More journals and a construction update

Good day folks
Here's my weekly (semi) post - I've been trying to write it all day.... anyhow.  This morning myself and several staff went over to the library construction zone and took a short tour - and pictures.  They're up at the Flickr site (http://www.flickr.com/photos/pannell_2010--I'll put the link in the side bar as soon as I get the sidebar working properly again! haven't figured out yet what I did wrong).

Anyhow - yet again. The place looks like a cyclone hit it.  There are many missing walls and it's almost impossible to orient yourself once you're inside.  the construction foreman showed me where the office area is laid out on the second floor and where my computer classroom is supposed to go (yummy!).  Incongruously enough, there's a metal ladder hanging from the ceiling. It goes out onto the roof through an access panel.  The thing is solid iron and they may remove and they may not. Can't tell. The area above our technical services space is being removed to make more head room and give us real office space in the area.  That may or may not be a good idea but that's the plan.  The main stairwell is due to come out next week.  A highly anticipated even I admit. You may notice that I've started actually labelling the pictures.  I cannot promise to go back and do them all, but I will make a valiant attempt.

I received a new BookList today and now want to run right out to the local public library and see if I can get my hands on some of them.  I think sometimes if I could get enough books, you could wall me up in a corner and I'd be perfectly content for months.  OK, you might have to slide a few strawberry Twizzlers@ under the door but otherwise, happy, happy. I want to know about the life of Queen Joanna (N. Goldstone) and I nver read biographiesDo we need another female investigator? R. Brady (and I) are betting we will enjoy meeting Emily Locke in her debut novel Final Approach.  I want to meet her, in prose at least.  One of the childrens books I plan to find is called "Pouch" (D.E. Stein) and I may just have to buy that one-I'm a sucker for a good kangaroo story. (who isn't?).

Technology resources

I've been reading more professional literature lately.  It's an unexpected dividend of our relocation actually that I'm happy to take advantage of.  The library subscribes to several profesisonal journals, newsletters and circulars dedicated to libraries and libarianship. Not wanting them to go to waste, I told the staff that I would shelve them in my office as they came in during this next year in exile.  I got plastic magazine boxes out and put them up on a shelf that Id need a stool to access.  Which brings me to the benefit in all this.  The material gets put in my box and I put it on my desk. Being much too indolent to climb up on that stool every day, the material collects on my desk.  My personal curiosity being what it is, I read whatever new thing happens to be on my desk (usually while I'm on the telephone!) - which happens to be; the library land literature.

So what I've been reading about is this:
Bibliocommons has rolled out its latest product.  It's a discovery tool (alert to new library buzzword) like Aquabrowswer with lots of nifty Web 2.0 tools incorporated.  It doesn't replace your Integrated library system (ILS), just makes it more user-friendly.  To quote from Smart Libraries (August 2009) "...Bibliocommons opertes separetly from the underlying [ILS].....data are harvested from the ILS and used to populate a separate search and retrieval environment"  All of these tools claim to be so intuitive, users won't need much instruction to use them.  I sat through a demo of Aquabrowser recently and I say that's a debatable claim.
OK, what else:  another player in the Audiobook service came on the scene - Ingram Digital Myilibrary has an audi book service for library that they say is fully compatible "at Launch" with iPods, macs and iphones.  The pricing models include the availabiltiy of setting individual user selections as well as consortium wide collections. Again, see Smart Libraries August 2009) for a more in-depth discusion of the topic.
I've also read a discusison in the latest Library Technology Reports (vol. 45/ no.6) about  building a digital branch library.  Which has led me to thoughts of our ELIN consortium webpage.  we never decided or determiend what functions we needed it to serve for us.  My thinking is perhaps we ought to give some time to deliberating this concept and determine if it's doing all that we want it to do.

BTW, I've also read the last several issues of Library Journal, cover to cover, which is something I never do!  I read American Libraries and College and Reserach Libries (and its newsletter) but usually steer clear of LJ.  there are a few more, infrequent publications I've begun to discover again. 

There are some pretty amazing goings on out there in library land people, we've just got to make an effort to discover them.

That Flickr site

Folks
I posted some photos a while back and forgot to list the permalink to them.  Either one will work http://www.flickr.com/photos/pannell_2010/


http://www.flickr.com/people/pannell_2010/
 
I'll be putting up a few more today or tomorrow.

An opportunity

Some of the opportunities that have come about due to the library renovation are the possibility to include a collaborative work table into the study area and to mount a plasma display screen for an electronic messaging system on one of the walls in the seating area.  This is doubly exciting for us as we could then feed campus announcements, library information and public service information-including alerts, through the display monitor.

The complications occur because we must plan an outlet somewhere up the wall to house the connections--without having purchased any of the equipment.

Are we buying furniture!

During the past several weeks I have had two meetings about furnishings and electrical outlet needs for the renovated library space.  Our VP for student services has been put in charge of furnishing the building and needs to translate the needs (and just plain desires) of the occupying departments into a physical set of specifications that can be ordered from some furniture supplier! [Lucky me, I'm sure she said to herself]

At any rate, we had our first meeting two weeks ago and we concluded that, neither of us had enough information about the space configuration to make firm decisions.  I thoought I had an understanding of the architects functional design and she assumed she did as well--including directives from the campus presient.  It turns out that our understandings did not coincide.  We decided to wait on furniture decisions until after another meeting with the architects and contractors shceduled for the following week.  We figured we would get the best information-as well as getting the same information - we were likely to get as to locations of electrical outlets and space configurations.

Every meeting, no matter how well intentioned seems to spawn a host of new considerations, complications and opportunities.  I'll go through that at a future post.

Finding a home for the ibrary skills class

This is after the fact but I'll give an accounting of it anyhow.  I may have told earlier what the set-up of the new library is like - we managed to bring over 9 public access computers. {go see Pannell_2010 on Flickr for the interim library set-up} since the entire room is onl 30 x 30 ft, we are not able to conduct our usual classes there.  I have to schedule a computer lab somewhere on campus.  At the beginning of the semester, usually through about mid-October, we have two to four per week usually during prime class time - 9am to Noon.  There are very few unoccupied classrooms with computers on this campus during prime time on Monday and Wednesday.  When the first instructor asked to have a class scheduled, I sent a message to all the academic deans inquiring as to the availaility of an open computer equipped classroom.  There happened to be two; one in the inner campus and one outside the campus circle.  We chose the inner building due to the time constraints of the faculty member whose class we were scheduling.  Unfortunately this room was only large enough to accomodate 1/2 the class at a time, making it necessary for us to split the class session over two days.

I had previously crafted an entry form so that faculty could go to the library website and submit their requests for classes to us electronicaly.  It is currently only available as a PDF file on the web so our reference tech fills out the form and emails it back to the faculty member when we confirm the date, time and location.

We have never had the use of a regular classroom, complete with data projection unit, before for our library skills class so we both went over the the room at the appointed time.  Her to conduct it, me to observe, critique and assist.  At the conclusion of the 50 minute session we discussed what sorts of changes would be required in our normal "spiel".  Some changes were necessary because of the straitened circumstances ot the library (practically no physical collection!) and some because of the configuration of the room and the addition of nifty resources we never had before.  I should state now that this will be the configuration of the classroom being added to the newly renovated library space when it comes online in 2010--yippee!!  Since the class was divided over a two day span, we did the same critique and assist thing at the other session, incorporating what we learned into that session.

We realized we still had many changes to make.  I am very much looking forward to our next library skills class.  We should have this routine just about right by the end of the semester!!!

Plea for help

I know I have been woefully lax in my posting but I have good (no, no great!) excuses for it.  anyhow, i'll catch us up later in the day.  Meanwhile:

This is the gist of an email I sent out to our local consortium group.  I am asking for voulunteers to work on planning local arrangements.


So, if you are at all interested, show up in Mansur hall 129 around 4:00 pm next Thursday---if I need to change the room I will announce it in an email and also post it on the door to room 129. I hope to get through most of this in about 1 ½ hours.

Tentative agenda:

• Decide on what “freebies” to include in packets – and how to get them

• Decide on what type of “flyers/informational brochures” to include in packets – and how to get them

• Determine Restaurants for the Dine Around held on 10/22

• Investigate entertainment possibilities (choose between the two referred to me by Museum staff)

• Look at preliminary schedule and determine needs for volunteers—guides, information booth staff, speaker babysitters, room monitors, etc.

• More?

That webcam business

Good day folks,

I sent two URLs out via campus email today.  One is to be used if you are trying to view the construction webcam feed from off campus http://204.134.48.130 and the other is to be used if you are somewhere on campus http://172.21.120.251 .  In addition, I sent out a set of instructions for enabling and installing the Active X controller that needs to be used to view the video feed.  We are working on resolving the faded color issues.  I think, considereing our bandwidth problems, things are going well.  Oh yes, the architectural drawings are also posted on the library home page.  These are the same ones I sent out via Flickr last week.

Rules of my game

I will make it a point to post at least once per week.  We may not have time for more.  I've subscribed to a few "libraryland" feeds which I will post in the side bar. So far I have not advertised this resource on campus, only to the other ELIN folks (or did I, hmm, can't recall).  I may have another one that is targeted toward the campus constiuency. Maybe not.  Anyhow that's all for today.  It's Friday and half the staff are on vacation today.   In addition, the poor students are exhausted - they've been back a week now so they've begun to find their niche.
TTFN

Background

This blog will be a running monologue (of course they all are aren't they?) about what's it's like trying to run a full service library under straitened circumstances. We moved out of our building over the summer - lock, stock, and barrel I think the expression goes. There are seven staff members besides myself from the library serving a student population of about 3200. The campus employs about 350 people during good times; which these are not. The library itself is sans 2 professional employees. Anyhow, I digress as I often do - the staff moved their personal office "stuff" and their supplies into an adjacent building. Then we moved a representative sampling of resources to an empty 30 ft. x 30 ft. classroom in that same building. After much diagramming, floor planning and shifting of furnishings we have an arrangement that works - mostly.
We have 9 public access computers, about half the print journals we subscribe to, our entire leased collection of fiction and non-fiction bestsellers, all the current DVDs we owned, some government documents, some reference books and some selections from the general collection. we also carted over some study carrels, chairs and a table to set up in the hallways.
I've set up a Flickr account to track the construction progress photographically. I also have a set of images provided to us by the architects so we can see what things will look like once we're done.
I won't go back and bore everyone with all the odd bits that have happened in the last 6 weeks since we started moving; suffice it to say, it's an expereience you wouldn't want to do more than once in your lives.

A blog begins

Well, school started yesterday and so did a minimal bit of construction. The company put the fence up around the building - for those of you that don't know what the heck I'm talking about, I'll fill you in later, perhaps in my next post.
to continue with this one however, I'd like this blog to be a useful and informative resource for patrons of Pannell Library. We will post links to images and video of course; but we will also deliver content about our electronic resources and whatever events and resources we encounter that we think may be of interest to you - our readers. I have an idea (I picked it up from a radio station this morning) of a way for our campus constituents to participate in this dialogue. I'll tell you about it in a few days. After I attain some proficiency with this!

I'll be talking at you!