While I was at ALA I attended the BIGWIG unconference and had a great conversation with David Lee King and other unconference participants about the ideas of experience economy and community development within your digital community. For example, consider the idea of Build-a-Bear (those creepy overpriced bears that you stuff on your own). It costs so much more money to build a bear than it does to just buy a plush bear from somewhere. The idea is that people want to buy the experience, if you just wanted a bear you’d go to HugeBoxStore and buy one for 8 bucks. What you’re really paying for is the experience of choosing fur, stuffing the thing yourself, selecting your own beady little eyes, and having it all stitched together within the hour: customization. Experience economy tells us that people are in search of more than a service, more than a product.

From that conversation we turned to discussing how to create some of this user experience via the library website/digital presence. David works in a public library, where I think it’s a bit easier to create and foster that experience—or at least the chance of an interested user population is greater. How to create some user experience for the PCC library distance learners and digital community members? How to create this experience in a way that ultimately floats our mission: support of the ac. programs?

experience economy

I thought about Blackboard and how much it generally FAILS to develop community, even in the face of mandatory participation. Then I started thinking about the students I don’t ever see until it’s “too late”, the subject areas I’m responsible for, conversations I’ve had with department faculty over the course of the year and it came to me… virtual drop in sessions.

I have a lot of work to do with this to get it to come to fruition, but I would like to experiment with creating a “brick and click” (both virtual and in person) drop in session. Initially I’d like to experiment with this idea for a specific chemistry class, maybe CH 104, because I’ve already talked to faculty at Rock Creek about the assignments CH 104 students are given and how they fail to connect on any meaningful level. We’ve also talked about how unlikely it is that chemistry instructors are going to get on-board with the idea of giving up 50-120 minutes for a one-shot with a librarian. Following that chat we talked about how students are missing the fundamental search mechanics required to complete the assignments, that I spend up to an hour with each student who comes to the library, frustrated at their perceived idiocy and inability to “find a stupid article”. The end of all of that chatting was an agreement to revisit the idea in the coming school year and to explore alternatives for delivering instruction to the students and one of the ideas bandied about was a drop in.

Traditionally I find that drop-ins don’t work because there’s very little student incentive to show up. You have to recognize that getting this instruction will benefit you on some level, even if you have to do it on your own time. Chem faculty indicated that she’d think favorably on providing incentive in the form of extra credit to attend a drop-in.

So all of this is to say that I have a lot of thinking to do. How to sell it? How to tech it? How to promote it?

More on experience economy: