New OPAC

Good news: we've got the TEST versions of OPAC and the resource discovery module, working and they look quite nice.

Bad news: we've had to postpone the training for the OPAC as we need to incorporate the change in the corporate branding that should be coming on stream this summer. Essentially, we'll be going live at the end of July with an OPAC pretty much out of the box. Perhaps the only "radical" novelty we'll be delivering at this stage is the range of subcatalogues we'll be presenting:

• The "vanilla" catalogue"
• Children's Library
• Local Studies
• The Co-operative Collection - very much an unsung resource, especially in this International Year of Co-operation
• The Maskew Collection - a special collection of English literature and philosophy funded by the bequest of a local lady

At the moment we're only doing this by imposing filters on the library catalogue, not doing anything in the way of additional information and canned searches. This is frustrating, but I guess unavoidable, but we'll just have to do as best as we can. I'm looking forward to getting the training as there's quite a lot of possibility lurking in these two customer interfaces, particularly Sorcer which has a lot of scope for creating personalised learning/reading environments.

Training days

It's daft really: the hard slog of the past few months has felt like a phoney war, despite the fact that there's been a lot of work and a good number of real successes along the way.

• The test data load from Dynix to Spydus has gone surprisingly well, with scarcely any glitches (I'm still waiting for the first shoe to drop, let alone the second).
• The MARC mapping of the Dynix seems to be good enough to do the job of converting to MARC21 in Spydus. Hats off to Anne Whiteley who did the original mapping back in 1990, armed only with commonsense and a manual she'd borrowed as a Regional Loan. My contribution to the cause has been a rank lack of commonsense and whatever I can crib off the good folks on th'interweb.
• We've got a good project plan and we're making the Library Service work to it. The good news is that nearly everyone involved is relieved to have some sort of structure to hang onto when things start getting giddy.

Next week we start two weeks' worth of "subject expert" training, the hardest part of which is convincing some people that they really are the local experts in their field.

Once that's done I've got a couple of weeks in which to do as much configuration as possible before we start training the trainers. If we can get as much of the configuration as possible done during the subject expert training we'll have a fighting chance of hitting our end of July deadline.

We're hoping that two decisions will help us a lot. The first is that I won't be delivering the training myself, which is a blow personally (it's one of the things I seriously enjoy doing) but it's the only way I'll have the time to be able to work on the outstanding technical details, including the interfaces we're requiring with other systems such as smartsm, the Local Land & Property Gazeteer and the corporate finance systems. It'll also give me space and time to respond to any issues or ideas arising from the training sessions being delivered throughout June.

Which brings me to the second decision: we've selected a group of trainers who'll act as champions and first line of support within the library servce. These are all Library Service staff, some managers but mostly front-line and all volunteers. In fact, twice as many people as we needed volunteered to be trainers, which is a bit gratifying. They'll have three pretty intensive days in which to get to grips with the new Circulation system and put together a package that can be delivered in a one-day training session for front-line staff. Which start the following week.

Tight deadlines; some hard decisions to be made about what to leave out of the training packages; and impossible if you're not documenting what you're doing and communicating in minutes and hours, not days and weeks. I'm lucky: the Data Hub has a couple of Project Assistants and one of them will be working with me on this project. That should mean we can get some real-time communication between training sessions and myself so that we can address issues on the fly and record the changes as we go along. He's only been with us a week so he's walking in completely fresh with no preconceptions or baggage, poor devil!

Never try to eat anything bigger than your head

Well, we've committed to doing it: we chose Spydus as our new LMS just after Christmas, we're formally starting the project now and we've decided we want to go live by the end of July. It's a tall order and we'll have to have some pretty strict project management in play to deliver. I suspect there'll be a good few late nights' workings going on.

Please don't tell me that at least Benito Mussolini made the libraries run on time

Just a thought…

If we ran public libraries the way that our privatised railways are run, the taxpayer would be spending more for to have to travel ten miles to their nearest library where they'd have to wait an hour for the opportunity to borrow a dog-eared old Harold Robbins paperback that somebody seemed to have used to wipe their bottom.

I can't say this prospect thrills.

Creative barcodes

I would dearly love for us to have barcodes like these or these in our library books; not just for aesthetic reasons, they help confirm the brand values of the organisation involved.

Aspirational acorns

A friend and colleague was beating herself up the other day for having somehow failed one of her work experience people. The upshot of her argument was that although she could see the potential in this person she hadn't managed to persuade them it was there. Most of the other work experience people she'd had showed a positive change in self-esteem and self-confidence by the end of the programme but with this one girl she wasn't convinced she'd made a difference.

This sounds horribly familiar — it's usually me moaning about potential wasted. Having listened to the argument, and having seen the work experience group on an almost daily basis while they were here, I'm sure that my friend is wrong: there are significant positive messages in this girl's experience with us:

• Somebody took a chance and took her on. From my own experience of unemployment back in the 1980s I know how important this is.


• Somebody was interested in who she was, not what she was.


• Somebody was interested in finding out what she could do, not what she couldn't do.


• And what she could do turned out to be a bit more than she thought she was capable of.

It's easy to ask: "who died and made you God?" but in circumstances like this there is a duty of care and those of us who care want to see things flourish and develop. No, there's been no magic moment of transformation, and perhaps there never will be. But that girl has gone away knowing that someone somewhere has thought that she was worth something more than just what was between her legs and that that something was worth somebody's making a bit of an effort to find it. That knowledge may or may not survive future experience and it may be years or even decades before anything might come of it, but it's there. And that's important.

We're not God, the best that we can do is plant acorns and hope to grow the occasional bit of forest.

There are worse ambitions.

Neologism

Faeture (n): An unwarranted new "feature" that buggers up a tried and tested product.

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…

Note to self: the library catalogue

Two principles to work to:

• A customer should be able to use the catalogue to get within six feet of the item they want on the shelves without staff mediation.


• Allowing the customer to find what they want is only half the job: the catalogue needs to persuade the customer to also want what they find.

Digital Inclusion workshop

This is the Prezi I did for today's Staff Conference to try and provoke a bit of discussion about digital inclusion.

The main aim is to try to get people to recognise what they're already doing (which is quite a lot really) and to take on board that they're going to be needing to do quite a lot more in future. My being shifted out of the Library Service complicates the dynamic of that bit, of course...