Sunday 31 January 2010

Improving stock management

diagram: lending stock life cycle from procurement to withdrawal and replacement

I mentioned a while back that we've bought into smartsm and that we want to do a lot with it. To give you some idea of the scope of our ambition, the only part of the lending stock life cycle that we don't see being directly influenced by smartsm is the actual process of procurement. Once the item's arrived it'll be included in the smartsm processes.

Which isn't to say that we're going to be doing everything at once. Realistically, the first stage is going to be the running of reports for stock that's either sitting idly on the shelves or else perhaps being physically overworked and needing replacement. We should then be able to move on to working up an evidence-based transfer régime that ensures that stock is moving to meet local demand rather than somebody's best guess (or long-standing organisational tradition).

Talking to other smartsm users it seems that it takes the best part of a year to build up enough data and trends analysis to be able to start using it effectively in the stock selection process. This is fine by us: the fact we can use smartsm at all for this purpose is icing on the cake so we don't mind waiting.

Between stock analyses on Dynix, smartsm reports and issue statistical reports on Dynix we should be able to take a more holistic approach to stock selection and location; make individual items of stock work harder by moving it on when it has fulfilled the local market; and demonstrate that we’re getting value for money.

At the moment we are only likely to be using smartsm as a lending stock management tool as we have chosen not to record evidence of use of reference stock. There is no technical reason why evidence-based stock management cannot be applied to reference stock: we could use Dynix's "In-House Use" function to generate the usage data for this stock.


Thursday 28 January 2010

Jumping on the bandwagon

We should line up all the architects and pair them off with the economists. This really is silly.

Thursday 21 January 2010

Making an interesting library

This is an interesting new library in Australia. I'm not altogether sure I'd be comfortable living in it (certainly not with those chairs!), but it's definitely an eye-opener!

Looking at it, I'm not altogether sure it would cost a lot more to kit a library out this way, as opposed to something rather more traditional. We've done quite a lot of library refurbishment over the past few years, mostly done in the style of modern book stores, and they've gone down pretty well. With the exception of the new-look Darnhill Library we've not really been adventurous as far as the children's library area's concerned, though. If and when we ever move a library into a fully-fledged joint use building with the public end of different services being integrated, I'd hope we'd end up having some part of the operation feeling like Mt. Gambier Library.

Thursday 14 January 2010

Reading resources on YouTube

Johnsone County Libraries have posted a bunch of videos to aid early literacy on YouTube. These are a lovely way to show what the library can do and can give people tips and ideas for things to do, including finger plays, songs, rhymes, and wordless books.

We've been talking about doing something like this at Rochdale for a while: we do some very good early-years work in our libraries and have been looking at ways of sharing some of the practicalities with wider audiences. We already do some of that with programmes like "What's My Story" but they're quite time-consuming. If we could record some of the activities it's a one-off performance that can be used repeatedly at the convenience of the viewer.

We need to stop talking and start doing something concrete about this.

Sunday 10 January 2010

Guerilla marketing opportunities

I couldn't resist having a go at this.

Aside from being a bit of fun this is also an opportunity to flag up the potential for unofficial, subversive advertising these days. There are so many ways for us to fall victim to stereotyping and lazy journalism (I am sick to the back teeth of our customers being referred to as "bookworms") we should make a point of getting the positives out there when we can.

I was bearing this in mind with our Facebook account:
  • We can be seen to be pushing good news items out to our "friends." Not only about our library service (which we should be doing anyway) but also things that might be useful to our customers and potential customers.
  • We can be friendly. We can like other people's good news. We can play Scrabble with our friends (one of our librarians is mad keen on Scrabble - she seems to have a couple of hundred games on the go at any one moment - and doesn't mind doing this in her own time for the fun of it). We can wish our friends a happy birthday.
  • I used one of the gift maker apps to build a "Presents from Rochdale Library Service" app. The gifts included the obvious things like "a best seller" and "some children's picture books," but I made sure it included items like "an under-fives' story time" and even "a smile." New friends were welcomed with "a smile." Cheesey, I know, but it seemed to go down well and the statistics showed that quite a few people were sending our gifts to each other. Sadly, the gift maker app I used became defunct just before Christmas and my app has gone the way of all things. It was fun while it lasted.

Thursday 7 January 2010

Because it's that good: 10 Exciting Ways To Waste Your Training Dollars

Thanks, yet again, to Marianne Lenox for flagging this up. It's an excellent summary of common conventional mistakes that compromise the effectiveness of training activities.

Monday 4 January 2010

Playing with the news

We've changed the way that we do the news items on our web site. Up to now I've just been plonking new copy at the top of a "news and events" web page, which is pretty inelegant and often means that the news loses quite a lot of impact. The council's web team have tweaked the content management system (Immediacy, I'm not a big fan of this software) and we can now work with each news item as a separate page, aggregating the headline copy onto the news page. The potential effects on the "news and events" page are obvious.
  • The page is now more easily readable;
  • We can point people to individual news items by giving them the URL, which means we can also share the news on facebook, etc.
  • The aggregating tool used on this page can be used, with tweaks elsewhere. This means that the front page can always be dynamically updated.

Less obvious, but potentially very, very useful, is the mother-daughter relationship of the news item. At first we worked with the news items' being daughters of the news and events page. Then we realised that if the news item was the daughter of the children's library page, for instance, then that page could have a news feed just about the children's library (it's in the right-hand column under the contact details). This is a potentially very useful way of providing news in context.

Taking this a step further led me to abandon some work I'd been doing a while. I'd been working with the web team to set up a new underlying taxonomy of pages that reflected the work we actually do rather better than the National Local Government Navigation structure does. We'd got as far as starting to set up some parts of the children's library structure when this new development came round. I've not entirely abandoned the proposed taxonomy but it was mapped out on the basis that we'd be using static web pages. There's a lot of scope for delivering the same outcomes with a simpler taxonomy using a mixture of static and dynamic pages in a way that should be easier for the reader to use. It's early days yet: I'll concentrate on the children's library and the books & reading sections first as they have the most incoming news and the greatest potential for me to over-complicate things. If I can deliver something manageable with these the rest of the library pages should be straight forward.

One thing I can't do easily with this function is to deliver a news feed for each library (assuming, of course, that each library provided news!!!). Because the news item have a simple mother-daughter relationship with another web page I have to make either/or choices when it comes to something like the page about Middleton Library's reading group, for instance. Does it go under "books & reading" or does it go under "Middleton Library?" The convention I'm using is that the theme always overrides the location. Which doesn't mean I can't rig something up about events at Middleton Library: I just have to be a bit creative about it. Probably the least messy way to do it would be to have a page providing an periodic report (realistically at the moment this would be annual in most cases; millennial in one or two) with a combination of a news feed of items attached to that library and links to appropriate items elsewhere on the site. One to look at in a couple of months.