The fundamental requisite for anyone that wishes to be read--or heard for that matter-- is to have something to say. That is a sore spot for a lot of libraries. Don't add a blog to the site without having the intention to keep it up by freshening the content regularly, and preferably frequently. [See how I turned my indecision about a topic to my advantage? I suppose I could talk about this...but no... ;^) ] I guess I'll be making at least four entries this semester, however, if people are following and time permits, I will post more.

The point of this blog is to discuss technology for the small and rural library. The emphasis is going to be on eliminating costs, adding features, and improving your computing reliability. I have a few posts planned but let's see what develops.

We'll start off slowly by considering a relatively easy way of providing features and content for patrons. I want to discuss the practice of collecting links. Many libraries do it to some extent or other. Some have gone so far as to catalog them in the ILS. You know how our favories folders are running over, right? Well then it's a natural step to share them, and of course, for the sake of our public, organize them too. This practice is really a throwback to the early days of the public's awareness of the Internet. Back then, it seemed that a web site wasn't complete without a page of links.

Today we find such rich collections of links as the Internet Public Library (IPL - originally a Michigan product, thank you) and the Librarians' Internet Index (LII). With all of that, why bother to collect on your own? Wouldn't it be better to just link to them and be done with it?

That depends, I guess. If you have a web site and some time, I believe it is still worthwhile to collect some links for your website. Why? Integration and positioning. Both of these make the user's life easier. Positioning is setting the object up in a meaningful way that clearly delivers some advantage for your patrons. Integration is achieved when the object is combined with other elements of your site for ease and convenience of use with the other tools in the web site. Both of these concepts are about adding value for the end user.

One of the problems of linking to aggregations is that each aggregator has a different interface and this presents problems for patrons. I have actually heard a patron speaking of our state's online collection saying that he doesn't have time to waste on all of that. In fact there is a lot to choose from there. A case in point is the history section. It contains a lot of digitized works of historical significance for students of state history. Unfortunately it isn't well indexed. This is where a librarian can spend a couple of hours once to save countless hours for patrons. Now all of the state's links to materials that are germane to our county's history have been analyzed and selected and are readily available on our site. This is a perfect example of a repackaged collection of links providing a tangible advantage for patrons.

The trend today is toward big libraries (State library) , big systems (OCLC), big utilities (Google, Ebsco, etc), and even big link collections (IPL, LII). This has a disintegrating effect as the patron now has to deal with all of them, each in its own environment. The library can mitigate this to some extent, as I have demonstrated. It looks to me like an important way to add value, and seems likely to be increasingly so as this paradigm overtakes us. What do you think? ~dd