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December, 2000

THE LIBRARIAN AS ACTOR?

James H. Sweetland
North American Convenor

Recently, the Harvard Business School published a book, The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Pine and Gilmore, 1999). While the authors may be overstating their case a bit, they make some very good points, points which should be considered by libraries (and other public service agencies as well).

In brief, the argument is that the developed economies have evolved over time through three phases, and are about ready to enter a fourth. Assuming that this model is correct, the authors then suggest that any business which does not adapt to meet the new stage will be in serious trouble. The stages we have gone through to date:

  • Commodities - essentially raw materials, with perhaps a little processing, such as food, iron, and the like.
  • Goods - the processed raw materials, such as a cooked meal, or a cast iron pot.
  • Services - intangible activities customized to the needs of a given patron, such as a haircut, or a custom-made set of silverware.
  • And, the next stage - Experiences, wholly intangible and memorable events.
One example of the differences could be in eating: The commodity, say a fish can be processed into a cooked fish, served to you, say at a "family restaurant", it becomes part of a service, in which the service becomes a part of the dinner. The experience, going beyond this, arrives when the actual fish dinner becomes less important than the action of being at the restaurant, or, to take a non-commercial example, the action of being at a family reunion, which just happens to have a fish dinner. The authors� main argument here is that currently, many businesses are trying to turn services into commodities, with the intention of saving costs, and thus providing a lower priced product. However, as nearly everyone can tell from their own experience, this commodifying usually reduces the quality of the ,service, for example, consider the replacement of the cooked-to-order hamburger found in the classic roadside diner with the mass produced Mcburger. Or, perhaps even worse, the replacement of live, human telephone operators with seemingly endless automated menus.

There is a lot more to the book, of course, but the above provides a basic summary of the thesis. The authors provide a number of examples of how businesses have successfully provided "experiences", such as the theme restaurant, or the "historical" amusement park. They argue that, in effect, the only truly successful way to make most business encounters into experiences is for the workers to become actors, and the business place a type of stage.

Here is where the library comes in: At present, there is serious concern about the development of Web based booksellers, and even types of reference services. These, at least the more mature of them, appear to some degree to be customized. Consider Amazon.com, which is set up to keep track of your purchases, and then suggest new relevant titles the next time you log on to them. Or consider such web sites as AskSam, which provides reference question answering 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and for free. Both librarians and owners of small traditional bookstores are concerned that this level of service, especially since it is free, or nearly so, will eliminate their own services (and their jobs, as well).

However, in fact the library (and the independent bookstore) already have, or should have, one very important feature lacking in nearly all Web services the existence of trained, competent, human beings. They also have, merely by existing in real space and time, an ambiance. Thus, they should be able to provide a more customized experience, and for that matter, provide a type of stage for librarians to act upon.

Pine and Gilmore spend some time discussing types of acting, recommending training studios for actors, and otherwise proposing that the employees of a firm put on a show. While some of their suggestions approach the bizarre, the basic idea has some merit. If the library provides a positive experience (as we all know, and have been saying for at least a hundred years), the patron will be more likely to use it again. And, if the librarians (and all library staff for that matter) consciously try to provide a positive experience, we can readily add something not often found in yet another transaction over the Web.

Already, many Web users have amassed stories of absurd responses from the system, responses which often cannot apparently be corrected since attempts to contact human beings are often unavailing. Here again, the human-power library has a leg up the human beings can interact with the person having a problem, and correct it (or at least explain the policy, if necessary changing the wording of the policy and repeating it until the user understands).

In any event, much of what we do can be entertaining, and if not, we can at least pretend to be entertained ourselves while doing the job. Consider the fact that urban areas often see a crowd of people watching construction workers, looking in the windows of restaurants to watch pizza being made, and the like. Think about a library which consciously decided to develop a specific persona say a friendly place with competent, caring staff. Then think about how you would organize things, and what sort of people you would need, and what sort of training they would need.

And this is the real point: Librarians are people; libraries, even with all the technology, still have some of the image to the users of friendly, people-places, versus yet another mass production machine. So, even if the net result of reading The Experience Economy is to see the demand that workers not only provide goods and services, but also become entertainers is yet another exploitation of the working class (even badly paid professional actors make more than the minimum wage), the idea of treating your job and your service as a type of entertainment provides something to think about.

Oh, and the next stage after "Experience"? It is said to be "Transformation". And here, we are ahead of business after all, what is the library supposed to be other than a place where one�s intellect is stimulated, and, in a real way, transformed?

References
Pine, B. Joseph and James H. Gilmore. (1999) The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press .

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