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Bookshop or library?

Went and had a browse in the Perth Borders shop last week. When the shop first opened some weeks ago, it seemed like a Very Big Deal and for the first couple of weeks at least, it was always packed. I guess the novelty’s worn off a bit now, because the super large crowds have dissipated.

There were still quite a few people in the shop when I was there, though. I saw the odd child sprawled on the floor, reading, people sitting near the graphic novels section reading graphic novels from cover to cover, other people perusing the extensive magazine selection, and generally quite a few people around the shop reading things in various other sections.

Someone (not a librarian) I was chatting to about the shop the other day said that it was ‘friendly’ and ‘welcoming’ and she liked it because she felt she could take her time browsing there. It was ‘just like a library, except without the photocopiers’, she added. (I’m not sure whether the comment about the library was just added on for my benefit…)

On the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) blog Barbara Fister points to an article in the New York Times which remarks on the fact that Borders “is losing money rather faster than expected” because people are not buying as much as the company would like them to. Citing a 1905 speech, Barbara remarks that libraries have always recognised the fact that our users appreciate having a pleasant and “hospitable book-lined social space” to visit, pick up a book or two, and meet with others. Attracting new users will always be challenging for libraries, though!

No matter how friendly Borders (or any other shop) is, ultimately they are not there to just be friendly to their customers - they are there to make a sale. And what will they do, when potential customers are more interested in spending time there, and not money? Send these non-customers to a library?

The picture is from Flickr, posted by its creator under a Creative Commons license. Click on the picture itself to read more about the context it was taken in, or to find out more about the photographer.

July 26th, 2006 Posted by CW | All sectors | 4 comments

Generation Y - moving in.

July 25th, 2006 Posted by tango | All sectors, Useful resources, New technologies | 3 comments

VALA 2008 seeks your help!

The VALA Committee is seeking expressions of interest from people who would consider becoming a member of the Conference Programme Committee for VALA2008.

There are two possibilities: becoming an attending member of the Committee, or a “corresponding” (via e-mail) member of the Committee.

The first meeting of this Committee (strictly speaking, a subcommittee) has been scheduled for Monday 31 July 2006 at 5.30 p.m in the Conference room, level 5, RMIT Central Library, Building 8, 360 Swanston Street, Melbourne.

The Programme Committee (usually a group of about 10 or 12) will normally meet monthly (mostly on the 4th week of the month) between now and mid-2007, although additional meetings may be called (probably in May 2007). Meetings may not be required every month in early 2007, depending on response to queries via e-mail. The Programme Committee’s work for the Conference includes researching and suggesting keynote speakers, the theme for the Conference, the topics and text of the call for papers, evaluating abstracts submitted, reviewing submitted papers, organising the “streams” for parallel sessions and for each day of the Programme, and assisting at the Conference.

If you would like to be involved, but would be unable to attend meetings, it is possible to be a corresponding member. You would receive minutes of the meetings and your contributions and responses would be sought via e-mail. You would still be included as a reviewer.

It is also possible to contribute by being a reviewer (October to December 2007), without being involved in the other planning for the Conference.

A range of people is being sought, so if you are interested in participating, let us know as soon as possible (even if you are unable to come to the first meeting). (Alyson Kosina
VALA Secretariat Email: [email protected])

July 24th, 2006 Posted by tango | Conferences, All sectors | one comment

Project management in a distributed team environment

Here at the RUBRIC project we need to keep a close eye on our project. The way that we do that is using the Trac project management system. It allows us to keep an eye on things such as:

1. Tasks that we are currently undertaking, plan to undertake, and have completed via “tickets”
2. It allows us to see each others tickets, and if necessary adjust our timelines according
3. Provide an overview of project timelines, and progress towards those deadlines
4. Issues that our project partners have alerted us to, and we need to investigate
5. It provides us with the wiki environment that I’ve posted about before

We recently opened up the access to our Trac website and have allowed the project managers at our partner institutions to put tickets into the system. The technical manager can then assign them to us and we can add the amount of time we think it will take, and adjust our work schedules accordingly. We’ve found this works really well and is a good supplement to the existing communication we have with the project partners via email, the wiki, teleconferences, and the website.

Systematically managing the project is, in my opinion, a requirement for a successful project. It doesn’t really matter if the way you manage the project is via Trac, or other software such as a Microsoft Project, or via a whiteboard in the office. The important thing is that everyone involved in the project is aware of the direction of the project, what they need to do, and when they need to do it by.

Something as simple as a to-do list written on a piece of paper, or a list of tasks in Microsoft Outlook, can also be seen as ways of managing projects, especially if you’re the only one on the project. Very small projects can benefit from some form of project management, and in a distributed team environment like we have at the RUBRIC project effective project management is a must.

July 24th, 2006 Posted by techxplorer | Australia, Queensland, Academic libraries, Special projects | no comments

Using del.icio.us in a team environment

Here at the RUBRIC project we share information a lot. One of the ways we share links to websites and other information of interest is via del.icio.us. The del.icio.us website is one of those “web 2.0” websites we are increasingly hearing about. Using the del.icio.us service we’re able to “tag” links to websites of interest and share them with the other members of our project. The website provides RSS feeds which means when one of us tags a new link we all find out about it via our aggregators.

Many of us have accounts with del.icio.us and use our account to keep track of links that are of interest to us. When we want to share a link with another member of the team we “tag” it with a common tag. We have one tag for technical information, and a separate tag for more general information.

By using a service like this we reduce the amount of email we send to each other. It also means that people in the project can be self selecting about the information they receive from us. If they’re interested in technical information about institutional repositories, they can monitor the feed for that specific tag. If they’re not interested they don’t have to monitor the tag.

I would encourage anyone involved in a project to investigate the use of del.icio.us and similar technologies. We’ve certainly found them useful.

July 24th, 2006 Posted by techxplorer | Australia, Queensland, Academic libraries, Useful resources, New technologies, Special projects | one comment

Blogs: Who’s reading? Who’s writing?

WHO’S READING?

You know how some things are obvious AFTER they are pointed out? Yesterday, Charles Arthur explained in the Guardian about the 1% rule. He starts with:

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

I’d not thought of this too much before. I presumed that the read/write web meant that people would write. Maybe not so. Makes me wonder where “save” fits into all this, as “save” is what libraries do so well. (reference via the Library Stuff blog)

WHO’S WRITING ?

Seems that everyone who knows I’m interested in blogging sent me this reference yesterday. The Pew Internet & American Life Project published a 33 page report of a survey of over 7000 Americans, all about blogging. ( Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers by Amanda Lenhart and Susannah Fox). They aimed to get a picture of who blogs, why and what they blog. They used the telephone (!) to conduct the survey.
Some of the findings, randomly selected for personal interest:

• The blogging population is young, evenly split between men and women and racially diverse.
• More than half the bloggers use a pseudonym
• A typical blogger spends two hours a week on their blog
• Nearly 3 in 10 bloggers say that their primary blog is a multi user blog.
• Half of bloggers believe their audience is mostly people they know.
• Percentage of all American adults who are knowledge-based professional workers (13%). Percentage of bloggers who are knowledge-based professional workers (38%)

The survey is available online if you want to take it, although of course the results won’t be “official”

(Just as I was about to push “publish” and get back to work, a colleague {you know who you are KM!} sent me a link to this report of a survey of British bloggers from today’s Guardian. Article starts with: One in four British internet users keeps a blog and more than half of that number share their online musings with the public, according to a report released today. Britain is home to nearly 7 million bloggers by David Flicking)

July 21st, 2006 Posted by Kathryn Greenhill | Useful resources, New technologies, Blogging | no comments

Wanted! leaders in the library

Here’s an opportunity for would-be leaders to get some invaluable advice, confront your inner-most fears and ambitions about leadership and do some critical thinking and collaboration on the future of librarianship. In the beautiful Thredbo village you will join up with about 30 other participants and several respected leaders in the profession who give up their time to provide mentoring. One of the great things about Aurora is that you will make contacts from all over Australia and New Zealand.
This is not just a few days out-of-the-office jaunt - be prepared for some challenges - I know.

Applications are now open for the 10th Aurora Library Leadership Institute, to be held in Thredbo, NSW from 15 to 20 February 2007.

The Institute’s mission is to assist future leaders in the library and associated cultural and information industry to maximise their leadership skills and potential. It aims to position leaders to be proactive and effective voices in a dynamic and sophisticated information environment.

Details at: http://www.alia.org.au/aurora/aurora.html

ALIA provides an Aurora Scholarship to enable an ALIA member to attend the Institute where this would otherwise be difficult due to the financial commitment required. Personal financial members of ALIA who meet certain criteria are eligible to be considered for the Scholarship. Further information at:
http://www.alia.org.au/awards/aurora.scholarship/

July 20th, 2006 Posted by Peta Hopkins | Events, Training, All sectors | 19 comments

What is RUBRIC?

I’ve been asked by Librarian Kathryn, also known as sirexkat to tell you a little bit about the RUBRIC project. RUBRIC is an acronym that means, Regional Universities Building Research Infrastructure Collaboratively. It is a project hosted at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) and we are working with a number of regional Universities in developing sustainable infrastructure for the deployment of best practice institutional repositories.

The key thing here is working collaboratively. We call our office here at USQ, RUBRIC-Central and there is only 7 people here in the office. The other people involved in the project, such as our project partners, are spread across 8 different Universities. We need to work collaboratively in order to achieve our goals. We use a wide variety of technologies to keep the collaboration working including blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, del.icio.us feeds and the more traditional email and telephone / teleconference.

In future posts I hope to talk more about RUBRIC, the things we’re doing, and the way we’re collaborating and working together.

July 20th, 2006 Posted by techxplorer | Australia, Queensland, Academic libraries, Special projects | 2 comments

VALA meeting (melbourne) 28th June brief report

Very interesting meeting on Wednesday about RFID. Susan Gately from Hobsons Bay Libraries spoke about the implementation of RFID at Altona Meadows, then Eoin Geaney from 3M gave some facts and figures about the different needs academic, special, public and school libraries have for RFID and a bit of technical discussion then finally Alan Butters of Sybis gave some pointers for the kind of process that should take place before you pick up the phone to place an order with “Vendor”The implementation of RFID at Altona Meadows has been a huge success, thirty percent of loans are now handled with the self serve machine, freeing staff to devote quality time to more patrons. The machines are big hit with the children, and more generally because RFID wasn’t sold as a cost cutting measure, rather with all the excitement that cutting edge technology can invoke, particularly in the Western suburbs of Melbourne where less resources have traditionally been devoted.

Some of the libraries in Australia already implementing RFID are
Gold Coast City
Altona Meadows (first in Victoria!)
Swansea Public Library
High Court of Australia
West Ryde Library
Marrickville Public Library
Redcliffe Library
Medical Library of Canberra Hospital
Belmont Public Library
Brisbane City Council at Wynnum
Commonwealth Parliamentary Library
University of Technology Sydney

and an interesting fact: it takes 2 people to process 260-350 items an hour when first programming the tags, and at Altona Meadows, just as a by the way comment, volunteers aged from 70 to 75 had no difficulties at all with the process:) and incidentally helped the library achieve tagging the inventory in a record three weeks!

Alan Butters from Sybis went through some of the questions to ask when considering RFID in your library, such as
Why?
What do we expect?
What will a successful outcome look like?
How will we know if we are successful? What are the critical success factors for our library?

and a useful tip to kickstart the research process: don’t pick up the phone to a vendor before you have read the literature on RFID available on websites and in general circulation…vendors are all different as are systems, and a preliminary stroll through the options can be a big help before you begin. Alan’s presentation on workshopping the RFID decision process is available via email and Alan can be contacted at
alan @sybis.com.au

Finally about 12 members of the audience, the speakers and the VALA commitee wandered down to University House for convivial dinner and drinks at a very reasonable price… I had the cherry tomato, prosciutto and roast chicken risotto (chef’s special!) and was thrilled to spot Barry Jones of the Labour Party and quiz participant extraordinaire at a table across the way…at first I thought it was Bob Ellis but I wasn’t wearing my glasses so may be excused this minor error. Many thanks to the committee, the speakers and fellow audience members for some amusing conversation on a bitterly cold melbourne midwinter wednesday evening. Glad I ventured out!

July 19th, 2006 Posted by sparkle | Victoria, Events, All sectors, New technologies | 8 comments

What skills do we need in the 21st century?

Have you seen this great post from Meredith Farkas, on Skills for the 21^st century librarian?
To summarise, Meredith argues that the library schools aren’t really teaching the “big picture” topics, and suggests the following “basic tech competencies” that should be covered:

1. Ability to embrace change
2. Comfort in the online medium
3. Ability to troubleshoot new technologies
4. Ability to easily learn new technologies
5. Ability to keep up with new ideas in technology and librarianship (enthusiasm for learning

Don’t be intimidated by technology and new ideas and ways of doing things – experiment, play, try it out! (I’d guess this is partly why we’re all here? )
In terms of “higher level competencies” she suggests:

1. Project management skills
2. Ability to question and evaluate library services
3. Ability to evaluate the needs of all stakeholders
4. Vision to translate traditional library services into the online medium
5. Critical of technologies and ability to compare technologies
6. Ability to sell ideas/library services

Do read the whole post – and the comments too, where readers have suggested more topics that could be covered by library school, like communication and basic accounting skills.

Update: Free Range Librarian has made her own list (for any century!) to complement Meredith’s. I particularly like:

Impatience. Patience is vastly overrated. Librarians love to process stuff to death, and are often all too willing to spend way too much expensive staff time deliberating very tiny matters in lieu of getting to “go.” (We don’t need no steenkin’ users…) At MPOW our style manual requires serial commas–as in salt, butter, cheese, and eggs–because it’s non-debatable. Keep your eyeballs peeled for time-sinks. Develop timelines and try to beat them. Live by deadlines.

July 18th, 2006 Posted by CW | All sectors | no comments