Some more stray thoughts about online catalogues

There was an article in today's Guardian about the Dyslexie font which is designed to be bottom-heavy to help people with Dyslexia: the idea is that the asymmetry of the characters makes it harder for them to dance about for the reader. Coincidentally, a conversation I'd had with somebody last weekend had set me thinking about how a library could present appropriate parts of its stock to dyslexic readers.A gallery display of book covers is an obvious format but wouldn't it be nice to have the accompanying text for that section of the catalogue in a Dyslexia-friendly font? I expect it's do-able; it would be interesting to see someone give it a go.

QR and literacy campaigns

Project-Q in the Netherlands is a nice, simple example of the use of QR codes to support a literacy campaign. I know QR codes are old hat and ho-hum to some but as a cheap and easy way to add a few more strings to a bow they're pretty useful and I don't understand why we keep on not using them.

QR

I know that QR codes are considered a bit old hat in some circles these days but I think there's still scope for doing interesting things with them in the library. The obvious idea, I think, is for signposting Useful And Interesting Facts about the library. Or at least doing a bit of in-library marketing using out-library resources.

Shelf guiding tends to be one or two words, which isn't a right lot for selling the product on the shelves. You can do a bit more with card inserts and shelf wobblers but after a bit they start getting lost or looking tatty. A QR code, strategically placed on or by the shelving, could add another string to the bow by pointing to appropriate web resources, for instance:

• A page on the library's web site 'selling' that particular collection.


• The web site of one of the authors of titles on the shelves, particularly if it's not one of the usual suspects. Many new authors have very interesting blogs which are good introductions to the ways they think and write.


• A genre blog or web site. Get your chick lit readers looking at sites like http://chicklitbooks.com/, for instance.


• Appropriate articles available online. Just because a newspaper essay about a particular author or book is a few months or years old doesn't mean it might not be interesting to some of your readers.


• Appropriate web sites to pique readers' interests in a particular style or subject. There's scope for a bit of creative thought here, especially if it's a good way of spinning strands between Dewey ranges. An article on lumbago and housemaid's knee might be useful to the older reader of gardening books!


• Or just something random but fun and interesting?

I think this has potential for increasing the library's potential as a serendipity engine, introducing customers to new ideas and/or authors. Especially if the code's used to flag up neglected areas of stock rather than the usual headliners.

OK, the audience is likely to be a bit small and niche but what does it cost? A bit of time to decide what to point at (and/or create a bit of new content if you need something locally-specific) and to create the QR code from one of the many free generators you can find on the web; and the price of printing the code out. Definitely worth having a think about…

Books in a box...

A picture of a Lighthouse Keeper's library gave me an idea: we do a lot of outreach work of one type and another and we’re looking at doing a lot more in future.

It occurs to me that the containers we use for delivery don’t actually say “Rochdale Library Service” or that acts as a unifying element to the collections of books, etc. that we’re sending out. It’s probably the wrong year to suggest this but it could be a good idea to have a robust package like this (one dreams of varnished oak!) that could hold a couple of dozen or so books or similar at a time and that could be issued as group items on the system — “Books In A Box.”

The advantages would be:

• There’d be a robust container that carried the Rochdale Library Service brand.
• The package could be designed to hold a set number of items, so it would be obvious to the borrower when something’s missing because there’d be a gap where it ought to be.
• The interior of the doors could include display information about the Library Service and/or the stock in the box. Which means that when it’s not being a package in transit it could be a miniature display cabinet, which would be particularly useful for situations with deposit collections.
• “Spare” boxes could be used as props in displays and at exhibitions and conferences.
• Each box would contain different materials so it should be easy enough to ensure that loans to nurseries, nursing homes, etc. were refreshed — staff would only need to know that the site’s had boxes 1, 4 and 6 so far this year instead of the 72 or so titles that had been loaned in the process.

Periodically, somebody would need to check the state of the stock in the boxes; the prompt for that could be set automatically on the system. And of course there’d be no reason why the site couldn’t borrow additional items to complement the “Books In A Box.”

It seems too obvious for us not to already be doing it. Perhaps I'll spot the snag if I sleep on it.

Demonstrating the Return On Investment: Renew, Refresh, Recycle

With the best will in the world, all of our catalogues will have a few skeletons in the closet. Human beings being human beings there's always the odd book that's been missed by the stock editors. They're not necessarily the liability they seem to be. They shouldn't be on the open shelves as items of current import, to be sure, but there are creative ways of using them, together with a selection of the "respectable" components of your reserve stock to make useful and informative display collections.

Public libraries hold a lot of the national back-catalogue of books. This is generally held to be important as far as fiction is concerned but, aside from a small proportion of 'classic' texts, not non-fiction. After all, out-of-date information is useless, right?

Not necessarily.

Imagine a view of the history of Germany through the eyes of somebody who didn't know that the Berlin Wall was ever to come down. Or go up in the first place. Or that Hitler would rise to power in 1933. Or... Well you get the idea.

It's easy with history, isn't it? What about science? The history of science is littered with the dead bodies of fallen ideas and Laws Of Science. I remember being baffled at university (yonks ago) by the civil war between the cladists and the phylogenetic gradualists (you'll have to look them up) - they were talking about aspects of the same idea, just using different language with all the intemperance of theologians disputing one or other heresy. A generation before it was the geosyncline versus plate tectonics debate. All a bit specialist and arcane, eh? Not really - all the time that the aeroplanes were grounded by the Icelandic volcano our newspapers were filled with diagrams of plate tectonic processes. How would they have been described fifty years ago?

And as for technology... It struck me recently that the world I grew up in as a very small child in the 60s wasn't wholly dissimilar to that of my parents' childhood (excluding powdered egg and the Luftwaffe). The Swinging Sixties didn't much reach our way, save for the Beatles and beehive hairdos. My brother was born into a world of colour television. My sister-in-law can't imagine a world without computers and MTV. Children born today would struggle with the idea of not having a mobile 'phone with a camera and internet access and umpteen thousand channels and applications. And we've still not got those personalised jet packs and robot butlers.

One of the reasons why primary resources are important is that they are uncontaminated by hindsight. Hindsight always has 20:20 vision. We know what happens at the end and that inevitably colours the narrative. History tells us which were the blind alleys, the discarded values, the paradigm shifts. And hindsight always imposes the prejudices and values of today onto the thoughts and actions of yesterday.

There is a case for our provided access to the unsullied product once every so often in "What we used to know" promotions to give us a better understanding of the historical context. It's not always enough to know how we got here, it's sometimes important to understand what happened along the way.