| It isn't just the information
industry that's been moving toward personalization in the past couple of
years. It's everything, every organization. Once the movement got started,
everyone else had to follow suit or run the risk of becoming known for
bad service.
It's not easy, personalizing
service, especially on the Internet. And suddenly every Tom, Dick, and
Harry wants this incredibly enormous network to be configured just for
him? It seems a little crazy when you think about it. Yet here we are,
playing along. OK, so maybe the coding it takes to make a personalized
default home page isn't so bad. And alert services are within our technological
grasp. But this is more than coding—it's a whole concept. It's every person
wanting the best of everything for himself or herself. It means that we
have to keep up with the Joneses, or the Lands' Ends, enabling services
like real-time reference chat and follow-me browsing. (See next month's
issue for more on these sorts of topics.) It means that we need to serve
each customer as an individual. (Hey, wait a minute, we've been doing that
for years. But it was a lot simpler in person.)
Sometimes the effort to
personalize patron service becomes a Catch-22 situation. For instance:
In order to get to know a person and her interests and preferences, you
might want to follow her computer activities and record where she goes
and what she does. You might want to use cookies and build a user profile
without her even having to worry about giving you information. But then
the user might get upset because you're "invading" her privacy. What's
a systems librarian to do? People want both privacy and personalization.
Service providers all have to walk a very thin line these days.
If you want to get into
the philosophical musings of how much to personalize and how to accomplish
it, you'll want to read Tripp Reade's feature on page 30. He's part of
the team that runs one of the most famous personalized services in the
country today; it's called MyLibrary@NCState. In another article, a public
librarian explains a custom book alert service that his staff set up for
their frequent readers. It's a fairly simple idea, but it seems to make
the readers quite happy.
Then there's customization
of a different color in the article on page
36. These corporate library staff members couldn't find the sort of
online catalog that could serve their specialized needs—so, with some good
old American ingenuity, they built their own catalog, designed just the
way they liked it. Hey, no one said you couldn't use personalization for
your own benefit!
Libraries are all about
service, and this issue should help you achieve a higher level of service
through today's big trend, personalization. |
