I’ve been working on a couple of projects lately and have come up against some frustrations.  Some of this is a bit of a rehashing of things, but I haven’t posted in a while, so here goes.

Ebooks.  There’s still no easy way for a library to process these.  As I’ve vented about before, we’re stuck with choosing between systems from library vendors (eg Follett) that work well in terms of the back of house library processing stuff but aren’t really intuitive or well designed for our users or systems from non library vendors that are intuitive (eg iTunes) but that aren’t set up well to work with a library loan system.  I actually had a chance to share this with a rep from Apple Japan last week, and we’ve got visitors coming from their big house in California next week that will hear the same thing from me.  Being non-library people though, I’m not sure if they fully understand our unique constraints and how we’re different from individual users.  Maybe they need to hire a library consultant…

My other problem of late concerns databases.   I think we have some great ones in terms of content, but again, they aren’t always the most user friendly.  As a result, we have some teachers recommending Google Scholar to their students even though we are paying a lot of money for access to a bunch of other databases (EBSCO, Questia, Newsbank, BrainPOP).  While I’d obviously prefer that we use the products we’re currently paying for, I fully understand why our users would gravitate towards Google Scholar – it’s an interface that they’re already used to, and therefore much less intimidating.  Google just needs to figure out a way to harness this potential revenue stream.  If it meant being able to increase their content, they should find a way to charge our library each time one of our students accesses one of their articles and I’d gladly pay the fee.

Google and Apple, I’ll kindly accept a 10% cut in the royalties for these ideas.  Given the markets of late though, my preferred form of payment will be in pelts or furs or some sort of payment that I can put in a coffee can and bury out in the woods.