IUG Conference - Innovations from the Library World

At the recent IUG Conference in Washington D.C. the eLGAR team picked up some exciting tidbits of innovation and initiative happening in libraries around the world. Here is a summary of the best.

New Kids Catalogue – Mid-Hudson Library Consortium
Mid-Hudson a large consortium in New York State, has developed a unique kids' catalogue designed for children to navigate using a highly graphic presentation and results display.

This Kids' Catalogue was the first place winner in the WebPac category of the Be Innovative Awards. Check it out on http://gigcat.midhudson.org:90/search~S2. Note: some library firewalls block this url but it is well worth taking a look at from your home computer.

Wiki Site for Staff Competencies
West Palm Beach a Florida based local library, has produced a wiki-based skills programme for staff.

The wiki provides training materials and tracks progress on core Millennium competencies. It has been so successful that there are expansion plans to cover other areas of library technology use.

Events Calendar using Patron API
Hong Kong Baptist University has come up with a clever way of using the Innovative Patron API to enable notification of due dates and reserve pickups etc to be sent direct to patron's web calendars or Outlook style diaries. They can also be advised of library events or programmes and register online without logging in to the library website. eLGAR currently uses the Patron API for Pay online.

American libraries particularly public, seem to be very programme focussed. There are a few quite interesting developments in proactive event marketing. Innovative have a Programme Registration module and there are a few other options using various Web 2.0 features like RSS and Atom feeds to alert customers to what’s on at their library.

Innovative have made several enhancements to its Programme Registration module making it one option for eLGAR however several other third party products also exist.

Facebook Library Search Application
Ryerson in Toronto, Canada is one of the larger Millennium universities. Facebook is absolutely pervasive in the U.S. university world as it was originally created by students to keep track of friends. On the basis of going where your audience already is, many libraries have catalogue search functions on Facebook but Ryerson has extended their functionality to render the results within Facebook rather than linking out to the OPAC in separate browser windows.

The Future of On-Line Browsing

There must be a better way for us to show off the collections in the OPAC, especially for the person at home that we are looking to deliver items to in the future. I had a really "thats it" moment when I saw zoomii.com.

Built to interface with Amazon books, zoomii shows you virtual bookshelves to browse online, just like you would in a bookshop or library. It just seemed right to me. You can interact with the "books" by zooming in & out in a way that feels natural.

If you look at the site, and I recommend you do, you can watch a video about zoomii. Then just imagine LibraryThing and zoomii-type browsing together in our OPAC.

Communicating with eLGAR Programme Office

We have recently discovered a very serious issue with all email replies inbound to the eLGAR office.
About the 20th of April, prior to leaving for IUG we added the programme office blog address to all our signature files as a means of publicising the blog and getting a wider audience.
The Auckland City network, of which elgar.govt.nz is part, uses a third party spam-filter service. This service has a list of banned words, which includes name of the Google subsidiary which is the largest blog site in the world.
The filter has been deleting all incoming replies to any eLGAR emails because our original message contained the banned word in the signature file.
This has only affected replies to our emails, not incoming "new" emails, so a steady stream of emails have been getting to us, disguising the problem for some time.
Some of you have probably been receiving increasingly exasperated emails from us asking for information you may well have already provided. Unfortunately we will not have received your reply to the follow-ups either so have been in a vicious circle.
We have today removed the offensive word from our email signature, and so do not expect any further issues. If you have a blog address in your email signature, you may have similar issues trying to send email to the aucklandcity or eLGAR domains.
We do apologise for any inconvenience and/or offence caused.