Mish, mash mashups!

Mashups would be of great use for all design projects involving:

Children and young adult arts and crafts activities - custom tailored images organised at the click of a computer button.

Jigsaws and fun badges and passes

Promotional posters, flyers, etc - inhouse design with a little extra pizazz at minimal cost.

Special promotional items - e.g. calenders

For 1. Home Library Service patrons,

For 2. Commerating historical library events - e.g. old library to new with photos taken of the demolition of the old to the creation of the new.

To podcast or not to podcast?

Our library could offer podcasts on in-house library produced events such as:

* Selected children's storytime sessions - Easter and Christmas stories

* HSC talks - "Minimising stress in the leadup to the HSC" or "Developing time management skills"

Positives: These have already been prepared by library staff

* Oral histories - Recordings on local people of interest, e.g. past mayors.

Positives: A number of histories already exist recorded onto cassette. These could simply be re-recorded into an mp3 format.

Special events and functions involving external non-library staff could also be offered.

Examples of this could include: author talks and special ceremonies such as the opening of branches.

General "negotiable" factors to consider would include:

1. Time - When would these sessions be recorded? How long would it actually take to record?

2. Location - Where would sessions be recorded? Our current library setup does not offer any quiet areas to record audio in. External noise from members of the public and music from the shopping centre would constantly interfere.

3. Staff - Who would be involved? Would we need to hire any external assistance at any stage?

4. IT restrictions - These would need to be relaxed to allow actual access to these podcasts in the library. At present, we are unable to listen to anything audio as there are no headphones on the internet computers and the speakers have been disabled. Only people outside of the library would be able to listen...

5. Prior permission from all participants - Not so hard to organise if only a few people involved but imagine a special function involving a number of speakers with only 1 person declining permission, then possibly the entire recording could not be used (depending on when they were involved).

Question? When all of these factors are considered, is it really something that a library could offer? If pictures of events are already available on flicker and news about the events are already publicised in the library's newsletters and website or in the local paper, do we really need to?

Answer Boards or bored questioners?

As another way of providing access to reference information an answer board service on your library's website could be useful. However, this would need to be managed very carefully and with clear guidelines as to:

1. What questions could be asked and
2. When they would be answered.

These guidelines are very important as I believe that most libraries work with very tight budgets with increasing demands on their services.

In the introductory section explaining about the service you could have examples of the type of questions that could be asked. Links to FAQs could also be included directing people to other pages on the Library's website which would answer questions regarding library membership terms and conditions, borrowing amounts, renewals, overdue fees, etc.

The benefits of an answer board service to library members would need to be weighed up against the real life financial and practical considerations in operating it. For instance,

* What staff would be required to provide it? Would it be just the Reference Librarian or all members of staff?

* When would the service be available? Would it be offered 24/7 or between certain hours Monday to Friday?

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In our library, although we do not offer an "Ask the Librarian type online service", we do take reference enquiries at the Information Desk. Many of these can be fulfilled at the time with more complicated questions involving extended research passed on to the Reference Librarian.

As it is a face to face service we are able to weed out any frivolous questions. Only people with serious questions with a real need for answers are assisted.

If we were to offer an anonymous online service I believe that the number of frivolous questions would increase with staff time wasted in responding. In addition, in my experience I have found that members of the public do not realise the amount of time it actually takes to assist them with many expecting "immediate" answers.

We have often received emails sent to the library's email address asking for information or assistance when we are closed only to find out when a reply email was sent (once we had reopened and were able to check our emails) that they had not waited for a reply and had not advised us that our assistance was no longer required. This has happened enough times that I now find myself having to check with the customer before attempting to assist as this saves a lot of wasted time and effort on my part.

I love Librarything!

Of all the online tools we have investigated, this is definetely the number 1 tool for me and I will most assuredly continue to use this long after all the L2.0 tasks are finished.

I simply loved the entire concept. After years of scribbling into notebooks, then transcribing into excel documents my own lists I am so very happy to have been shown this resource.

I loved the different "viewing options" of my collections and the ability to be able to create my own preferred view. I also loved that I could have multiple lists and was also able to add more as desired.

I also loved the librarything and member recommendations of other titles which I might like to read and the reviews. This connection between titles easily leads one to create even bigger lists of what "to read" in an extremely effortless way.

One very, very, deliciously, dangerous aspect of this site is the offer for members to read and review titles before they reach the shops. Although the majority seem to be in America, Canada and the UK there is still some Australian offers.

With so much to love, there has to be something bad surely? The only negative I can find is that I cannot seem to be able to sort my search results for series searches into series order. One seems to get a random list of series titles in no order whatsoever. However, I have only just started to explore this resource and have perhaps not found the right way to do this just yet...

Del.icio.us ways of keeping track

I like Del.icio.us very much. This can be extremely useful in preserving perpetual (as long as del.ici.ous exists) access to the websites regularly visited on communal staff library computers.

At present our information desk computers have a number of favourites saved for the internet. However, this is regularly cleaned out, as what one staff member considers relevant and important for quick access, another does not.

If we bookmarked Del.icio.us then we could still visit our own individual list of favourites which could be accessed from all computers.

Del.icio.us could also be saved as a favourite on the public access internet computers. The library could create an account with particular pages of regularly requested websites listed for quick access.

This would save staff time and decrease customer frustration as we would both no longer have to go through the multiple steps involved in locating the required information. A classic example involves trying to locate the practice driver knowledge tests on the RTA website (www.rta.nsw.gov.au).

A video screened in legomation..

In a previous post I mentioned a video I found when searching for "lego".

Here for the first time on my blog is that video. Enjoy!

Library videos

One interesting and pertinent (to my position) library related video that I found was on George Washington's overdue library books. This former American president apparently borrowed 2 books from the New York Society Library in 1789 and never returned them. Allowing for inflation his overdue fees currently owed (as at time of reporting) amounted to $300, 000!

This makes our 25c per day, per item overdue fees (capped at $12) look positively paltry. I wonder if I can use this as an argument to support how fair our fees are in comparison?

What could our library make a video about?

With our library temporarily located in a shopping centre, whilst our new premises are being built, as part of the Chatswood Concourse development project, we could make videos on:

* the progress of the reopening of the library e.g. from the bare building being furnished, to the staff moving in and to the library's opening ceremony and first day of operation.

Or perhaps

* a real life tour of the new library and facilities available.