Connecting Librarian

Although not directly to do with libraries, this story is something that hits close to home personally.

We’re stressing Indian callers is a story in Queensland’s Sunday Mail newspaper, which outlines the stress and burnout that workers in Indian call centres are experiencing from their encounters with Australian callees.

Having been the recipient of many of these calls, I can relate to the frustrations listed. Add the Indian accent to a poor line (which is what calls come in on), hungry stomach (they call at dinner time) and no desire for the product and I more often than not, hang up with just a quick, curt, “no thanks”. I agree that there is no need for abuse, as these callers are just doing their jobs, but on the other hand, the frustration is happening on both ends of the line.

I don’t know what the solution is. Maybe the government or the telcos sets up a facility for us to be able block these sorts of calls, whether from Australia or overseas. When someone comes up with a reasonable solution, I’ll be interested.

In the meantime, whilst I am sympathetic to the stress levels of these call centre employees, I have to protect my stomach, my family and my hearing, so I will continue to say “no thanks” and hang up as politely as I am able, considering its dinner time in a house with young children.

Love to hear your thoughts on this.

We here in Australia are still pretty new to blogs, especially in libraries and especially compared to the US, but we are catching up. However, there is a new tool available to Australian bloggers and to those seeking Australian blogs, which will hopefully help our local blogs to become more a part of mainstream internet access and use here in Australia.

“AustralianBlogs.com.au is a free community resource to bookmark your favourite Australian blogs. Similar to del.icio.us (but less invasive - we don’t need you to register or login), you can add your bookmarks or just browse to see what’s popular.” (direct quote from the site).

Not only that, it allows Australian bloggers to list their blog on the site, with the bloggers choice of tags and description, to hopefully encourage expanded readership.

Unfortunately there are only 2 other Australian librarian blogs there at present (thanks CW and Genevieve for putting me onto it), so if you are an Australian library blogger, get your details in there!

If you want to add your blog or you are looking for an Australian blog, regardless of topic, its worth the look. You never know what treasures you may uncover.

Funny isn’t it. When I wrote that last post, it hadn’t really filtered through my head, that my library service was being involved in a similar public survey so soon.

This one is a little different than previous ones however. The Library Census 2006 is being run by I & J Management Services, on behalf of Viclink, LibraryBoard of Victoria and the State Library of Victoria and is intended to get a snapshot of online users of Victorian public libraries. How is that unusual you may ask?

Well in two ways really. One is that my library service was involved in the trialling of the survey a few weeks ago, to make sure that the questions were understandable etc. That involved marshalling users within our main library one afternoon, to take the time out to hear an introduction, then actually fill in the survey online. A couple of our outgoing, enthusiastic staff were most innovative in achieving good numbers for this purpose. Due to their efforts, we were able to get a good cross section of people who were all very helpful and cooperative.

The second is that at the same time that the online survey is running (ie. now), we are also running a shortened version of the census survey in our branches. The aim is to enable us to get an idea of the demographics of those people who are using our facilities physically, as a basis for comparison to those who are using us virtually. It will be fascinating to see the results on a number of levels, so I will keep you posted.

onlinesurveys” rel=”tag”>online surveys
http://technorati.com/tag/public libraries” rel=”tag”>public libraries