Scaling Library 2.0

Live and learn. I have been wrestling with this post for days, tweeking and editing and expanding it far beyond its original germ of an idea. TIme to take the blue pencil to it and get it out there.

The title of this post can be read in two ways, and I mean both of them: Not only scale in the sense of 'ascend', but also 'scale' as in 'adjust the size'.

What started my thinking was a post by David Lee King entitled Making Time for 2.0, a must-read for library staff who want to know: How can I possibly have time for this stuff? (Shout out to the omni-web-present videoblographer Michael Stephens' Tame the Web for the reblog.)King answers both library administrators and managers unsure of how to "provide time, equipment, and training in order to successfully implement these new tools into the library's digital space" 2.0; and library line-staff, who may be reluctant to invest the time learning new library techniques.

In the Comments Jenny Levine makes the excellent point that in the final analysis time spent learning 2.0 is fungible: "I also think it’s important to point out ways to get BACK time that can then be devoted to tracking and playing with emerging technologies ... Doing seemingly small things ... can help you regain time, which is almost unheard of anymore."

One of the things that has confounded me about implementing Library 2.0 in our libraries has been a question of scale—both the size of the staff and the size of the audience. Michael Stephens’ delightful video reminds me that his library can loose a good-sized staff on exploiting the new social software. David Lee King answers the flip side of the coin smartly with his example of the solo librarian who still “has time for a library blog and console gaming nights.”

Both strike me as examples of libraries, big and small, that can depend on a large and diverse audience. But what of the small library with the small audience— due either to the narrowness of the subject focus, the library’s small core mission audience, or it’s restricted access policies?

Until recently my library has tended to operate under the Field of Dreams fallacy: It you build it, they will come. The collection itself will generate its 'natural' audience--whatever that is. There’s frequently little incentive to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ in special libraries, and therefore little incentive to innovate.

"You cover such esoteric topics that you either have to do it really well or not at all." This aphorism was uttered some time ago by my wife to describe the challenges and pitfalls of running a special library. When we launched our blog we knew that its subject matter—art, archaeology and material culture of much of the ‘non-Western’ world—would appeal to a fairly small audience. We also knew that the web audience was potentially far larger than our walk-in audience ever was ... or will be. We saw right away that the blog offered the opportunity to expand our patron base by reaching out to the audience beyond the walls. Would it draw more people into the library? Perhaps, but that wasn't really either realistic nor even the primary objective.

It suggests to me a third dimension of Library 2.0, namely depth: Our library can capitalize on its traditional strengths of subject knowledge but provide it to a wider audience. In the end, it's not so much a question of scaling down what Library 2.0 has to offer in deference to your narrow audience, yet taking advantage of Library 2.0 to discover and address an untapped and potentially much larger audience with the same economies of scale.