repositories for the rest of us

2008/09/13: It's a megalist not a bibliography

Here's a NY Times article on antiquarian book bibliographies being used as entrepreneurial tools. Interesting use of metadata, no? Librarians can learn something from this. Compiling bibliographies is a service. A service which, in this case, has a niche market willing to spend on the long-tail, and can easily be automated. It's low-hanging fruit for savvy entrepreneurs gathering business opportunities.

Librarians compile bibliographies all the time. How do we sell these services? Using a word like megalist rather than bibliography would help, no doubt. Do we consider the needs of our particular niche market? Do we put those needs in context with rest of the information universe? I think most librarians think they do. User needs assessment has a long and strong megalist in the LIS realm. Librarians pride themselves on creating collections and designing services based on data gained from studying user behavior, based on many methodologies. Yet, use of traditional library services is declining. And, the NY Times article shows us that other people are providing the same services librarians do and possibly doing it better. Obviously, user needs assessment is not enough. Because,

Users.don't.always.know.what.they.need.

AND

Past.behavior.may.not.necessarily.reflect.future behavior.

User needs assessment must be combined with other types of market research in order to create a value proposition. In plain English: what are you selling? And how are you going to sell it? I'm definitely including business literature in my professional development because I only think I can answer those questions for MPOW. My answers, right now, would only be opinions and conjecture. I need facts for decision-making. A business plan(s) will help with figuring out what facts to gather to create the most successful new library services.

Labels: metadata

posted by Laura @ 4:02 PM