Librarian Day In The Life: Vendor Edition

I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project.  You can learn more about it at librarydayinthelife.pbwiki.com.  Most folks are participating by tweeting their daily activities using the #libday5 hashtag or blogging about them.

I’m a librarian that works for a vendor.  I’d like to clear up two of the most common questions: Yes, I have an MLIS.  No, I’m not a sales person. 

I work for Evanced Solutions in Indianapolis.  The short description is that we make library management software and also have a new product that is an automated materials vending machine.

My title is “Coordinator of Customer Experience”.  Or as my boss says – “Make sure our customers are happy and be the voice of our customers here at the office…”

While there are days I really miss being on desk, I really love what I do at Evanced.  I have an amazing 20,000 foot view of what’s happening in the profession.  I interact with libraries across the US and around the world on a daily basis and get to see how they are similar and different and often watch innovation unfold.  Instead of helping patrons directly, I now get to help librarians help patrons, and I think I like that even more.

Here’s some of the things I’ve done over the last few days (creeping into late last week…)
– met with an elementary school media center specialist to discuss a school wide reading program
– coordinated software training for libraries in Australia
– wrote blog post about summer reading programs in Texas
– spoke to several customers in Chicago, mostly at public libraries
– began the research for a customer experience survey
– helped a library enable a software feature to better manage their room reservations system
– began LITA presentation preparation (October is the conference!)
– pondered my presentation topic for a digital libraries conference in Germany in September 2011 (I just pondered, didn’t get too far…)

Addition: July 30 – I also became majorly bummed out when I spoke to a customer at a library cooperative that was shutting down.  That’s just brutal.  Talk about a pang of fear and sadness. 

Social Media and the Retail World

I read this white paper today and wanted to share.  The white paper, written by BrandSwag, discusses various phone apps and social media tools that can be used in retail environments.  Libraries do have similarities to retail environments, whether we want to admit it or not and by keeping tabs on trends in the retail environment, we can help our profession.

http://kylelacy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/socialmediawhitepaper.pdf

1) Some of this stuff applies to libraries, some of it doesn’t.  If anything, the white paper provides a great description of location based social networking options like Foursquare and Gowalla.

2) Even if you don’t really care, you might want to read it anyways because patrons are asking about this stuff.

Have a good weekend, folks!