Library News July 2008

On a work front the maintenance boys have been back in the library this time to replace all our mosquito screens on the windows. This is something I am very pleased about as I sit here at 6.45pm at night not having to slap myself and flick the bugs off my desk. I have been managing to get some action around here as you can see. I will have to stop spending the non-existent budget soon though although I have had fun ordering book display stands and other necessary library items that I don’t know how they have done without. Adam and I also created several panels for the walls which are plywood covered in samoan fabric. They are going to brighten the place up if and when we manage to find a way to hang them up on the very stubborn concrete walls. We have tried drilling and hammering but nothing will work. Hopefully the maintenance boys will solve this problem tomorrow and find something to hang the panels up with. Maybe this is why the walls have been blank for so many years ………. Note to self, curb weird and wonderful ideas in the future!

We have just started the Second Semester at work. Today has been relatively quiet. The students must be easing themselves into study again. Last Friday we had a staff meeting to talk about what we needed to remember to do when serving people. We also did some training on the library system Athena. Having read the manual (as you do – or as I do) I discovered things that could be done that were not being used. We therefore started with Circulation and went through each part of it to make sure everyone knew what was there. There is a nifty feature that allows us to search for any part of a patron record so you can search for a first name if need be. Quite surprising that the past system I looked after couldn’t do this even though it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars!! I have discovered that no one is using the reserves functionality so am looking to put this into place especially considering we have only 1 copy of most books. It’s contacting the students when the book is in that will be the difficult thing as we can’t phone mobile numbers from our phone lines and they don’t generally have a land line or a postal address. Email it will have to be and I think we might have to introduce the writing of names on a whiteboard like I’ve seen done in Whanganui. Next step – buy a whiteboard!!! There is also a booking feature but I’m saving that one up for later. It might be useful for putting bookings on DVD titles for lecturers. I discovered a barcode scanner in a drawer and plugged it in. Much to my surprise it worked – just like that – so hopefully that will cut down on the number of mistyped barcodes at the desk. We are going to have to enroll our patrons properly and put in more info about them than just their ID and name (which does not help with contacting them!) One of the other things that was news to the library staff was that you could put a message on a patrons name that could pop up at circulation. This is certainly going to help keep track of things if we put it into practice.

We are now closing at 7.00pm at nights. I wowed the campus manager with my spreadsheets and graphs of library usage in the evenings and convinced him that shutting an hour earlier was a good idea. As there are still just 2 of us covering the evenings and weekends this is a good thing. Hopefully this will mean that during study and exam time we only have to open til 8.00pm instead of 9.00pm which I personally found hard going. Soon we will have the place up to a standard I’m happy with (lol) and then we can begin to tackle new projects…….

Oh one thing I have to deal with here that I didn’t have to at home is sudden power outages!! Yes the power can go off without warning fairly regularly which then plunges us into darkness. The computers crash and the fans stop working so it fast gets hot. I have got a UPS plugged into the Library Server machine so at least that doesn’t have a hissy fit and we have time to shut it down normally. I also discovered another UPS in the cupboard (covered in dust and cobwebs I might add!) which I have plugged into my machine as it’s mighty annoying to lose what you are working on when the computer crashes. I’m the boss so no one else gets to be this lucky and have their own UPS!! I should put it out on the library counter really right? I’m just testing it to see if it’s working ;-)