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...

Library Day In The Life

I'm joining in with A Day in the Life of a Library... Like a ton of other people I'm tweeting a few of the goings-on at work (you can follow them here).

It'll be a useful exercise for me anyway, I'm meeting myself catching up just lately and could do with reviewing what/how I do. Not the least because one of the issues being addressed this week is the status or not of my own job (the good news being that I should still have a job somewhere or other this Summer!)

Hey ho.

Rethinking user education materials a bit

Am consciously neglecting this blog: a lot on at work, much of which is pretty grim, and other stuff I need to get to grips with. Let's try and find something positive to say for myself.

A chance online encounter prompted Ian Stringer to ask if he could come and have a chat with me about some work he and his son Paul are doing. It was an opportunity for Paul to have a look at a library management system and have an overview of how we use it. Classic Dynix is absolutely not what you would use as the textbook example of a modern LMS but it does what it does pretty well on the whole for the purposes of illustration. It's a shame that they hadn't come along a few weeks ago when I still had the schematic for the customer interface on the whiteboard. They went away happy. It turned out that this was a useful meeting for me, too. I needed to be reminded that I do actually know a few things.

I'd intended to spend this afternoon drawing pictures of a learning session, or programme of sessions, on the theme "Online reading for people without e-readers." It's an idea I've been kicking round the office for a couple of weeks: the majority of our various how-to-use-the-internet sessions and programmes are geared towards helping people learn how to use the hardware and software and not towards what you might want to do with them, except in a generally cursory fashion. My argument was that a lot of our customers wouldn't see themselves as being in the market for signing up for a Myguide session, say, but could well be interested in finding out more about things that interest them on the web. Signing up for Myguide would then be a way of helping them get more out of an existing interest rather than requiring a new interest in computers. So I was asked to put my typing finger where my mouth is and sketch out the learning paths.

That was the intention. So of course I followed an interesting-looking link a couple of people had flagged up on Twitter and the next thing I knew I'd signed myself up on xtranormal, spent a couple of minutes getting my head round the instructions and within half an hour I had this, admittedly very clunky, bit of user education video about how to renew your library loans. It wouldn't do for most of our audiences, especially in this state, but I can see some mileage in our putting together a few short, snappy "informercials" for younger (or dafter) audiences. Especially as it really is very easy to put together.

This in turn opened up a few more possibilities which, together with my getting my head around Bit.ly's new link bundling tool, means I'll probably need a bigger bit of paper to scribble on. Once I've started to define the shape of the work I'll do a tidier version on Prezi to share the details with colleagues at work.

I'll get it done tonight. There's a pile of crap on the telly.

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.