Escape from the walled garden (Library 2.0-style)

As you may know I (and a team of colleagues) have been re-designing the Utica College library web site. We have spent alot of time dealing with what I now understand to be information architecture, the way things are categorized, labeled and organized to be as useful as possible to our target user-the most unsophisticated undergraduate researchers.

Utica College, as an institution, recently launched a new content management system wherein all departments are locked into templates. This has largely solved the problem of design inconsistency for the institution, but it has also left little room for the types of design updates and innovations which we feel are important to our new site.

What we lack in "prettiness" due to some of these restrictions is made up for with what I believe to be an easy-to-use and highly functional site. The index page will include quick searches for the catalog, the e-journal portal and also a cool new database search created by our cataloger (and defacto systems librarian-thanks CP)

We were also going to include a library news section on the index page called "In the Spotlight." We haven't gotten to the real discussion of how this "In the Spotlight" area is going to be managed, but one of the issues that has arose is content update. We know we will need to update this section on a regular basis for it to remain relevant. To do this we realize we need to have full staff participation, but we also know that getting staff involved in the effort may be a little bit like pulling teeth. Assuming the staff may find it difficult to see some of things that they are doing as worthy of mention in a library news section. If we get little or no input from staff we end up making one person responsible for constant news updates(CP). Something we see as unmanageable and frankly unfair.

So I was reading this article from the awesome people at Talis regarding the issue of Library 2.0. The most important notion related to Lib 2.0 (as I understand it) is that to remain relevant to today's information searcher we must acknowledge the environment in which we now find ourselves. We cannot continue to exist in our own little password protected digital "walled garden," in our illogically "opaque information silos" if we hope to remain a relevant source of content for an increasingly sophisticated information seeker. In short, our data in long overdue for liberation from the shackes of the library card number and PIN.

Anyway, this got me thinking about the little digital walled garden that we were creating for our library. How could we liberate our data? One thing I think I understand is that this liberation is going to require coordinated effort from many people and the notion of expolding our catalog is simply something that we cannot do (at least now) because much of it is out of our control. In many ways we are at the mercy of our vendors, it seems that they are in control of these changes.

Well, what about this "In the Spotlight" section of the index? Could we do something with this to get us out of our private garden? Why yes we can. My thinking is that we should start a web log for the library that is a conversation between the library user community and the library staff. It would be very simple to create a blog with all staff members as contributing writers. We could then embed the most current bog posting into the "In the Spotlight" section with a link to the complete blog.

Doing this would solve the problem of having only one person responsible for content update, because everyone would have the ability to contribute with no mediation. It would also create a new and different (more casual and more familiar) space with which we could steer our users to our resources. I see no reason why we couldn't put links to the catalog, the e-journal portal, or any resource we see fit to include on the web log.

This new blog forum is flexible, there is no reason it has to be only library news. For instance, we could include mini-tutorials, links to sites that we have deemed appropriate for scholarly use, our own citation guides or pathfinders...the possibilities seem endless. Would this be the perfect escape from the walled garden?

We could create a new social garden for the library. Not only this we could also enrich the real library home page with links to pertinent postings in the right places to useful blog postings. Say for instance a staff member writes a mini-tutorial on how to find a journal full text. We could put a link to this posting on the ILL page or the e-journal page, or wherever we deemed appropriate. In this way we could plant little social flowers (in the form of links) in the walled garden of the library's "real" virtual space and vice versa.