The actual future of the library. This past Saturday, Buffy Hamilton sent me the link to Seth Godin’s new post, “The future of the library” as well as some reaction blog posts. (I’ve put the links at the bottom of this post.) It’s the opening line that really started the ball rolling on this post and has lead me to take issue with Mr. Godin’s post (hereafter quoted in blue). What should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age? And this is my answer: Nothing. To say that libraries are irrelevant is a statement about the individual perception but not the greater societal whole. That’s where our advocacy efforts need to be applied. They can’t survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own.) Ah, but we can survive as a community-funded repository for books that individuals can’t afford to own (or for reference books that have no internet counterpart).
Here’s my proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative. The Blog Readability Test - What’s Your Score? Recently I’ve been working on a Social Media Marketing e-book and a friend who’s editing it sent it back with an important comment – not everyone will be able to understand it at its current level of readability, otherwise known as the level of education required for people to understand the text.
As soon as my friend made this comment, I realized I hadn’t thought about my audience’s reading level for years, since I first started writing professionally. While most of us take into consideration the audience for whom we’re writing, e.g. moms, teens, technopiles, etc, we forget that any writing we do geared towards the general public should be readable by everyone. A couple sites like and offer excellent tools for finding out the readability of your blog or web content.
Added Bytes uses these specific methods of scoring: Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease (Wikipedia) -61.5 Aim for 60 to 80. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level (Wikipedia): 8.3 The Authority Domains Blog – College Undergraduate Level. Online - E-Media Tidbits. Top 8 Usability Mistakes on Websites.
OK so it's been done before by about a million other people, including the Daddy of Usability Jakob Nielson.
However, I thought I'd create my own Top 8 - why Top 8 you ask? Because, I'm an Internet Rebel and I don't conform to your ideals of Top Tens...plus I couldn't think of 10 things to write about. The points aren't in any kind of priority order, that would just require too much thinking. 8. Not identifying hyperlinks properly. I'm not saying all links should be blue and underlined, but they should be differentiated from the rest of the text/content to an extend that I don't have to mouse over them.