Direct Requests from Information Wants To Be Free

2.0 and don’t even know it | Information Wants To Be Free

Great post from Meredith over at Information Wants To Be Free about an innovative idea for getting books posted direct from Amazon to distance students for their requests. It's worth reading the post and the comments as well as it seems the idea isn't unique. An innovative way to deal with the problem of delivering information to distance students and I'd be interested to know how many other places are doing something similar.

If I didn't work here...

It's easy to get over excited about different applications and ideas for ways to transform library services. Harder to make sure that we change things that make a difference to library users. Today I've been trying to think about what I would want from my library account if I didn't work at the library. Some are 2.0, others are just things that would make a difference to me.

1. Pay my library fines online with a credit card. If I didn't work here I would certainly have library fines and I would want to pay fines when I renewed my late books online to save time when in the library and stop my card getting blocked.

2. Manage my loans history. A chronological list is fine but if I can borrow 30 items at a time I would want to manage that list, save items that I may want to borrow again and mark authors that I didn't like so I don't make the same mistake twice!

3. RSS feeds for authors and titles. I'm pretty addicted to my Bloglines and I'd like a feed for new books by authors I have enjoyed and a feed for my wish list so I know when new titles I'm interested in have arrived.

4. A wish list! At the moment I add items I want to borrow to my Amazon wish list but I would love a library wish list that I could add to even if the book isn't available in the library. I'd then like to be able to search for and reserve items from my wish list.

5. Online ILL requesting. I know many libraries do this already but we haven't quite caught up yet and this is something I would really want as a reader.

6. Books due reminders. Again I've seen this elsewhere and it's something that would make a difference to forgetful folk like me! Email or SMS acceptable.

What would make a difference to you?

My 100th RSS Feed on Bloglines

Today I subscribed to my 100th feed on Bloglines! Number 100 is a UK blog by a senior library assistant working in HE in Kent who is studying for a librarianship qualification. Check out The Singing Librarian who describes himself thus...

The Singing Librarian is not, technically speaking, a librarian. He has been working in a higher education library in Kent (UK) since Autumn 2000, but does not yet have a librarianship qualification and is therefore only a quasi-librarian. His job title is ‘Senior Library Assistant’. The library he works at is known as the Library of Doom due to the various problems it has encountered over the years, including floods, near-death experiences and rampaging wildfowl.

My favourite posts so far have been Singing Librarian Flashback: S Club Library which made me laugh and sing out loud and Good librarian, bad librarian comparing good responses to stupid reader questions and the responses we would all love to be able to give:

Student: Do you have that blue book my tutor recommended?
Bad librarian: Yes, we do. It’s kept with all the other blue books in the blue room, between the green and purple rooms. Once you get to the room, you’ll find them arranged in order by how much the tutors like them, with books written by members of staff at the very beginning.
Good librarian: I’m afraid I’ll need a bit more information than that. Can you remember what it’s called?
Unfortunately, the student often fails to remember the author or title, sometimes forgets which course or tutor it was that suggested the book, but always knows that it’s very important that they read it. At this point, the bad librarian manifests himself in the form of steam coming out of the good librarian’s ears.

I'm currently on the lookout for more blogging UK librarians and library students so The Singing Librarian fits in nicely.

Think I'm going to need a bigger blogroll...

UK Library Bloggers

Working my way through the handouts from last night's event I've just come across this post from Brian Kelly on Where are the Blogging UK Librarians? I think this is an issue that will be discussed more and more this year as blogging becomes less "something geeks do" and more a useful tool of everyday life. Reading the blogs from US library folk you get a real sense of community and I think this is something that will develop over here too. I'd like to see more mention of blogging as a CPD tool too - CILIP's new framework is very much about reflecting on what you have learned and showing your professional reading and writing this blog has pushed me to do this and keep doing it over the last few months. Can't let my subscribers down! Huge thanks by the way to those people who have commented on my posts, I still can't believe people read this and it's fantastic to get feedback and suggestions. Isn't this what a professional community should be?

RSS, Blogs and Wikis with Karen Blakeman

Last night I attended a thought provoking CILIP event at Basingstoke Library - RSS, Blogs and Wikis by Karen Blakeman. Organised by my local sub-branch this was a very popular event - interesting as I had seen very little publicity and had wondered if we would be the only ones there! At the beginning Karen did a quick hands-up assessment to see how many folk had heard of the different 2.0 technologies. About half of the room had heard of RSS feeds although not everyone was sure what they were for; blogs were only used by a small number of people and wiki knowledge was mostly limited to the odd search on Wikipedia. Probably quite indicative of an average group of UK library staff but it was good to see how many people had given up their evening to come along and find out more. I've been reading Karen's blog for a couple of months now and had come across most of her recommendations before but it was really interesting to hear which services she recommended for beginners and how to get experimenting. Today Karen posted her presentation and recommended links on the RBA website and I'd recommend having a look as it is a useful introduction to the subject.

I'm looking forward to getting together with my colleagues who also attended and seeing how we can start to use this technology to improve our library service. Maybe an internal wiki for library procedures and ideas or RSS feeds for readers to get news of new books/library events etc. There is always the standard difficulty of permission, getting the powers that be to agree (or even the IT department!) will probably be the biggest battle but I'm hoping if we start small and demonstrate something that works and makes a difference we can move onto bigger things. Watch this space...

Life as I Know It's Library 2.0 Roundup

Jennifer Macauley in her excellent blog Life as I Know It has created a comprehensive list of sites and citations on library 2.0. Library 2.0 Roundup was originally posted in October 2006 and it is a pretty huge list to work through. Thanks to Jennifer I've discovered a wealth of posts and ideas that I hadn't previously come across and I'm only about a third of a way through. I imagine it would also be a really useful resource for anyone wanting to chart the development of the library 2.0 idea from autumn 2005 to the present. Just don't blame me if you stay up all night reading the posts, I'm finding it rather addictive reading...

Sunday Review - mostly about library visits

The past couple of weeks have involved a certain amount of travelling and as usual I've slipped a couple of library visits into each journey. Last week I had a meeting in Birmingham and decided to go up north a little early to get some family history research in (I have ancestors from Rugby). This meant I managed to spend a day in the lovely Rugby Library and Information Centre using their microfilm reader. I've visited Rugby Library a few times now and I really like the layout and atmosphere. The children's library is right by the entrance with a great big activities room viewable from the issue desk through the perspex wall, the activities room does a good job of making the children's activities visable but cutting down on the noise in a very open library. The computers have been put up on a mezzanine level which also cuts down on the noise level and allows for a IT classes or homework sessions to be held away from the main library. Unfortunately all 3 microfilm reader/printers are on their last legs and after several dodgy printouts the librarian had to admit defeat "they need replacing but I don't think we'll get new ones any time soon"! They also have a single photocopier, located at the front of the library which has to be activated by a member of staff and then involves you queuing up a second time to pay for your photocopies (assuming you're honest enough to do this!), a little frustrating when you consider there are no reading areas near the photocopier. In all Rugby gets my thumbs up as a lovely public library.

A thumbs down however to the Birmingham Central Library which I found rather confusing and depressing. A quick look at their website shows that the service is aware of the problems with the library and a new Library of Birmingham is planned for the near future. I'd like to see tidy shelves and a more welcoming staff presence added to the list as the only smile I received was from the guard on the front door and after 10 minutes wandering round the library I had to leave before I took my coat off and started tidying!

This week I managed to fit 2 visits into a trip to London for another meeting and also popped into the British Library. My first visit was to Swiss Cottage Library in Camden (north London near Regents Park). I came across this library following a conversation at work discussing innovative libraries we could visit in London. All the news from London seems to be about Ideas Stores so I wondered what other London libraries had been redeveloped recently and I'm so glad I looked into this. Swiss Cottage Library was a delight to visit! I even sat down in the library and started to make a list of all the things I liked so that I didn't forget any! The layout was so simple that I felt I could make a decent guess at where any book might be filed and find it there. They have gone for an Arts/Science division to the library with a red zone for arts and blue for sciences. Arts includes fiction, biographies and CDs/DVDs on the first floor with more academic subjects such as music scores on Arts 2. Science has cookery etc on first floor (including teenzone with GCSE and A-Level revision guides) and subjects such as chemistry on the second. The children's library is fantastic and has been designed by a local artist. This library doesn't set out to wow but includes lots of simple little ideas to make the user experience better. I liked the globe in the travel section, the quiet reading areas with wall racks for newspapers and current journals, the children's toilets right next to the children's library and the large number of desks with sockets underneath for laptops to be plugged in. I would also like to steal the idea of promoting subjects on the second floor by putting new and interesting items on designated displays on the first floor and 'for more books on ... see S2' notices. Much of this echoes plans that we have for our library and I'm hoping our librarians get a chance to head up for a look sometime soon.

While in the capital I had to check out one of the Ideas Stores as well and chose the most recent 'flagship' Idea Store Whitechapel for my visit. Now before I go further, please bear in mind that this visit was at the end of my day, I had been on my feet for about 7 hours and had just experienced how 1 inch of snow can affect the Tube 12 hours after falling! Firstly, there is a very good cafe at the top of the 'library' which serves excellent tea and chocolate cake (a very important point when you forgot to stop for lunch) and has a lovely view of the city at night. This is not top of my list of what I would like from a library but I did like the fact that the newspapers and popular journals were available in this area for you to read over a cup of coffee. Refreshed I ventured into the rest of the library hoping to be inspired but left rather disappointed. I had hoped to see something innovative and exciting but the building felt to me like a library in a multi-storey carpark. There was some rather nice curvy shelving and self-issue points on each floor but the library is still divided into reference and lending floors with families firmly kept in the children's library on the ground floor away from the adult books. DVDs and some display books are the only other items available on the ground floor and from the outside children and DVDs are about all you can see. I'd like to visit again and take a look at some of the other Ideas Stores as my first impressions of this venture were not good!

Lastly a mention of my quickest visit of the fortnight - I finally got a chance to pop into the current British Library exhibition London: A Life in Maps and this has to be my top recommendation for anyone visiting London this month. I love historical maps generally but was amazed by the amount and variety of images that the British Library have brought together in this exhibition. Arranged chronologically the exhibition takes you from the earliest images of Roman London to visions of the Olymic future. I was particularly fascinated by the maps showing London before and after the great fire and the descriptions of how the city grew to encompass surrounding villages such as Islington. Unfortunately I only had about 30 mins so I'm hoping to pop up for a longer visit later in the month. For anyone who doesn't get a change to visit the BL I can recommend the online virtual exhibition.

Library 4.0?!

Tame the Web's Michael Stephens has just republished an article that was originally published in the OCLC NextSpace Magazine in April 2006. The article is about Librarian 2.0 and is a challenge for anyone working in libraries to think about how they use 2.0 technology to provide a library service and what a library service should be. See Into a new world of librarians for his article. Following the link I then read the original article in NextSpace which asked a futurist, three librarians and an OCLC vice-president to comment on the library possibilites of Web 2.0 in Web 2.0 : Where will the next generation Web take libraries?

This is a fascinating article and I particularly enjoyed futurist Dr Wendy Schultz On the way to the library experience of the future where she takes us from Library 1.0 a resource base right up to Library 4.0, the neo-library: Experience, a mind gym or knowledge spa. And I was just getting to grips with the idea of 2.0!!

OA, public libraries and distance learning

Many thanks to Heather Morrison who has taken the time to write a comprehensive comment on yesterday's post about open access articles. She has included some interesting links and a reference to her blog The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics which has been added to my Blogllines subscription for updates on the open access world. I've also read a few posts recently about distance learning and how students can feel a little abandoned by their institution and library service when studying from afar. I wonder whether this is an issue that public and academic libraries should be looking at together in more detail? We tend to focus on offering support for Open University students but distance learning seems to be an increasingly popular option for other HE institutions. I'd be interested to know how easily distance learners access library services, both remote access and locally and whether public libraries could do more to help with this.

This week seems to be my random thought week, please feel free to add your random thoughts to the mix!

Public Library Blogs part 3

Back in November last year I considered the complete absence of public library blogs from the UK . This afternoon I had a good hunt through the list on the The Blogging Libraries Wiki to see if any UK public library blogs were listed. After a number of false hopes caused by English sounding place names such as Rye, Cambridge and Cumberland I failed to find any based in the UK. I did come close with an interesting blog from Galway Public Libraries in Ireland. The archive goes back almost a year and they seem to post pretty regularly on library news, books and events. They describe themselves as the first Irish Public Library Blog and I think they're a good example for other public libraries to follow demonstrating a passion for books, writing and libraries.

Another blog that I came across is pretty far from being a UK library blog as it comes from Singapore! High Browse Online is an initiative from the National Library Board of Singapore "Helping you make informed reading decisions". It is an online version of their printed booklist with a greater focus on reviews and discussion and I've really enjoyed reading the last few posts. Great example of a library blog which set a clear aim and has stuck to it with a good level of participation and useful links to library services such as the catalogue and enquire services.

Still haven't found any UK public library blogs though...

2.0 ideas to stop OPACs sucking

I've read a large number of posts recently about 'Why my OPACs sucks' and so much has already been written that I don't want to repeat it all here. What I will do is look at 3 sites that have made me think about what they offer that our library website doesn't...

Librarything
Yesterday Librarything hit nine million books catalogued - they blogged briefly about this and the point that caught my eye was "If LibraryThing were a "real" library, we'd now be the 10th largest in the country (ALA fact sheet)". No one forces people to catalogue their books on Librarything and yet over 95,000 people (latest figure I could find on the website) have signed up. Not only are people eagerly signing up but they are often willing to pay a subscription use the site (only necessary if you wish to add more than 200 books to your account). Imagine if your library catalogue was so good that people were eager to sign up and use it! Cataloguing books is simple and uses records from authoritative sources such as The British Library and the Library of Congress via their Z39.50 servers (best use I've seen of Z39.50 so far!). There are lots of ways to find new books to read, suggestions and unsuggestions are all intriguing - imagine looking at a library catalogue and seeing the words 'Don't Read This' above a book! Makes me want to read it! Most importantly the users have ownership, they choose to upload their books, they eagerly tag them, search for other books and share information with other users. We spend ages in libraries looking for innovative ways to get readers to review books or join reading groups but obviously there are plenty of people out there eager to share their opinions on books and we just aren't reaching them with our lovely old OPAC.

BooksWellRead
Only recently come across this site thanks to a mention on Phil Bradley's I want to blog. Here's the goal from their website

"The goal of BooksWellRead is to be the online destination of choice for people who want to 'digest' what they read by capturing their thoughts in writing. BooksWellRead has been designed to be simple, fast, and easy to use. We hope you like it and tell others about it!! By the numbers: 3007 books, 1016 entries, 389 members"

Obviously much smaller than LibraryThing but describes itself more as an online book journal than a library. It is designed for people who like to reflect on what they have read and possibly share those reflections with others. I have to admit that I haven't yet logged in and fully explored this site but I like the focus on thinking about what you've read rather than just listed everything you own. I can imagine using this to keep records of books I've borrowed from the library or wish lists of books I'd like to read. I'd like to see a library catalogue that allowed you to add books to your basket and then save them to a wish list which you could look at and amend whenever you logged in (or even upload to something like BooksWellRead or your Amazon wish list). And a free text comment section to remind yourself why you added it to the basket in the first place! Again the key is fun of reading other people reviews and the curiousity factor of seeing what else that person has read.

Both LibraryThing and BooksWellRead demonstrate what we already know about readers in libraries - everyone likes to know what other people have read and recently returned and love to have other people's opinions on a book even if they just want to disagree with it!

Booksfree.com
This is a site that interests me because of my involvement in interlibrary loans. Basically it is NetFlix for books. You create a list of books you would like to read - they suggest having at least 10-15 titles on your list at all times - and you get new books on your list when you return the ones you have. They have different subscription levels depending on how many books at a time you wish to have from $8.49 a month for 2 books to $34.99 a month for 12 books. The books are sent direct to the user in the post and a pre-paid return mailer is included to return the books. They have more than 79,800 titles in their paperbacks range and do not charge any late fees. They also have a CD/MP3 audiobooks service. There is even an option to keep the book you have rented if you really like it (only for post-1995 publications). I couldn't find any information on the site about how many people have signed up to this service but according to their press information they have been around since 2000 so they must be doing pretty well! I'm really interested in ways that public libraries can provide direct delivery of books to readers. There's a great article on Techessence looking at Library Delivery 2.0 which looks at how Netflix and Amazon are changing people's expectations. David Lee King's blog post The "Missing Piece" of the Library Netflix Model pointed out that Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library have been mailing all holds to patrons since the 1970s (for UK folk that's sending requests to borrowers in the post!) and their director describes it as one of the most important library services. Is this something that libraries in the UK could provide either as a free or premium rate service? At the moment we usually charge just to request a book on the shelf at a different branch so not sure how much we would have to charge for a postal service, especially for an item of indeterminate weight or size.

Would love to know if any public libraries in the UK are trialling something like this or coming up with innovative 2.0 changes to their websites...

Beyond Borders

Thoughts on a trip to Borders...

Their mission statement: 'To be the best-loved provider of books, music, films, and other entertainment and informational products and services.' (from their website www.bordersstores.co.uk)

Things I liked:
Arrangement of shelves and seating in fiction section
Colourful children's section including round sofa area for sharing stories

Things I disliked:
Too much of the store taken up with non-book items such as Paperchase outlet, calendars, CDs and board games
No map - the fiction section was obvious but it was difficult to find areas in the non fiction
Scifi and fantasy books lumped together and just labelled scifi (at least label them scifi and fantasy!)
Poor range of stock in non fiction eg just 2 books on Rome and half a shelf of very basic genealogy books
Staff did not seem particularly interested in what they were doing or aware of the customers

I've been to our new Borders store a couple of times now and been very disappointed twice. The bookselling scene in our city is dominated by Waterstones and although I always enjoy visiting Waterstones I was looking forward to some competition and some new book promotion ideas to steal! I don't believe libraries and bookshops should be the same, they each have their own role to play in the reading experience, but I do think that libraries can often learn from their commercial cousins especially when it comes to stock layout, promotion and service delivery. For a large store, the Borders I visited had a very limited range of non fiction stock, probably due to the amount of floor space devoted to selling cards, calendars and CDs etc. Planning a trip to Rome next month, I visted Waterstones earlier in the week and found a shelf full of books covering almost all of the main travel book series. At Borders I found 2 books, both aimed at the independent traveller. Genealogy rarely seems to be covered well beyond the basic level in mainstream bookshops but Borders had the poorest section I have seen outside of a supermarket book section!

My library lesson - many of the elements we are being encouraged to include in our libraries were things I disliked about Borders. I found it frustrating that there are several large music/film stores in the city but Borders still tries to compete with them at the expense of the one thing I had gone there for - books. We also have plenty of stores selling calendars, cards and similar products. The atmosphere did not make me want to stay and browse and the staff did not encourage me to approach them (mostly because they were complaining loudly about being open til 10pm!). I hope that libraries don't go the same way, people frustrated because they can't find the books they want or the staff interaction they need because we are too busy generating income with DVD rentals and deleting librarian posts to make short term savings for the council.

Can we go beyond Borders and create a fantastic library service instead?!

My 2.0 Experiments

Tonight's project was investigating del.icio.us and LibraryThing and both sites were truly fascinating.

Since getting my broadband up and running at home I have been pushing my little Mac Mini to the max checking out all those mysterious sites which were heard of but never seen (at least not at my workplace!). Blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, podcasts, vidcasts, photo sharing - "social software" "web 2.0" "library 2.0", it was time to play...

Here are my thoughts so far on what I've tried and tested...

Bloglines
This was my first real venture into the 2.0 world. As we are unable to download anything at all onto our work PCs I wanted an RSS reader that I could access from anywhere. Bloglines has certainly transformed my online experience although it has given me indigestion a few times when all the blogs I subscribe to get updated at once with really interesting posts! Now I check my RSS feeds at least once a day and can even sort them into folders like my email. I also have my blogroll from Bloglines showing on my blog here (over on the right there) and it updates here when I update it there.

Flickr
The more blogs I read the more I looked at links to Flickr. I don't take a lot of photos but I did enjoy uploading some of my favourites and I always enjoy looking at other people's photos. There is so much more to Flickr that I haven't even looked at yet like groups and forums.

Blogger My Blogging tool of choice! I tried a couple of others but this was the simplest to set up and just start blogging. I'm on the Blogger Beta version so there are some bugs and new things arriving but I'm certainly blogging and you're reading it here!!

MySpace The one that most people have probably heard of! Although I'm probably the target age group etc I have to say that almost no one I know uses this site! I mostly joined up because one of my favourite bands Cato Street Conspiracy moved there and I thought I'd investigate. So far I have found my younger sister and someone I went to university with 10 years ago - not exactly a social hub... On a more practical note this site is blocked at work as we have the same filters in place as the schools and MySpace is very firmly on the dodgy list in the UK. Think it may be sometime before we have a MySpace presence as excellent as Denver Public Library over here.

PBWiki Peanut Butter Wiki - as a peanut butter addict I had to use this as my first attempt at creating a wiki. Mostly I used it to plan with the idea of an interactive staff manual for my interlibrary loans department and it was simple and easy to use. Before I knew it I had a wiki that worked and would be really useful, no more carrying round notes or uploading PDF files to an antiquated staff intranet. I'm really interest in taking the staff wiki idea forward... watch this space!

del.icio.us Tonight I used del.icio.us for the first time but I doubt it will be the last. I'm always finding things at home and then wanting to look at the website at work (or vice versa) and I also use PCs on the enquiry desk at work and can't remember the website address of every bookmark on my desk PC. I do not have the memory of an elephant!! del.icio.us was so easy to use that I can't believe I didn't try sooner. Originally I was put off by mentions of Google toolbar and downloading toolbar buttons (not approved of at work!) but I have no Google toolbar and adding bookmarks to del.icio.us is as easy as adding them to my browser. Haven't looked at anything else on the site yet, just added some bookmarks and tagged them to see what happens but I'm looking forward to having a play.

LibraryThing Another site that I"ve heard a lot about but never looked at. Now I have a pile of books on my desk that I have "catalogued" and I'm very excited by this site. I don't imagine I'd use LibraryThing for some of its suggested uses - if I'm in a bookshop and can't remember whether or not I own a copy of a book then I don't own it and don't need to look at LibraryThing on my mobile to check my home catalogue! But imagine being able to check your local library catalogue via a mobile phone. LibraryThing is so much friendlier than most library OPACs I've seen and does everything new LMS suppliers offer and more. Working in interlibrary loans I've looked at most public library OPACs in the UK and a good number of the academic ones as well, none of them make me want to stay and look around once I've found the book I want. LibraryThing does.

I did plan to include a jargon free guide to these sites as well but this post is already too long so this is the end, for now...

Topeka & Shawnee - mailing requests to readers!

I'm really interested at the moment in direct delivery to readers - to their homes or offices.

Netflix for Library Books by Tame the Web referred my to the exciting service offered by Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library. They don't shout about it on their website but placing a hold on a book on their system means getting that book mailed to your house AS DEFAULT! If you don't want this you can request a phone call and pick up the item at the library. There is no premium rate for this service and the options for returning the book include - in person to the library, to the drive-by book drop box in their car park and to a number of book drop locations in the city (these are not libraries, the one I looked at was a petrol station!).

Much more details on how it all works and what it costs is available in David Lee King's post on The Missing Piece of the Library Netflix Model including some interesting comments and questions.

This is a fascinating example of direct delivery in a public library setting and is my favourite example so far. Now I'm on the lookout for more...

Posts I Have Saved part 1

My list of posts I have saved to read later or the magic posts that made me hit the 'Keep New' button...

Phil Bradley's post on 11 Things to Do in Tescos One of those posts that you just 'have' to forward to your friends on a Friday afternoon :o)

Phil Bradley's Surrealism Stalks the Library This should be required reading for senior management when they try to sell RFID as the ultimate way to "free up" library staff!

Random and cold medicine-induced thoughts on screencasting From Information Wants to Be Free - unfortunately I am one of those mentioned folk who hadn't heard of screencasting but having followed some of the links I'm really interested in seeing whether we could use this for staff training.

Phil Bradley's post on Internet Detective" Promise this is my last Phil Bradley link for today! Links through to the Internet Detective site which is not just a great example of teaching HE students how to use the web for research but also an interesting reminder of just how confusing the web can be to anyone trying to sort fact from fiction!

Library Delivery 2.0: Delivering Library Materials in the Age of NetFlix A TechEssence.Info post on library delivery in the web 2.0 era. Particularly interesting for me as I work in interlibrary loans and am looking for ideas about end user delivery. Always good to think about what the Amazons of the world have to teach us in libraries.

Meme attack! Sorted science fiction Velcro City Tourist Board is one of my favourite blogs at the moment, although some of the Sci-Fi is beyond me it did prompt me to read and thoroughly enjoy Ursula LeGuin's Dispossessed recently. Now this post makes me want to go and make strange towers from the books at work tomorrow!

Book Review: ‘The Dispossessed’ by Ursula le Guin And here's the book review by Velcro City Tourist Board.

Ok this is taking some time so part 2 may have to follow tomorrow (I keep getting distracted by clicking on links!) - to be continued...

Library Music Video

Came across this video on YouTube just now which has cheered me up after a long day at work. It's a brilliant library version of Madonna's "Ray of Light" by St Joseph County Public Library staff and now I'm sitting in my lounge grinning!
Watch it and you'll see what I mean...
Ray of Light St Joseph County Public Library version

On a more serious note, half the people who have commented on the video now want to work in that library - what an amazing way to recruit staff, CILIP take note!

Online Treasure Trove

Did you know you can access a huge amount of information online via your local public library website? Despite working in a library I rarely investigate our online resources and have recently been amazed by just what I can access. Our current list includes NewsUK, Britannica Online, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford Reference Online, Oxford English Dictionary, Grove Music Online, Grove Art Online and The Times Digital Archive. Might not seem like a long list but each resource has a multitude of other searchable resources linked to it. For example the Oxford Reference Online includes Bilingual Dictionaries, quotations, maps, and pretty much every subject dictionary that you can imagine OUP publishing. Some titles that have caught my eye include: A Dictionary of World Mythology, the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, A Dictionary of Contemporary World History, The Oxford Companion to the Body, A Dictionary of Writers and their Works. Now this is starting to sound like an OUP advert so bear in mind that this is just an example of what is linked to each resource. NewsUK includes a searchable archive for national and regional newspapers including The Times from 1992, The Guardian from 1992 and even the Wigan Observer from 2002!

This is an amazing resource and is available free to most people in the UK via their local library website. How many people know that it exists? How many people use it? I'm sure most people looking for information use Google and Wikipedia before they logon to their library website. But have you even heard about this resource in the news? In your local library? If we can't advertise the library service via a resource like this what hope is there for library marketing?

Sorry about the rant but when even the library staff don't realise what they have...

Public Library Blogs - 1st search

Not much luck so far! A Google search returned a few academic libraries and specialist libraries but no public library blogs in the UK. Plenty of US public libraries came up on Google and on a Bloglines blog search but nothing closer to home. A couple of articles referred to Gateshead Public Libraries but looking at their website it looks like the blog has gone - certainly no sign of an RSS feed or an ability to comment on news items listed.

I did find an online article by Ian Winship in Update's May 2004 edition which looks at using weblogs in libraries - Weblogs and RSS in information work but this again only refers to the Gateshead project.

Are there really no UK public library blogs out there???

Ann Arbor District Library

Before coming across any UK library blogs I thought I should mention the one US library that has been all over the Library 2.0 news. John Blyberg of Ann Arbor District Library recently won a the Talis competition Mashing Up The Library for his Go-Go-Google-Gadget. Ann Arbor's homepage consists of a library blog which simply and effectively gives library news, event information and other interesting library posts. The Shifted Librarian referred to this as the Perfect Library Blog Example last year and it will be interesting to see how it compares to any UK blogs I find.

Public Library Blogs

It seems that the US public libraries are way ahead of the UK when it comes to Web 2.0 activities. Whenever I see an exciting reference to a public library blog or wiki or a library using an RSS feed to publicise their books or events it is always based in the US! Is this just the location of the blogs and news sites that I use or a reflection of UK libraries' attitudes to new technologies? With this in mind I'm on a blog hunt - are there any libraries in the UK using 2.0 technology??? I'm off to find out...