Please don't tell me that at least Benito Mussolini made the libraries run on time

Just a thought…

If we ran public libraries the way that our privatised railways are run, the taxpayer would be spending more for to have to travel ten miles to their nearest library where they'd have to wait an hour for the opportunity to borrow a dog-eared old Harold Robbins paperback that somebody seemed to have used to wipe their bottom.

I can't say this prospect thrills.

Creative barcodes

I would dearly love for us to have barcodes like these or these in our library books; not just for aesthetic reasons, they help confirm the brand values of the organisation involved.

Aspirational acorns

A friend and colleague was beating herself up the other day for having somehow failed one of her work experience people. The upshot of her argument was that although she could see the potential in this person she hadn't managed to persuade them it was there. Most of the other work experience people she'd had showed a positive change in self-esteem and self-confidence by the end of the programme but with this one girl she wasn't convinced she'd made a difference.

This sounds horribly familiar — it's usually me moaning about potential wasted. Having listened to the argument, and having seen the work experience group on an almost daily basis while they were here, I'm sure that my friend is wrong: there are significant positive messages in this girl's experience with us:

• Somebody took a chance and took her on. From my own experience of unemployment back in the 1980s I know how important this is.


• Somebody was interested in who she was, not what she was.


• Somebody was interested in finding out what she could do, not what she couldn't do.


• And what she could do turned out to be a bit more than she thought she was capable of.

It's easy to ask: "who died and made you God?" but in circumstances like this there is a duty of care and those of us who care want to see things flourish and develop. No, there's been no magic moment of transformation, and perhaps there never will be. But that girl has gone away knowing that someone somewhere has thought that she was worth something more than just what was between her legs and that that something was worth somebody's making a bit of an effort to find it. That knowledge may or may not survive future experience and it may be years or even decades before anything might come of it, but it's there. And that's important.

We're not God, the best that we can do is plant acorns and hope to grow the occasional bit of forest.

There are worse ambitions.

Neologism

Faeture (n): An unwarranted new "feature" that buggers up a tried and tested product.

QR

I know that QR codes are considered a bit old hat in some circles these days but I think there's still scope for doing interesting things with them in the library. The obvious idea, I think, is for signposting Useful And Interesting Facts about the library. Or at least doing a bit of in-library marketing using out-library resources.

Shelf guiding tends to be one or two words, which isn't a right lot for selling the product on the shelves. You can do a bit more with card inserts and shelf wobblers but after a bit they start getting lost or looking tatty. A QR code, strategically placed on or by the shelving, could add another string to the bow by pointing to appropriate web resources, for instance:

• A page on the library's web site 'selling' that particular collection.


• The web site of one of the authors of titles on the shelves, particularly if it's not one of the usual suspects. Many new authors have very interesting blogs which are good introductions to the ways they think and write.


• A genre blog or web site. Get your chick lit readers looking at sites like http://chicklitbooks.com/, for instance.


• Appropriate articles available online. Just because a newspaper essay about a particular author or book is a few months or years old doesn't mean it might not be interesting to some of your readers.


• Appropriate web sites to pique readers' interests in a particular style or subject. There's scope for a bit of creative thought here, especially if it's a good way of spinning strands between Dewey ranges. An article on lumbago and housemaid's knee might be useful to the older reader of gardening books!


• Or just something random but fun and interesting?

I think this has potential for increasing the library's potential as a serendipity engine, introducing customers to new ideas and/or authors. Especially if the code's used to flag up neglected areas of stock rather than the usual headliners.

OK, the audience is likely to be a bit small and niche but what does it cost? A bit of time to decide what to point at (and/or create a bit of new content if you need something locally-specific) and to create the QR code from one of the many free generators you can find on the web; and the price of printing the code out. Definitely worth having a think about…

Note to self: the library catalogue

Two principles to work to:

• A customer should be able to use the catalogue to get within six feet of the item they want on the shelves without staff mediation.


• Allowing the customer to find what they want is only half the job: the catalogue needs to persuade the customer to also want what they find.

Digital Inclusion workshop

This is the Prezi I did for today's Staff Conference to try and provoke a bit of discussion about digital inclusion.

The main aim is to try to get people to recognise what they're already doing (which is quite a lot really) and to take on board that they're going to be needing to do quite a lot more in future. My being shifted out of the Library Service complicates the dynamic of that bit, of course...

Library Day In The Life

I'm joining in with A Day in the Life of a Library... Like a ton of other people I'm tweeting a few of the goings-on at work (you can follow them here).

It'll be a useful exercise for me anyway, I'm meeting myself catching up just lately and could do with reviewing what/how I do. Not the least because one of the issues being addressed this week is the status or not of my own job (the good news being that I should still have a job somewhere or other this Summer!)

Hey ho.