Founded in 1991, IDEO is an innovation and design firm that uses a human-centered, design-based approach to help organizations in the business, government, education, and social sectors innovate and grow in three ways:

• Identify new ways to serve and support people by uncovering their latent needs, behaviors, and desires.
• Visualize new directions for companies and brands and design the offerings – products, services, spaces, media, and software – that bring innovation strategy to life.
• Enable organizations to change their cultures and build the capabilities required to sustain innovation.

A friend recently pointed me at an old ABC News Nightline story from 1999 that covered how Ideo cultivates an environment of innovation. Links to the parts of the series on YouTube are below. Watch all of them – they’re free!

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

This story is inspiring. There were three things I learned by watching this again. 1) Ideo creates a culture of innovation by making good ideas more important than job titles. 2) They stick to deadlines (even the tight one from ABC News). 3) They work in groups, in close proximity to one another.

Remember, this video was made 11 years ago. Despite the availability of this information, many businesses still conduct business in direct opposition to these principles.

The question we should be asking ourselves is, “What if we worked this way?”.

Now we’v come full circle. The powers that be have instituted another project. But this time they’re taking a very different approach. Important in this new approach is the three phases they have organized: 1) Information Architecture, 2) Design, 3) Engineering. Tthey’ve decided that the project should begin with user research. This alone should have great power to fix what ailed the last redesign. However, there is one thing about this approach that is even more important than the well designed process: trust. Not only are we throwing out old methods, we’re discarding outmoded philosophies. This is very important.

We have an opportunity to change the course of University web branding. There is a small window that has opened. Brent Harker (the aforementioned ‘powers that be’), in a very King Benjamin-like relinquishing of authority, has designed a system that opens the doors to the community, to succeed or fail on our own merits. He has placed the authority back in our hands to organize ourselves, choose leaders, discuss practices, establish policies. It can work. It is the best way to advance the BYU brand on the web.

But we have to trust each other. We cannot think of ourselves as silos. We must see what we share in common and build on that, through ‘cooperative action‘.

There is no community without trust.

We need to be moving on this now. Libraries have the data and the authority to produce the most valuable linked data sources on the internet. As libraries make their data available for mashing up with other linked data, our resources will be easier to discover. Libraries will take their place in the information landscape as sources for the best data available.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of linked data and it’s potential, I’m including this TED conference video by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the other guy who also invented the internet.

What Patron to Patron Lending would look like: The loaning BYU user would bring their book to the ILL office. ILL would then check out the book for a typical checkout period to the borrowing BYU user. When finished with the item, the borrower would then return the book to the ILL office to be returned to the loaner.

The borrowing patron would never know their request was filled by a local BYU user; ILL would be the full mediator of the exchange.

To do this, ILL would need a database of all user volunteered holdings with the contact information of the potential lenders. The BYU users would need also a browser extension that would pop up any time the browser is displaying a book record (e.g., even if they are searching on sites like Amazon, eBay, Goodreads, etc). The language would be something like: “Do you own this? If so, would you be willing to loan this anonymously to another BYU user?” This would need user authentication. If they check the box, Yes, then the user information and title information would go to the ILL database for future reference.

This project could also have implications for items that we do own but are currently checked out. This could be a way to alleviate pressure on long queues of Holds on popular items.

Gerrit van Dyk

Betsy Hopkins

ScholarSearch has another search option available that has not yet been implemented by the library that has the potential to overcome all of the MetaLib shortcomings. It would return results in less than one second, would create more accurate facets and have true relevancy ranking available.

I would like to propose that the library implement Deep Searching for ScholarSearch for as many 3rd-party databases as possible.

Specifically, the article talked about Rite-Solutions, a software company, that put in place a system that allowed everyone in the company to contribute ideas and vote on the ones they thought would be most beneficial. Here is what the CEO had to say about this system:

“We’re the founders, but we’re far from the smartest people here. At most companies, especially technology companies, the most brilliant insights tend to come from people other than senior management. So we created a marketplace to harvest collective genius.”

One of the first ideas generated using this system now accounts for 30% of the sales in the company.

I would like to propose something similar for the library. I want to create a Digg-like system that would allow anyone at BYU to contribute ideas to the library and then vote on the ones they think are the best ideas. The ideas could be anything from a new way to search the library’s systems, to new services, to ways the library could save money. The library would then implement the most popular ideas.

• Discuss library related topics amongst employees. If there is a topic that needs to be discussed a forum is a great venue for allowing everyone to express their opinion.  In large public settings a lot of people are inhibited from expressing their opinions, but on a forum people tend to be more open because 100 eyeballs are not looking directly at them. It provides historical data about the conversation.
• Allow students to post questions, make suggestions, and talk about classes. Would student really use a forum? I don’t know. We should see if other libraries have had success getting students to use a forum.
• House the HBLL FAQ, its easy to update and change. Also the most FAQ’s will naturally bubble to the top of a forum as user interact with it.

What else could we use a forum for?

Jacob

Once we have gathered the data what would we do with it? Does it need a Blackboard interface so it can be incorporated into classes? Is it just a place for faculty to store their work so they don’t lose it? Please share your thoughts.

Jacob