Connecting Librarian

Here’s the last part of my notes from the ProBlogger training day I attended Tuesday. I know its hard to get something out of someone else’s notes, so if you need to ask a question – please do!

Blog Workshop – Chris Garrett
Handed out a mind map to give some tips on how your blog could be improved. He then offered to critique some of the attendees blogs. The following is the feedback he gave.

goodlife zen.com – good start having a dot.com address. Fresh look, nice clean layout. Eyes are drawn to the photo – personalises it and connects with people. Layout is good to the content – content must be first. Subscribe options should be at the top and be as simple as possible – top right is usually best – above the fold. Make it work at 800 by 600 but make it look good at 1024 and above.
Subscribe could conjure payment ideals – try to work free/join into it. Tell them how and why to subscribe to your blog at the end of EVERY SINGLE POST. Chris added his email signup up box into his theme, so it appears automatically at the bottom of each post. Add related posts links to get people interested in more content.  RSS footer – type plugins available for Word Press (and others?), usually used for copyright but can put your email form in. Good also to put into the content, but gets tired if you do it all the time. Do it before the comments – regular readers will just scroll past it.

Have a call to action for your comments – edit your theme so it says, leave a comment now, no. of comments – add yours now. DISQUS – helps to organise comments into threads, can help make your comments viral – they then can be posted to social networking sites. Reply to  comments – not just the key ones – its a relationship builder. Have a public comment policy – gives you basis on which to edit or delete comments – my house, my rules.

blog.iqmatrix.com – having a blog separate to your main domain could be good if you are security conscious, but if you link to the main site, then www.domain.com/blog would be better as this is where both search engines and users would expect it to be. Need to be aware of floating footers – may link to ads or original coder – be wary. Floating bubbles can be annoying – but will work better if you use a short delay before it comes up. Can get popups when you scroll over heading, such as comments. Image was great but needed some context – never overestimate the intelligence of your readers. Be careful of how you use the term blog – Latest Blog Articles may be better as Latest Articles.

Open Panel with Darren, Chris, Yaro, Collis and Pip.
Darren has a subscribe page – RSS, email to RSS and newsletter(s) with a short explanation of each.

Introduced a forum when they had 1000 daily visitors. (Darren)
There are personality based niche blogs and then niche information blogs. (Yaro)

Multiple blogs – have an editor for each one – they keep track of direction and management etc, under broader guidelines. (Collis)

Personality, authenticity, sincerity can drive a non-profit blog – you can’t buy that. (Pip)

Persuasive selling techniques not incorporated deliberately into sales pages – more passive than subjective, more natural as it comes from him personally as he learns from other examples. You can utilise both, as long as you are not compromising your personal standards and still meets the demands of your brand. (Yaro)

So that’s the day’s labours but not the day’s results. I will be looking at incorporating many of the things I learnt here in any or all the blogs I am involved in, including this one, so stay tuned!

As so it continues. Here is Part Two of my notes from the ProBlogger training day I attended yesterday.  Just to save your eyes and my fingers, there will be a third post, for the last of my notes. In the meantime – enjoy!

Building Community on your blog – Darren Rowse

Building community is about good relationships, using skills which can be transferred from the real world.

Why build community on your blog? Blogs can be about providing information, but they can take on a life of their own and communities do form.  Community makes your site:

• more useful (comments add to the content and these can be used create their own content based on this, but located elsewhere);
• social proof makes it easier to promote your blog (comments, members, subscribers etc);
• increased page views (in community areas rather than blog areas); makes it more valuable to sell;
• more attractive to advertisers;
• your community becomes an advocate (for you);
• user generated content.

How to build community:

• be the community you want to have – readers will take your lead;
• invite interaction – they respond to invitations and questions – run polls, surveys etc – if no comments, answer yourself or get someone you know to answer;
• start with your comments section, build an off-blog community elsewhere (eg. Flickr, Facebook etc);
• add a community area (forum);
• use social media to reinforce and build community, write in a personal and engaging tone;
• use personal mediums (photos/video), use ‘you’ and we – write to people – direct language – we = our site;
• reader centred posts – start with the reader;
• offer additional ways to join or become a member;
• social proof – highlight interaction/community/numbers to your community;
• identify natural leaders – give jobs, train them, pay them;
• give people space to play (off topic interactions);
• teach the wisdom of the crowd to your community;
• invite reader generated content;
• set homework/projects – send them away to do something on their own and then report back;
• give readers a chance to show off;
• involve readers in decisions and change – can work for you or against you (survey, features they want etc);
• be accessible.

Dealing with trolls: think about policies and standards before you need them; model good community; reward good behaviour; outline roles of moderators carefully and talk about policies, values and procedures; marginalise trolls; allow community to help you police; be firm, polite and calm with trouble makers.

How to get more comments: use your own comments section, followup commenters, ask questions, be open ended, invite questions, discussion posts, controversy/debate, highlight hot conversations make space for self promotion, ask for advice/opinions/examples/stories. (use a more button to take them to full post and comments, rather than hoping they will go to comments)

Interview with Pip from Meet me at Mike’s (craft/lifestyle blog)

Blogs are a healthy tool to help you document your interests or just your life. It’s OK to write about the human aspect, your good stuff as well as when you muck it up. Run projects through the blog, which are to benefit your community or the wider community. Retain your core values throughout. Interact on lots of different platforms – so that you can reach people and make it easier for people to reach you – don’t talk about just your own stuff, also talk about what they are interested in. Its about them as well as about you.

What she would have done differently? Label your posts properly, categorise them clearly so they readers can find them; use comment moderation or comments systems like DISQUS to protect yourself from nasty comments.

Blog monetization – Yaro Starak
It is not just about making money directly from your blog, but also because of it. 20% effort can achieve 80% results.  Yaro told us how he turned his blog  – Entrepreneurs Journey, into bucks.

Aim to get a lot of results from the least effort – 80/20 rule in general, but to begin with, blogs take a lot of effort to establish.

Ways to make money directly from blogs: advertising income, affiliate income and selling products.

Yaro sold his own advertising, as AdSense didn’t work for him. He charged a monthly rate, used a Paypal account and had different options for advertising. Uses OpenX to manage his banners and they are rotated through. Its all automated.

Affiliate income – wrote a review on a book about Google AdWords. Didn’t work initially, but then managed a sale and now earns a large part of his income through reviews. His most important move was to add an email newsletter to his blog – this made the biggest difference to his income stream. Combine email with blog posts to make the most money.

Blog Mastermind – his first online course product.  Wrote a paper on the topic, which he gave away as a free sample as a lead in to the product and has increased his readership dramatically.

All this helps you to create solid, multiple income streams and establishes you as an authority in blogging and money making. Get a product out as soon as you can.

Did some private coaching recently, only because it gave him an opportunity to investigate his market and to get some case studies. It breaks his 80/20 rule, but it gave him insight he couldn’t otherwise get. He enjoys it, but it is not the best way to leverage his time.

Panel: Yaro, Darren and Chris (Chrisg.com)
Yaro gave a rough estimate of $1 income per unique individual page view per day. Can also vary your prices according to demand. Darren said that he has negotiated with advertisers, based on what they were wanting to spend. Can also be involved in a banner networks and start with getting what the market will pay, then when you have proven performance, you can negotiate a higher price.

90% of geeks will use AdBlock, but they aren’t a big issue outside the geeks.

Email subscriptions going down? Need to have your subscribers waiting in anticipation of what’s in the email, so that they will be waiting for it. Use a commercial product for newsletter creation and subscription means. Options are AWeber, Mail Chimp, Constant Contact and others. Can get content from RSS feed or encode the content yourself.

Affiliate products – different for every industry. Yaro focuses on the ones he needs to use in this day and time.  He uses it and then does his review and recommendations – need to have some negatives otherwise people don’t quite believe it.  Use Clip Bank to get help on finding programs.  If there is not an affiliate program, you can approach the producers to establish one or something similar. Amazon runs an affiliate program and there are many more out there. Do a search on cost per action or lead generation. Be honest about making money – people will appreciate that. Legally required in US, but not in Oz yet – should disclose, because you want to honour the trust that has been place in you by your readers. Reciprocity works here too.

AIDA – attraction, interest, desire, action. Provide proof, answer objections. Think about where your traffic is coming from and then target an offer towards them (specificity). Not just about conversion rates, you need to see the action all the way through. What is the refund rate etc.

Collis Ta-eed – Case Study

Blogging industry been around 6 or 7 years, but there are still a lot of opportunities. How do you identify them? Wrote a post about freelancing, which gave him more hits than the rest of his blog posts combined. Started http://freelanceswitch.com/ – within 2 weeks he had 3000 readers – 10 times what he had on his previous blog. Had written a series of tutorials on PhotoShop which he published on a blog, which also took off and has now spun off into a new series of blogs which also provide tutorials on different topics. Another blog came out of a post which ended up on top of the Google search results for Mac Apps.

Not all opportunities are the same. Not everything they did worked. Freelance Switch worked but Work which aimed at office workers is just trudging alone. PSD/Net great success but Audio has been growing Ok and not the runaway success that its inspiration was. Mac Apps spawned Web Apps which hasn’t really moved, iyet Phone Apps which came later has worked much better in a shorter time.

Some blogs rush straight off the ground. Others are a hard slog, traffic, revenue, audience etc. No difference in the inputs, so need to figure out how to get it right.

Techniques to get it right:

• Variations on popular – imitate but with a twist, can be successful if you get in early-ish, are good and have a sufficiently different angle;
• Using empirical results – search rankings, popularity of posts (not just on your own blog), Adsense testing, any method where you gauge the popularity of a niche in an analytical way;
• problems & passion – doing what you love Or solving your own problem, assumes that there are others out there like you (and there probably are);
• using trends – pick where the market is going and bet on it, great example – Twitip! Great for technology but applicable for other areas too.

Is it really an opportunity? Not always. To find out, try some competitive analysis, empirical analysis, test the waters.

Capitalising on opportunities: Move quickly – web moves first and it takes time to gain momentum so you need to start sooner rather than later. Don’t be afraid to change – you have to give something a good solid go and back yourself but if its  not working then sometimes you have to pull the plug and concentrate on a different opportunity.

Opportunity is only the beginning: you still need to execute well, you need to create good content, you need to be consistent, you have to be better than your competitors.

So that’s it until about mid afternoon on Monday. I will post the last of my notes in a third blog post tomorrow.

I was so fortunate to be able to attend the ProBlogger training day held in Melbourne today. If you don’t know ProBlogger (Darren Rowse) – check him out. He is one of the foremost authorities on blogging and an Aussie as well and he gathered together a great group of blogging colleagues to present a well-rounded day of information and insights. People came from as far as Brisbane to attend this one day event!

Although parts of the day were focused on the money making side of blogging and I was surrounded by business focused bloggers, I still got a lot out of it, even from those monetizing sections. I ended up taking 7 pages of notes, so instead of inflicting them all on you in one go, I will break them up into parts.

Creating Killer Content – Chris Garrett

Worked on Problogger book with Darren Rowse. In from UK. What brings them together is content.

Its one of the pillars of blogging, but it is also the key pillar. If you don’t have content, you don’t have anything to blog with.

It’s not about making cash, it’s about long term value – to have this you have to have killer content.

First: common sense is seldom, common practice. Are you doing this? Are your peers? Could you do better at this? Keep your edge or catch up by doing this.

What is killer content?  Leads to attraction, retention, conversion and referral. Many stop at the attention grabbing. Attention is only the first step and its a cycle. Blog can plateau. Need to keep existing people happy, whilst also getting new people in.

You are only as good as your last article. Even if you have consistently done great content. If you have killer content it becomes viral. Word of mouth is the best advertisement you can get.

Why create it? It puts your blog on the map – a must-have resource. Must be something that they subscribe to. You establish yourself as the go to person in your niche.

Do you know your prospect? Do you know your niche? Do you know your positioning?  Have to stand out and for a good reason. What are you giving to people that nobody else does. You have to be different, but with value.

Success factors: be remarkable (people talk about it), more useful, in more depth, better researched, attractively presented, magnetic headlines, easy to grasp, friendly URL, WIIFM (whats in it for me – for your reader), minimum hype, prominent placement – being where people are going to be and no barriers – don’t make them jump through hoops, just give them the content and explain how they can share it (ie. Creative Commons badges etc). Never say you’re an expert, let others say that for you – if you say it, all the barriers go up.

Compelling content types: your biggest tips, big vision, guides/how to/tutorials, FAQs, Story with a message, research and results, jargon buster, product database, case studies, resource round-up.

Generating Ideas: Yahoo Answers etc – find out what questions people are asking and answer them. Once you get some followers, people will ask questions. Get their permission to answer the question on your blog.

Blog this! Write about what you know or your journey about learning what you want to know. But it also has to intersect with what people want to know (rather than what they need). If it doesn’t, you won’t find an audience. Add proof that you know people want to know it. Back up that you know what you are talking about with your proof – statistics and social verification.

Emotional motivators – towards or away from people – towards is goal oriented, away is worry etc – need to know your audience and blog accordingly. Past, present, future; they live on these clocks – understand where they are coming from.  What if, how to…..; information…. action – people need results from your information.

Headlines – need to get people to read your information. Need to look at the reason they are looking – risk or reward. Need to have keywords that people are seeking.
10 proven formulas for blog posts:

• DO you make these mistakes?
• The secrets of ………..?
• What …….. can teach us about ……….?
• Everything you know about is ………. wrong.
• How ………… made ……….. and you can too.
• If you …………. you can …………..
• Finally, no more ………….
• At last! …………….
• Learn how millions of…..
• How to get more/better/cheaper………….

Borrow Authority – if you don’t know the information yourself, ask an authority and get permission to re-use the content. It gives you more authority because you know people who are recognised authorities.

Jedi Mind tricks (marketing) – audience, relationships, authority, proof, story, conversation, reciprocity, polarity, commitment, consistency.

Multimedia is very persuasive and easy to get out – can make it easy to go viral. It makes you stand out (most bloggers go with text) and is easy to share.

Re-purpose your content – bundle it into a container, make videos around it, take the audio and make it into a podcast, create an e-book from the multimedia you create. Leverage it to get more traction from it. You can even outsource the re-purposing.

Case Study – Chrisg.com – 41 blog success tips —– includes benefit and proof. Has an image that catches the eye. Problogger – becoming a problogger – rags to riches story – underlying message is that you can too.  Copyblogger – on dying, mothers and fighting for your ideas – story with a message.

Mistakes in creating content: – writing purely for search – filler content (just to fill a space) – recycling ideas (update, not copy and paste or link) – Echo chamber (we all agree) – Poking the Hornets nest.

Finding Readers – Darren Rowse
What was your biggest day of traffic and how did it happen? (go and check it out for your blog – can learn so much from this alone)

Which Readers? What type of people do you want to read your blog? Knowing who, informs your content strategy, your promotional strategy, community strategy and monetisation strategy.

Develop reader profiles: create a typical scenario of who would read your site – demographics, dreams, why they would read your blog, needs, challenges, how they use the web, financial situation – all completely made up – but it gives you a starting point. Profiles will evolve and need to be updated. They inform your content and how you promote your site. If you don’t know who reads your blog then how can you find them? If you have a profile in mind, it helps you to personalise the content to that particular profile.

Principles of finding readers:

• choose popular topics for your blog and posts (google trends, market samurai);
• build something worth being found;
• get off your blog – build a home base – then interact on outposts on the web – outposts depend on who your readers are – eg Twitter, Flickr
• build anticipation – give readers a reason to subscribe – a reason to stick around;
• start with the readers you have – you can potentially reach more through the ones you have;
• build a sticky blog – engross them so much that they don’t want to leave (sneeze pages – gets people deeper into your blog, into the things that interest them);
• content event (results of surveys or polls and more, seasonal stuff etc) – look at what your peers are doing, social bookmarking and networking are talking about in your niche and make the most of it;
• use familiar technologies for subscribing – email;
• persist – momentum does grow and it does get easier;
• promote…… but not too much. Survey your readers – find out what they want to know about and what other sites they use.

Lifehacker – suggest a link/topic. Get them to write about something you think their readers should know about.

Blog posts on themes or greatest hits……

Techniques for finding readers:

• guest posting, social media sites, you tube, seo, forums,
• pitch other bloggers,
• leverage other online and offline presences
• participate in other memes and projects of others,
• blogging/web communities, competitions and awards,
• speaking at events and workshops online/offline.
• Blogging alliances,
• present workshops,
• develop reports/whitepapers,
• incentivise subscriptions,
• interview someone/be interviewed,
• comment on others blogs (make an impression),
• comment on readers blogs,
• promote posts or landing pages – not just your blog,
• advertise,
• submit stories to media/press releases,
• anticipate big events,
• press releases.

Forums still have value, particularly in finding readers – you can help those there with your expertise, build your reputation and gain exposure for your blog.

Find a community that helps you to promote and improve your own blog.

Check your public library for training opportunities on things like public speaking, choosing cameras etc.

Getting readers to subscribers – depends on your readers – add a subscribe link to end of each post and if not used too much, in content links.  Sidebar links don’t work that well.

That took us to morning tea – will post the next stage in Part Two – coming soon!

I have not been online in a social/professional manner much since I started as Acting Branch Manager in late May, but its only lately that I have really started to feel a loss. Much of my day to day work still involves computers, but it is so all over the place. One moment it is filling out a maintenance request, then its doing payroll, checking email, writing a report and then a quick bit of web editing, etc, etc.  Because of this wandering computer use, I am finding it hard to remember to get on Twitter and post on a regular basis and Facebook has been relegated to one check a day, unless I get notification of a comment.

Uploaded to Flickr on January 18, 2005 by loufi, Attribution 2.0 Generic

I was managing to live with that to a certain extent, as I was still communicating with my online friends in a lot of instances via email. But now I am experiencing problems there. I don’t know if people are just as busy as I am and havent’ been able to answer, or whether emails are disappearing into the ether, but I am only getting limited email now and I am beginning to feel digital isolation.

What do I mean by digital isolation? Feeling out of touch with my online friends. Being able to see what is going on with them in the odd times that I do get onto Twitter, but not being involved in the ongoing conversations that are happening there and so feeling more like a spectator than a participant. Have you felt the same way in the digital world? What was your situation and if you dealt with it, how did you? For me, I am going to work out if my email really is an issue at present and be more proactive and thought-filled about my online interactions – work harder at making it work for me. I guess it is like any relationship, it takes work. And BTW, its Happy Blogiversary to me. On the 29th July 2005, Connecting Librarian was born. When I first started this blog, Facebook and Twitter weren’t around and email was the only way to communicate with my online peeps. Thank goodness things have changed!

Today, Monday 26th July, 2010 was Round 5 in the Library Day in the Life, where librarians around the globe write about what they did. Its a snapshot in the working life of librarians and builds an amazing picture of the wider ranging work that librarian’s do.

So anyway, here’s my contribution to the big picture.

Speaking of which, let me set the scene first. I am currently Acting Branch Manager at a large public library, which is part of a regional service in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. On a Monday, I have about 12 staff working at our branch and we have a weekend’s backlog to recover from.  So here goes….

8.45am – Arrived at work and noticed one of our emergency exit lights was annoyingly on the blink. As I needed to log a maintenance call to get it fixed, I did a quick review and noted other lights that needed fixing/replacing, before placing said call.

9.00am – Touched base with staff arriving for work and with some managers who were meeting with another staff before meeting with me.

9.05am – Made sure that all people who worked the weekend turned up and were paid appropriately. Very happy that this process is all computerised now and very straightforward. Last time I did this (many moons ago), it was all paper based.

9.25am – Adjusted our daily roster to accommodate changes arriving from the absence of one staff member and the addition of extra hours for another.

9.35am – Meet with our Customer Services Manager and our Adult Collections Manager to do a quick wander around our adult collections, to discuss needs, over stocking and collection maintenance. Our users will be happy to know that one of the immediate impacts will be that we will be getting more romances.

10.30am – More rostering and report completion.

10.40am – Assessing donations, dealing with duplicates discovered on our collection review.

11.15am – Started work on next week’s rosters as I realised I was going to be away on training the next two days. This involved compiling the weekend roster for two weekends ahead and beginning the desk roster for next week.  Got the first draft done, to be completed when I get back to the branch on Thursday.

12 noon – Lunch.

1.00pm – Short staffed over lunch, so spent the next hour trying to make an impact on the 33 boxes that arrived from our headquarters and other branches in our region. Along with one of our branch staff, we managed to get through about half of those boxes. Left the work in the capable hands of other library staff.

2.00pm – Dealt with stock rotation items that had appeared on the courier run. Assessed, made decisions on which titles I wanted for our branch, added them to our collection and sent the others on.

2.15pm – Did some website updating and created one of our e-newsletters – this one on suggested reading on the topic of Mind and Body Fitness.

2.50pm – Answered the email enquiries that had come in over the weekend. Queries ranged from “I returned that item” to “Can I do this…..”

3.00pm – Posted a staff created book review on our adult reading blog.

3.10pm – Briefed one of our librarians on what’s happened whilst she has been on holidays and what might be happening during the two days that I am away.

3.20pm – Added a range of CD’s from another branch to our collection and spent time accommodating them on our shelves.

4.15pm – Dealt with a couple of user issues – including payment for a damaged DVD and a disputed return of an item.

4.30pm – Spent the last of my day on desk which was uber-busy and involved a circulation desk overflowing with returned stock. Our process has been significantly slowed by the RFID tagging process, so an extra hand was very much required.

5.15pm – Finally headed home once I realised two things – one, that the staff could handle it and two, that if I didn’t leave, I could be there all night.

So that’s been my day. Not entirely typical, but not atypical either.

Hope your day was interesting, I look forward to reading of all you have been up to as well.

Within a couple of days, I had two people at our library, ask me to recommend a good read.  Not a rare thing in a public library, but on reflection and as I was reading Redefining Reader’s Advisory: Kissing Cousins in Library Journal (which by the way, is well worth a read), I realised that I had been receiving that question a lot more in recent times.

My usual process is to ask a few questions about the sort of things they like reading and if they have an author(s), they particularly enjoy. If they have the latter and its an author I haven’t read myself, I go to our reader’s advisor print bible “Who else writes like”, or refer our users to the wonderful Who Writes like, compiled by Eastern Regional Libraries or the UK What should I read next.

Reading Giovanni Battista Niccolini, uploaded by takomabibelot to Flickr, 29th November 2006, Attribution 2.0 Generic

But it has challenged me again to develop my reader’s advising skills a little more personally, by dipping my toe into other genres. I was intially a big fantasy reader, but of the last ten years I have been into mysteries. So now its time to try some other stuff, just to make myself aware of what is going on outside those genres.

Interestingly, the book that I have chosen and a conversation I was privy to yesterday have helped steer this pondering. We had Australian urban fantasy author Keri Arthur in as a guest speaker and after hearing her talk I was inspired to read one of her books as a starting point. What also came out of her talk was that there are still a lot of fans of print books around – both authors and library users alike. (but that’s a topic for another blog post)

So how do you help your recreational readers find a good read?  Any favourite tools or training that helps you to help them?

I posted a little while ago about how the National Library of Australia was going to be archiving Connecting Librarian as part of the Pandora Archive.

Well they don’t muck about!

Like many others out there, I have a vanity search on my name and my blog, using Google Alerts. This arrived in my email today:

Trove Results

So I click on the link, which takes me to the National Library’s Trove search on librarian (check it out). And there, down the bottom right of the screen, under Archived Websites 1996 – Now, is this blog!

This is so cool on so many levels.  Including:

• I am still thrilled that the National Library is archiving my blog
• I am extra thrilled that not only my blog, but all other websites that NLA is archiving can be accessed (along with a whole pile of other great stuff) through Trove

And most importantly:

• It is awesome that the NLA is opening up Trove to search engines like Google for indexing. As a result, how many more people will be accessing NLA collections through search engines, who would not have thought of visiting the library otherwise.

Like I said, awesome!

I am looking forward to hearing what the NLA reports back when they next update us on Trove. But in the meantime, it makes me think that somehow, this is the next inevitable step for libraries with digital collections.

How long before more library collections are opened to the broader Internet like this and what could this mean for our libraries?

Has your library done something like this and how is it working out?

Its Day 30 of 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge and I tried very hard to resist, I really did. But it’s the last day, so I have succumbed.

Here’s my one and only meme post in the 30 days challenge – the 30 things meme, with an extension. Mine is 30 things I did, as well as 30 things I didn’t do in the challenge period.

So as you can see, another quiet month.

Its been a challenge in a number of ways, but I have really enjoyed coming up with something every day. I hope you were able to get something out of them too. For me, I hope it will help me to blog more often, although the plan is closer to once a week, rather than the once a month it was before the challenge.

Thanks for following during this challenge. Your reading and comments have made it easier and much more enjoyable. I really appreciate it.

Its Day 29 of 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge and after something that happened today, I was wondering about serendipitous discoveries that have been made in libraries.

We went to Mt Baw Baw in the Victorian Alps, taking the kids for their first visit to the snow. Left early, made sure we had all the gear, etc and got there at a not unreasonable time, only to discover that we had selected the correct chains for our car, but they did not fit.  So we had to turn around, go back down the mountain and collect a new set. All up, it added an extra hour to our travel.

Pretty upsetting really, with kids being so excited and having to deal with car sickness on all those windy roads. Turned out that having to do that and put up with all that was serendipitous indeed.

On our second trip back up to the mountain, we came around a tight corner and I watched in amazement as a pair of lyrebirds came floating down from some treetops on the right and landed on the road ahead of us. I drew the family’s attention to them as I slowed the car. They briefly walked down the road away from us, displaying their beautiful lyre tails and then raced across the road and disappeared up and left, back into the forest.

We couldn’t believe it and just wow’ed for almost the rest of the way back up the mountain. Even my daughter realised that we wouldn’t have seen them if it hadn’t been for the problem with the chains.  We all felt immediately better about the problem and it was pushed back further into the ‘not to worry’ category after having a great time at the snow.

That was our little moment, what of  other discoveries? I know that there have been a number of chemical discoveries which came about by accident, including gelignite, silly putty, teflon, scotchguard and artificial sweeteners. In the medical realm, important serendipitous discoveries have included penicillin, nitrous oxide, viagra, anti-pscyhotic drugs and some cancer treatments. (great write up in Wikipedia)

Serendipity in the library, happens pretty much every day. You are looking for some information for a patron and find some for another one, a borrower browses looking for a particular author/title/genre and finds something they weren’t looking for, but are delighted to find.

But have there been serendipitous discoveries that have changed projects or libraries, or even affected the profession in some way? I am sure there are, but I can’t think of any.  Hopefully you’ll be able to think of some – if so, please let me know through comments.

Its Day 28 of 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge and I’m inspired today by another quote.

I have just started a Quote of the Week in our staffroom at work – picking up on the groundbreaking Word of the Week started by my predecessor.  I was inspired by a quote forwarded to me by my husband, who has a blog – Quote for the Day.

Anyway, the quote is as follows:

“A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.”  Jo Godwin.

The staff have delighted in this quote, its one they can relate to quite easily as we have enough complaints about someone being offended about something in the library.

The more common complaints are about (at least in recent years):

• Having games consoles to play on (used to be the Internet computers)
• Having graphic novels that are too graphic (same was said for romances a decade ago)
• Having pictures of human bodies in anatomy type books that kids can access (that one has been consistent since forever)
• Too noisy
  
• Not given enough time on the computers – just to finish ……
• Not trusted to do x without x (eg. borrow without their card, or borrow if they promise that they will return their long overdue item the next day, etc, etc)

What sort of things does your library do/offer or not, that causes offense to some?