Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Pimp Your Endcaps
Shocking as it may seem to us librarians, not everyone has the Dewey Decimal System memorized. So in order to help people who are wandering through the stacks trying to find stuff, I created these browsing guides and stuck them on our endcaps. It's great for people who just want to browse the cookbooks, the travel section or the home improvement books without coming back to the desk every 2 seconds to ask where things are. I think it makes the collection seem just a bit less overwhelming... at least, I hope it does. ¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 3:08 PM 0 comments links to this post
Shocking as it may seem to us librarians, not everyone has the Dewey Decimal System memorized. So in order to help people who are wandering through the stacks trying to find stuff, I created these browsing guides and stuck them on our endcaps. It's great for people who just want to browse the cookbooks, the travel section or the home improvement books without coming back to the desk every 2 seconds to ask where things are. I think it makes the collection seem just a bit less overwhelming... at least, I hope it does. ¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 3:08 PM 0 comments links to this post
Pimp Your Shelves
I stole this great idea from a bookstore in Manchester, VT. When people are browsing in the stacks, taping these little "If You Like" cards up really gets their attention, and it helps break up the monotony of the stacks while at the same time giving people some new reading ideas. All the comments from patrons and staff have been very positive! ¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 3:07 PM 0 comments links to this post
I stole this great idea from a bookstore in Manchester, VT. When people are browsing in the stacks, taping these little "If You Like" cards up really gets their attention, and it helps break up the monotony of the stacks while at the same time giving people some new reading ideas. All the comments from patrons and staff have been very positive! ¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 3:07 PM 0 comments links to this post
Monday, August 07, 2006
Pimp your staff workflows!
No matter how cool you think technology is, you’re toast if you can’t get your staff to buy into technology (unless you’re a one-person library). Nothing spells frustration more than a gung-ho library director with all sorts of neat ideas on how to use technology, who has a staff still insistent on chiseling spine labels on stone tablets.
So how can you get your staff more invested in technology? First, take the time to listen to them. Sit down with them and use your systems analysis skills to find out where the staff thinks bottlenecks in their workflows are – not necessarily where YOU think the bottlenecks are.
If you can use technology to solve some of the problems that your staff perceives, and make their lives easier, they will slowly learn that technological change is not always awful and scary.
One example of this: I learned that our automation software was making it difficult for our staff to print the information they needed. Sure, I could have tried to explain to the staff that they could use the PrintScreen key and then paste the screen into WordPad and print it from there, but that would only have increased their trauma. I needed to find an easier solution. So I went to Tucows and looked up “free screen printing software.” There, I found PrintDeskTop, a small program that makes it really easy to quickly print out whatever is on the screen. The staff was delighted! ¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 1:48 PM 0 comments links to this post
So how can you get your staff more invested in technology? First, take the time to listen to them. Sit down with them and use your systems analysis skills to find out where the staff thinks bottlenecks in their workflows are – not necessarily where YOU think the bottlenecks are.
If you can use technology to solve some of the problems that your staff perceives, and make their lives easier, they will slowly learn that technological change is not always awful and scary.
One example of this: I learned that our automation software was making it difficult for our staff to print the information they needed. Sure, I could have tried to explain to the staff that they could use the PrintScreen key and then paste the screen into WordPad and print it from there, but that would only have increased their trauma. I needed to find an easier solution. So I went to Tucows and looked up “free screen printing software.” There, I found PrintDeskTop, a small program that makes it really easy to quickly print out whatever is on the screen. The staff was delighted! ¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 1:48 PM 0 comments links to this post
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Amy's post about not letting fear rule the day (below) is well-taken. DOPA is well-meaning, I'm sure, but I don't think it is going to dissuade people who really mean to do harm. All it'll do is add another frustrating bureacratic layer to our already red-tape filled lives. Those libraries who can afford to operate without e-rate funds will probably choose to do so, while the libraries who are financially crunched and NEED e-rate funding to survive, will have to divert even more of their resources from helping patrons to filling out reams and reams of forms...
You know another thing that is hindering librarians? I hate to say it, but I think it's our own frustration, and our wanting to take the easy way out. Some of us figure that if we just ban all the sites people (aka teens) might actually want to USE, then we won't have to spend all our time acting as traffic cops at the computers, "which is, after all, NOT why I went to Library School." (Did you go to library school to tell people where the bathrooms are 12 times a day? Huh? 'Cause we do that too, but no one talks about banning public bathrooms in the library.)
What we fail to realize is that if no one is USING the library, then they are well within their rights to decide that they don't need us. Our current patron-unfriendly and paternalistic policies (and I'm not even talking about asking people not to look at porn in the library; I'm talking about libraries who say "you can't play games, you can't do IM, you can't use MySpace or Flickr") could end up helping to shepherd our future selves to the unemployment line when the library closes because we can't get funding. ¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 10:50 AM 0 comments links to this post
You know another thing that is hindering librarians? I hate to say it, but I think it's our own frustration, and our wanting to take the easy way out. Some of us figure that if we just ban all the sites people (aka teens) might actually want to USE, then we won't have to spend all our time acting as traffic cops at the computers, "which is, after all, NOT why I went to Library School." (Did you go to library school to tell people where the bathrooms are 12 times a day? Huh? 'Cause we do that too, but no one talks about banning public bathrooms in the library.)
What we fail to realize is that if no one is USING the library, then they are well within their rights to decide that they don't need us. Our current patron-unfriendly and paternalistic policies (and I'm not even talking about asking people not to look at porn in the library; I'm talking about libraries who say "you can't play games, you can't do IM, you can't use MySpace or Flickr") could end up helping to shepherd our future selves to the unemployment line when the library closes because we can't get funding. ¶ posted by Mary Martin @ 10:50 AM 0 comments links to this post
