I feel a little sheepish whenever I talk about a product on here, because I don’t want to come off sounding like a commercial. But I thought this Book Due Date Calendar was a good idea.
It’s available on Etsy from a seller called Aunt June, and it’s a fun and creative way for patrons to keep track of when their library books are due.
Paper for our receipt printers is expensive, so we ask people if they need a receipt instead of printing one automatically - which means many people leave the library without any tangible reminder of when their books are due back. I’ve seen libraries use due date bookmarks, which are also a good idea, but this calendar was colorful and definitely eye-catching enough to be a great reminder (especially for kids) - kind of like a real-world Library Elf.
Here’s what it looks like in action:
It looks like you download a pdf, which is nice because you can print out extras if you’re a heavy library user. I wonder if you could print it onto some kind of glossy paper that might work like a dry erase board. I also wonder if the seller would be willing to work out some deal with libraries to let them sell these as fundraisers.
An important function of the library is communicating our upcoming events to the community. There are lots of ways to do this, one of which is by having an online calendar.
Of course, there are also lots of software for online calendars and for patrons to reserve meeting rooms. My library just switched calendars, and so did the Blue Hill (ME) Public Library. Since we each evaluated a number of different calendar options, Rich Boulet and I combined our notes, in the hopes of saving other libraries a bit of legwork when looking at calendars.
There are more calendars than what is listed here (in no particular order), and our pro/con notes reflect the needs, requirements and situations of our individual libraries. If you have questions about how we made our decisions, you can contact me through my contact form, and Rich through Blue Hill Library’s staff page.
Allows a great deal of design customization, to integrate with the look of your website
Serves as both a calendar and meeting room reservation system
A limitation is that it is designed as an “in-house” product (example, a school would use it for the teachers to reserve meeting rooms). It does have a public room reservation form, but take a little work to customize to be easy enough for the public to use
Allows for multiple calendars (Childrens, Adult, Teen, etc) all to be fed up into one master calendar
Here are a couple reading suggestions website I came across recently that I liked:
The first is TheBookCalendar.com, which is simply a book-a-day online calendar. It shows the cover, a description (and sometimes author video), includes an Amazon link, and also has email and rss options. via lisnews.org
The second one might not be all that new, but I just learn about it a few weeks ago. ReadingTrails.com and provides a reading suggestions by linking related books into a chain.
Sound odd? I first heard of this form of readers advisory during an RA workshop in the SLIS program at Kent State University. The idea behind it is to identify one theme from the book that the reader likes, then find another book that contains the same theme. Next, pick something from that second book the reader likes and, based on that second criteria, link it to a third book that has that criteria, and on and on and on in a long chain of connected books.
An example: for someone who liked the magical aspect of the Narnia books, you might suggest they read Harry Potter. Then, since the Harry Potter series is based in England, you could link it to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.
Sort of like a six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but for books. It’s a neat idea, but tough to do mentally - which is why it’s a perfect task for a database. Or, in this case, “an innovative new social network for book lovers.” They say:
Reading Trails is a wonderful way to discover books to read, meet new people, and most importantly, to share your reading experiences with friends by creating trails. In particular, Reading Trails is a great tool for book clubs….
Because a book can appear on more than one trail, trails intersect. The result is a network of trails that can be browsed to find unexpected reading pleasures.
I checked out the site, and it seemed typical of new and innovative ideas - it’s a great idea, and I got some useful information from it, but the site doesn’t always work the way I expect.
It can be used without signing into an account, which is good. And you can search for books or themes, and from there scroll up and down the “reading trail” of that book to find other reading suggestions. Great.
Other good things:
Fairly easy to use, and the trails are visual and useful and pretty cool
Lets people write reviews of the books
Provides links to Amazon to buy the book and WorldCat to find the book at a library
Provides widget code to embed into your website, like this:
A few technical glitches I noticed:
On the search results page, each book had a little checkbox next to it, and I couldn’t figure out what that was for
Each book also had an odd little box under it, which only becomes useful when you are logged in (if it’s not useful, it shouldn’t be shown)
For the searches I ran, the bottom of the screen would say something like “Viewing 1-7 of 7 matches” and yet there would be twelve books displayed. None of the searches I performed displayed a number of books that matched what was listed on the bottom of the page
Some of the trail themes I searched for did not exist (Vietnam, Iraq, poverty, aliens) but most others did
There doesn’t seem to be a way to view details of any book - just see where it falls in various trails
They don’t seem to explain why books are linked in a chain - I’d be curious to see what theme connects them
Most of these cons are probably due to the newness of the website, and will likely be improved as the site grows.
I don’t think I’ll use these much on a personal level (unlike LibraryThing), but I will keep both in mind for readers advisory at the reference desk.
A project we’ve been kicking around at my library for a long time is creating some kind of town-wide centralized volunteer listing. The library is a natural place for such a resource, but it’s a big project.
To fill this need, we just launched ChelmsfordVolunteers.org. The end product was not really the goal we set out with - and I don’t think it’s the last version of the resource, either.
Originally, we wanted a tool that would list groups in the area that need volunteers, and also a calendar of upcoming events with volunteer opportunities. We also wanted the local organizations to be able to update their listing and event information themselves, without any library staff intervention.
As part of a grant, a local high school student explored a few different software options. We started with a WordPress version, then a Drupal version, then a WebCalendar version, but we kept running into the same problem: the tool did either the database part well, or the events calendar part well, but not both. Each solution also had other pros and cons, which is why we kept looking at different options.
The current iteration of volunteer listing actually uses two existing tools, which are combined under one domain name (chelmsfordvolunteers.org). From a single web page, we link to each tool, but tried to make it look like it was all integrated together.
The two tools are the Community Information database, which is run by the consortium and is (supposed to) list all non-profit groups in all communities of the consortium. I edited the records of the Chelmsford organizations to make sure they all had a reference to “volunteers,” and these records provide all the contact information for the groups.
The other tool is the Calcium Calendar from Brown Bear. The library has been using this as our main events calendar for years, so it was easy to set up another one just for volunteer events.
Between these two tools, we’ve got both an events listing and an organizations database, although they are not connected. Using Comm Info is nice in that we don’t need to maintain two records for each organizations, but we are limited at the same time to only non-profit groups - which excludes some hospitals and other businesses that offer volunteer opportunities.
Another drawback of the current setup is that the organizations do not have direct access to update their information and events. We set up two web forms to handle submissions and updates, but it’s an extra layer and more of a hassle for everyone involved than it needs to be.
But it works, and it’s better than nothing until we find the ideal solution. So if anyone knows of a tool that will fill this need, or another library doing something similar, I would appreciate hearing about it.
I feel a little sheepish whenever I talk about a product on here, because I don’t want to come off sounding like a commercial. But I thought this Book Due Date Calendar was a good idea.
