Blog Every Day of June

 

Welcome to the first day of our virtual event- Blog Every Day of June. ALIA Sydney is going to participate in this wonderful blogging event for the second time. It is with great pleasure that I announce that we have guest bloggers hailing from both international and local libraries along with your ALIA Sydney committee members, who will be blogging about anything and everything related to library and information sciences to bring you a wonderful array of thought-provoking, inspiring and illuminating posts.

So I hope you can join with me in celebrating this year's Blog Every Day of June by following our blog posts, and engaging in conversation via the comments function on each blog post. You can follow our blog feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ALIASydney or you can catch each blog post on the @ALIASyd Twitter feed. Happy Blog Every Day of June!

For this first post, I thought I'd share with you some ideas I've had to do with dreaming up new ways of discovering things at your library, whether it be your public library or your research library...
For me, it's all about finding interesting books to read for pleasure.

One of the things I loved about my first library job (which was in a public library) was discovering what the library had to offer by just working on the circulation desk. As a library assistant, I did a lot of shifts on this desk, and it was great to see what was getting checked out, and more importantly for me, what was getting checked in, so I could get dibbs on some really interesting things to read for myself!

I’m pretty sure I rarely had to venture into the shelves themselves to discover something to read of my own volition, unless I was looking for something specific!

The only drawback to this vulture-like picking off of returns (come on- you know you love looking at the recently returned shelf at your local library, as much as I do!!), is that I ended up with too much stuff to read, and way too many books on my library account.

Now that I no longer work in a public library, but instead in an academic life sciences library, the kinds of books that I check in on a day-to-day basis appeal to me less in a reading-for-pleasure kind of way (although some of the titles, provide much amusement and hilarity, but that’s a blog post for another day!)

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was an app that allowed you to see in real time what was being checked back in at the library, or what had just been put back on the shelf? I envision it to be kind of like a twitter feed that you could integrate into a library’s mobile site or mobile app.

What about an app that geolocates you in the library, and pops up with recommendations that are on the shelf near you, based on your reading history?

Does anyone else have any other ideas for 'how cool would it be if...’ type apps for the library?

- Crystal Choi is the convenor of ALIA Sydney and is a Faculty Liaison Librarian at the University of Sydney Library. She tweets @crystalibrary.