I was sad to read a recent post on Walking Paper, quoting someone who was unhappy with their local library’s interlibrary loan record.
Any bad library experience is a blow, but especially so with interlibrary loan: I personally think the ability to freely lend library items across the country is one of our greatest strengths, and one definite thing that sets us apart from other local groups and for-profit organizations.
And honestly, I always get a bizarre little thrill when someone calls to request a book. I like knowing I can pull a book from the shelf, print a hold slip, and put that book on the hold shelf. Then, another staff member will continue to forward that book on to the patron, be it a local patron or someone in another state. Dorky, I know, but I like that sense of being part of a system.
But back to the comments: unfortunately, everything cited is (or can be) true. Requests can take time to fill. Books do go missing. Most ILSs don’t provide an easy way to communicate problems upstream. Sometimes, the best a local staff person can do is mark their local copy missing and hope the request is filled by another library.
But that shouldn’t be the best we can do. To capitalize on our unique network, and to compete with modern options like NetFlix, any new system (software and people) should be designed to optimize interlibrary loan, not just allow for it. Massachusetts is at least lucky that we have a (mostly-)state-wide catalog, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
I know I’m a couple months late to the party, but this past weekend I upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.5.1 (I upgraded the library’s blog, too, but more on that in a minute).
Upgrading SwissArmyLibrarian.net
The upgrade went fairly smoothly, and I think this website is operating normally. If you seen anything different or wrong, please let me know in the comments.
A few backend issues still need to be dealt with. For some reason, the comment admin screen is not displaying comments. If I search for them, they appear, but when I click the Show All Comments I get a “No results found” message. Odd. And, I’m having trouble with the ftp settings. Which should be fairly straight-forward, so I’ll keep trying.
Beyond these issues, I’m also still getting used to the new look and design of the admin interface. I’d heard it was very different (and not necessarily better), so I was prepared. Even with accounting for bias, I do think I like the old version better, but we’ll see.
The upgrade itself went smoothly. Wordpress makes is pretty easy, with their upgrade instructions. It really was as easy as the directions indicate, despite me making a few mistakes along the way (hurray for backups).
Upgrading ChelmsfordLibrary.org/blog
However, I must say that it was not as easy as upgrading my library’s blog. Our website is hosted at Bluehost.com, which offers many web services and programs pre-installed through Fantastico. I know Fantastico has some issue, but it sure does make upgrades like this easier. What took me a few hours to do on my own for swissarmylibrarian.net took perhaps ten minutes through Bluehost (and I didn’t see the problem with comments and ftp settings).
I don’t want make a sales pitch for them, but if a library is looking for a place to host their website, we’ve been very happy. It’s cheap (something like $7 a month), their tech support has been great, and so much software comes preinstalled that it’s easy to manage and try out new web tools without having to do all the installations yourself.
But if you are a library looking for web hosting, definitely check out LISHost.org. They specialize in hosting library websites, offer a lot of the extras, and will also help design a website.
This isn’t a reference question, but instead is a list of a few other places where reference questions (and answers) are being archived:
Help Build a Library Q&A Custom Search A post on the Library 2.0 Ning group mentioned a project to create a Google custom search engine of just reference questions from libraries. If your library does this, be sure to add it to the list - the more data it can search, the more useful it will be.
“The Oracle Collective” An article in this week’s New York Times Magazine talks about asking questions on the internet, and a few services that provide answers (Yahoo Answers, Ask.com, etc). It’s an interesting article, and the recommendations at the end are worth reading. Via LISNews.
I Get By With A Little Help From MeFi
No roundup of ask-a-question resources is complete with mentioning Ask MetaFilter. MetaFilter, a.k.a. MeFi, is a community blog to which interesting websites are posted (essentially “filtering” the internet for the rest of us). In Ask MeFi, volunteers from the community provide answers to questions asked by site visitors.
Internet Public Library Reference Desk
Staffed by librarians and library students, the Internet Public Library is always a reliable source for answers. Their list of frequently asked questions isn’t as fancy as some, but it still gets the job done. (And in the interest full disclosure, I volunteered with the IPL when I was in library school.)
Surely There Is A Wiki…
Very similar to Yahoo Answers and Ask MeFi in principle is WikiAnswers. As a wiki, anyone can ask or answer a questions, and also edit existing answers. The format of a single answer can be easier that reading lots of individual replies from different people, but here you can also view the discussion of the answer. Part of Answers.com.
I know lots of individual libraries are doing this too, and some are twittering their reference questions. If you know of other good sources to ask questions online and search through answers, please share.
This isn’t a new issue, but it’s happen three times this week, so I thought I’d mention it: people using the library for storage.
I don’t mean the library collection. I mean patrons using the friendly and easy-going atmosphere of the library as a safe place to either leave things, store things, or transfer things to someone else.
So far this week, I have been involved in the following situations:
A patron who routinely leaves her notebook and text books at the library. She knows we clean up each night and hold things like this at the lost-and-found at the desk, in case someone comes to claim them. She said she knows they are safe, and it’s easier than her lugging it all home each night
A patron who emailed me important files from his home computer, because he was sending it out for service and didn’t want to lose them (I won’t even try to explain that he could have emailed them to himself instead of me, not to mention backing up to disk)
A patron who uses the library as a drop-off point: for instance, if she needs to get some documents to someone else, and they can’t meet personally, she’ll leave them at the desk with that person’s name on them and tell the other person to pick them up at the library
It says a lot that people not only trust the library like this, but also think of us in these situations. That’s being an important part of the community.
But it’s also annoying, you know? The library cannot take responsibility for these items, so it worries me that people rely on good natures and good fortunes. I could understand if we had public lockers for these purposes, but we don’t (then there are the stories of library lockers being used for drug deals and who knows what all).
All of these exchanges involve staff time, which is another concern. A few times a month is no big deal, but if more people routinely use the library to store their personal property, or to pass along items to other people - or worse, as daycare until their child can be picked up by someone else - this kind of thing could easily get overwhelming.
Or am I wrong? Should libraries do whatever patrons ask of us, and make it part of our mission to offer this kind of service? I fully support the idea of library as community center, so perhaps. It just seems something like this needs to be decided deliberately, and not just be some patrons getting special treatment on the sly.
Librarians can spend so much time thinking about how to run a library that we forget that we’re also patrons, and get to use the library, too. At least, I did.
I mean, I read a lot of library books, and also watch a lot of our DVDs. Popular materials are a valuable core library offering, but my own personal entertainment doesn’t feel like it should count as library use.
So I was happy that I was able to use the library for a bit of research and practical knowledge (and just a little bit embarrassed that using the library wasn’t my own idea).
A friend of mine gave me an old wooden rocking chair a few years ago, which was in pretty rough shape. I’d always meant to fix it up, but doing it right would have entailed recaning the seat. I’d put it off and put it off, but a few weeks ago I finally got around to starting the project.
Since I had to buy some caning supplies, and hopefully learn how to do it, I went to a chair store that did this kind of work. While talking to the guy there, he suggested I use The Complete Guide to Chair Caning as a guide. He went on to suggest that, instead of buying it, I should try to get it from the library - and then he asked if I ever go to the library. That led to a nice little discussion about the benefit of libraries, but it also left me feeling a little sheepish that I hadn’t already checked to see if my library had something that would help me with this project.
The next day I searched our catalog, and ended up requesting the book from another library in our consortium. After consulting the book, and a few days of work, I was able to fix up the chair’s seat, good as new (check out my progress).
For whatever reason, getting this book from the library and finishing this project is such a more rewarding and positive library experience than DVDs or audio books. I don’t mean to detract at all from popular materials, and perhaps I’m kind of biased being a reference librarian, but hooray for non-fiction. I’d forgotten how good it feels to be a library patron.
(and as a completely unnecessary sidenote, some of my other “research” was caught on video. At this year’s Westford Strawberry Festival, a woman was doing seat caning demonstrations. I probably watched her and asked questions for a good half-hour, and was so engrossed that I never even noticed the video camera five feet away from me. I’m the headless one in the gray shirt, about 0:54 seconds into it:
I was sad to read a recent post on Walking Paper, quoting someone who was unhappy with their local library’s interlibrary loan record.
