Sunday 26 February 2012

firefox, Cardiff City and Google Plus - Feb 20th-24th 2012

With one eye on the Carling cup final (come on Cardiff), another eye on my tea (roast pork) and a third eye on my blog, I’m pleased to report that I’ve survived another week, a busy varied week as well.

It’s proof reading New Books time again which involves not just typo errors and inconsistencies but also the formatting itself so that readers can navigate their Daisy CD version. There still seems to be an absence of series information in the children and young adult section which has taken a bit of time sorting out but in the whole it’s running pretty smoothly. Deadline is next Thursday and there are just corrections and a second proof read to do.

On Wednesday I went to the CSG Curriculum Meeting to continue the discussions between the merger between ourselves and the Diversity Group. The 3 main decisions to make was the new name and the structure and size of the new Committee, things seem to be moving on and everyone seems happy with the progress made. The most contentious part was the new name and took the longest to decide - Libraries transforming lives: community, diversity, equality. To me, it symbolises a new future with new ideals for the 2 groups, will mean something for people when they decide on which group to join and had a good eye-catching strapline. We ended up with a maximum of 12 people on the committee, for reasons of not only being a workable committee (not too big where decisions become hard to make) but also financial as if we were too big we going to be spending all our finances on travelling expenses! There’s going to be 6 from each with the Diversity Group wanting to rotate their members as they have a large committee base and also they want to keep people involved, which is a good point. I think the idea would be that although there will be the main 12 members, there will be opportunities for additional people to do work behind the scenes which I think is important as it would be a shame to lose enthusiastic people. We also picked the 4 most vital posts –Chair, Vice chair, Treasurer and Secretary –with 2 each from the groups being picked. I took the minutes for the CSG for the joint meeting, (Cardiff’s just scored! 1-0) so that will be my next job – trying to decipher my notes.

Thursday dinner time was spent learning about RNIB and Facebook and Google Plus. I was familiar with Facebook though surprised about how many followers RNIB had. Looking at the stats for the different age groups and that Facebook is engaging the younger audience more, I think the National Library Services need to capitalise on this. It will be a way in engaging the younger readers as there is a general feeling when speaking to them on the telephone that we cater more for the older talking book readers. Google Plus is a relatively new thing but RNIB have got in the act right at the beginning unlike Facebook where there were queries regarding accessibility. There are surprisingly 500 followers for Google Plus (Cardiff’s just equalised 2-2!!) though for something this new, it’s not that surprising that the majority of the followers are students, IT buffs and managerial types. There’s a lack of apps and adverts at the moment but no doubt with the influence of Google, Google Plus may end up overtaking Facebook for popularity.

Trying to work out how to do emails on my new lap top as I don’t have any standard email software. I’ve downloaded Firefox for free which looks good for sending email but haven’t yet worked out how to access my emails with this software.

Sunday 19 February 2012

Getting Rid of Matthew and Mobile Libraries - Feb 13th-17th 2012

It’s been an easier week this week – probably because I was in for 3 days only. Monday and Tuesday were both intense but Wednesday was quieter and I managed to break up with a clear conscience. I spent Tuesday evening catching up with the recent Booksellers and the latest CILIP Update. It all made depressing reading with all the news of public library closures, libraries having to be run by volunteers to survive and general cutbacks to public spending on libraries. My own county Lincolnshire is monitoring mobile library use, an essential you would have thought with Lincolnshire being a large rural county with poor public transport to the towns. I sometimes wonder if there was any call for a mobile library to run in the evenings as there are a lot of people commuting to work like myself and finding that the libraries close too early. The mobile library could run reading groups and work with colleges running evening classes and adult literacy programmes.

There was also an interesting article by John Pateman in the Bookseller who makes the point that no other professions such as architects and accountants would accept volunteers to do their job for them. There was also a useful article in the Update which caught my attention about #UK LibChat – a live fortnightly discussion held on Twitter for library and information professionals to discuss cutting edge issues and to network on "http://uklibchat.wordpress.com". I had come across this before when I was doing the 23 steps and had put to follow an online chat or similar as one of my aims this year. This article was a good reminder for me. The biggest problem would be the start time of 6.30 as I’m rarely home by that time.

I also got caught up with new titles coming out in the next couple of months and what was doing well in the various charts knowing that half of these titles will be snapped up by the commercial publishers, some will end up with bad reviews while others will be difficult to transcribe into alternative format. I’m still trying to visualise how the Bradshaw’s Railway Guide will translate into Daisy or Braille if it was selected as I know that it would actually be very popular with the readers. A trip to Waterstones is on order here. I need to have a look at a print copy and see what it looks like.

It was also that time of the month – the circulation of the month’s customer requests – and a real mixture we had too! I don’t know if it was just the time of the year but there was a lot of true crime, misery memoirs and gritty crime of the “Martina Cole” variety – Kimberley Chambers and Jessie Keane are the 2 authors in demand this month. In amongst all of this “Darkness”, we had Hugh Walpole, Alan Partridge’s autobiography, several requests bizarrely asking for Jane Fallon’s Getting Rid of Matthew and even more weirder 2 customers asking for Jim Corbett who writes a lot about hunting tigers etc in India in the time of the Raj!

I attended an HTML Refreshers Course on Wednesday, ran by the RNIB. It was supposed to be 3 hours but lasted just 1 and ½ hours. It was a good reminder as I had forgotten the most basic codes. We had a go at coding pages and spotting errors and then covered a few extras such as how to incorporate images into pages. Most of the class used html on a regular basis so we went at quite a pace. My knowledge is well over 10 years old but I felt I kept up with them. It’s always good to try and refresh old skills as well as learning new ones.

In between trying to clear the garden for Spring, I’ve been getting to grips with Constant Contact, a bit worried though that I may accidently send out a test email to CSG members. The manual so far makes sense though I would be happier once I’ve had a go with it. The notes regarding links definitely need a good practice before being let loose on a newsletter.

Monday 13 February 2012

Not much to report - Feb 6th-10th 2012

Not much to report from last week. It was just one call after another, made worse by the fact that we were short of staff. On the one hand, it’s good that our number is advertised quite widely, in particular, when we send out info out to new members. I had quite a few calls from new members asking for advice on how to choose books and ideas for authors which is good as we are putting new readers on the right path at the beginning. The downside is that we are spending an increasing amount of time doing basic customer service work such as just ordering and returning lost books. If there were more of us, it would also be beneficial if we worked harder to retain readers – those that don’t use the service much and are in danger of their local social services withdrawing their service or working with those passive readers who you never talk to and rely on the computer to pick their books and just accept what they receive.

I feel I’ve made a big step forward with revalidation. I’ve sorted out my CV and mentee form and emailed this across to my first victim. I’ve not heard anything as yet but it’s still early days. My next task is to work through some Constant Contact notes to see if they make sense.

Sunday 5 February 2012

Snuff and mentors - Jan 30th - Feb 3rd 2012

Despite being a busy week, I feel strangely refreshed and not needing to have such long lie-ins over the weekend. Then I suddenly remembered, I was on annual leave on Monday! Appointment at my son’s school beckoned instead.

The main concern this week for the readers has been the change of the wallets we send the CDs in. They are now sent out without the plastic in the middle which has seems to have confused everyone, particularly the readers that have been using the service for a long time. One reader joked that he blamed his wife for damaging the wallets with her long nails and that he had always been nagging at her to keep her nails shorter. The main concern is the worry that the CD may fall out of the wallet or will get damaged more easily. On the whole they are realistic and understand that the change of packaging is a cost cutting exercise but they usually end the conversation “But I still don’t like them”.

We had our stock familiarization meeting this week where we have to read a book in a chosen genre, category or popular author which is in our library and talk about it with our reader in mind. As we recommend titles on a daily basis we need to be familiar with a wide variety of genres and authors, not just our own reading preferences. So far, we’ve covered political fiction, travel, family stories, war, prize science fiction, popular thriller authors and popular female authors amongst other things. This week it was the Galaxy Awards and the general consensus was how did half of these books get on the shortlist! My book was Terry Pratchett’s Snuff, an author that I haven’t read before. It started off well and the one-off lines made me smile and I didn’t even mind the fantasy element with all those goblins. I liked Vine, his wife Sybil, his young son and his butcher Willikins. I think the book lost the plot at the end when Vine and Co were after the villains. The book started to ramble, the humour became a bit Carry On/Tom Sharpe and it lost its way. I found this also happened with the Robert Rankin book I had to read when we looked at the fantasy genre.

On the revalidation front, I’m making it my aim to sort out a mentor. I’ve found a victim to email and am busy updating my CV and filling out my mentee form. Hopefully should get this sorted this week. I managed to do some proof reading for the CSG Website and sent out a circular email to the rest of the committee for input for the monthly email bulletin.