January 28th, 2010 Brian Herzog
Speaking of creative bookmarks, I love these combination custom book covers/bookmarks:
Similarly, last year our Children’s Librarian started pulling books that she felt were good, but had misleading or unexciting covers, and had kids design their own covers. That’s a great idea, and it’s fun to take great ideas just a little bit further.
Yay for activities that involves patrons and lets them take more ownership of their library use.
via LISNews
Tags: book, book covers, bookmark, bookmarks, Books, covers, custom, homemade, libraries, Library, public See Also
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January 26th, 2010 Brian Herzog
A patron asked for help finding books on Taoism, so we walked over to the Religion section. As we were flipping through the index of books in the 294’s and 299.514, I noticed something odd - many of the books we picked up all had bookmarks in them.
It’s not uncommon for people to leave bookmarks in library books. But in this case, all of the bookmarks were identical - they were all business cards for a local yoga studio. Interesting. After I finished helping the patron, I went to the 613.7’s, and sure enough - all our yoga how-to books also had these business cards tucked in them.
I dislike businesses targeting patrons, and in fact it’s against our library policies, but I did think this approach was clever (although I shudder to think whose business card would end up in the 613.96’s).
It also reminded me of a library tactic I fail to use effectively: put promotional bookmarks in books. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your subscription databases, online subject guides, special programs, or general announcements, but it’s also tough to maintain.
But too, this book-based advertising could be used as a fundraiser for libraries. Local business could donate money to purchase books on a certain topic, and in exchange they’d get a label on the book saying it was donated by them. Libraries would be able to expand collections, and perhaps also charge these businesses a fee on top of that.
This last idea is of course a terrible one. But the one before that is legitimate, really. And for another interesting library/business idea, check out Brett’s idea for “Amazon Libraries.”
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Posted under Library, Marketing | 4 Comments »
August 5th, 2008 Brian Herzog
Someone sent me a link to AllMyFaves.com recently - at first I ignored it, but now I kind of like it.
It’s a visual list of popular website, broken up into cataegories like Video, Maps, Search, Travel, etc. It reminds me of the early days of Yahoo, with two guys making a directory of useful internet websites. But seeing everything on one screen is helpful (and being a visual person, I like the logos).
And that’s it’s compiled by “a team of experts,” I can reasonably presume that these are the “important” websites in each category (at least, important to someone). Which is great for me to learn of a new website, or to use as a cheat-sheet to see what the kids are using. Plus, it helps with reference questions like “what’s another website like Facebook and MySpace.”
I did notice they didn’t have a “Books” category, so I made my own:
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Posted under Library, Resources | 6 Comments »
June 19th, 2008 Brian Herzog
This is worth repeating: Kate over on Adventures in Library Land highlighted an AbeBooks article that listed a few examples of things that were found in used books:
- Forty $1,000 bills
- Piece of bacon
- Credit cards
- Valuable baseball cards
- A diamond ring
I’m sure most libraries have a collection of odd things, too - just this week I found a Pokémon card (in a book about dealing with bullying). I tend to use receipts myself, or whatever random scrap of paper is handy at the time. Perhaps there should be a Where’s George?-like program for bookmarks, too.
Tags: book, bookmark, bookmarks, Books, found, mark, marker, markers, marks, Random, used books See Also
Posted under Library, Random | 5 Comments »
