A PERSONAL NOTE: I'm going to be retiring this year. I'll still publish Neat New Stuff and ExLibris on my web site, and speak at conferences when invited, but I'm curtailing my writing and other for-profit activities. That means that I'll no longer be able to afford the cost of bulk mailing NeatNew and ExLibris to subscribers. Effective with the end of February, NeatNew and ExLibris will only be available on my web site. I do plan to learn XML to make it available to RSS aggregators (and if anybody would like to help me learn it, let me know).
BOOK REVIEW: MICROTRENDS
Mark Penn. Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes. Twelve (Hachette Book Group), 2007. Reviewed by Marylaine Block
Mark Penn is Hillary Clinton's pollster, but there's nothing political about his analyses here. What he's saying is that there are numerous demographic groups and interest groups that are being ignored by industry, media, marketers (and, while he doesn't mention it, librarians). They're overlooked because they're such a small percentage of the U.S. population. But even one percent of 300,000,000 people is a sizable amount of people, and librarians should ask themselves, A) if these groups are in their community, and B) if so, what are they doing to accommodate them.
Penn points, for example, to "extreme commuters." He says 50 percent of today's workers leave their home counties to get to work, 10 million commuters travel more than an hour, and 3.4 million more than 90 minutes. What is your library doing for them?
Presumably, you have books on tape and CD, that can be downloaded from your website. That's a great start. Now, do the commuters know that?
Probably not.
How might you let them in on that? You could buy radio spots on commuters' favorite stations. Place ads on trains and buses, and in stations. Even buy a billboard ad on a prominent highway.
There are some groups we don't see because they're counter-intuitive. Penn points out that 40 percent of the 44 million people giving unpaid care to infirm adults are men, and fathers over 50 account for 1 of 18 new babies. When you program for caregivers or for parents, are you making a point of inviting men as attendees or even speakers?
Homeschoolers are another increasing market, and I'm pleased to see that many libraries have homework help for the kids and sessions introducing library resources to their parents. But Allen County Public Library and Multnomah County Library are the only libraries I've found that provide book clubs and other socializing opportunities for homeschoolers. Given how much child social life is organized around school, homeschoolers' social needs are as important as their educational ones. This is an opportunity for libraries to provide a service that will be warmly welcomed.
Among the other groups Penn identifies are pet parents, the hard of hearing, lefthanders, "DIY doctors," young knitters, video game grownups, etc. I bet you can easily come up with both programming ideas and physical accommodations you could put in place for these and any other groups Penn talks about.
Buy the book. Read it. And start looking around your own community to see what groups you may have been overlooking.
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BOOK REVIEW: SUPER CRUNCHERS
Ian Ayres. Super Crunchers: Wht Hinking by Numbers Is the New Way To Be Smart. Bantam, 2007. Reviewed by Marylaine Block
In a presentation I've delivered on the future of reference <http://marylaine.com/ref.html>, I posit that reference librarians will survive by offering more sophisticated services: personalizing information, contextualizing it, reformatting it, visualizing it, and creating it. One of the ways we can actually create information is by going directly to the datasets, mining them for specific kinds of data, and combining those results, possibly even laying them out in geographic distributions.
If you haven't considered the possibilities of data crunching, this is the book to explain them to you. Ayres shows us how the extraordinary availability of datasets, and the increasing computing power that allows us to mine them, have enabled us to analyze the effectiveness of marketing tactics, teaching stragies, medical diagnoses and treatments, differing government strategies for social problems, and more.
In fact, one of the more humbling aspects of the book is its revelation that super crunching machines generally produce better results than most human experts. Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano may be closer to truth than fiction. But the machines can only crunch what human experts tell them to.
Which gets back to a central rule we reference librarians have always lived by: the answer you get depends on the question you ask. Therefore, ask good questions. And read this book.
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COOL QUOTE:
So you want to know what is
And also what is not.
Robyn Hitchcock. Belltown Ramble.
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Copyright, Marylaine Block, 1999-2007.
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