Connecting Librarian

Today is Anzac Day, a public holiday in Australia to commemorate the men and women who fought and those who died for our country in armed conflicts around the world. Its a time of reflection, of thankfulness and of gratefulness and I truly am grateful for what those men and women gave - not only those that died, but all those whose lives were changed dramatically by being involved in these events. They have made our country a better place to live and I am one of the beneficiaries, with opportunities I could never have imagined otherwise.

Jerry Segraves, of http://jerrysfoto.com

So I felt it appropriate, to stop in the middle of all the busyness which is my life at present and reflect. Its funny, my husband and I were commenting the other day, that things have been a bit off lately - things weren’t disastrously bad, but they weren’t going right either, in pretty much everything except our family (thank goodness). We have recently celebrated our 15th anniversary and I am grateful for this strong, supportive and funny man who is my rock, my anchor, often my small still voice reminding me of what’s important and who is so supportive of all the things I have been doing and wanting to do, moreso in the last year with all the opportunities that have arisen. The rest of the “off” stuff we will work through as best we can.

Work is also getting exciting. We had 2 meetings this week, with the first we have now expanded our main library blog team to 5 people, with contributions to come from 2 of our senior managers. I’m really excited about this for a few reasons, one is that I don’t have to try and come up with something myself all the time, two is that we will have a range of voices and viewpoints, with more content coming on a regular basis and finally it is good to get some concrete support for what I think is becoming more important to my library.

The other meeting was about a prototype teen blog, which has been taken up enthusiastically by 3 of our youth services team, with news, reviews, plugins and lots of widgets etc. A couple of our young library officers have provided some great feedback and we will work with them to finalise the blog before we go live, using the blog to replace our static and little used or updated teen webpage.

I was also inspired by an interview of Helene Blowers (as I usually am by Helene) about some of what she is doing at Columbus Metropolitan Libraries. The thing that really stood out for me was having a focus for their virtual services in the coming year - they were going to be particularly aiming at power users, young people and the general public. It made me realise that it may no longer be enough for virtual services to be a focus of our Information Services, but that it is now big enough in itself to have its own strategy.

So that’s my ramble and my recent reflections. Things can change quickly in a few days. For the last few weeks I’ve felt tired, discouraged and sooo busy to the point that I wasn’t even interested in blogging or much else in professional development. I’m not so tired anymore (sleep-in today helped), I am more encouraged than I have been for a while and although I’m still sooo busy, a time of reflection and those elements of encouragement have brought me back here, just a little more fired up. We’ll see how long it lasts and where it will lead!

Second day at the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenberg County. Today Helen introduced me to Charles Brown, PLCMC’s Director. That was an honour and a privilege to enjoy our short chat together about our respective parts of the world.

Helen then took me to their CheckIt Outlet, a small shopfront library at the other end of the Charlotte city centre. (Check out the flickr photos) It is a small popular materials library with 3 staff, open only during business hours Monday to Friday and they do roaring business, particularly at lunchtime. Very cool!

It was then back to the Main Library where Helen gave me a quick rundown on what they want to do with the Virtual Village. This includes changing an unused part of the service desk to a collaborative space between library patrons and staff, plasma screens to inform and engage library patrons and to be used for on the spot teaching as required and a digital display area. They are planning to pipe music into the Virtual Village to help contain the issue of noise. They will also add more equipment to a studio to enhance music creation and make it a more collaborative space and reorganise a 2nd studio into another smaller PC lab. They will hope to reorganise some unused office space for gaming.

Back upstairs, we chatted about some other things that PLCMC is doing or has done. They have an IT department of 12 staff, who do everything in house. They host 75 servers and service over 1500 PCs throughout their admin areas and 24 branches, including help desk assistance.

Their website has recently included podcasts on their Readers Place website. Book reviews are easily uploaded through a simple form interface. They have filtering on all PCs, a condition of federal funding and have found it works well, with no real issues arising from its use. They have a MySpace page (Library Loft), which includes a library catalogue search box and has over 1100 friends.

Patrice Ebert, Head of Public Services took me on a tour of one of PLCMC’s regional libraries - Freedom and one of their branches - Sugar Creek. It was very interesting seeing what their libraries are like away from the Main Library. I’ll let the photos on flickr tell the story.

When I got back, I grabbed a few quick minutes from Matt Gullett, the Emerging Technologies Director. He spoke about libraries needing to be more interactive, collaborative and having a life-long learning facet. I have copies of some plans that they have and they look awesome. They want to use emerging technologies to help develop experience and learning opportunities.

Matt would like to develop programs that attract a lunchtime crowd, appealing to the corporate culture that is their neighbour, the banking town. Ideas include a digital art exhibition, guest speakers and more.

They still have those experiencing the digital divide. They want to give them training to enable them to get basic certification, which will open job opportunities for them. Want to offer enrichment, learning and Web 2.0 tools type training to the public.

They are having a big open night at the Main Library, partnering with local restaurants who will provide food for the evening. There will be wine tasting, gaming to enjoy and speakers. Should be a ball and I’ll be there. Will blog it later.

In the meantime, thanks to Helen and the team at PLCMC (particularly Kelly), I have had a ball here in Charlotte and have a lot to take back with me about virtual services. I really appreciate the time, effort and attention you have spared for this visitor from down under.