Connecting Librarian

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?

Its Day 27 of 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge and today’s post is inspired by a TED talk by Chip Conley – Measuring what makes life worthwhile (which is worthwhile checking out) and in particular the following quote he used in his talk:

“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. ” Albert Einstein.

The world is so fixed on statistics, in libraries as well as in life.  We seem to be caught up in the cycle of needing numbers to justify everything, yet not being happy to be relying on only the numbers that those tangibles give us to justify what we do.

3D Bar Graph Meeting, uploaded to Flickr on December 25, 2007 by lumaxart

We report our numbers to our governing bodies, who use those numbers to report back to their stakeholders and to justify the money they spend on their libraries. Are they any happier with only having tangible numbers to work from?

I’m not saying that numbers are bad – they are valuable and do give a view of how our libraries are being used. As we have been using those numbers for so long, they are also giving us a picture of how libraries and their use are changing. But those numbers have never been able to give the whole picture.

How do we count the value of the interactions we have, such as those I described in my blog post, The importance of librarians.

I know I am far from the first person to ask these questions and I won’t be the last. But until we find a way to measure these things and to break away from the cycle we are locked into regarding the tangibles we count and report, nothing is going to change.

Libraries are valuable above and beyond that we can currently count. So I’ll throw these questions out to the universe – How do we count the intangibles in libraries? How do we report these to our governing bodies? How do we get everyone to accept these counts as legitimate expressions of what libraries do and how they contribute to our society?

I hope that the work that Chip Conley and others are doing with the GNH will be able to answer those questions and we will see some different counts coming out of our libraries and being accepted by our governing bodies,  in the not too distant future.

Its Day 9 of the 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge and a comment from Penny on my last blog post got me thinking. Unfortunately its only a quick ponder, but  I would appreciate hearing your ideas.

So what’s the question?

If we weren’t such sticklers for privacy in our libraries, what could we do?  Penny’s comment was about having swipe cards to gain access to our public toilets, to help stop the issue of vandalism.  My immediate thoughts were both yes, protecting our facilities and users and no, protecting individual privacy.

But apart from the negatives we could protect from, what could we do if weren’t concerned with privacy?

We could have recommendation options such as those done by Amazon and take it further and link our users to other users who have similar interests or enjoyed the same titles. Taking it further, we could send recommendations or place holds on titles for our users, before they even realise that they would be interested in a particular title.

We could compile profiles on our users, based on their borrowing and useage patterns and then strongly focus our marketing to users who match the profile of any event or program we are running.  We could then use any and all of the contact details they provide us with, to get that marketing straight to them – personalised!  Or even just send them a confirmation with an opt out function.

There are plenty of more ideas out there I am sure and I would love to hear them, but having started to blog about this, I am confronted by conflicting emotions. First is excitement about the amazing level of service that we could offer to our users. Second is apprehension at anyone have control over that amount of information, even if it is initially only to be used for good! Once its collected, there are no guarantees that the line won’t move and things won’t change.

So what will happen to privacy?  Are we heading to a truly open society where privacy will be an out-of-date term that doesn’t really mean anything anymore?  But I think we’ll be losing out in some way, regardless of which way it goes.

Its Day 5 of the 30 blog posts in 30 days challenge, its Saturday and I worked today, so I thought I’d share a bit about working a weekend shift in a public library.

It seems to be a habit of ours to start work on a Saturday, trying to predict what sort of day its going to be. Is it going to busy or quiet? This is not just dependent on numbers, you can have low numbers on a day, but still be very busy because of the type of interactions you have with users.  They could be lengthy inquiries, long interactions, complaints or problems or everything could run as smooth as silk.

I’ve worked one Saturday where it felt like twice the number of people had beent through, because just about everyone needed that extra time. And I’ve worked other Saturdays where it felt quiet, but was extra busy, because everything went so smoothly with very little demand.

So each Saturday morning we try to predict what sort of day it will be. We try to take into account factors such as weather, other events on either locally, city-wide or national, whether’s its holidays or a long weekend and more.

Today, we wondered if it would be quiet as the weather was very chilly and dreary. It did start quiet and stretched beyond what we usually thought of as a slow Saturday morning start. Then briefly the sun came out and all of sudden, everyone was streaming through our doors.

So it was weather, we thought. No. A few hours later, it starting bucketing down with rain and it didn’t get any quieter, people just kept coming in (and not for the shelter). We ended up with numbers reflecting a busy Saturday which meant that with the slower start in the morning, we ended with more people over the course of the afternoon.

So do I want a job predicting use patterns for our library? Considering the dedication of our library users in the face of such weather and our record for predicting such use patterns, I think not. I’ll stick with managing the branch and providing the best user service we can, regardless of how busy it is.

We all know that our users don’t really care all that much about copyright. If they did, they wouldn’t be ripping CDs and DVDs or illegally downloading a wide variety of content in a wide variety of formats from the Internet.

We know it happens, but apart from the producers of such content and formats, libraries are amongst the last bastions of copyright protection.

photomastergreg, Uploaded on August 17, 2009 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

So I don’t know why I was suprised at the response of one of our users to – what to them anyway, seemed like a straightforward request.

She had been told of a small publication which covered a local history topic in which she was interested. She had contacted the small history group holding the publication and somewhere communication got crossed and she ended up on our doorpost, wanting to get a copy through our library.

Several problems with that request: it was an interstate publication, there was only one library who had holdings and it was not available for inter-library loan, being more pamphlet sized than book.

So user, understandably in a way, wanted it now and expected that it would be delivered soonest.  That’s where the problem started.  She wanted it now, so was expecting that we could just get an email copy and hand it over to her in minutes. Up popped copyright considerations. We couldn’t do that – it was in breach of copyright. But we couldn’t find a way to explain copyright and the implicaitons to her in a way that she either cared about or understood.

In the end, we helped her get her own email address and she contacted the library herself, to see what they could do for her directly.

So how do you explain to someone that doesn’t understand, that the thing they want is not on the internet and can’t be just scanned and sent without legal obligations being filled. Especially when for many things, they can just go on the internet and download it?

How can we explain them in ways that they can understand, that copyright is important and that everyone’s intellectual property needs to be protected in the way the creator wants?

Creative Commons - Some Right Reserved - Algunos Derechos Reservados

Or instead of trying to explain copyright, do we instead get everything licenced under a Creative Commons attribution and save everyone a lot of time and grief.  I have used Creative Commons images here and am doing so in my presentations. If you don’t know what it is, I strongly suggest you check it out!

Would love to hear your stories, your solutions and your thoughts about copyright and your users, I can’t be the only one having these experiences.

Today, 25th January, was Round 4 of the Library Day in the Life Project. The aim of the project is for librarian’s to document what they do in a day, for others to discover.  So here’s mine.

To give context, I am an Information Librarian working for the Casey-Cardinia Library Corporation – a public library service serving 300,000+ people in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.  We have 7 branch libraries and a mobile library.  My main area of responsibility is our online services, but I also work at our biggest branch.  I work half-time – Mondays, Thursdays and alternate Tuesdays.  Monday I work at HQ on online services – all day.

So here’s today.

8.30am – Arrived at work at our Regional HQ, which I do every Monday. Spent the next 30 minutes checking email, printing off articles for later reading, catching up on memos, bookmarking sites of interest, returning and renewing my loans and a brief moment catching up with the Finance Manager on the progress of our intranet development.

9.00am – Checked for updates to Drupal modules for our website and downloaded, then uploaded the only one required.  Also took the opportunity to delete old versions of modules that were no longer required, both locally and on our IPS’s server.

Discussed adding information about our mobile library’s forthcoming renovation to the website.

Posted a review received from one of our local teens via our website, to our teen review blog.  Added an image and a catalogue linking before publishing it and then refreshed the feed on our website so it would appear there too.

Updated a post on our Staff training blog, with information emailed me by the reviewing staff member. Made some minor additional changes to that post of my own as well.

9.30am – Posted information on our website in several places, about the Mobile Library renovations.

Being the day before a public holiday, we were very quiet at HQ as many staff took the opportunity to enjoy a long weekend. So I spent some time filling in urgent requests for stationery etc that were phoned in from the branches.

Worked on the agenda for our forthcoming Information Services team meeting that is on the week I return from leave.

10.00am – Lots more bits and pieces (did I mention that there were lots of people taking a long weekend).

Chatted briefly with my boss, who was seconded to help out at one  of our branches, which resulted in me taking on the answering of email questions for the day. Quickly cleared up a few procedural queries, started the process on a claims returned and sought further information on an inter-library loan request from a staff member at one of our local Councils.  Was quite pleased that I found the article he requested, even with minimal information and so was he when I emailed him both the full citation and a link to the full article not long afterwards.

11.00am – Morning tea done after successfully completing that information request, it was now onto a new blog post for our library news blog. Spent some time looking for inspiration and accidently came across links on our catalogue that I hadn’t noticed before. Ended up blogging about the public holiday tomorrow instead, as one of our libraries will be open to support the Book Sale that their Friends’ group is running.

11.30am – Did a backup of our email newsletter subscribers lists. Not very exciting, but very necessary. Then investigated further the new catalogue features and with the assistance of a colleague, figured out exactly how they worked and started thinking about how they could be taken advantage of by our users.  That’s another blog post in the making – but not today.

12.00noon – Received an information request from the mobile library on behalf of one of their users (via email). Rang the mobile to clarify the request and the context and within the half hour I had a emailed a list of websites and book titles to be passed onto to the user.

12.30pm – Lunchtime and I escaped the building for a short time. Normally I would go out to lunch with my HQ partners in crime, but they were either on leave or elsewhere.

1.30pm – Played with ideas and images for a new slide for our website’s events slideshow. Gave up on it afer a time – software kept crashing and I couldn’t find the inspiration to make the slide more than bland.  Will get back to it on Thursday.

2.00pm – Had a quick revisit of Event Brite. We are trialling it for online booking of library events, for a seminar we are holding in February. Chatted again with my boss to catch up on the day’s happenings and the week ahead.

Spent most of the rest of the time trying to work out how to get an imported Javascript working in Drupal. Lots of cutting, pasting, saving, trialling and repeating the process all over again. Got it working, but with lots of extraneous information, which when I remove it, kills the operation of the form. Its working for now, so will look at it again on Thursday.

4.00pm – Checked my Google alerts and Twitter searches for mentions of our libraries and service in those areas. Twitter mentions are growing slowly and we always get plenty of mentions on Google.

Began reviewing our brochures on online resources. Started considering how I could get the content of two to three brochures down into one.

Created three new book cover images and associated information to use in our books slide show on our library homepage.  Uploaded these and then deleted the three oldest ones – we have a 4 weekly cycle on these.

Filled it out with other bits and pieces (did I mention there were many people away) and then called it a day just after 5pm.

So that was my day – never realised how busy it was and how much territory I covered until I documented it.  Hope you find it interesting.

See you next Library Day in the Life Day!

I’ve been pondering again. So I’m going to inflict it on you.

We have recently added Chili Fresh reviews to our catalogue.  I like it, its easy to use, easy to add reviews, we have the weight of Chili Fresh reviews from around the world to populate our catalogue and they have some really cool social networking features coming soon.

Tagging from the Darien Catalogue

But Chili Fresh doesn’t have user tagging (at least not yet).  Which of course got me thinking about tagging.

A common problem experienced in public libraries and I’m sure in other libraries too, is when you have a user come up and say something like:

“Can you help me, I’m looking for a book that I have had before. Its about gardening, its green and its about this big (demonstration using hands).”

They can’t remember anything about the author, but sometimes they can remember more about the content.  In the above type of example, it would be something about vegetables.

Barring miraculous circumstances, (like you have read that same book), or the luck of finding said book on shelf or trolley in roughly the place you would expect it to be, the likelihood of finding it with that information alone is nigh impossible.

So my reasoning was that if users could tag our catalogue records with that sort of information, it we be of great use to both them and us in finding that same title in future.

A few problems with my reasoning as I pondered further.

First would be getting the users to tag the details in the first place. Although we have a few people (more than we expected) putting reviews on our catalogue, it is nowhere near critical mass.

Second, do you know how many green books about gardening, let alone vegetables, we have?

And finally, the piece de resistance.  You finally find that book that the user was so desperate for and the only thing they got right was that it was about gardening. As for the rest of it, the subject was hydroponics, the book was orange and it was a very different shape and size.

Now only if we could tag each item by its actual details as well as its perceived details, we might have something.  But by then, the tags will take up more than a screen of detail and would probably send the catalogue search feature into meltdown.

When we do get tagging (and we will somehow, someday), we won’t stop our users from adding this sort of information, but I guess only experience will be able to tell us if it will be of any help.

What sort of ideas have you had about new technologies, which might not work so well in a library situation?  Maybe we can help you resolve your problems around it. Would also love to hear your thoughts on this one.

We all know about the various loyalty schemes run by the big chains, whether they are supermarkets, airlines, department stories, online sellers etc.  Even small coffee shops do coffee cards to encourage repeat patronage.

However, I came across the rewarding of customer loyalty in a different way recently, which got me thinking about this topic again.

We have a local set of shops close to home, mostly food related (I know its a hardship…. lol). I regularly visit the local Charcoal Chicken shop because they have great chips and salads.  Over time, because they are great people and because I understand what its like being on their side of the counter, I have developed a relationship with the staff that work there.  You can imagine my delight when they told me recently that I was their favourite customer (and not just because I bought lots of stuff there).

This customer loyalty has not just been rewarded by their friendship and the conversations we share, but in other ways.  I have been shouted lunch as a Christmas gift and I now get a discount on anything I buy from them (and as I said, that’s often because it is so good!).

That got me thinking about customer loyalty at the local level.  They are a single shop, so don’t have have the buying power of a chain behind them, so anything they do comes directly from their end profit.  So I really appreciate the discount, because I know what it costs them.

Now translate that to the library world.  We all have great regular customers who utilise our services and borrow our items weekly if not more often. I know of library users who are on our website and catalogue almost daily.  How can we reward those customers, encourage them to make even more use of the library and to also be our unheralded ambassadors to all they know?

One problem with this concept, especially in the bigger library where I work, is being able to identify these regulars.  We have so many staff, who work at different libraries, so we don’t always realise that the people we serve each day are loyal, regular users.  Sure we recognise some, but it wouldn’t been fair to offer a customer loyalty service to some and not others.  So how do we discover these people?

The next problem is what do we offer them? We don’t charge to place holds at our library, so we can’t offer free holds for them. We do charge fines, but are hoping to remove those in future, so even if we could discount fines for our regulars, it would only be a (hopefully) short term solution. We have unlimited loans on most item types, although we still have some limits on AV, so maybe there’s  potential there.

Some may say that our services and collections, being free, are reward enough. They are a reward in their own right, but my charcoal chicken place provides good quality food at a reasonable price and still give me a discount for loyalty (and being a nice person… ).

So the only things I have been able to come up with for our loyal, regular library users, have been discounted fines and increased AV limits.  Anything else that you can think of would be appreciated. These people are the lifeblood of our public library and deserve to be rewarded.  Please help me to figure out how we could do that.

And by the way, Happy New Year!

As promised, here is the update.  Its quick.  Check out the previous blog post for the details of what happened, and for Monique (Branch Managers) update in the comments.

The cleaners did a great job and the carpet was dry and library staff were able to put all the shelving back to its normal places by late Friday afternoon.

Children's area as it was and is again

Although there was close on 100 items affected by water, only about 12 had to be withdrawn, mostly magazines and humour which were on fixed shelving.  The rest of the affected books were dried out, the minor damage noted and returned to circulation.

Eighteen interior roofing tiles will be replaced, due to the water damage.  The cause was the amount of rain – it was too much, too quickly and the gutters and drainage just couldn’t cope.  Barring another such storm, it is not expected to happen again.

As of yesterday, the Council Offices were still drying out sections of their carpet affected by the flood.  The shopping centre mostly returned to normal operations by Monday just gone, although the cinema complex, where 9 out of the 10 cinemas were flooded, only reopened yesterday.  ( the noise of many wails heard from teenage girls not able to see New Moon locally, finally abated).

We were very fortunate in terms of where the flood hit us – it was not near electronic equipment and in the only part of the library where 90% of the collection was on wheels.  So between placement and fast acting staff, we got off very lightly.  Now its as if it never happened.

Business as usual.