KioskCom/DSS: Library of Congress gives peek behind the screen of its digital success

This year's KioskCom Self Service Expo and The Digital Signage Show in Las Vegas started its final day with a keynote presentation by Jo Ann Jenkins, COO of the Library of Congress. The library, whose interactive/online self-service deployment in 2009 won KioskCom's Best of Show award, has seen a significant increase in in-person and online use of its collection since the deployment.

"It has been a wonderful experience, and also a huge team-building program," she said as she outlined the factors that contribute to the deployment's success. 

Library of Congress program director Rob Sokol explained that library officials began discussing an interactive project in 2000 at the library's bicentennial celebration. Library user surveys had identified a gap in its use by non-academic or congressional users, and the planners wanted to make the collection more accessible to elementary and secondary school students. 

"We have seen a dramatic shift in who we're preserving information for," he said. 

The planning process that followed took eight years and involved a dynamic decision-making process that forced library employees to cross departmental boundaries in the interest of common goals.

"The technology was changing so rapidly while we were doing this," Jenkins said. "What you begin with isn't necessarily what you end up with – the solutions are being developed daily." 

The library's 23 touchscreen information stations, online connectivity and barcode-based user identification system resulted in 1.7 million instances of exhibit items being saved in online user accounts and a 50 percent success rate for getting library visitors to continue using the collection online after their visits. The industry standard for that conversion, Jenkins said, is 10 percent. 

Jenkins credited project planners for looking at the project from a very holistic perspective – making sure that user identification systems wouldn't receive interference from the historic facility's marble floors and walls, for example. She also noted the planners' ability to look beyond technology to the collection it highlighted. 

"The wow factor's the collection itself," she said. "The technology needs to stay out of the way." 

The Library of Congress deployment is the largest use of Microsoft's SharePoint CMS. And both Jenkins and Sokol emphasized that the project's success has resulted in the library's collection reaching far more people than it could have in its brick-and-mortar form alone. 

"It's not just about books anymore," Jenkins said, reflecting the session's introduction, given by NanonationCEO Bradley Walker. 

"What they're doing in terms of digital media, it's the right place at the right time," he said.