Well, certainly on the cutting edge in 1994! Take a look at the promotional video some creative library folks at SSJCPL put together 16 years ago in order to get out the word about the services the Library has to offer. The video is a hoot for many reasons. SSJCPL has long been considered a great library and, from today's perspective, those services that were great back then seem just a little quaint today. Also, many of the people in this video are still working hard to provide outstanding service to the community today; seeing them in their 1994 persona is fun!
Each clip takes a few seconds to start so be patient:
And part two:
The thing is, while these videos provide some good laughs, the spirit that led folks at SSJCPL to create a video promoting their services (presumably for local access cable?) 16 years ago, when such ideas weren't in wide practice across the library community, tells you something about this Library. I'm lucky to be the newest member of a group that has a long tradition of innovation and dedication to customer service!
Today, we've joined all of the contemporary versions of communication that parallel the 1994 incarnation of 2.whatever. You can follow SSJCPL on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (we're on Yelp, too) by looking for our username: SSJCPL on all channels!
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
100 Years and Counting!
In just a little under two hours, a celebration will begin in Stockton's Martin Luther King, Jr. Plaza to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the partnership between the City of Stockton and San Joaquin County allowing for unified public library services throughout our region. I have the honor of saying a few words on this occasion about the past and the future of our library. Here are my prepared comments for those of you who just wish you could be present but cant...:
What has been the legacy of the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library over the past 100 years? For as long as the libraries throughout this county have been serving our visitors, our libraries have served as a snapshot of our communities. Whether it’s the Troke Library or Ripon, the Thornton Library or Chavez, the people who walk through our doors on a daily basis, to the tune of more than a million visitors each year, come for reasons that are their own.
Some come to the library for a sense of community. They come to meet with others and to enjoy the variety of opportunities present at the library to learn, to pass the time, and to enjoy the community experience.
Some come to the library to satisfy the human need for a good story. We are a place of stories. The library is the place that children have come for more than a century in this country to develop and share a love of reading with their friends and family.
Some come to the library to because of what we have to offer to those who can’t afford luxuries such as books or movies or access to the Internet. They come because libraries are the one place in the community where we all are equals, where we all can share with equality the offerings of our collections.
The future of the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library, I believe, will not be so dramatically different than the Library that has been so beloved by the residents of this community for the past century. Whether you want your library to be a meeting place or a reading place, we will satisfy your need.
Without a doubt, the container may change but the content remains. While our children will grow up to bring their children to story time, they may also grow to think of the library as the place they can freely download all of their reading needs, fiction or fact, right on to the cell phone they go nowhere without.
While the method of interaction may change, the meeting will remain. Our children will continue to know the library as a physical location where they can attend cultural and community building events but they will also know us as a presence online where they can interact with one another through the technologies that develop allowing robust interactions across distances.
My vision of the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library is one in which the residents of this county feel, to a person, that they cannot live without their library and that the people working for the library do everything we can on a daily basis to engender that love of libraries in our community.
What has been the legacy of the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library over the past 100 years? For as long as the libraries throughout this county have been serving our visitors, our libraries have served as a snapshot of our communities. Whether it’s the Troke Library or Ripon, the Thornton Library or Chavez, the people who walk through our doors on a daily basis, to the tune of more than a million visitors each year, come for reasons that are their own.
Some come to the library for a sense of community. They come to meet with others and to enjoy the variety of opportunities present at the library to learn, to pass the time, and to enjoy the community experience.
Some come to the library to satisfy the human need for a good story. We are a place of stories. The library is the place that children have come for more than a century in this country to develop and share a love of reading with their friends and family.
Some come to the library to because of what we have to offer to those who can’t afford luxuries such as books or movies or access to the Internet. They come because libraries are the one place in the community where we all are equals, where we all can share with equality the offerings of our collections.
The future of the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library, I believe, will not be so dramatically different than the Library that has been so beloved by the residents of this community for the past century. Whether you want your library to be a meeting place or a reading place, we will satisfy your need.
Without a doubt, the container may change but the content remains. While our children will grow up to bring their children to story time, they may also grow to think of the library as the place they can freely download all of their reading needs, fiction or fact, right on to the cell phone they go nowhere without.
While the method of interaction may change, the meeting will remain. Our children will continue to know the library as a physical location where they can attend cultural and community building events but they will also know us as a presence online where they can interact with one another through the technologies that develop allowing robust interactions across distances.
My vision of the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library is one in which the residents of this county feel, to a person, that they cannot live without their library and that the people working for the library do everything we can on a daily basis to engender that love of libraries in our community.
Friday, June 4, 2010
The CL Newsletter Edition
Today's installment of the The Civil Librarian will be in newsletter format! Just a few quick blurbs about some things of interest going on in my world.
The Civil Librarian in AL Direct!
First, a piece I posted on my blog on May 19, "Put the Book in Their Hands (however we can)" was included in that same day's issue of AL Direct, the American Library Association's electronic newsletter. That's pretty cool! It is funny, though, because on May 20, I noticed way more traffic to my blog than I'd ever had before but I wasn't able to figure out where it was coming from because the showing up in my analytics package pointed back to some encrypted page. I just stumbled across my name in AL Direct last night while surfing around.
After writing that post, in which I suggested that libraries ought to familiarize ourselves more fully with the e-reader capability of smartphones as well as with the vast "collection" of freely available ebook titles on the web, I did some more thinking on the subject. I'm convinced that this approach would be an enhancement to the services we already provide our users but this isn't something that we can just pile on top of everything we already do.
In order to make the concept of library staff as purveyors of free, online ebooks in addition to the physical titles we own in our collections, staff need training. And we need to implement service models that encourage absolutely as many customers as possible to do for themselves in the library what they can (using self-check stations that allow for every possible transaction to be carried out there). This is important because the kind of service I'm envisioning down the road relative to face to face "reference" transactions are those that are more complex, take more time, and require a greater degree of technological facility on the part of staff than we currently expect.
For the reasons I've just outlined, I'm excited that, due to some restructuring at Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library (forced upon us by fiscal crises), our library will have a dedicated staff trainer come July! I think this is an example of some really good news coming out of difficult situations. SSJCPL is under tremendous stress right now due to all the budgetary concerns but we're going to come out of this positioned to provide even better service than we already do while, at the same time, demonstrating our commitment to the ongoing education of the staff. And, we'll also be implementing self-check stations across the county (and in sufficient numbers) that allow for the scope of transactions required to free up staff for those more complex and meaningful interactions with customers.
Possible SSJCPL Privatization?
This morning's Manteca Bulletin details the ongoing issue of potential privatization of our library. It's very encourage to see a councilmember described as "having no stomach for privatization"; here's to hoping that other influential folks feel the same. The other noteworthy part of the article is the expressed interest on the part of the Manteca government in reviving the regional library advisory board. Manteca isn't the first body to suggest this lately and I concur that such accountability and transparency on the part of the Library could only be a positive for our system as we move forward.
Google Forms!
Yes, I know that Google Forms are not new. But, admittedly, they're new to me. I have not played around much with Google Docs in general but, last weekend, as I was putting together an HTML form to collect statistics from all the branch libraries in the system, I stumbled across Google Forms. My challenge (as a non-expert in web development) was how to dump the data I collected in a form into a spreadsheet that would allow for easy use later on. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Google Forms does exactly that in about as easy a manner as imaginable!
Take a look:
Just in case you have data collection needs and aren't aware of Google Forms, this program lets you very, very easily create a form with any number of different input types (radio button, check box, likert scale, free text, etc.) that, when completed by a user, dumps that data directly into a Google Docs spreadsheet. If you want, it's very easy then to export that data into Excel but the Google spreadsheet does plenty on its own, too.
SSJCPL has not done the best job of collecting statistics in the past and, clearly, a well-conceived and consistent approach to data collection can provide a great deal of valuable decision-making information. I'm excited by this small enhancement to our administrative processes as well as by the improvements to our library that this will bring!
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