Creating the Ultimate Information Experience


Creating the Ultimate Information Experience
Planning Our Next Generation Libraries

Literacy is a learned skill involving an ability to transform characters on paper into mental concepts and images.  Listening to an audio book requires a slightly different skill, but requires the ability to transform audio sounds into mental concepts and images.

The trend in the information world is to make the interface between information and our brains as seamless and as invisible as possible.  However, if all we do is download tons of information into our brains, we haven’t accomplished much.  Information needs to be relevant, useful, and somehow meaningful.  In short, we need to experience it.

So how do we take dry, boring information and turn it into a meaningful experience?

In the team-based business cultures of our working lives, where good service is a minimum and professionalism is a given, businesses are grappling with the experience concept as a way to distinguish themselves?  “The service economy, like a houseguest with good manners but too many vacation days, is leaving the scene. It is time for the experience economy” says renowned futurist John Naisbitt.

Stepping up to this challenge, many companies are working to “repackage their products and services in a way to deliver unique experiences.”

An experience is something personally encountered. Hence the popularity of falling in love or riding a rollercoaster. To imagine ourselves creating information experiences requires that we think of customers individually and that we use adaptive methods of problem-solving. Now we have to rise to another level, and it is a potentially chaotic level since it requires attentive interaction with people.

John Naisbitt tells us that “in the experience economy, services are linked together to form memorable events that personally engage the customer.”

As an example, coffee can be bought on a commodity level at any grocery store.  On a product level it can be bought in any restaurant.  But if you want the real coffee experience, you have to go to Starbucks. If you pay close attention, Starbucks is not in the business of selling coffee.  Rather, their primary product is the Starbucks experience.

So if we transition that concept into the information world, how do we go about creating the ultimate information experience?  How do we take words on a page, books on a shelf, or digitized bits on a memory stick and create information that has an impact?  Another way of asking this is, how do we create informational experiences that are entertaining, timely, pertinent, and fun, and at the same time, meaningful and relevant to our lives? 

Libraries are a perfect example of an industry struggling to make this transformation.  Long regarded as a “center of information”, libraries find themselves competing with Barnes & Noble and their warm, inviting atmosphere, soft comfortable chairs and in-store coffee shops.

Future libraries have an opportunity to reinvent the information experience.  Here are some examples of featured experiences that could be added to a library:

These are just a few of the possibilities for creating a next-generation library.

In many respects, the ultimate information experience at future libraries will be where great ideas happen and people have the tools and facilities to act on those ideas.

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ADDITIONAL LIBRARY ARTCLES:

By Thomas Frey

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