The Bull Run Library wiki – I found this site fun. They have an excellent resource called Elf “for anyone who wants to reduce overdues, families with children and lots of books, individuals with several library cards, anyone who requests a lot of holds. It delivers email and/or RSS alerts before items are due, email and/or RSS alerts on overdues and holds, consolidated list of yours or your family's library loans and holds, cellphone text message alerts for holds (US and Canada), and real-time checking by browser.” It’s probably costly, but perhaps it’s something our library could look into? It would certainly help a lot of our patrons - many are still complaining about their overdue fines with the "new" no stamping system! And think of the staff time it would save calling (and re-calling) patrons to tell them their holds are in, and the amount of postage saved not sending out overdue notices! Not all our patrons have computers, but their patrons must not either. It might be worth contacting them to find out how it is working for them.
BookLoversWiki is another fun site. It’s interesting to see what people are reading and find out what they think about books – as long as they don’t give away too much information. I think it might be fun for our library to have a wiki where patrons can review books.
What I don’t understand about wikis is the fact that anyone can edit them. What if some “idiot” decides to just go in and for the fun of it mess things up? Is there any way they can be traced/stopped?
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2 comments:
Hi Gwen,
LibraryElf is an Internet application that is not affiliated with any library. They have it set up to gather the information from your online library catalogue. There are dozens of libraries listed (not many Unicorn libraries though). I have set up an account to see if our library will work. I'll let you know.
Gwen,
My test run seems to be working fine. If you want to set it up for yourself go to www.libraryelf.com and follow the instructions. It's very easy now that our library is showing on the list. Please do not promote it to patrons though as users are required to supply their library card number and PIN to a third party agency and we can't be seen to be endorsing this disclosure.
Chris
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