, I didn’t know you could do that/had that/can get that/knew about that/can direct me to the resource I need!” That tells me that our biggest failure is in outreach and marketing the materials and services we already have. We’re working on creative solutions to that all the time, because we simply don’t have the budget to throw more man-hours at the problem. No complacency here!

(Pondering what I’d do with three to four times my current budget)

Beth,
I pulled the $80-$100 range from my own property tax statement. Granted, Ann Arbor probably allocates more money toward its library system than other municipalities, but those types of figures are not uncommon.

And I am sure you are, indeed, using every last cent very wisely.

In fact, you bring up one of the very reasons that we simply cannot compete with commercial services. We just don’t have the money to do it.

So we need to approach lending from an entirely different point of view, while expanding the role of the public library in the community beyond simply a place to “borrow.”

That’s why I found Roy’s post so applicable to us as well as our vendors. Status quo will bury the public library.

Beth, I agree with you about the need for marketing (my blog post of 19/02/07 has one idea -what do you think?).

In terms of necessary-but-painful breaks with the past, public libraries need to move their emphasis in providing information away from being ‘containers’ to being one in a vast network of ‘conduits’. I’m still thinking through what this metaphor means, particularly in regard to online presence.

I imagine information, info-seekers and content-creators as water falling, flooding, pooling and trickling through a vast space. The space is filled with different-sized containers, overflows, drains, leaky pipes, mains pipes, juntions, all sloping and trying to maximise the flows that pass through. All of this is constantly shifting, reassembling itself into new configurations of convenience.

In Web2.0, information conduits and containers must be able to rapidly reposition themselves to catch and carry some of the myriad flows of information and individuals. This repositioning can be achieved partly through maintaining authority, interest and relevance, and partly through being an effective conduit to external sites of authority, interest and relevance.

Sorry for the elaborate metahor, but I think it’s useful in communicating about drastic possible changes in what we do.

[…] Tennant and John Blyberg made an open plea to ILS vendors - and their customers - to embrace change and survive. Richard […]

In 2003, per capita support of public libraries in the United States was almost exactly $25. Translating that into household support yields something like $63.
Since not all households pay property taxes (directly), and not all support of public libraries comes from property taxes, it’s not clear what the average property tax allocation supporting libraries is, or was at that time, but it’s probably closer to John’s number than one would think.
I can construct an argument (wealthy communities are more likely to use property taxes to support libraries than communities that depend on state and federal support) that would put him right on the number.

One answer is that our mission differs profoundly from Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes. They make a profit; we provide learning opportunities and build community. If we were only about moving popular materials, I’d find the concern more valid. This does not reduce the need to fearlessly question our own activities, nor to market the value of our services.

Yet, compared to Netflix, our selection is lousy, availability is a joke, and distribution methods? Ha. That’s just one example of many instances where our users are not getting the ROI they may be looking for.

I’ve been thinking about this and I disagree. Library collections and circulation policies serve library users very well. They only seem lousy to non-library users.

At my local library, almost all DVDs are in circulation, so you have to place a hold to get one. When it arrives, you have a week to pick it up and 3 weeks to watch it, ample time even if I’ve checked out a season of a television series.

This works incredibly well. I don’t pick out a movie I want to watch next, I pick out 15, and I’ll watch whichever one comes fist. If 5 come in one week, I have all the more to choose from. The library is convenient to me (hrm, I work there), so this beats the pants off of subscribing to NetFlix for $60-$288/yr for 1-4 DVDs at a time.

The library wins, at least until we’re all ready for downloadable movies on demand - I’ll give it 12 months.

I think that DVDs drive circulation because they are easy to consume in the time that the library gives the patron to watch them, even if you only circ DVDs for 2 days.

It takes a lot longer to read a book than it does to watch a movie, unless you are a reader of romance, mystery, science fiction, children’s literature or Harry Potter, and note that these genres are popular in libraries as well.

If libraries are concerned with competing with other literature-distributing organizations, we should look to make our materials easier to consume, and that includes becoming more convenient to more people.

A new ILS can address this partly, but the problem is bigger than that. ILS vendors know this and so do library managers - if you want to reach more library users, the conventional way to do it is to open a new branch.

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