The people of the New York Public Library have it right.  You can tell if you watch their video.

Search changes.  So do they.  Not in the sense of forgetting who they are.  After all, they’re the NYPL, one of the world’s great institutions of information.

The NYPL has changed by being a human face (and mind) behind search.  I love the part of the video that focuses on the research specialist who’s worked with students in the same field for 30 years.  She claims, rightly, that you can’t get that experience online.  It’s true.

The video shows that the library is changing with technology.  They are trying to convince people that the experience of the library, not isolated information, is what their customers are looking for.  They know people can search online.   They also know that they help people find what they can’t find there.

In other words, there are no keyboard cats at the NYPL.

In the past, it was probably okay for the NYPL staff to structure things however it best suited the NYPL.  They had the market cornered on what they were, the purveyors of (sometimes incredibly hard to find) information.

Not so now.  Anyone can do a Google search and find just about whatever they’re looking for.  So the NYPL reevaluated its position and fell upon the fact that, hey, we’re way more than just information.

They are the personal, the physical, some would argue the emotional manifestation of information.  They are what the internet can never be.  And there is a place for them- the library is far from obsolete.

The direction that the NYPL is taking is one that businesses can learn from.

Everyone is saying print is dead, etc.  That’s not ever going to be true, but it’s hard not to see at least some of the logic coming from there.  What’s a library’s role in the internet age?

And what does a vacation destination do in a recession?  What does a hardware store do when Lowe’s moves in?  What does the department of highways do when high speed rail lines get built?

The NYPL is answering their question.  How about you?

Tags: content, Digital Marketing, marketing strategy

This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 8:06 am and is filed under Digital Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.