Conference thoughts

Well, just back from a busy day at the National Library Technicians Conference. Busy, crowded, loud but strangely reassuring. The Drama Queen and I were lucky enough to go on the first day. There was a very nice Welcome to Country by a Aboriginal Elder Woman, followed by a lovely dance accompanied by a didgeridoo.
The first session we attended was the one including Loud@Pathways a youth engagement initiative. Now this was where things got good, they run a program called "Loud" that is designed to bring in the group that we all want to get the 12 - 17 year olds. Once a month they hold these nights out of library hours were they have up to 100 youth in the library for pizza, drinks, internet, music and the like. These are very successful and they are assisted by a very helpful friends group, the local policeman attends for the night, and they also have a group of regular attenders deemed 'angels', kids who also help out on the night and self-monitor the behaviour, etc a little. The funding for these nights appears not to come from the library but from the Pathways group, which is apart from the library. Pathways is a large multi-purpose community facility combining a new state-of-the art library, leisure centre, education and training centre, village-green and meeting and function spaces. They discussed treating the teenagers like normal people, but setting boundaries and having respect for the rules. They appeared to have a uniform of sorts, a t-shirt, that the library workers, friends group, and the teenage 'angels' all wore, I guess this helps identify the necessary people and probably makes the 'angels' feel more important. They allow people who aren't library members to attend, but only library members are eligible for any prize draws they may have on the nights. I think that we already do very similar things with our Runescape nights, the games consoles, etc. Perhaps the after-hours opening specifically for the targeted age groups would be a good thing to consider.
The next one was 'One desk, one stop', again stuff we are already doing. This one was talking about combining the information desk and the circ desk into one, and the pros and cons in doing this. They also discussed having no desks and roving librarians. This was discussed as happening in an academic setting, and interestingly they found that roving librarians did not work for them. Wonder if it will work at the new NAR if this is what they decide to do?? The roving librarians had a uniform to assist people in identifying them, I wonder if our staff will like that?
We then had a long spiel about how a certain library service manages their inter-library loans without paper. It was very specific to their library service, and sounded very involved and maybe a few bits of paper would've helped them.
Then we were told about how a library service in Queensland went about amalgamating their library services, what was good about this was the multiskilling that the staff ended up with, although for people resistant to change this would've been quite a difficult process to go through.
The next session involved the dynamo that is Suzette Boyd, The Connected Library: engaging users author. She was great, very customer service focused, and passionate about it. She suggested things like a getting to know your staff display, so that our patrons could begin to understand that we actually have a life outside of the library. Some gems included, 'Always under promise and then over deliver' and the always good one 'It is easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission' so take a risk she said. Not so sure about that last one. Now she also heads a staff of 11, has a patron base of approx 1400 students (if I got that right) so her staff to patron ratios are a little better than ours. She did push the idea of getting the customers input into the ideas for the library, maybe this is something we should look at more.
Then came Interior design for libraries. He has been out to CRA library before, and was very good. A lot of it we already knew, and put into practice pretty well I thought. There is always room for improvement, but the necessary funds need to be there as well.
The last session was Ipods and the library. Unfortunately this wasn't as interesting as I thought it would be, the presenter was very knowledgeable, but a bit all over the place. And it was a bit of a long ad for ipods at the start, I mean, most of knew what an ipod was, and wanted to know about the possible uses in the library area. She mentioned about libraries pre-loading audio books onto ipods and then loaning out the ipod to a patron. This would mean having access to a computer to do this, with the necessary programs and staff-time to download the material, knowledge of copyright laws, and a way to pay for the downloads at the time of downloading. The possible uses for ipods in a public library seem great, but there is a lot to sort out first. For example with such a large client base, how many ipods would be enough?? Podcasts were also discussed, and these seem like they could be very useful, but staff time to develop content and then produce the podcasts may be prohibitive.
That's probably enough from me for now,
I hope all the others lucky enough to go to the conference have a great time, I know that the Drama Queen and I did.