Whyalla joins the party

Whyalla joined the One Card consortium today.  With a population of over 21,000 people Whyalla is South Australia's 2nd largest rural city.  Participation in the consortium complements the city's nearly new (opened in 2012) purpose-built public library in providing a modern, connected library service for the community.

Library staff have designed their Enterprise site to reflect the Council's website - in terms of colours & font etc.  And as the council site contains lots of information about library services Enterprise links directly to this existing information.

As an aside it is interesting to see that the Library now runs a Council customer service counter from 12 - 5 Monday to Friday.  At this service point residents can undertake a number of council related transactions.

Catherine McIntyre - library manager at Whyalla has sent us through a couple of photos from their very busy day. I love the library staff members' T-shirts!




Coral Dyason, Catherine McIntyre, Jim Pollock (City of Whyalla Mayor),

Janet Ashman & Migelle Hiscock (Whyalla Council Group Manager Community)



Karen Gruenwald “on loan” from Port Augusta Library, Naomi Haldane & Lynette Steele

 

We've managed to get Benedict the knitted boyfriend amongst the cupcakes,
however the photo of him flying - attached to a One Card balloon is still misbehaving

 

Stats aren't everything, but...

With Port Lincoln joining the consortium last week we've passed the 1M borrower mark.  The exact number is 1,000,690. 
 
Of course we have quite a few borrowers in the system with more than 1 card, so they're being counted twice or more in this number. It will be interesting to see what the figure will be when the borrower numbers peak before we do some serious de-duplication of customer cards.  Our eventual goal will be 1 borrowing card per person & then we'll have an accurate State-wide count of borrowers - for the 1st time ever. It will be interesting to compare this final number to previous reports of borrower numbers.
 
Our "item numbers" are accurate & they stand at 3,741,425 items on the database to-date. This is likely to rise to be just over 3.8M items.

Port Lincoln joins the consortium

One of South Australia's larger rural cities - Port Lincoln (population 14,000) - joined the One Card consortium, last week, going live on Thursday.  The library celebrated with a morning tea for the community, free book prizes and staff on hand to assist customers using the new system.  They also had the mayor along who made a speech for the event.

The library took the opportunity to issue new library cards, which contains a beautiful image of the bay that Pt Lincoln is situated on.  The photo was taken by the late Councillor and professional photographer Jill Parker. This is the image which is now on the library's Enterprise site - see the link below.

The local newspaper the Port Lincoln Times attended the event & captured a few photos, some of which is shown below.  The Port Lincoln Times has now published a great article about the library joining the One Card network

The Port Lincoln library is based at the site of the local TAFE College. While it was a joint use library for many years, the library has fairly recently changed its arrangements so that it is a public library which supports all in the community but is no longer formally providing services to TAFE. 

The library's Enterprise site uses the Council's blue & yellow colour scheme to good effect and links to so many relevant services, databases and libraries. It also links back to the council's website where the library's e-newsletter is housed.

The local newspaper photographer Laura Cook lining up (from the right)
Library Manager, Louise Mrdjen Mayor Bruce Green,
Deputy CEO Katrina Allen & Manager Community Development Janet Grocke

Sue Heath joins Louise & Bruce to cut the cake



Library staff Helen and Sue showing the new library cards

Most libraries are really fortunate to have dedicated volunteers &
one of Pt Lincoln's great supporters Janet was on hand for the launch.

One Card Project Milestone

Port Lincoln has joined the consortium this morning.  I will post something about their project soon.  However I thought I'd comment on our progress with the whole project to date, as this "go live" is a bit of a milestone for the project team. 

We started off needing to do 77 database conversions, and with Port Lincoln going live we now have 19 databases left to convert.  While the databases that we've had to work with have been of different size and complexity, on a measure of database conversions we're now 75% of the way through the project.  From my perspective this is a remarkable achievement in less than 2 years & with a very small & hard-working project team. 

However on the basis of population covered or councils using the system the figures are even higher. 

We only have 12 of 68 councils to work with, and for some of them like Naracoorte Lucindale we have already done some of their libraries.  So this metric puts us at over 85% of councils on the system.

And from a population covered perspective we've got well over 95% of the State covered - which is perhaps the best measure of progress from a library & customer perspective.

While it is not obvious from a "who is live" perspective it is also worth noting that libraries who are due to go live right through until May have received their training & are progressing towards their go live date. 

If you're looking for the list of who goes live when you can see it here.

Mallala goes live

Apologies to Mallala for the slightly late post regarding your "go live".  You scheduled date was yesterday, but all systems were go on Tuesday.  However I've had my head stuck in Libraries Board reports & other things & missed the opportunity to post about this.

While Mallala is live now, I know that they're holding off on doing their formal launch until the 25th.  I'm looking forward to getting to the event.

In the meantime some may want to check out Mallala's Enterprise site here. It includes a nice welcome message & some succinct instructions about how to use the site.  And they've put up a picture of their new library card, which looks great, along with a bunch of links and the opening hours of their main library and two depots.

I'm also interested to see that they've exploited the option to add more pages onto Enterprise to hold other content.  The small white box at the top left has links to news & events and to Services.  This is a great way to use the Enterprise technology to provide a more comprehensive library "web site."
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Update: 25 March
As I mentioned above Mallala decided to wait a few weeks after their "go live" before having a bit of a celebration.  A few of us from PLS went to Mallala on Tuesday afternoon to join the staff, CEO, Mayor, volunteers & community members for a really nice celebration - along with a great cake from the local bakery and champagne.  Below are a few "snaps" taken at the event.

Mayor Richard Kennington making the "opening" speech

Leeanne from PLS along with library manager Anne,
and library staff members Amanda & Di

The cake - with a representation of the rural scene
which is on the library's borrower card