Lucky Me

IAG readers, I am off on vacation beginning tomorrow--and I am not taking a computer. I know you'll miss me...actually it's more likely you won't notice I'm gone now that we are rich in IAGers. Five of us means five voices telling stories.

On the drive home yesterday, Alice remarked to me that she thought my presentation about the Perceptions report was better than it was the last time she'd seen me make the presentation, about two months ago. Well, good, I said...how come? She replied that I'd made it a story this time. This was great to hear. Talking about the results of our survey means talking about a lot of data, a lot of numbers, and I had a tough time finding the story in this data the first few times I gave presentations on the report. I had said as much to Jane Dysart after she'd listened to me speak at the SirsiDynix SuperConference as I felt I should have done a better job of presenting.

Story-telling is powerful, much more so than presenting facts, and yet, in business settings--libraries, offices--we rarely weave a "story cloth" out of facts as a way of helping people find meaning in those bare and cold facts. "Circulation rose by 27% last year." "Reference questions dropped by 8% last semester." OK....but what does this mean? Is there a story behind the numbers?

Stephen Abram's Personas project is interesting for many reasons, but one good reason is the story-making potential of the personas as you'll see towards the end of this presentation Stephen gave at CIL in March--the link to the slides is in the post. Much more powerful and useful to make a story about people using libraries than reducing them to percentages. Jane Dysart has some additional resources on personas here.

See you around May 16th. Oh, no secret decoder rings here either.