Sutherland Shire Libraries Staff News

One advantage I have discovered of using the newly launched (and accessible to public) Trove over our Libraries Australia login -

A borrower wanted to read a copy of the 19th Century biography "The story of John G. Paton told for young folks".
LA produced a list of 24 bib records of varying editions and imprints. So one has to click through each one to see the holdings.

In Trove, however, despite finding 778 results, these were easily limited to 19 bib. records -

As you can see, the beauty of this results list is that all the NSW holdings of those 19 records can be viewed at once by clicking on the NSW tab.
I know of no similar feature in Libraries Australia.

Furthermore, the initial results list in Trove provided a direct link to a free ebook version of this book (look for the green tick).

In the end, the borrower, rather than paying $15.70 to ILL from a Uni, found a copy for sale in the Koorong bookshop for $15
(If only Trove could link into that bookshop catalogue too!)

I would recommend all staff keep Trove in mind and promote it to our customers, particularly for Australian subject enquiries,
Search for Ned Kelly or Tasmanian Devil and you will get an idea of its usefulness in retrieving all kinds of formats, many of them immediately accessible online.

Brian

Sydney Libraries received a nice write up in the Sydney Morning Herald's (Sydney) Magazine. It talks about Libraries being a great place to be. It's a bit of fluff really, but good press all the same.  As far as I can see it's not on the SMH web site but you can read it on ANZRC.  If you want to see the pictures you've probably still got the November issue of The (Sydney) Magazine hanging around.

Following on from Jacinta's article a couple of months back about Google News Archive, I thought this was an interesting article from The Age on the NLA's digitisation of old newspapers (Click here).

The Australian Newspaper Digitisation Project (ANDP) was begun to digitise old newspapers so they'd be keyword searchable. The problem was that OCR software to interpret the microfilmed newspapers wasn't 100% reliable and many errors occurred in the 'translation'. That is when the National Library hit on the idea of allowing the public to tidy up the text. Genealogists, amateur historians and online library users (about 3000 of them) are turning on their computers for up to 50 hours a week and making corrections to the texts, as well as subject tagging and even annotating them.

If you'd like to have a look at how the digitisation has progressed check out their website here.

Barbara

Remember Matt Harding? He's now working for Camden Library and Matt was involved in filming their customers talking about why they came to the library and what they enjoyed about their experience. It was done during Library Week and they have posted the videos on YouTube.

You can see them on Camden Library's YouTube Channel.

This article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald web site on May 31, during Library and Information Week.

Book now: libraries are top shelf in family attractions

Good publicity nationwide for libraries.

The day started with a sighting of the library van swinging out of the carpark with Ken at the wheel and Scott assuming the navigator position. They were back in record time perhaps just for the food??

Meanwhile back at the library, the kitchen was abuzz with preparations for the morning tea. And oh what a gourmet selection. After initial attempts to stick to fruit, cheese and nuts, all willpower was abandoned when faced with Gwen's brownie slice.

Ken was in good humour and obviously looking forward to his new life away from work. He was presented with a wallet and 2 gift cards. Dianne had also thoughtfully put together a Home Library goodie bag as a reminded of what he will be missing out on.

Ken has been a familiar face in the library since 1984 and despite the odd grumble or 3, has delivered your Storytime packs and crates - usually with all the bits that were meant to be in them - intact.

We would like to wish Ken all the best for the future. More time for dancing - yay.

During Youth Week we held a Manga Character Design Workshop. During the 2 1/2 hour workshop teens learnt how to design their own Manga character. By the end of the afternoon 29 characters were created and one was chosen as the best. The lucky winner was awarded with special Manga design paper kindly donated by Althea and Fiona the workshop trainers.

Following hot on the heels of the Manga Workshop many kids joined us in the School Holidays for our Movie Madness activities. The staff dressed to the nines ready to walk the red carpet and many of the kids dressed as their favourite movie characters. They enjoyed playing the memory game, celebrity heads and making their own Hollywood Star.

Here's an update about the agreement reached between Google and authors and publishers about the future use of books digitised for the Google Book Search program. It's food for thought...

Increasing access to books: the Google Book Search settlement
agreement by Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director for Google Book Search

If you were at ALA Midwinter this year, you may have attended the panel where Paul Courant, Karen Coyle, and I discussed the settlement agreement that Google announced with a broad class of authors and publishers this past fall. The agreement, which settles two lawsuits brought against the Google Books Library Project, proposes to dramatically increase access to millions of books in the U.S., while at the same time expanding the opportunities for authors and publishers to earn money from their works. The agreement also provides a wealth of new opportunities for libraries, academics, and researchers, a few of which we'd like to share with you:

Expanded access to millions of in-copyright books: Librarians have been providing access to books for thousands of years, and over time they have increased the size of their collections and broadened their reach into the community. The agreement dramatically expands the reach of Book Search Library Partners by enabling readers across the U.S. to preview millions of in-copyright out-of-print books preserved in their collections. Readers will be able to search these books through Google Book Search and where previously they have only been able to view bibliographic information and a few snippets of text from the book, they will be able to view a limited preview (up to 20%) of the book to find out if it suits their needs. From there, they can click through to a list of libraries which hold that book, to online bookstores (which carry used books) or to purchase instant online access to the rest of the book so that they may read the book in its entirety. Free online viewing of books at U.S. public and university libraries: In most communities, your local library is one of your primary access points to information. Through this agreement, public libraries, community colleges, and universities across the U.S. will be able to provide free full-text reading to books housed in great libraries of the world like Stanford, California, Wisconsin-Madison and Michigan. A newly-created Public Access Service license will allow full-text viewing of millions of out-of-print books to readers who visit library facilities. Public libraries will be eligible to receive one free public Access Service license for a computer located on-site at each of their library buildings in the United States. Non-profit, higher education institutions will be eligible to receive free Public Access Service licenses for on-site computers, the exact number of which will depend on the number of students enrolled. Institutional subscriptions to millions of additional books: Imagine never having to ask a patron to wait until a book is returned or arrives through interlibrary loan. Beyond the free license described above, libraries will also be able to purchase an institutional subscription to millions of books covered by the settlement agreement. Once purchased, this subscription will allow a library to offer patrons access to the incredible collections of Google's library partner when they are in the library itself as well as when they access it remotely.

Services for People with Print Disabilities: One of the advantages digitization presents is the opportunity to enable greater accessibility to books. Through the agreement, the visually impaired and print disability community will be able to access millions of in-copyright books through screen enlargement, reader, and Braille display technologies. New Research Opportunities with the Creation a Research
Corpus: The vast database of books that Google is digitizing is not just a resource for readers, but also a one-of-a-kind research tool. The agreement allows for the creation of two research centers that will include a copy of almost all of the books digitized by Google. These research centers will enable people to conduct research that utilizes computers to process or analyze the text of the books. Examples of the types of research they will facilitate include automatic translation, analysis of how language has evolved over time, next generation search technology, image processing research and others.

This agreement would not have been possible without the work of
librarians who have preserved and maintained books for years, and Google Book Search's library partners, who worked with Google to make so many of them discoverable online.

I've been thinking about Twitter for a little while now. I really think I should sign up and have a play with it. I feel like it could be a low cost way for the Library to communicate with our users, especially since users on twitter can elect to receive updates to their mobile phone. the popularity of our SMS hold notifications suggests that this may be the communication channel of choice for many of our customers.

Then I came across this article about the use of Twitter in Local Government in Australia, Using Twitter as a benchmark for Australian local government use of social media.

I think we could set it up so that our Library News blog feed could be automatically sent to Twitter. This really would be low (no) cost and might be the best way to stick a toe in the water.

Are any staff already on Twitter? I'd like to pick your brains if you are.

In thinking about what I'd like in any new library system my mind turned to some of the social features that I think would improve the user experience of library catalogues - borrower history, tagging, commenting, etc. But to do these things you need to start collecting data about who borrows what, which inevitably leads to discussions about user privacy and the security of that data (leaving aside for a moment the issue of storage space).

This reminded me of an excellent blog post I recently read on Library Garden, What Libraries Can Learn from Facebook. The discussion in the comments on this post is lively with people on both sides of the fence putting forward their viewpoint.

Here's a bit:

We all know that people (myself, and probably you included) will share personal information in exchange for a quality experience. We share personal renting and buying habits in exchange for Netflix and Amazon recommendations. We share personal reading habits on GoodReads and LibraryThing to connect with others who share our interests and tastes...

and then:

We know all this, and we personally experience the benefits, but librarians still seem generally loathe to let our customers share their personal information in exchange for anything. We don't just protect customer privacy, we paternalistically protect it from the customers themselves, rendering them childlike. Our privacy philosophy often reduces down to, "We know better", or
"You can't be trusted with that--you'll hurt yourself."

I'm definitately on the side of letting users choose to opt in to share their data in order to improve their experience of the Library. I've just heard people ask me on the enquiry desk whether we keep a record of what they have borrowed too many times for me to think the bulk of users would be worried about sharing this type of data.

The Australian Newspapers (beta), and Papers Past (New Zealand) are now available via Google News Archive:

The Google archive is a sub part of the main Google news page (direct link to archive search from Google news page).

Google intends to deliver newspapers via the Google News Archive only (not the main Google) at present. The Google News Archive consists of three resource types:

1. Newspapers digitised by Google and available via Google newspaper viewer (launched Sept 2008)
2. Digitised/online newspapers from other organisations that are free or cost and results go direct to those sources eg New York Times, Australian Newspapers beta, Papers Past (NZ), Sydney Morning Herald.
3. News from web sources.

The digitised Australian and New Zealand newspapers are the first non American newspaper content in Google News Archive, so this is a landmark event for users.

The easiest way to find the old historical digitised newspapers is to go into 'advance search' and check the 'no price' box, then add your search terms. There is a date filter on the left that lets you find older things since the search seems to default to latest news first even in the archive search. For example search for Sydney Gazette. There is also a timeline option.

If you are interested in viewing the digitised papers from Google in the Google newspaper viewer here are the instructions: (we do not know the extent or titles of the Google newspaper digitisation program).

1. Go to Home Page of Google News Archive
2. Select Advanced search
3. Man on the moon - all words, Check No price
4. In the Results list look for the title of a newspaper followed by - 'Google News Archive' in grey to find those Google have digitised that are available in their viewer. Click the link. The page should open in the viewer.
5. Once an article is found you can cite it by clicking 'link to this article' top right to get a persistent URL. e.g. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=8KAFAAAAIBAJ&dq=man%20on%20the%20moon&sjid=9TIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6926%2C4212087

OR

In advanced search put in the source name eg Rome News Tribune or St. Petersburg Times and check no price. Put no keywords in search box.

Jacinta

I've been getting a lot of requests for the seniors newspaper when we've run out of copies. I had a look online and found a link to the digital edtion at:
http://www.thesenior.com.au/publications.asp

Access to this is free but requires the entry of a valid email address. I'm sure many of you already knew about this but it is news to me. I thought it could be a good alternative for those Seniors able to access and use the Internet.

Karen

I have recently made a significant change to the home page of the Library web site. I've added a widget that lets our users search the catalogue, Journal Search (online databases) and Picture Sutherland Shire (historical photos) directly from the home page of the site. It replaces the yellow/green buttons.

We've had the fortune of having the page template updated by Ross Ozolins, a web designer working part time for Council in Communications. This update eliminated all the wasted white space on the left column of the home page and allowed me the width to include a promo column on the left hand side of the home page while still leaving room for the search widget. Updating templates is not something that Council has been able to do until now.

I've currently got YourTutor, Overdrive and Novelist showing on the home page but I envisage this is an area that I can regularly change depending upon what is happening in the Library. I'll inlcude things like Living Library, author talks, new databases, new services, etc. when they're happening.

Of course, if you have something that you would like to promote on the home page let me know. I'll obviously have to prioritise things if there are too many so I can't promise to include everything you ask for but I'm sure most things can be worked out.

So, go on and check it out. have a play with the search widget and let me know if you discover any problems. http://library.sutherland.nsw.gov.au/

These are the words of Agnes Nieuwenhuizen in a provocative article about children's literacy and the CBCA in the Weekend Australian.

Yes, you read it right: the beloved Children's Book Council of Australia, is, according to the author, an archaic institution run by "a powerful old guard that fiercely protects territory and states' rights".

The column is sure to draw some passionate responses in next week's letters pages.

In the meantime, listen a podcast interview with Nieuwenhuizen broadcast this week on Radio National's The Book Show, where she further expands her argument with reference to literacy campaigns overseas. Australia's Books Alive campaign, for example, is described as "wishy washy", and she questions the simplistic focus on quantity in the Premier's Reading Challenge.

Get cracking - the podcasts only hang around for a week or so! What are your thoughts?

Here's a note from Informit Support...

The Informit service will be unavailable on Saturday 20th Of December 2008 from 7am to 7pm (AEST) whilst we relocate servers to a new building. It is possible that Informit may be up and running earlier in the day though we cannot guarantee this. Additionally over the holiday break (25th December 2008 – 5th January 2009) there may be short periods of outage (less than one hour) which cannot be determined at this time. These outages are due to upgrades to network infrastructure within RMIT University. RMIT Publishing apologises for any inconvenience these outages may cause.

I just wanted to let everyone know in the unlikely case that we get a customer asking to use APA-FT while it's down. Unfortunately, until we get the wireless hotspot up and running again I can't update the APA-FT page on our JournalSearch site with this notice.

The State Library has become the 10th organisation to join the Flickr Commons.

From the Flickr site:

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

More details on the RISG blog...

The St. George and Sutherland Community College Brochures for next term have arrived in the library and have been distributed to branches. Supplies are kept in the cupboard behind the RA desk.

Earlier today I had an enquiry about a new collection of maps detailing coastal walking tracks in Sydney. A patron had read in the newspaper (not sure if it was the Leader or not) that she could collect these maps from Sutherland Council but was asking also if the library held copies.

Council's customer service staff were able to confirm that the contact person in Council for these maps is Brendon Graham (x 5405). Brendon is going to forward a complete collection of maps in the weeks to come for us to put out for patrons to take. (Council are currently waiting for the completion of the Cronulla map). Reference will distribute the maps to branches accordingly.

Please visit Walking Coastal Sydney for more information including printable maps.

Auburn Library has started up a Flickr group to promote NSW Readers Week 2008. The idea is that you use the Motivator tool over at fd's flickr toys to create a poster that expresses how you feel about reading.

Then upload the photo to the flickr group and share your wisdom. Here's my pathetic attempt - I'm sure you can all do better. If you created a Flickr account as part of Learning 2.0 then you can use that to store the image, otherwise put it in the Library's Flickr account (ID:suthlib pw:route66).

There's more instructions on the Group page at Flickr. Someone might even like to take this idea to our library readers and try to get them involved.

I hope you have a go. I think it's great that NSW public libraries are starting to think about how they can use new tools such as flickr to reach out to users. More about how Sutherland can use Flickr coming soon...