Friday, November 30, 2012

Blog December Day 1

As a personal challenge I am going to try to blog every day of December.  This will be a challenge as my parents are coming up this week so perhaps I will miss a couple of days but hopefully I will have a bit of time in the day to do some reflection.

I don't reflect enough so blogging will force me to reflect.

To kick off, on Thursday I attended the Public Libraries NSW North East Zone meeting in Taree.  It is the last time the librarians and councillors who attend the meeting get to catch up for 2012 and the first time for some of the new councillors who were elected in September to actually meet.

I will discuss the meeting in more depth in a later blog post.

My two councillors were unable to attend so I travelled down with our new Information Services and Collections Librarian.  We decided that we would do a library road trip on our way back on Friday.

So while this post will be short and sweet - I will share with you some photos I took of some of the libraries we visited.

Our first library was Great Lakes Library - Forster branch.  I didn't take any photos here because I have visited this branch before and must upload the photos from this visit at some point.  So I will share later.

Next we went to Harrington Library.  It is 4 years old and located within the towns new shopping centre car park.

Then on to Wauchope Library.

Both libraries were small branches but I find visiting smaller branches very worth while as my branches are small and I can get some great ideas that I can implement in my libraries.

It is worth noting that when I visit libraries, I first go to the customer service desk and introduce myself and ask if I can take photos.  Most times I encounter a proud and enthusiastic library staff member that is happy to provide a tour and answer questions.

Sometimes I have visited a library where staff have not been very helpful.  I sometimes drop a note to the library manager (especially if I know them) and make them aware that my encounter was not a friendly one.

I'm sure other library staff do this too - well I would hope that if someone visited my branch libraries they would let me know if the customer service was not up to scratch.

What are your thoughts on this?  Would you contact a manager about customer service or would you let it slide?

Sorry this post is a bit rushed but Saturday mornings means chores and I have lot to do with the parents visiting this week.  More later!!