Coming Up!
Saturday, April 17, 2010
facebook eats our blog.
so go HERE for our fb page. And please comment! The more you tell us, the better we can serve you guys, which is the WHOLE POINT.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
New catalog interface
A couple of days ago, an upgrade was done to our online catalog. We apologize to those of you who are missing the "Look Inside" feature that allowed you to see an excerpt of a book--it's being worked on at a server level. Sadly, we (the Horicon librarians) have nothing to do with how the catalog looks or works and we suffer along with you when it goes badly. Please bear with us as we try to improve it's functionality. One thing you can do is contact us or MWFLS about what does and does not work regarding the catalog. You can click "contact us" right in the catalog interface (this link may work too.)
Monday, December 21, 2009
Survey Says!: Weeding And User Perception
It was our hypothesis that patrons would prefer the younger-looking collection to the older-looking collection. To some extent, our study confirmed that hypothesis. However, a low turnout for the Beaver Dam survey means our findings can only be considered preliminary to a more in-depth study.
For a really great slide show talking about this research, check out our SlideCast!
And thanks so much to the 26 fabulous Horicon patrons who took the time to come to the library and do our survey--your 5-10 minutes of work helped to further library science. Yay for you guys!
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
My mission, should I choose to accept it.
A couple of months ago I went to a workshop and one of the things that stuck in my head was the idea of having a mission which could be expressed in one memorizable sentence. That's been fermenting in my brain, more or less subconsciously, ever since. A week or so ago, a mission blossomed full-formed (I love when my mind does this work for me) without any effort on my part. Here it is:
IxE3=The Horicon Public Library (Inspire. Enrich. Educate. Empower.)
Now, whether we would ever consider that an official mission, or if it's just a first iteration of what could become a mission, or if I never think on this again, I still feel that my subconscious did a great job. Because this is exactly what I feel my job is about.
Some of you may scratch your head. "I thought your job was to check out books to kids" you may be thinking, "and maybe have a few programs when you have some spare cash lying around." Yeah, well, NO. Actually I've been saying for years that our mission is to bring people together with ideas, whatever the medium of the idea is (books, movies, music, Internet, programs, conversation, whatever.)
But actually the WHY of wanting to bring people together with ideas is critical--thus this mission. I want to bring people together with ideas so that they are inspired, enriched, educated and empowered. That pretty much covers it all, doesn't it? What do you think? If you could dream up a mission for the library what would it be? If you could dream up a mission for your life, what would that be? (I'm thinking mine would be the same for my life, actually).
--ms. shannon