Vive L’Amusement!
Casey Bisson won the Mellon Award for his WPopac. The first time I saw his proposal for a library OPAC based on WordPress, my mind was fairly blown. So it’s great to see him getting an award for that. (Getting an award for creating the WPopac, that is, not for blowing my mind. There’s no award for the latter, although if Casey digs chocolate, I’d be happy to send him some of my wife’s fantabulous brownies, just for firing my neurons in new and exciting ways.)
Steve Lawson jumps on the fun train, referencing Tim’s “fun OPAC” post and Casey’s big win. Steve makes a point similar to the one I made, that a library’s whole website should be fun. Right on, Steve!
I haven’t seen a library website yet, even the really good ones with integrated CMS and nice visual designs, that didn’t start with the premise “What useful information do we need to get to our patrons?” rather than “What awesome and fun experiences can we give our patrons?” They all seem to begin with “Where is the library? When is it open? What events and programs are coming up?” and then moves on to “Here’s our OPAC, here are links to other websites–if you have any serious questions, just ask.” Library websites started as internet-based information and advertising for library services, and they haven’t really moved away from that. Just as the OPAC has basically been a physical card catalog on HyperCard, the library website has basically been the library’s pamphlets and flyers on HyperCard. (If anyone knows of a library website that isn’t like this, please point me towards it. I’d love to see something different.)
Steve makes another great point:
It also got me thinking about what kind of user community you would need to support a library website that was more–as one commenter said on Thing-ology–more MySpace than Google.
Indeed. I’m gonna think on that one for a bit.
December 5th, 2006 at 11:16 am
w/r/t your previous post and Tim’s Thing-ology post, I think we need to be more unabashed about library fun. Not just the events, coffee, and DVDs (sex, drugs, and rock & roll?) kind of fun, but the losing-yourself-in-the-stacks kind of fun, the I-never-knew-this-existed kind of fun, the I-can’t-believe-this-is free kind of fun. That will always be a minority taste, but I’d say it is our “base.”
And, actually, a library HyperCard stack sounds like boatloads of fun. Did you ever play with the Beyond Cyberpunk stack? Now that was fun.
Thanks for the link.
December 5th, 2006 at 11:57 am
I think we need to be more unabashed about library fun. Not just the events, coffee, and DVDs (sex, drugs, and rock & roll?) kind of fun, but the losing-yourself-in-the-stacks kind of fun, the I-never-knew-this-existed kind of fun, the I-can’t-believe-this-is free kind of fun. That will always be a minority taste, but I’d say it is our “base.”
I completely agree with you, Steve.