Reflective journal processes

There's a nice diagram of the Reflective Diary/Journal Process on the Businessballs site. I'm forever telling people that "experience isn't what happens to you, it's what you do with it" and this diagram provides a useful template for following this through. One of the more dispiriting truths is that too many people's experience of training or development activities stop at stage two of this process: "What did you think of the training?" "Very good/bad" and back to business as usual.

And how many pieces of work do we get involved in that completely ignore the question: "How will I measure and know that I've succeeded in this?" I know I'm a bore about needing to know the success factors but I do feel this is absolutely important. If you don't know how to tell when you're successful you can only know how to fail.

Library web page development

It occurs to me that if I do a web page for each library pulling in the appropriate news and events it would be a good idea to also populate it with appropriate statistics and factoids.

Just making a note before I forget.

Games people play

Interesting piece in "Government Technology" (there's three pages of this article). I'm pretty agnostic about the virtues of gaming in libraries: if people choose to come in and play games on the public PCs and they aren't doing anybody any harm, that's fine. It keeps them off the streets, and in a few cases some of our staff have actively encouraged this precisely to stop kids and youths hanging round making a nuisance of themselves. So I can see the benefits from a social perspective. I just haven't seen much, if any, evidence of libraries using gaming to deliver on traditional library purposes. It's interesting to read how some libraries are using games for media literacy and reading literacy programmes.

Derring-do

While I'm on the subject of adventure, the British Library's just added Captain Scott's Diary to its collection of virtual books.

Minette gloves not mandatory!

The grandeur of life

A friend works at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City. I was extremely impressed when I went to visit him, not least by the very friendly and helpful staff who let me have a look at some of their rare books. At the time they were running an exhibition on polar exploration, which gave them the opportunity to display some of the classic texts of Victorian adventure (and which leads me to wonder what the rest of the world really refers to instead of "Victorian"). Their Darwin exhibition is just coming towards the end of its run now. It makes me wish we could do something similar with some of our special collections. I'm a voice in the wilderness on that one but I'll keep banging on about it.

Improving stock management

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.

Jumping on the bandwagon

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

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.

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.

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.