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4/27/2006

Why Blogging Matters

One of the best reasons for a department director or any member of management to blog, is the ability to share with staff some of things that keep you thinking. What makes blogging rewarding for me is not only the ability to stick ideas and thoughts out there, but it’s the feedback and emails that I recieve from staff.

As Tech Director for a twenty-four location library system with 550+ staff members, I don’t have the opportunities to meet every staff member as I used to have when I started here as library resources trainer. So today when I received this email from a staff member that I’ve never even had the pleasure to meet before (T, please excuse my memory loss if I have met you at Orientation), I was pleased to find that this endeavor is making a connection.
“I have been working at PLCMC for a few months now and I've been keeping up with the blog. I'm really enjoying it and it's nice to get some input from outside my branch. Actually, I subscribe to a lot of blogs … and I found a couple of entries today that I thought I would pass along to you.

An article about RFID - I've heard some talk about this recently at our branch - http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2006/04/27/rfid_and_books.html ...

Nice to 'meet' you! T ”

Hi T, It’s nice to meet you too & thanks for the links. As for all RFID talk at your branch, that’s definitely a technology strategy we’re working on building into our future.

Helene

PS: In case you're wondering when we'll make a move to tagging books, it won't be this coming year for we still have a system-wide study to complete and funding to secure.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Book-tagging would be very cool.
Another idea would be something where users could provide comments, reviews, etc on items we've checked out, a la Amazon. Or how about an RSS feed of items I've checked out?

I like reading your blog and seeing that our library system is embracing some new ideas.

Speaking of Amazon, I modified a greasemonkey script that will automatically search the Charlotte Library system for a book you are looking at on Amazon and let you know if its at the Library. You can give it a try: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/2488


I don't think it works on videos or CDs.

Anonymous said...

Ryan --

Great script! As for the suggestion about RSS feeds of books you've checked out, see LibraryElf (www.libraryelf.com) It offers both RSS feed and text messaging for items checkedout, on reserve etc.