Library futurist troubadours, David Lee King and Michael Porter have launched their new video. Library 101 . It’s a bright and breezy call for libraries to keep what is at our core and learn new basics if they are going to survive in the future. The video features the faces of over 500 librarians throughout the world.

The was aim is not just to wear disco pants and entertain – although I’m grateful that they did that – but to get people talking and thinking about what to keep and what to change. The Library 101 site , also launched this morning has a section of Resources and Things to Know plus a collection of 24 essays around the theme. David and Michael “asked some widely known and respected folks in Libraryland to talk about what they see changing in libraries and what we need to be doing to ensure we remain relevant as technology and society evolve”.

For my contribution I made a 2 minute mini-movie and a little essay about the basics of what it means to get “deeply local” – community, content, local linking, linking to the world and knowing possibilities. Here it is, Deeply local at your library 101 .

DEEPLY LOCAL AT YOUR LIBRARY 101

The key for libraries to thrive in the new digital landscape is to get deeply local.

Libraries have a competitive strength over Google or Amazon or off-the-shelf one-size-fits-all databases.

We can use human skills to know intimately our communities and their information needs. We can know what type of information they want, how they prefer to get it and ask them questions.

We can provide platforms for creating local content and match existing content to the needs of our communities.

Rather than declining in a world of born-digital user-created content , libraries have a chance to occupy a central place in our communities.

We do need to change the way we do things.

The deeply local has five key components:
1. Community – Knowing intimately our communities and their informational, recreational needs. This could involve chatting regularly to our users, conducting non-user surveys or analysing the hits on our website.

2) Content – Knowing the content available for our local community and by our community. This includes local history collections in local libraries and institutional repositories in academic libraries.

3) Local linking – Linking our community with each other via local content, or content that meets their informational needs. Encouraging study groups in our buildings or hosting a social network for a local bookclub is an example of this.

4) Linking to the world – Linking the world to local content. Linking our users to the local information hosted elsewhere. Essential in this is providing free and open access to material produced with public money and understanding about the best ways to get data in an out of our systems for remixing.

5) Knowing possibilities – Knowing what is available and possible with information and content – and bringing that back to our communities and matching it to their needs. Getting deeply local is not about doing exactly what our users want – we can do better than that. It is about library staff knowing about how to connect people and information so well that we exceed our users expectations.