This 'n that

Wed I went back to the Library Supply Centre to get more detail about their Collection Development dept (go figure!) while Mollie and Carl went to the Media Authority. One of them will have to give you more detail on that. All I know is that it deals with media and the Internet.

Some general observations:
Teenagers are the same everywhere! One of the directors here kept calling them "monsters". :-)
Every place has its politics.

The National Library Board (NLB) is trying to discover ways to bring their digital content/ resources into the lives of their customers. They are really struggling with how to make libraries relevant to their customers. (Sound familiar?) They are constantly re-evaluating their processes and fine-tuning things. They are willing to try and fail so that they can ultimately succeed. They are committed to customer feedback. They are also very interested in being able to measure their success so that they can evaluate it. They offer research services (for a fee) to customers; they're very interested in packaging information for their customers.

The Singapore postal service is the library's delivery system and is so good that customers can get any book they've requested from another branch in 1-2 days. Books returned at other branches are sent back to the owning branch by the next day--AND postal staff shelve the books! They don't have anything resembling our Book Quick system; everything is done through reserving in the CARL system (charge of $1.55--Singapore dollars). I had a discussion with one of the other attendees, Diane Mayo of Information Partners, about our system and she posed a very good question. "Why do you charge for automatic holds which requires less staff time (& at a lower paid level) when book quick service requires more staff time (at higher paid level)?