Hyperlocal Libraries

While Google has been busy making good on its mission “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,” it has been less successful at making your community's local information accessible and useful. It's not that the company is not trying, but that information seems to flow differently at a local level than it does on a global scale. Google's most visible foray into the “local web” is its local search engine Google Maps. Essentially, it's a business and residential directory enhanced by the addition of maps, photos, user reviews, and more. Type “libraries buffalo ny” into the search box and get a list of libraries in Buffalo. While such local search engines are useful, the real potential of the local web is just emerging—something deeper, more 2.0, and more “hyper,” to use the prevailing term.

“Hyperlocal” information is in-depth, intensely local information about the places where you live your everyday life: not necessarily cities or towns but the amorphous places with which you often associate more closely, like your neighborhood or your street or block. Hyperlocal web sites associate and connect online data with specific locations in the real world. In doing so, they make the Internet less of a placeless infosphere, totally separate from the physical world, and help ensure that the virtual world complements our real-world activities. In short, hyperlocal web sites are bringing a sense of place to the Internet.

And bringing a sense of place to the Internet is becoming a bustling business. EveryBlock, Hello Metro, and Outside.in are just a few of the newer hyperlocal sites focusing on geo-enriching online information. Likewise, many newspapers, often in efforts to save their very livelihoods, are initiating hyperlocal coverage of their communities. Even Google is becoming more hyperlocal by enhancing Google Maps, improving local search capabilities in Google News, and experimenting with geographic displays of search results using maps.

Libraries, too, are bringing a sense of place to the Internet. Many libraries are widely recognized for their local heritage projects that produce valuable online collections of local images, documents, maps, and more. Other libraries focus on bringing community information online: calendars of local events, directories of local organizations, municipal government data, and links to other informative local sites. Beyond that, however, the local web is creating new opportunities for community-based, locally focused libraries to get more involved with native information provision and to go hyperlocal.

A central challenge of local community data has always been that it comes from so many different places: the media, residents, government entities, and other narrowly focused organizations. Today, blogs, social networks, Twitter, and emerging hyperlocal web sites are generating even more sources for potentially useful, relevant community data. Libraries can and are serving important functions in their communities with resources that don't engender any original content but that tidy up the local infosphere, that aggregate, organize, and unify the existing information tucked away in various corners of their communities and on the Internet.

For example, placeblogs (blogs about specific places) are becoming more common, and some libraries are building directories of noteworthy local placeblogs (see Hartford Public Library's, CT, “Hartford Blogs” page). More enterprising librarians could even design a blog aggregator to syndicate and display content from a variety of local placeblogs.

Another example is the community calendar: local event data abounds on the web but is spread across many different sites. Using the technology developed for the elmcity project by Jon Udell, a “new media innovator” at Microsoft who is developing a community information hub, librarians can become “calendar curators” and work to merge all the event data for their area on a single page.

Then there's Twitter, the microblogging tool used to share information in the form of short tweets. By deploying the power of hashtags, tags that categorize tweets by topic, and encouraging the community to use them, libraries can aggregate tweets about their neighborhoods (see an example at Syracuse.com's “Central NY on Twitter” page).

Lots of locally relevant data comes from a wide variety of government entities, and some libraries are working to organize more of this information on their community pages: mortgage and foreclosure data, crime statistics, economic indicators, demographic data, neighborhood profiles, and so on (e.g., Colorado's Pikes Peak Library District's “Community Information”). An ambitious nonlibrary resource in this area is EveryBlock, a site that aggregates block-level data about things like building permits, liquor licenses, restaurant inspections, construction projects, film shoots, and more. Libraries can display EveryBlock's data feeds right on their own sites. EveryBlock only covers 11 cities so far, but by the time this article is published, the source code for the site will be released to the public, meaning tech-savvy librarians can use it to build similar sites targeted to their own environs.

Other libraries are taking advantage of the organizing power of wikis. Have you ever looked your town up in Wikipedia? You'll likely find a pretty good, but general, overview of your town (if not, go write one yourself). Some libraries are taking that a step further and devising their own more comprehensive locally focused wikis. LoudonPedia and WikiNorthia are examples of libraries using wikis to create comprehensive local guides that are collaborative efforts involving the community.

Maps also can be effective for organizing and presenting local information on the Internet. These days, people are using maps not only to find their whereabouts but to find information about where they are. Google's My Maps, Platial, and other similar tools are making the formation of custom maps (or map mashups) easier, and libraries are taking advantage by mapping all sorts of data about their communities (one nice example is the “New York City Labor History Map” from New York University Library).

What's the most common place name in the United States? I'll let you Google it (sorry Simpsons fans; it's not Springfield), but in truth, we're not very original when it comes to naming our cities and towns. This makes for a confusing landscape when search engines attempt to identify information associated with specific places. One remedy is geotagging or geocoding: the application of geographic metadata (latitude/longitude coordinates, zip codes) to online content.

Thanks largely to Flickr, geotagging photographs is relatively easy and popular; a quick endeavor for libraries is to monitor Flickr for the geotags related to their communities and subscribe to the feeds. Libraries are also starting their own pages on Flickr to post photos and syndicating their community's photo stream right on the library's site. Libraries can even establish a unique geotag to identify their neighborhood and then encourage residents to post photos using the tag. More enterprising librarians might consider a “geographing” game to collect images that document their communities (like a smaller-scale version of the “Geograph British Isles” project).

Geotagging is very effective for helping to identify local information, but other than photographs, most content on the web is not geotagged at all. As a result, determining the “whereness” of local data is not easily automated and that frames another role for librarians. Librarians can employ their information skills, community focus, and area knowledge to identify locally relevant data that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to find using popular search engines.

There are multiple tools that can help librarians “whereify” different types of online information. For blogs, check out Placeblogger and Outside.in. For local news, there's Google News and Topix. For Twitter, there's Nearby Tweets or the advanced search in Twitter itself. For maps, Google Maps now offers the ability to search for user-generated maps of communities.

Another approach to identifying locally relevant material is to produce a custom search engine that only searches the most informative sites about your community (see mycommunityinfo.ca, for example). Google Custom Search and Rollyo enable the design of focused search engines that only search the sites you select. You can put the search box right on the library site and customize the look of it. The best part? They're both free. Any library that already has a web page with a collection of local links can simply use those two sites as the basis for its own custom search engine.

Think about it: Who knows the community best, who are the real experts? A multinational behemoth like Google? The city newspaper? No! It's the locals themselves, people like you and your patrons. And the best hyperlocal web sites draw out the knowledge that resides in the citizens of a community by creating local conversations. One way libraries can do this is to start a placeblog. Lots of libraries are already blogging, but most blog about themselves. By turning the lens around and focusing on the community, librarians can work with the two-way, conversational nature of blogs, by encouraging comments from readers in the pursuit of local dialog. Some librarians may even want to consider collaborating with the community on its placeblog.

A step beyond placeblogs are locally focused social networks that combine old and new media platforms: information from traditional sources like newspapers and magazines comingled with user-generated blog posts and photos. Many cities have them, e.g., Hoboken411 and Buffalo Rising. A library-affiliated example is myhamilton.ca, where the Hamilton Public Library, Ont., is a collaborator (“The one location where you can find everything you want to know about Hamilton, Ontario, Canada”).

These sites implement a more full-blown “crowdsourcing” approach to tap into local knowledge: residents not only comment on posts but also submit their own. The sites also provide forums with often lively discussions about local topics. Starting and maintaining a hyperlocal social network is a large undertaking and likely not feasible for most libraries. Still, at the very least, libraries can monitor these sites to stay in touch with topics of interest within their communities. Some librarians may want to become active participants, more vocal locals, in these networks and establish the library as a knowledgeable, resourceful presence.

Starting up a local dialog, however, doesn't have to entail a large technological endeavor like a social networking site. Some libraries may want to follow the lead of Front Porch Forum, a site that relies on the ancient technology called email to devise neighborhood discussion forums that have proven to be quite effective.

Baxter Black, the cowboy poet on National Public Radio, once wrote, “Small-town papers often thrive because CNN or the New York Times are not going to scoop them for coverage of the 'VFW Fish Fry' or 'Bridge Construction Delay'.... I think of local papers as the last refuge of unfiltered America—a running documentary of the warts and triumphs of Real People—unfettered by the Spin and Bias and the Opaque Polish of today's Homogenized Journalism. It is the difference between Homemade Bread and Pop-Tarts.”

Like small-town papers, libraries can thrive because they won't be scooped if they focus on organizing hyperlocal information that is more granular, more specialized, more detailed than what other sources supply. Every community is, in its own way, buzzing with activity, and local librarians can dare to press their ears to the hive. There is no shortage of material that locally curious libraries can strive to make more accessible online, from the traditional (oral histories, postcards, death certificates, draft cards) to the more techie (blogs, mashups, tweets). Let Big City Newspaper (if it even survives) serve up Pop-Tarts, while libraries focus on all the different types of bread being baked at home—the things that capture the truly unique personality of their communities and things that will not likely be available elsewhere.

When people refer to their local library they often mean “local” only in the sense that the library happens to be the one located closest to them. By becoming more persistently and energetically local, by going hyperlocal, libraries can make the word local a more meaningful part of what defines the library's role in the community, beyond just its physical location. Doing so can demonstrate that the library is in touch with the information needs of community members and help them view the library as a more relevant resource in their everyday lives.