Musings about librarianship: Using library 2.0 tools for technical services

Description

Technical services in libraries which encompasses back-room work like acquisitions, document delivery and cataloging are often deemed as the less 'sexy' part of librarianship.

Yet, satisfying and even delighting library patrons depends critically on having an efficient and effective technical services departments which explains why many libraries are embarking on projects to streamline and improve their services. While the biggest gains probably come from radical redesign, some gains can be gotten from minor changes. In this post I will share some ideas to do that.

Librarians have being introducing tools like Libx toolbars , opensearch plugins , bookmarklets greasemonkey scripts ( ezproxy script , amazon script ) etc but the focus always seems to be for library users.

But it occurs to me that such tools are even more effective for technical services work.

Libx for instance automatically converts any isbn on a page to a clickable link, and clicking on it will do a xisbn search (it searches not just the given isbn, but also related isbns) of the item in your catalogue. While this is no doubt useful to users, one suspects that a typical library staff assigned to say acquisitions would use this dozens if not hundreds of times in the course of his/her work for checking orders that come in. Though each use saves them probably 5 seconds (not to mention reduces errors), the ...

Original URL

http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2009/08/using-library-20-tools-for-technical.html

http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2009/08/using-library-20-tools-for-technical.html