Study Expo

Come along to the eLGAR study expo for free advice on courses you can take to enhance your library career.

When: 5th September 2008
Where: Level 3, Waitemata room, Auckland City Library, 44 Lorne Street, Auckland
Time: Register to attend one of the two sessions at 9.00am – 11.00am or 11.00am – 1.00pm

So who will be there?
The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand
Victoria University of Auckland
Te Wananga o Raukawa
LIANZA
Auckland and Manukau City Libraries

What can I find out?
Information about courses available for library and information, Maori studies, management, IT, teaching, children or adult education and more! You may also decide to choose a tertiary organisation that suits your learning style i.e. you can attend a structured workshop or complete your studies by correspondence.

The LIANZA professional registration scheme recognises your qualification as a librarian and will be available to answer any questions that you may have.

Can I take a tour of the central library?
There are three tours available to visit behind the scenes of the central library. Tours take approximately one hour and leave from the lift on the ground floor. Tours start at 10am, 11am or 1pm and numbers are limited.

How do I register?
Email Libraries_training@aucklandcity.govt.nz and let us know:
your name, library site, the session of the study expo you wish to attend (9am or 11am), your email address and tour preference (10am, 11am or 1pm).

What prizes can I win?
Check out the following cool prizes which will be drawn at the end of the day. Winners will be notified within seven days.
A $100 book voucher from The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand
An iPOD shuffle from Victoria University of Wellington
A clothing pack from Te Wananga o Raukawa
A year's subscription to LIANZA

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.

Load Profile training

While here in Washington, DC for the Innovative User Group conference, I am also attending Load Profile training. This is a 2-day intensive workshop on building data manipulation tables for importing records into Millennium.

The training content is excellent - an in-depth approach to a very useful topic - and the presentation is an effective mixture of lecture and hands-on. I only hope to have opportunity to put it in to practice before it falls out of my brain.

The most obvious use of this new skill is in improved import of bibliographic records from cataloguing suppliers - but there are other applications including migration from other systems, and data cleanup/enhancement not possible inside Millennium. If you are interested in hearing more about this, or would like to explore possibilities for a project, please get in touch with me

Cheerio for now,
Sarah Cox

Rivkah at Rodney & North Shore

Yesterday Rivkah Sass started her grand NZ tour with a library management seminar followed by a presentation to Rodney Libraries. Rivkah, American Librarian of the Year, is in NZ thanks to eLGAR and the 3M Innovation Award. Rivkah also presented to the North Shore Libraries yesterday evening.

Her wide ranging presentation includes Rivkah's thoughts on the need for librarians to be open to risks and challenges and try new things, if they don't work it doesn't mean the end of the world. It is interesting how some things are universal, challenges for here are shared by librarians around the world. Increasingly librarians are having to manage the expectations of staff, political and financial stakeholders, and customers. Rivkah also says "Omaha is Omaha" meaning we all need to serve our own community and there is no single solution that will fit across the entire Libray world.

The tour continues at Manukau and Waitakere today (Thursday) and Auckland City tomorrow. Next week Rivkah travels south as far as Invercargill, which must be about as far away from Omaha as it's possible to be.

Assistance Required

We are looking for assistance with the Millennium Training Strategy and the eCommerce Implementation projects. We are also trying a new method of communicating.

Documents outlining what is required and how you can assist are at:
- ECommerce Project Comms
- ECommerce Project Training
- Training Review Strategy Team

If you would like to assist in either of these areas, please contact Hamish at:
hamish.mcdonald@aucklandcity.govt.nz

I would love some feedback, or whether you have any suggestions for how we communciate.

(Original Post by Hamish)