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Create space for each audience
Gamers need social space. Boomers need “a third place.” Toddlers need storytelling terrain. Seniors need quiet areas. Everyone needs technology. And many want coffee! Opened in September 2004, the new 144,000-square-foot Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library, Evansville, Indiana, creates space for each of these audiences. The library has a Teen Zone for Gamers complete with a bank of computers, outlets for laptops, a collection of audiobooks and a network for wireless and PDA devices. And it’s right next to the Cup and Chaucer café and garden. The library also has activity rooms, a technology center, a children’s story area, a popular materials section and a quiet study rotunda. Other newly opened libraries, such as Seattle Public and Salt Lake City Public, also have built special spaces to accommodate the wide range of users libraries serve.
Throw a LAN party
To embrace Gamers and bring them into the Santa Monica Public Library in California, Miguel Acosta, Principal Librarian, Information Management, organized a LAN (Local Area Network) party with the help of the library’s Teen Advisory Council. The idea was to connect with this new generation and begin grooming them as future library users. Three hours before the event, 60 Gamers lined a city block, the first time a library program had people waiting to get in. The success of the party lead to poetry slams, animated festivals, Yu-Gi-Oh tournaments and a number of new members of the Teen Advisory Council.
Embrace mobile devices, SMS technology
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Boomers
and Gamers love hand-held electronic devices, so they would fit right in at
Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia. Students, faculty and staff
there are using cell phones and Blackberries to reach their favorite librarians.
A new “SMS a Query” service lets them send text-based messages of
up to 160 characters to librarians from anywhere, at anytime. SMS stands for
Short Message Service. Deputy Librarian John Frylinck says early student feedback
praises the service as an easier, cost-effective way to find an answer to a
simple query. “Mobile phones are ubiquitous and accessible, and SMS provides
students with a very popular way of communicating,” he says. “Since
the student population at Curtin has clearly embraced mobile phone culture and
SMS technology, SMS a Query offers another way of servicing a large client base.”
