My Return and My Thoughts on Desert Island Sites.

First of all, yes I realize I have been failing on trying to maintain a blog. This post will hopefully begin my re-return and a new attempt at doing a blog properly.

On a recent episode of T is for Training (http://tisfortraining.wordpress.com/) part of the discussion centered on "What would make your library's website a must have site?" The idea being if you were stranded on a desert island and could only access five websites what would make your library's site be one of those. My response was that this ran counter to what I'm trying to do with the library site. As libraries continue to fight to be recognized as relevant, they seem to be trying to be all things (information, entertainment, social opportunities) to draw in all people. While this approach may be warranted with regard to the physical library as a community space, I believe it is not appropriate for the library's digital space.

While I do support the idea of the website as the digital branch of the library, it differs from a physical branch in a way that is particularly relevant to this topic: travel time. It can take less time to navigate from one website to another than it does to move even from one room to another making switching your digital location a comparatively trivial task. This can be good or bad for your website.

It can be bad in that it will make it difficult for your library's site to be one of the "desert island" sites. I doubt your library has the budget to create and maintain it's own social networking site, news aggregation service, e-mail service, etc. and even if it did, could it make them better and more compelling than existing products? If instead, you plug into existing sites and services (for example through Facebook's API), when users are forced to economize their access, do you really expect them to pick your "bolted on" social features over the wider range of social interaction they can get from a site that focuses on social networking?

The difficulty of competing in these areas is a good thing for your library's website. It allows you to focus your effort on the things your library does best such as circulate books to your customers, provide research resources, serve as a platform for ultra-local and niche information. Your site might not be on the desert island list, but it may come up when the patron wants primitive methods of building boats.