We have a new suite of 2.0 tools focused on human needs and relationships that are changing the dynamics of the entire marketplace — not just libraries. User expectations are changing, permanently. This is a good thing, since libraries have always been about service and personal relationships with our users. The technology is just catching up with our service ethic! Now we just have to reintroduce ourselves into every aspect of the virtual world. That means focusing our staffing balance from the backroom to the front room; investing our technology decisions in ones which meet the needs of the end user; and retraining an entire segment of our library workers to adapt to a fundamental new reality.

Now we’re challenged with moving our “tricks” into the new spaces. This is definitely a bigger challenge. For this challenge, we have to change our own personal behaviors and styles to adapt and reach beyond merely adding websites, technologies, and content to our toolkits. For this change, we have to place ourselves in all of the spaces inhabited by our users. We have to introduce complementary in-person and virtual contact. We have to be everywhere they are, since that’s the user expectation, and adapt to the tools that match their needs — IM, texting, smartphones, social networks, and the rest. And we’re seeing strong resistance from many of our colleagues. Can we do it? Remember, the dinosaurs didn’t go extinct because the climate changed. They disappeared because they couldn’t adapt quickly enough to the changes happening around them!

We have adapted well to so many recent changes. Our “bricks” have been renovated to within an inch of their lives into commons, research, community, teen, and scholarly spaces where information, databases, books, and serials are placed in the context of their host institutions and communities. We have adapted well to “clicks” strategies and have built websites, elearning objects, and licensing for more content than individual libraries ever dreamed of having in the past!

To capture market share and, more importantly, mindshare, we must now prioritize our long-term and short-term strategies around serving the real customer (and not just the internal needs of library workers). For instance, the OPAC and ILS systems don’t suck for library workers. They were built to meet our specific needs — library management, transaction processing, inventory systems, etc. When we moved an internally oriented tool out of the backroom to make it accessible to the “public,” we did a good thing. The unintended consequence of public OPACs, however, has been to teach us that end users have different needs and processes for discovery and navigation than library workers — especially in the virtual digital world. Rats! It would have been so much easier if it had worked out differently. We shouldn’t feel too badly. Retail operations such as Amazon learned very quickly that people behave differently online than they do in physical stores; online learning is different than in physical classrooms; and online communication, in all its formats, is different than simple telephone or in-person conversations. How many of us really want to use Wal-Mart’s warehouse systems or our mall’s backroom tools to replace the shopping experience? A small minority, I’ll wager.

After more than 20 years of primarily working on the infrastructure of libraries — servers, websites, wireless, electronic content licensing, broadband, access, security, viruses, etc. — we have reached a real tipping point. In 2008 we are seeing the real action in our world of libraries move from the back office to the front desk. We’re moving from a technology-centric strategy to one in which the real needs of our clients must predominate. Aligning technology with user behavior no longer suffices to ensure success. We need to understand, and understand deeply, the role of the library in our end-users’ lives, work, research, and play. This is critical to our long-term success, and failure is not an option.

Reference and research services, the front line of library service, are dealing with a far-less-predictable future. The asynchronous, asymmetrical threats facing us are very real hydra monsters challenging our roles in many ways, all having some truth. The fate of reference has come into clearer focus in Web 2.0/Library 2.0 discussions and debates. The emphasis has moved from understanding and learning the technology to understanding end-user behaviors in context. Policies have moved from serving library management needs and library workers’ preferences to where end-user needs trump librarian insights and personal search preferences. If this attitude hadn’t changed, we’d be in real trouble now — although, admittedly, you still occasionally encounter dinosaur tracks and hear the roar of distant mastodons. A plethora of new end-user research — from usability through personas and from hit analyses to ethnographic and behavioral studies — focus on workplace needs, scholarly behavior, learning styles, and entertainment and demonstrate a material shift in the library user firmament.

It cannot be denied that our reference stats are down, though this is not the case with our research requests, training activities, and one-on-one contact with clients. Public library circulation is way up. Website hits — from nearly any measurement data point — are up. Even gate count is up in most libraries. In public libraries, life is proceeding very well. In the academic and college space, change is moving apace with elearning and learning commons initiatives growing and major technologies expanding, such as OpenURL, federated search, portals and portlets, APIs, and more innovation in user experiences aimed at learning and research missions — and not centered on libraries alone.

I suspect that ratio is quite different now — worse, from this old reference librarian’s perspective! Reference is the place to watch for change and innovation in libraries. Indeed, all this 2.0 talk is all about the real nature of the customer relationship — in person and virtual. The IT and metadata types were dealing well with a fairly predictable future — one driven by the consumer space and reaction-driven, one with standards and rules and not as influenced by messy human behaviors. You can almost see that train heading down the track and just hop on and enjoy the ride.

Many years ago, the esteemed Barbara Quint offered an estimate that Google answered as many reference queries in half an hour as all the reference librarians in the world did in 7 years.