WiLS July 2016 Vendor Partner Interview: Randall Maxey, Boopsie

At WiLS, we want to bring valuable information to our library partners, including information about the missions and big ideas of the vendors they may already do business with.  Each month, WiLS interviews a vendor partner in order to bridge the gap and open the door to valuable collaborations.  This month, we are delighted to share insights from Randall Maxey, Director of Sales at Boopsie, a new WiLS vendor partner!

Tell us about your company’s background.

Boopsie, Inc. was founded in 2006, before the iPhone was released, in order to provide mobile apps for libraries and their users. Our founders knew that mobile apps would be a game-changing technology, a fact which is becoming more evident every day. We understood it would be important to partner with those companies that served the library market in order to be able to feature those resources in a user-friendly experience within our apps.

Why do you, personally, choose to work with libraries?

I have been an avid reader my entire life. I spent Saturday mornings, as a child, sitting on the floor in the stacks reading. Libraries opened up my world. I believe in libraries as a center of our communities where one can get answers to many of our most pressing questions, or learn, or simply just read a good book.

What do you like to know about the libraries you work with? What helps you better understand their needs?

I like to know what the strategic mission of the library is and how, in part, we can help them reach their goals, be it outreach, increased engagement, or communication. I want to know what the pain points are for the library. If we know what the real needs are of the libraries we work with, as well as their users, we can be a better partner and provide better products and services.

What big ideas are being worked on at your company? What problems are being solved?

We are constantly working to make sure that our products keep up with the latest in mobile technology design. We are getting ready to launch push notifications through our mobile apps. We believe it’s very important to push information out to your users to pull them back into the library, reminding them why they need and love your library. We also want to develop personalization in the app. That, of course, has implications within the notion of privacy.

How can librarians become partners in product or training development?

Very recently we have had several libraries make recommendations with regard to the design of our products. We take them very seriously and are looking to formalize that process. We don’t want to be a company that simply develops software the way we think it should be developed and hope that libraries buy. We want to know about workflow and the user experience at your library. How does a mobile app make the life of the user easier or better?

These interviews are part of a series of interviews with both WiLS library and vendor partners.  Your feedback is appreciated.  If you have any to offer on this article, or suggestions for upcoming interviews, contact Andrea Coffin at .