My research is focused on my learnings from Blink and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. More specifically, I’m trying to find out how libraries can identify the right library 2.0 technologies that will work best for their own communities. So the first part of my research really involves decision making.

Making Library 2.0 Decisions

What steps should libraries take to find out what works best? Is it better to spend more time planning and discussing or make simple snap judgments? What are the best ways to ask patrons what they want?

To find possible answers to these questions, I’m going to rely on two books with totally opposing viewpoints:

• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
• Think: Why Crucial Decisions Can’t Be Made in the Blink of an Eye by Michael R. LeGault

In addition, I started reading a couple of other books on decision making to get a better perspective on the whole issue:

• Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average by Joseph T. Hallinan
• How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
• Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by. Timothy D. Wilson

There are also a few relevant blog posts that pertain to this subject:

• Researching Your Library Tech Decisions
• Strategic Decision Making …
• Making Good Technology Decisions

Promoting Library 2.0

The second part of my research, will focus on how we can successfully implement library 2.0 technologies. So once we make the decision to use a particular product or service, what are some of the things we can do to ensure that the technology is being utilized by the community.

For this part of the research, I decided to start with these three books:

• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference: by Malcolm Gladwell
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
• Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking by Andy Sernovitz

And a couple of links (blog post & presentation) I stumbled upon:

• Join the Conversation–Promoting Library 2.0 Tools on Public Library Webpages
• Give Them Something to Talk About: Infusing Library 2.0 Into Your Library Instruction and Web Presence

And of course, I will refer to our text Library 2.0: A Guide to Participatory Library Service and anything else I can get my hands on that’s relevant.

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, is a book about decision making. More specifically, it is about snap judgments — the decisions we make in the blink of an eye, without thinking. What Gladwell shows is that there is a lot more to that split second of decision making than we might think.

Gladwell explores the concept of “thin-slicing” which he defines as “a critical part of rapid cognition” and “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience” (23). He also explains how all of us use thin-slicing in every day situations and how this is particularly important in how we interact with others.

One interesting section of the book titled “Listening to Doctors” (39) focused on how we talk to people, and proved that when people feel “rushed or ignored or treated poorly” (40) the quality of care, or the information that they’re given doesn’t matter as much. Although the book referred to Doctors, I think we can learn a lot from this; the quality of our interactions with patrons can mean so much. It’s not just about what we say to people, it’s how we say it.

Another concept in Blink that intrigued me, is the process of finding out how others make decisions. Gladwell states that there is a right and a wrong way to ask people what they want, and points out that simply asking people what they want, more than likely will not work. And it’s not because people are lying, it’s just that truly knowing what you want is more difficult than it seems. What you think you like might not actually be true. Therefore, finding out which Library 2.0 services our patrons really want is a more difficult task than we might think.

Blink Animoto

p.s. If you haven’t it already, check out animoto — I had a lot of fun making this video :)

There are a couple of topics I’m considering for my research paper.

heart & trust

The first is what intrigued me during our first weekend in class; the importance of positive human interaction in libraries.

How we can encourage kindness and trust through library 2.0 technologies.

How social networking can be the vehicle for creating closeness and connecting library users with each other and the library staff.

How an online community for library users can create excitement and passion for services, programs, library materials and the library itself.

This topic would also lead to an analysis of how libraries can create a positive presence on the web; and how the physical and virtual spaces can remain consistent and interconnected, one being the extension of the other.

I’m thinking this would be more of a list of best practices that libraries can use to evolve their online presence and start utilizing library 2.0 technologies with their users in mind.

decisions & change

The second idea that I’m considering was inspired by my recent readings of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and The Tipping Point (two great reads, by the way).

There are a lot of ideas in the two books, but what I found particularly interesting, and what I think would be extremely useful to libraries, is understanding the process of finding out what people really want before deciding on making a change (Blink) and then how to make that change really happen (The Tipping Point).

In reading Blink I learned that in order to find out what people really want, asking them is not the way to go because usually people don’t know what they want. This seems counterintuitive at first, but the truth is that people are not always good at explaining what they want, and more often than not, they really, truly don’t know what they want. This is why it’s so difficult for libraries to find out what technologies or services their patrons would like see implemented; asking them simply doesn’t work.

The second part of this is change; in The Tipping Point, Gladwell shows why some ideas take off and become popular and others don’t. There are some really important and practical lessons that libraries can learn on how ideas spread. So that once you find out what your users really want you’re able to implement that change in the right way and ensure its success.

So the questions I would be dealing with are:

1. how can libraries identify which library 2.0 technologies should be implemented, or simply what’s the best way to find out what patrons really want
2. how can library 2.0 technologies be implemented with success; how will patrons find out about them and learn how to use them

Wow, I guess writing this out really helped me decide which topic I should go with; I could go on and on about each, but at the moment I’m leaning towards my second choice :)