Power to the People: Do it Yourself Content Distribution
June 17th, 2005From an an article in EContent:
“In his breakthrough book Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel, head of the Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, documents the impact of user input on product innovation. From extreme-sports equipment to library information systems, users are consistently ahead of the curve, von Hippel observes. Indeed, some 80% of the novel products he and his colleagues have studied over the last several years were prototyped by users first. ‘Open-source projects are object lessons that teach us that individuals can develop, produce, diffuse, maintain, and update products for themselves in the context of user communities,’ von Hippel says.”
Emphasis mine. I was chatting with a colleague this week about library catalogs and we both agreed that the OPAC should not be a one way street. Not only should librarians provide content via the OPAC, but users should be involved as well in making their experiences more pleasant and worthwhile. The OPAC should not just be about providing access to library materials…