Here are my slides from Internet Librarian. Keynote and my laptop had a moment of epic fail and I gave my presentation without notes. My slides are pretty much all picture, so here’s the bullet point version of what I said. Edit: I realized the PDF cut off some of the photo credits, so I’m including them here!

Slide one: Title slide. Nothing to see here folks.

Slide two: Hi! I’m the head of reference at Darien Library. I’m relatively new (started in March) so I have a strong sense of where our library is starting from and what’s unusual and interesting about that. We are moving to a new building in a few weeks and we just launched a new website with John Blyberg’s amazing SOPAC 2.0. Photo credit: Someone at Darien Library!

Slide three: Extreme! Our focus has been on extreme customer service. The library is valued by the community thanks to the hard work of our director for the past (almost) thirty years. Extreme customer services is a great starting point- our patrons have very high expectations of us but they also have a great relationship with us and are willing to let us know when they think we’ve missed the mark. Our current physcial set up is fairly traditional. We have a reference fort, things are arranged by Dewey with a Reference section and a Q or oversized section. Everything is great! Except it’s not. Photo Credit: Flickr user Tyla’75

Slide four: The death of reference. I presented in the Problem Track. Reference has problems. Everyone knows the statistics- reference is down, no one loves us. We’ve all been wringing our hands about this for years. Libraries have been slow to adapt and grow to people’s new relationship with information. When everyone Googles, we chastise them for looking for mediocre information, which does not endear us to our users. Photo Credit: Flickr user ozyman

Slide five: Where to Start? This is a tough problem.  If people don’t need us to look up the GNP of Argentina for them anymore, what do they need us for?  We can’t make people talk to us, but we also can’t be useful only as assistants to figuring out Dewey or lousy database interfaces. Eat your wheaties, kids! Photo Credit: Flickr user ilmungo

Slide six: Our professional ideal is very hands off. Not just the stereotype of the librarian pointing to the correct section, but the philosphical underpinning of “we don’t know things, we know where to find things.” I’m not suggesting that we answer things off the tops of our heads, but the gatekeeper model doesn’t work. No one wants a gate keeper, they want a partner. Photo Credit: Flickr user Today is a Good Day

Slide seven: Stop. Collaborate and Listen. True collaboration isn’t doing their work for them (though it isn’t awful to hand out some fish). Collaboration requires engagement with our patrons, with their content. We’ve hung our professionalism hat on a model that avoids engaging with the content our patrons bring to us. We come to work as whole people, though. We can be professional without being omnipotent reference dictators. Photo credit: Flickr user detritus

Slide eight: Power Law of Participation. I found this online- it’s kind of old for the Internet (2006!) Traditional reference interviews pull out context, but to truly be collaborative, we need to go a step further. When I was a new librarian, I had a patron who was looking for a single volume that would compare cost of living, cultural amenities and private schools of an area. She wanted Peterson’s, a cost-of-living guide and a retirement guide all in one book. I showed her the various volumes we had that had the disparate pieces of information in them, but she wanted one book.

A magic book as far as I could tell.

She ended up leaving empty handed. If I had it to do over, I would have pulled up a chair, sat down with her and started making a chart with her with the information she wanted from the various books we had. We didn’t have the book she wanted, but I could have made it if I wasn’t still so attached to traditional reference. Graphic by Ross Mayfield

Slide nine: I made this library law of participation chart, based on the previous slide. Darien’s new library won’t have a reference desk. There will be a service point- it’s a really nice table where we can collaborate with our members. Librarians will be roving- the table won’t get the label as “place to come for help”, our people will. Phones and tablets will rove with us.

We’re trying to free our members up to move up that participation curve. We need to get out of the way so they can collaborate with us or with each other using the library in their own way and not just the way we think they ought to.

Slide ten: Evolution. Virtual reference is something we’re continuing to grow. We opted out of our state’s IM reference service because most of the questions are local and our patrons were not happy to have nonlocal answers. We’ve been doing IM reference for a few years (started during the 05-06 fiscal year). The new site has caused an 80% year-over-year uptick- good design and placement makes a big difference. When I looked at the early transcripts, it helped me see the trajectory. We started with a lot of “call us for that information” and now we’re sending links and scanning documents to email. The questions have evolved too. People are asking more involved, complicated questions over IM and we’re outgrowing the MeeboMe widget. Photo Credit: Flickr user Leo Reynolds

Slide eleven: Libraries=Love. We’re also remixing Dewey. BISAC is great for browsing, but not so good for finding. Dewey is great for finding, but not wonderful for browsing. We’re putting peanut butter in the chocolate. Photo Credit: Flickr user fornal

Slide twelve: Ultimately, everything we’re doing or experimenting with is for our patrons. We’re trying to move past “giving them tools” and into making the library experience so seamless and easy they don’t need new tools to use it. Joseph Muennich of CraftySpace was talking about Drupal and OSS in general and said, “the more you give away, the better it is”. Even though libraries give away information, traditional service models have included a lot of holding back- we’ll give it to you if you can find it or if you approach us in just the right way.  Our service models keep trying to lower that bar. Free isn’t free if they have to jump through our hoops. Take away the hoops, reduce the threshold to free. We need to let our patrons in and learn from them. Photo Credit: Me!