Brisbane City Library - Built from Lego Blocks and steel

Oooh, pretty. According to one of the staff at the library (I took a tour), this is one of the top 5 buildings in Brisbane that people 'love to hate'. It reminds me of the Ernst & Young building in Melbourne, a giant mass of glass and steel that is on top of something else (in the case of the E&Y building in Melbourne, it's propped up above the old Herald-Sun offices by yellow poles; in the case of the Brisband Council City Library, it's propped up above some Lego blocks by grey poles and then propped up AGAIN above the grey box by some yellow poles).

The library inside is fascinating. It is over 3 public levels (as well as a basement level featuring a $2mil book sorting machine which is reminiscent of a mail sorting machine). They force all new members to go to an obscure corner of the top level to join, thus ensuring that they give themselves a tour on the way up. They also have all kinds of funky interior features such as glass meeting rooms which made me feel like I was having a meeting in a fish bowl (designed to prevent people shooting up/having sex in obscure meeting room corners) and neon lit shelf ends ("the non fiction section is in the hot pink area next to the go-go dancers").

Interestingly enough, although they have a heap of self-check machines and a giant book sorting/automated returns machine, they don't currently use RFID. Reasoning for this may have something to do with the cost (if you have 32 libraries I am guessing that tagging all of your items would not be cheap).

An interesting thing to note was that they receive all of their items totally shelf ready. Some items (ie some LOTE items) were sent from the supplier to an external cataloguing/processing agent and then to the libraries. I wonder if Brimbank could possibly do something similar, especially as we order some of our stuff direct from the country of origin (ie our Maltese DVDs come to us direct from Malta). That being said, Brisbane's LOTE collection was tiny compared to ours.

Holidays and the drive through library

My last post was sent whilst I was away on holidays. I cheated and wrote it beforehand and scheduled it to 'post' itself whilst I was away. The beauty of technology.

Whilst I was sunning myself in Queensland I had a chance to visit a few libraries. At one library I had a tour of their absolutely fantastic building (I am sure it is worth squillions of dollars). At another library I snuck in and looked around without anyone being any the wiser.

The 'snuck around' library was the Logan Hyperdome Library at the Logan Hyperdome shopping centre. The only reason I went there was it had a drive through. I'd never experienced a library with a drive through before and I was very excited. I have determined that the drive-through is only there because they have no parking and it is better to have people queue in a car to return/pick up items than park illegally.

Interesting concept though. According to their advertising, you can go into the library, select your books and set them aside to pick up later through the window. Nearly every library I've worked at has been of the opposite persuasion...take your books when you select them cause we don't have room to store them.

I'll write about Brisbane City Library (the squillion dollar one) next time.

Why use barcodes?

Brimbank Libraries are considering stopping the use of barcodes. Fairly soon we will be totally RFID and, when that happens, we don't see the need to have barcodes AND an RFID tag on the book. In fact, the only things we are looking to stick on our items are an RFID tag and a call number sticker. No more stamping and spotting and stickering for us! Our RFID tags will be printed with a pretty design and come with a barcode number printed onto the tag itself. We will then pop that tag on the outside of the item so that the book is 'branded' as one of ours.

There are some problems with this. Our vendor have given us dire warnings about sticking the tag on the outside of the book. They believe that the constant rubbing of the book against other books (and in bags, etc) will damage the tag beyond belief. We are testing this currently and, after heaps of tests, the only thing that seems to kill the tag is if the tag is bent in the wrong spot (which will occur whether it is stuck inside the book or outside the book) or if you scour the small chip in the middle of the tag with something sharp.

Honestly, our items are only meant to last between 5-8 years anyway so it's not going to cause untold grief if they die early.

I think that I must be missing something important though. I have not been able to find another library that has stopped using barcodes because they are using RFID tags. 3M (our RFID vendor) know of only one other library in the world who don't use barcodes, and they were a library that went direct from a card catalogue to RFID...they are also a special use library in a government department and don't have our turnover issues.

If anyone out there can think of any other negatives to doing this then I'd love to hear them. Currently, all I have are the fact that RFID tags could be damaged on the outside of the item (even though I will cover them with contact or some kind of plastic laminate) and that our RFID tags will have numbers printed in a range and we won't have duplicates (so multi-part sets in Chinese or Vietnamese will not have an RFID tag on each item). I am getting around this second bit by probably buying a Brother P-Touch printer to print up labels with the barcode number on them. We will then stick these to items such as mutli-part sets and onto part of an AV item.

Amlib goes to OCLC and our catalogue comes underway

Hello all, today is a good day. Yesterday Amlib (our library management system) announced that they had been acquired by OCLC. Lucky Amlib! I'm a bit suprised actually, Amlib is quite a small LMS compared to, well, OCLC's company size. I know that they are interested in AmlibNet, the online version of Amlib. They're possibly interested in it because you can change everything about the interface. That would mean they could use the one piece of software and port it over to many different language groups. A Chinese language version of Amlib could easily be created by an enterprising customer (or, as OCLC have just purchased it, probably by an enterprising staff member).

Some other good news is that I am going on holiday for 2 weeks on Monday. Yay to time off work!

Some updates from work. I am still creating our library catalogue. I have posted some screen shots below to show you what it will look like. The 'New Books' box on the right comes direct from an rss feed and scrolls whilst you're looking at it. Results are grouped and I'm still working on neatening some things up on that page. Enjoy!

The catalogue search page

The results page