Surely you all remember the P.D. Eastman book Are You My Mother? In it a baby bird wanders around asking all types of animals if they are his mother. Well that’s somewhat how I’ve felt over the past few years as I’ve tried to identify who the real customer is for the OPAC.
The easiest answer is that the customer is the one paying the bills and yet that’s who I’ve been listening to for years only to find out (if all of you other bloggers are to be believed) we’ve gotten it all wrong. I think the answer is that my customers are a community that includes both the librarians with all of their specialized needs and the patrons who have, sometimes, completely opposite needs. It takes a partnership that includes both camps to create products that really work.
Sometimes it’s good to have your head served to you on a plate. It’s a great way to clean the slate. While it’s true that mud has been slung at the ILS vendors I think many in the library world have taken their fair share of ownership of the problems and embraced the challenge of thinking differently and working differently. For me, the development of Encore has been an amazing opportunity to work closely with libraries trying to create change. But beyond that we’ve been given an incredible amount of feedback directly from their patrons. We’re all working together and it works! Who woulda thunk it?
I realize this isn’t radical thinking and you could find this same message any number of other places on the web. But it’s important because it isn’t easy to break out of our routines. It is even harder to keep from slipping back into them. As the technologies and trends come and go I believe we’ll all continue to be successful if we stay focused on this 3-way customer partnership. If we continue to create products including all the partners we can’t fail.
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June 30th, 2008 at 8:20 am
I whole-heartedly agree with you. No matter what the service offered, the 3-way customer partnership is key to the success, longevity, and performance of any venture, libraries not the least. I read a book
recently by the President of MindShare that gives a bit of an old school twist on current trends in customer relations.