Working Like a Patron, and, Rethinking Reference

Just two sort-of unrelated announcements today, although they actually compliment each other quite well:

Wed., Oct. 12, is Work Like A Patron Day
I know it's not feasible for everyone, but if you get the chance tomorrow, try approaching the library as if you're a patron - use the front door, use the public bathroom, see if the posted signs help you at all, whatever. Check out the Work Like A Patron Day 2011 post for more ideas and how to share your experiences.

Rethinking Reference, Non-Fiction, and Local History
This past Friday I gave a talk for NHLA-READS on a few projects my library has done to keep our collections (and access to them) in step with the needs of our patrons. They are a great group and I had a wonderful time, both giving my talk and listening to the other speakers. If you're interested, my slides and other links are available.

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Reference Question of the Week – 9/25/11

In library school, one things I was taught was the way a library is organized allows for a great deal of serendipity. This isn't really a reference question and doesn't have anything to do with the way a library is organized, but when I came in to work one day, two of my coworkers filled me in on this odd case of serendipity.

About 10:45 that morning, a patron came to the desk and said,

I left my laptop here last night - did anyone find it?

My library is on two levels, so we have one lost-and-found at the Reference Desk (downstairs) and another upstairs near the Circulation Desk. The person on duty at the Reference Desk checked our lost-and-found box, and not finding a laptop there, went upstairs to check the other one.

Nothing there either, so she came back down to the Reference Desk to search a little more thoroughly - thinking that if someone had found a laptop, perhaps they put it somewhere a little more secure than just the lost-and-found box (which is a drawer in the Reference Desk). She searched all behind the desk, and after not finding it, started looking in the Reference Office (which is right behind the desk).

The only thing she found back there was a laptop in a Black & Decker bag that had been left here over a year ago. The battery was dead and we didn't have a charger for it, so we couldn't turn it on to try to identify it. I didn't want to just throw away a laptop, so it just sat in a corner of the office - literally for over a year.

The staff person knew that couldn't be it, but picked it up and showed it to the patron anyway saying something like, "this is the only lost computer we have."

Apparently, the patron looked at it intently, paused, looked at it again, and then said,

Well, wait. That is my laptop. It's not the one I lost last night, but it's mine - I lost it like a year ago just before I stopped working for Black & Decker.

How bizarre is that? Since he had the timeframe right, she gave it to him - but it still didn't help find his most recently-lost laptop.

By then it was 11:00 AM, and the second reference person was just getting to the desk to start her shift - and, it just so happened that she was the person who had closed the night before. She remembered the patron, because just before closing time the previous night, she had seen a laptop sitting unattended on a table, and asked him it if was his (since he was one of only two patrons still there at the time). He had said it was - but even with this reminder, apparently he forgot to take it with him.

Since the laptop was nowhere else to be found, she walked over to the table where she had seen it last night - and there it was.

The patron was happy to have both laptops back, and left - and the Reference staff were kind of baffled that he had them running all over the building looking for it, without even checking to see if it was where he had left it the night before.

Lost and Found Policy
I was happy too, because it made me feel vindicated for not chucking out that laptop long ago. I didn't want to get rid it of without knowing if there was private or personal information on it, but I also didn't feel right drilling or otherwise destroying it.

But this makes me curious what other libraries do with found laptops. For flash drives, I look at the files and 90% of the time find a resume that allows me to contact the owner and return it. Otherwise, our policy basically is keep everything until we run out of room, and then get rid of the really old stuff to make more room (and delete all files on any disk before we recycle it).

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Update on Screencasting Options

A couple weeks ago, someone who reads my website emailed me this question:

I was wondering, in reference to your article from August 9, 2009, what web-based screencasting resources you might recommend given that both ScreenToaster and Screenjelly have apparently bit the dust?

His email took me a little by surprise - I hadn't realized that both of them were gone now.

I haven't made a screencast in awhile, but they're always a good idea (check out the Overdrive/Kindle video by the King County Library System), so I did a quick search and read some reviews just to see what was out there. The best free online options seemed to be http://www.screenr.com and http://www.screencast-o-matic.com, although I haven't tried either one.

I also know a lot of librarians use Jing, but that is software you download, so it's a little different. And another somewhat related option is http://www.xtranormal.com - it doesn't do screencasts, but is an easy way to make little movies.

Does anyone have any other suggestions for creating screancasts and videos? Or any links to good examples of library promotional/help/training videos?

In any case, one last word of caution: since these do come and go so often, it's good not to use them to host your video - upload them to YouTube or at least save them as video files, so you don't lose them if the website goes out of business.

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Reference Question of the Week – 9/18/11

A patron came up to the desk with "SONY" written on a piece of paper. He said,

This is the kind of TV I have; can I plug headphones into it? I looked at the television but there are so many little plug holes that I don't know what they're all for.

I explained that Sony makes lots of different models, some with and some without headphone jacks. We really needed the actual model number of his television to answer this, so he said he'd go home and look for that and call me when he found it.

20 minutes later he calls, and I do an image search for sony kdl32l5000 to look at the pictures. My logic was that a headphone jack would probably be right on the front of the television if anywhere, so it should be easy to spot. If that didn't work, then I'd look for specs or a manual.

I found lots of pictures of the front, back, and sides of the television, but didn't see a headphone jack anywhere. None of the reviews mentioned headphones either. To double-check, I visited the Sony's product webpage for this television. I did Ctrl+F to search for headphone on the page, but there was no mention - and disappointing product images, too.

All the while, the patron had been describing the jacks he could find - none of which had a picture of little headphones next to it.

For a quick last attempt, I did another search for kdl32l5000 headphones and found the manual, and also the chat log of someone offering support for this exact question. I found the chat log hilarious, but between that and everything else I'd found, the conclusion was that there is no headphone jack on this television.

The patron was fine with that when I told him. However, in the meantime he had inadvertently pulled all the other wires out of the television while sliding it around, so the headphones were now the least of his worries.

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Most Popular Computer Ebooks (at my library)

Since getting back to work this week, I've been trying to get caught up on emails and feeds.

Stephen's Lighthouse linked to the top 25 most downloaded titles on Overdrive - which reminded me that I had recently done our year-end database usage stats, and compiled highest-access titles for our Safari Computer Ebooks database.

Our top 12 most-accessed books were:

The Safari stats interface doesn't make it really easy to identify this. Finding the number of sessions isn't too bad*, but we have to report the total number of "circulations" for these ebooks - which to me means the number of times each one was accessed.

I was able to run one report that seemed like a master total usage report, which I think indicated that 433 of our ebooks have been "hit" a total of 12,256 times.

Also interesting, if I'm reading these reports right, those 433 books are only about 1/8 of the collection, meaning 7/8 never got touched even once. Also, of those 433, 250 were accessed five or fewer times (totaling 410 circs), and the top twelve books (which all had >200 "hits") have a combined total of 5233 circs. Which means that 12 books account for a little under half of our total activity.

That is shocking, but also should be a fairly good indicator of what the leading technologies are right now (at least for my patrons, and among the selections available in our Safari catalog) - and a good reason to supplement our Safari access with print copies.

*Incidentally, we had 963 patron user sessions for FY11

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Reference Question of the Week – 9/4/11

This week's question is one we get asked many times a day - it's not difficult at all, but this time had a sort of heart-wrenching twist.

A woman in her early twenties walked up to the desk. Very politely, and with a little hesitation, she asked:

I just printed something for my school, but I don't know where to pick it up. Can you please help me?

For public printing in my library, we use Envisionware's LPT:One, which works well for us. All the print jobs from our public computers go to a central print release station, where patrons pay for their job before it actually gets printed. So that patrons know which print job is theirs, when they print they get prompted to name their job:

Once a patron goes through this once, they understand how it works. But the first time isn't totally intuitive, so we do get asked for help in printing frequently.

My personal rule is this: if someone asks me where they pick up their print job, I take that to mean they've never printed here before, so I go with them over to the print station and walk them through the steps to pay for and release their print job.

That's what I did in this case, and while walking over to the printer, I asked the patron if she had entered a name for her job. She replied,

Well, a little box asked me to name my job, so I typed in "waitress."

I don't know why this struck me as so sweet and sad - maybe her innocence and naivety, maybe the idea of someone working their way through college. Maybe I'm just getting sentimental in my old age. She didn't mean anything by it though, so when we got to the print station, I showed her how to select the job named "waitress" and print it out. She thanked me and left.

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