What's gonna happen?

It's been busy in the Reading Room and with less staff to call on for various reasons- which gets me thinking about the way we do things.
A while back Helene Blowers posted a comment about innovation on her Blog and I've been thinking about that for a while. The article in question suggests their are 12 ingredients to innovation. Check it out: how many ingredients do you think the library has in place? And how many don't we have in place? Not having 1 ingredient impacts achieving the other ingredients in my opinion. Reading the article in full makes me think we have a State Librarian in place who has these things in sight- I make this judgement without having interaction with said boss but by her statements and approach.
So- The way we do things? Innovation? In regards to what I do? Stack Retrieval right?
Doing what I do for such a long time now I'm at a loss for the way we do some things- in particular our inabilty to adapt to busy periods and the unnecessary pressure we put ourselves under at such times. The client focus is their but we don't seem to cope under pressure.
Example? One day this past week we had an unusual amount of staff away but we continued to provide a service as if we were fully staffed- we have things in place to help but they need to be looked at and sometimes they are overlooked. To (attempt to) solve this problem we call people from all over the library to help out which takes these staff members away from their own work and this may include librarians doing a LA's work.
Stack Delivery is being looked at in terms of considering electronic printing request slips and batching slips- I think batching will provide a longer delivery time and require more staff to deliver.
A general service model review is also in place which will be quite interesting too.

Another Blog i get feeds from has posted about a company called Zappos and praises there service approach- in particular check this post. Talk about innovation! And culture by the truckload. You really have to check out what Zappos does because judging by the post you wouldn't think they are simply an online retailer. Your job becomes your life but if you love what you do then what's the harm? Just to touch on some points if you can't be bothered checking the post: they have Xmas twice a year, work on culture and get rid of those who don't fit the culture, a full time 'coach', staff can't be overtrained and the more training courses you attend is reflected in your pay packet, tell your staff their opinion counts and mean it, create a welcoming culture, everyone is a VIP, keep on looking out for the next new/great idea, reward greatness. I know we are the public service but we can learn from others and if nothing else it's interesting to know how other businesses grow culture and innovation.

Don't tell anyone but I heard The Library/Reading Room got the budget go ahead to implement Vocera. I believe the positives of Vocera outweigh the negatives. Which brings up another point I've had on my mind: in the Stack Delivery Review process we haven't weighed up the pros and cons of the options being reviewed. It seems voices of dissent (?) or whatever you want to call it are ????? The notion that a good idea will stand up to criticism and in fact will be better for it is lost. I guess there are reasons for not doing things this way but....

I checked out this video that's about craft brewing in the US- they are appealing to people to support craft beers because they have something for everyone and the Brewers are community based and focussed, that Craft Brewing values are American values: check it

I Am A Craft Brewer from I Am A Craft Brewer on Vimeo.

It got me thinking about the libraries strengths: staff and diversity of the collection came to mind.

I'm back baby i'm back!

To quote George Castanza.
I've had a break from this blog but I thought I'd do a quick post and hopefully a few more still.
Today (thurs 26th Feb) I attended a Aboriginal Cultural Awareness Course. It was quite good and could easily been longer than 3 1/2 hours. Had a few things explained like why the ABC make those warning announcements about naming deceased Aboriginal people, that Koori is the word for a NSW Aboriginal. It was interesting to hear that some people in certain circumstances are required to prove that they are in fact indiginous people to both Government Departments and to Local Elders. Working in a Library really gives you an insight into the rich and colourful history of Australia.
I'll add a few vital links that were mentioned too:
NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA)
NSW Aboriginal Land Council
National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC)
National Sorry Day Committee
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library and Information Resousrce Network (ATSILIRN)


Lastly, a Library Blog i've been getting RSS feeds from has been writing posts from New Orleans which is worth a look as she claims there's lots to do during Mardi Gras and in general.

Newspaper Digitisation Project

This is pretty amazing and you have to have a look at it to find your way around.
If you can see the screen shot above- on the left is the text from an article (from the Brisbane Courier, pg 2, Thursday 9th June 1864) which can be edited by subscribers and on the right is the article itself highlighted and how it appeared in the paper itself.
Did I say it's amazing?! And you can save want you want as a PDF file or print them.
This will make it easier for people to do large chunks of their family history from home.
Will this put clunky old microfilm readers/printers out of service for good? Probably not.

I have to suss out if something like this is available for New Zealand.

Best Tea Room Anywhere

Fort Denison you can see in the middle of the photo.

The weather hasn't been great for a couple of weeks but today (Thurs. 16th) was super- clear and 20 degrees.
This is on The Mitchell Rooftop where staff can have their lunch. I put a slideshow of the photos I took on Flickr.

Library 2.0 Conference

I found a post from one of my library feeds about a Conference being run by the State Library of Queensland.
It's in late November and they are asking participents to show a slideshow of your libraries experiance with Web 2.0 tools in your library.
The slide show tool to be used got my interest- it's called Pecha Kucha and was designed by two people in Japan (Wikipedia link). The unique feature of this tool is it sets a limit of 20 images to be shown for 20 seconds each- so all slideshows get an equal showing.

And just when I was going to say the library barely makes use of Web 2.0 tools they announce a bunch of historical photos have been uploaded to Flickr.

Blogging for a Living

I saw this article in the Australian this week about Bloggers in Australia who try to make a living out of Blogging. It mentions long hours but most don't make enough to equal the average pay.

The article mentions a few times that Australia is five years behind the States in terms of the impact blogs have on media and the general viewing public.
(links to the blogs)

TV Tonight

Media Spy

The Inquisitr Blog

Radio News

Girl With A Satchel

Campaign Brief

Robert Scoble At Library of Congress & Seagate

Above is an interview (recorded on a phone) that Robert Scoble did with Matt Raymond who does a blog on The Library of Congress website. Matt talks about some of the projects that The LOC are working on and the purpose of his blog which is letting people know what's going on at The LOC. (click on to the next 2 clips to see LOC's photo collection and stereograph collection. What's a stereograph you ask? From the LOC site:Stereographs consist of two nearly identical photographs or photomechanical prints, paired to produce the illusion of a single three-dimensional image, usually when viewed through a stereoscope). 

I've been checking on Scoble's blog for a while now but I've never checked out his video interviews before, but as he ran a post about a bunch of new hard drives released by Seagate I thought I'd check the vid out:

I've been thinking about getting a hard drive for a while now and some of the portable ones sound good. I've got all my music backed up on to a dozen DVD's!

The guy he's speaking to has been working for Seagate for 24 years- back then a 300 MB drive was the size of a washing machine and cost US$12,000!!

Helene Blowers

It's been a bit over a year since Helene Blowers spoke at The SLNSW and I'm dissapointed I missed her talk but thanks to the net I can keep up with presentations she does give- a recent post of 67 slides on her Blog doesn't quite put me in the audience but it's worth a look all the same.
I can't say for sure that I'm on the right side of The Digital Divide, but I'm enjoying getting involved all the same!
Check out the slides, they are quite uplifting!

Google

Google has just turned 10yrs, I read an article in The Good Weekend about how it grew so quickly and permeates our lives. What will Google achieve in another 10 years?

99% of Google's income comes from advertising.

Does Google have any other choice but to continue growing?Anything but will see it get left behind.

What other areas will Google move into?

Google is offering $3o million to the first company to send a robot to the moon, land and transmit video and images back to Earth. To find out why go here, it's to do with saving the planet or something. Whateva.

Above is how the page looked way back when.

This is Google's Corporate Philosophy which seems to come up because it is so huge, particular it's point of making money without being evil- those who question Google's level of evilness say that Google has more information about "us" than governments do.

Library Tours

After reading this post @ Information Wants To Be Free Blog I got to thinking about how difficult it must be to engage the public when they attend a SL Introductory Tour. (the video from the post is not bad too).
I really think this is something that I could work on - a similar clip but alot shorter showing how to get a Readers Card, Request a book and use the Set Aside service.
I'm not saying it will get used but for a little bit of effort it might get someone talking about the idea of how do we inform our clients on how to use the library.