The Library Science collection

A bit off topic for this week I guess (seeing as it's not to do with my website project) but I am currently weeding our library-science collection and, well, I am starting to wonder what other libraries have in their collections.

A list of some of the less relevant things I have:

• Library Service in Victoria produced by the Library Council of Victoria in April 1970 (and purchased later that year). Rivetting stuff. Highly relevant to a library in 2008.

• Stress Control by Steve Bell. We actually have a large number of books on controlling stress, it doesn't really invite confidence in me having a good working environ here does it?

• The Publishing and Review of Reference Sources which was published in 1987. Again, highly relevant, especially with the chapter on modern publishing methods such as the optical disk and those expensive online databases such as DIALOG.

In all honesty, the vast bulk of the collection has not been touched since the books were intially purchased. All of our library science periodicals are accessible online through our virtual resources. Currently these periodicals sit here and our staff can reserve them to read. Noone does. Instead we are going to make a push for staff to be notified by our databases when new issues of each LS periodical comes out and they can read them online (Dear Bob, The latest copy of inCite is available to read, isn't that fun? Lots of love, EBSCO).

I'd love to know what other libraries have in their collection though. So far I have kept a single book on building a library (it goes through how much space you should assign for each collection and I really haven't seen much else on the topic before) and reports that staff refer to frequently such as our annual report and a couple of years' worth of the survey of Victorian public libraries. Most everything else is available online, it's not like we need much of the book trends stuff in hardcopy anymore.

Photographs in the library

We've decided to hire a professional photographer to give us some good quality images of our community using our libraries (instead of buying stock images). I imagined it would be a doddle; hire a photographer, line a bunch of people to come in, allow 10 minutes per person, tada, photos. Mostly it was easy, I'd just kind of forgotten about the people element of things.

1. Finding a photographer. We sent out three requests, two came back. Of the two one was better than the other. (easy).

2. Line a bunch of people to come in. I contacted a key representative at each of the branches doing this. They 'enthused' the staff to contact people they thought would be good in their photos from a wide range of backgrounds, nationalities and age groups. This didn't work too bad. (moderately easy).

3. Allow 10 minutes per person. Ha! You look at all those glamour shots in the glossy magazines and think "well, they probably took 50 photos in quick succession, picked the best one and then photoshopped the crap out of it". I can tell you not at all.

a) Lighting - it changes. It's dark. It's light. It needs a flash. A lesser flash. No too little. A bigger flash. Flashity flash flash flash. It's actually quite impressive, the camera's flash is connected wirelessly to every other flash in the building (two ones with umbrellas and a hand-held extra flash) and so when you click 'take photo'...FLASH!

b) Backgrounds - blurry, not blurry, wide lens, angled badly, move the furniture, lift the couch, stand on phone books, sit on phone books, how about we use the encyclopaedias to bolster up the wheely chair. But, having looked at the proofs, it's amazing what you can do with two phone books and a bit of focus.

c) People - they don't do what they're told (I'm one of them by the way, it turns out that move right means move right, not turn to the left).

d) Parents - 'why isn't my child featured more?' 'she smiles all the time, I don't know why she's crying now' 'she's so cute when she's throwing the $10,000 camera around isn't she?'.

4. Photos. These came out brilliantly. Some photos looked a bit boring to me (yup, it's a building, woo) but others came out amazingly good. There is one of a guy sitting on a couch reading a book. When the photo was being taken I though 'ho hum, very ordinary' but, when I saw the low quality proof I was sent, it's amazing. Also, the one of a guy with dreadlocks dropping books onto the head of an Italian man was very funny.

When our new website is launched I'm going to feature these photos all over the place. I'll post here to let everyone know. It's been an experience, I can tell you that.

Oh, and for anyone deciding to do this in the future. If your library has a steady stream of visitors coming in, I'd suggest not trying to do a time sheet beforehand unless you desperately want certain faces in the photos. Because of the time taken with each person (and the fact that people coming into the library are interesting and are very photogenic doing what they normally do), you can cause much angst to people who are on the time sheet and are either unphotogenic, unhelpful or impatient.

Facebook and my ILS

Now maybe I'm just having a bit of a whinge (okay, I'm having a lot of a whinge), but a certain ILS that I have used was very keen on becoming a next-generation-style ILS. They were open to any ideas from us (the ILS-using customers) about how they could integrate the ILS into other areas of our library, aka Web 2.0. Why is it then that they won't allow me to integrate into Facebook?

I suppose my biggest gripe is probably with Facebook actually. I designed a small applet that would plug into Facebook and search our catalogue. Easy. It uses a custom-made form that sends the request on to our online catalogue. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't really like me using my form and adds a bunch of gobble-de-gook into the form to kill it. This extra data is very important (from Facebook's perspective) in that it allows me to keep track of who is using my applet and, maybe, store their data so that I can market to them. Of course this extra data is in no way compatable with my ILS' catalogue.

I sent off an email explaining my plight "Dear ILS, Please let this work. People won't click on a link that says 'search the library' but they might fiddle with a box that allows you to search the library. Hugs and kisses, C". Unfortunately they said "nup, can't be done, besides, people who want to search the library will click a button, just make it a link". I think the help people missed the point, I want LESS steps, not more. If I wanted more steps I'd put in a wizard.

Step one: Click "Search the library"
Step two: Choose what kind of item you want and click "Continue"
Step three: Select which library you want your item to be located at and click "Continue"
Step four: Choose the language you want your item in and click "Continue"
Step five: Choose what colour you would like your covers to be and click "Continue"
Step six: Type in what you would like your item to be about and click "Search" or choose from our predefined searches in the "Predefined Search Wizard" which has an easy 65 steps.

Maybe I'm too picky...and a minimalist. Less is more (more or less).

The hyperlinked library

I had the pleasure of attending two excellent professional development thingymabobs last week (aka I sat and listened to people speak but calling it training would imply I had a formal-ish teacher).

The first one was called The Hyperlinked Library and was held by Michael Stephens of TameTheWeb. What a fascinating day. Not only did everything he said ring home, I also got to shmooze with other library staff who are interested in the Brimbank Libraries website which is being developed in Joomla. I got plenty of business cards and, unfortunately, have managed to lose the one I got from Michael Stephens. Ah well, he's easy enough to find an email address for.

It turns out that other libraries have tried using Joomla for their website. One lovely lady from *unnamed country library* did not like it at all. She'd used an older version of Joomla and remembered only problems in creating a community portal. After 3 months of glaring at Joomla, I'm apt to believe her. But I will make this work if it kills me (or, more likely, if it kills my job-share partner Andrew).

In Brimbank-Joomla news, we finally have a visa card which we can use to order things online. I don't think council appreciated us asking for a cheque for US$2 for our hosting for one month. Ah well. Visa it is! Huzzah! Because of our Visa, we now have a lovely new location for our Joomla site (previously we were using the boss' webspace).

For those interested in having a squizz : http://www.brimbanklibraries.com . Isn't it wonderful? Tricked ya! Maybe by the time someone reads this post I will actually have the website there, but currently it's a splash screen. We have a sandbox with the actual trial website on it.

The second personal development thingy was a leadership forum where library 'leaders' spoke about what they had done and then we split up into little focus group-esque things to talk about the issues that leaders face. It sounded very much like something I could have slept through but actually turned out to be very exciting. Hurray for training.