Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Working in the Library

My name is Sydney Richardson, I’m in year 10, and I did work experience at the Wollondilly Library in Picton for one week. During this time, I learned a lot of new things and I now have a great experience that I can talk about and remember.


Organising and maintaining a library isn’t as simple as hiring one librarian to scan people’s books and library cards. It’s not just a matter of putting contact on a book and sticking a few letters on the spine.


The Wollondilly Library has a whole other floor up top, where a bunch of clever and creative people work on the libraries website, design crafts for little kids to do during story time, check the books everyday to make sure they’re in order and easy for you to access and find, plan and host small events for all ages of the community, and research the present and past of Wollondilly and other nearby places in preparation for people of later or future generations who may inquire into a topic we people today may otherwise not appreciate. Even their “incredibly boring” staff meetings are fun to watch.


And despite popular belief due to the exaggerations on TV, librarians aren’t cranky old grannies. They do possess vocabularies that extend far out from the word, “Shh,” and the Wollondilly ones are great, funny and totally nice! I’ve had a great time meeting all of them. Each of them has their own invaluable personalities and I’ve felt very comfortable being around them.


I chose to do my work experience at Wollondilly Library because I love to read, and truthfully I expected that all I’d be doing was putting books back on shelves. But, I was wrong! I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in research, view the ways that the library chooses the books they’re offered to buy—my opinion was even taken into account!—and I was able to sit down and watch Story Time, which was so cute!


I was shown inside the mobile library, which is a large van filled with shelved books, magazines, DVD’s and audio-books. The mobile library drives around Wollondilly, stopping at a specific town for most of the day, giving members of towns with no library the opportunity to borrow books.


The amount of community work the staff of the library are involved in and their efforts to make many people happy really is elevating, and I’m very glad I had the opportunity to do work experience here. I’ve done many things, I’ve never sat around wondering what to do with myself, but most importantly, I had fun.

Monday, March 22, 2010

Social networking in libraries

I belive social networking will become invaluable to libraries as it is a growingly popular form of communication. Libraries can advertise programs, events and services, get feedback from customers, answer questions and queries and I think also there is the possibility in better getting to know your clients, what their needs and wants are and how they go about satisfying them.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Mashups

Using mashups in public libraries would be excellent for local studies as shown the the examples. I also think it would be fun to do something with the mobile library stops and mash ups.

Podcasts

Podcasts would be great to use in a library setting, especially for our library because our community is isolated geographically. One idea I would like to pursue is working with out local history groups to do podcasts of interesting local studies/history info.

Del.icio.us

I've used Del.icio.us before http://delicious.com/Shriggles for work and find it really helpful to tag things I want to look at or read later. I think it's a greally great resource to use for libraries in research assistance and would save alot of time on the reference desk especially if it is as well set up as libraries like Sutherland.

Library Thing

Library thing is fabulous - my library has recently added library thing to our catalouge and it's been really helpful with readers advisory. Despite having and loving it at work I never really thought about opening an account myself but I think I might continue with it at home and I know of some friends I can recomment it to.
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Shriggle

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Vidoe

I really love You Tube (and I especially love the common craft video's used in this course) and have used it alot but only recently took at look at Google Video. I found them both really simple to use from searching to finding related material.

Mossman Library is fabulous; they way they use technology to create access to their library is impresive; from the video's of visiting authors to their oral histories.

My manager and I saw a great video on a library web page of a mobile library driver talking about his job and the mobile library and we're looking at doing the same because it was such a great way to showcase such a wonderful service.