Blog Post #3: How to Keep Your Library Relevant in Today’s Web 2.0 World

My thoughts first started churning when I saw this post about how to sell RSS via Tame the Web. Since the original posting, the author of the post, David Rothman, has started his own blog and has provided us with an updated post.

I was so impressed with the way in which David articulated his idea and then really sold it to his patrons. The post could alternately be titled “How to Keep Your Library Relevant in Today’s Web 2.0 World.” David, who is a medical librarian in a small hospital, describes how he set up his patrons with customized RSS feeds via Google Reader so they could stay abreast of the latest medical literature in their field. Here’s how he described the service to his hospital’s head of surgery:

“How would you like it,” I asked our hospital’s head of surgery, “if you had one list of items from news or medical publishing on exactly the information you want. Imagine you could flip through this list and check off items as ‘not interested’, ‘maybe later’, or ‘the library must get me the full text of this article’. And what if, when you wanted the full text, you could click a couple of times to order it from the library?”
His eyes widened. “That’s possible?”

My favorite part of this is that if the patrons are interested in the full text of an article they see in their RSS feed, they can simply email the citation to the library’s inbox, and the article will be delivered to them via email or hard copy, depending on the library’s subscriptions and capabilities, I assume. How cool is this?

I got to thinking about how offering this service can really revitalize special libraries and their relevance to their parent institutions. At my place of work (a large professional medical association), the library is increasingly trying to increase their visibility and relevance for employees and members. Imagine if they began to offer this service for the in-house physicians, economists, and policy experts? If they really marketed the service well, it would remind staff that they have a great resource in the library and the librarians as well. It could be pitched as a great way for staff to simplify the way in which they stay current in their field. I don’t know of many professionals who wouldn’t be interested in that. And this idea could be transferred to any type of special library that serves a specialized group of patrons, museum libraries, architecture firm libraries, military libraries, etc. There’s a lot of potential here.