Belated Valentine's Day post

So, Valentine's Day has come and gone, but today I saw that John Green, who has written some darned good YA novels (An Abundance of Katherines, Looking for Alaska, and Paper Towns, among others) has some fine answers the age-old question, "How do I get boys to like me?" And it seemed like the sort of thing that I would have liked to hear on Valentine's Day when I was fifteen.

So here it is, all funny and sweet and stuff.

Good customer service

My trip to the ALA Midwinter conference wasn't exactly fraught with peril, but winter travel is always time consuming and never predictable. After arriving in your hotel lobby an hour before midnight, after spending 15+ hours in airports and on planes, the last thing you want to hear is that the hotel is overbooked and you have to go somewhere else.

I was very cranky with the Hyatt Regency, and with traveling, and with the conference, which I wouldn't have attended this year if my life had worked out in happier ways, more than five months ago. I was tired, self-pitying, and disappointed (but hopefully polite) as I took myself off to the room at the Comfort Inn that the Hyatt arranged for me that Friday night.

The next morning, as I returned to the Hyatt, it became clear to me that this place does customer service right. First, their manager admitted to making a mistake, then he apologized for it, sincerely and thoughtfully, letting me know that they new it wasn't pleasant for a customer arriving late in the day to encounter an overbooked hotel. They gave me access to the Regency Lounge (free breakfasts!), sent another note of apology with fruit later Saturday evening, and didn't charge me anything for Friday night's reservation. All nice things, but what still sticks with me is the sincerity of the apology I received. No one at the Hyatt knew how ambivalent I was about attending Midwinter this year, or that I haven't been the happiest of campers lately. But they recognized me as a human being and valuable customer; they took responsibility and made amends. They not only did the right thing, they made me feel better.

How often, in Libraries, do we make mistakes, admit to them, and make things right for our patrons? How often do we do this graciously and thoughtfully? It takes a lot of bravery to do this. To do this right, I think it takes a sincere desire to serve people well. I am now looking to serve my patrons better and more thoughtfully.

Thank you, Hyatt. I'll be back.

What bloggers can learn from journalists

I listened to the commencement speech given at WSU on Saturday by Frank Blethen, publisher and CEO of the Seattle Times. I admire Blethen's defense of journalism, but I think that, by attributing so much of the blame for the newspaper industry's current dilemmas on the internet, (Google and Craigslist, particularly) he missed a chance to talk about how newspapers, online news sites, blogs, and search engines can work together.

Also, it seems clear to me that newspapers, while they have provided and do provide invaluable services to the public, need to think innovatively and creatively if they're going to survive. We're trying to ask our auto industry to do this, the faculty and administration at my university and universities around the country are being asked to do this, and it seems reasonable to expect new ideas and business plans in other industries as well. Blaming Google seems like a real avoidance of the kind of creative thinking that could lead to survival.

Blethen was very dismissive about blogging, and this is understandable. There are plenty of tensions between professional journalism and blogging, and how these tensions play out in the next several years is going to be fascinating. But bloggers, many of whom are interested in driving traffic to their blogs and in cultivating audiences, and some of whom consider themselves citizen journalists, can learn a lot from journalists. Anita Bruzzese, writing a guest post on Chris Brogan's Community and Social Media blog, has a brief and sensible post about this: What Bloggers Can Learn from Journalists.

Journalists may already be learning from bloggers as well - that would make an interesting post, too.

And, if you want to watch the commencement and hear Blethen's speech for yourself, you can take a look at the streaming video.

Edited to add: Stephen Abram lists some good additions to ways bloggers can learn from journalists: Bloggers as Journalists.

Current economics, and many reasons why Libraries are especially important now

Just a nice clip showing how valuable libraries are to their communities when things get tough economically:

Meryl Streep

is going to play a librarian:

http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/currentnews/newsarchive/2008/November2008/streepheartsdewey.cfm

New Summit catalog for WSU

From our Library News feed (http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/general/News-Events.htm), here's some information on the upcoming new iteration of the Summit catalog used by WSU Libraries and by cooperating Washington and Oregon Libraries. We keep trying to make interlibrary loan easier and better, and hopefully this new version of Summit will help us in doing that.

New Summit Catalog Coming Dec 1
Post Time: 11/12/2008 1:02:11 PM
Posted By: coreyj@wsu.edu (Corey Johnson)
Category: News

Summary
WSU Libraries, in cooperation with the 35 other WA/OR academic libraries of the Orbis Cascade Alliance, will be launching a new version of the Summit Catalog on December 1. We will be offering enhancements to the catalog while supporting Summit borrowing without interruption. New features include:

• The addition of the 110 million book/media records from OCLCs WorldCat to those discoverable through Summit.


• Access to about 50 million articles from OCLC databases such as ArticleFirst, British Library Serials, PubMed, and ERIC, through Summit.


• An improved user interface with spelling assistance; book covers; post-search filters such as author, format, date, audience, language and topic; improved relevance ranking, syndication/tagging with online services like Google, Amazon and Facebook; citation creation tools and book reviews.

You can learn more about the new version of Summit at: http://orbiscascade.org/index/communication-kit

You can test a beta version of the new catalog at:
http://www.summit.worldcat.org/
(You cannot order materials through this test instance of the new catalog.)

When librarians build a search engine...

I'm very curious to see what will come of Reference Extract, a web search engine "built for maximum credibility" that will weight results toward sites used heavily by libraries.

According to the article on Reference Extract in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus, "The idea is to cull and promote recommendations from tens of thousands of librarians around the world."

I think this could be phenomenally cool, or a complete disaster. It would be nice to see a good marriage of search engine algorithms and librarian knowledge, something that would leverage the abilities librarians have developed as we evaluate information and attempt to teach others to do the same. It would be nice to have access to a search engine that was not so easily leveraged to bring up results corporations want us to see.

On the other hand, it often seems to me that librarians are really excellent at gathering and organizing information but not always so good at making it easily accessible to non-librarians.

Good luck, Research Exchange. I hope you do very, very well.