Library or Google ?

A reader walks towards the Library , but stops at the gate and ask himself or herself "To be, to Not to be ? ...." similar to what Prince Hamlet said in the Shakespeare play 'Hamlet' .

But only with a little modern touch ....

"Library or Google ?"

How many times a librarian himself / herself visits Google first rather than browsing through their own collection ? I asked this question to my audiance during a seminar recently and almost 60 % hands went up !

I would like to conduct a small survey on this. So any Librarian reading this , if could comment on this I will be really glad.

Because I feel we have reached a state of "If you can't fight them , Join them " kind of a situation with Google today .....

Cataloguing Raghu Rai way !

This Saturday I attended a one day seminar on Photography at PGI Mumbai. Pune to Mumbai is cool three hours these days and hence I could reach at Worli at 10.30 even after taking a fairly large break at Khopoli for breakfast. Incidentally you get some amazing Wada Pav & Misal and stuff there.

While I was walking in the hall , I heard Atul Kasabekar (Kingfisher calendar fame - now everyone remembers him :) ) introducing Tarun Khaiwal ! Both of them are such legendary photographers . Tarun Khaiwal showed some amazing pictures and above all talked about his philosophy about life - which was really amazing.

Post lunch session was Raghu Rai ! He started with a very interesting thought.

"Genius is not borne but they die everyday , only to be born again the next day with a quest to become a genius again !"

He is writting a book on Musical maestros of the country and he is touring with them for quite some time now and this is what he is has inferred out of his interactions with them !

I really felt funny when he said "Genius are nothing different than people like you & me !" I think it was really the height of down to earthness. Someone like Raghu Rai talking about you & me .

Then when he started with his photographs , he showed the first photograph he had clicked - BTW it is a photograph of a donkey , close up or portrait to be precise ! And he could narrate the entire bibliographic information about the photograph. And then those famous photographs of Mango plantation , Mother Feeding the kid , Chaos at Chawari Bazar and so on and so forth. But his cataloguing was so perfect that he could perfectly tell the year , place , description and his special comments ! He is almost 67 now and even at this age he can very clearly remember everything about every photograph he has taken - now that is what is called passion . I remember those old Librarians before computer days , who could tell you about a specific book even without going though the catalogue cards .

Any way now we have the computers at our disposal but the net result is we have lost so many of those soft skills that we possessed earlier.

Anyway "Hats off to you Mr. Raghu Rai - you are not just a great photographer but also an equally good Librarian".

Data Porting Blues

These days you hardly come across any library which is 100 % manual . Because the PC penetration has increased to such a level that usually you will rarely find a Library without a PC. I do not want to name one Library I know which is without a PC even today but do not worry , you will find more about this library on "Ripley's Believe it or Not" very soon.

Usually many Library automation happen like this ....

Just because you have a PC in the Library and since your friend gives a pirated (usually) Microsoft Office ( or if you are smart , you are using Star Office) - the first step is entering the data about your books in EXCEL ! Normally when you reach around 1000 records , either the worksheet gets corrupted or will not open for some strange reason and then one more word gets added to your vocabulary called "Backup" . Unfortunately Backup is something which you learn only after a crash !

So again it will be the data entry in EXCEL or few lucky ones will get hold of MS ACCESS (or if it was around 10 years back then it would be Foxpro). It is data entry in a flat file with Name , Author , Classification No etc.

Around this time you discover that there are few FREE Library Software's available on the net including the UNESCO packages. So now you are in phase III but soon realize that your data is almost 10000 records are in Access and 3000 in Excel & may be 200 in MS Word !

Incidentally Phase III is usually the most difficult one because in this phase everything works only when the expert is around and when the expert goes away , it is more like an art film by Ritwik Ghatak- till the end you try to figure out who is the real villain and who is the hero.

By this time usually you are convinced that this is the time to go for the commercially available softwares. Suddenly you have some nice interfaces , help , user manuals etc. But now you realize that your data in split into four different formats . Now you have some data in the FREE application which you downloaded and used.

And then starts the never ending exercise called "Data Porting" ! Probably Ekata Kapoor's TV serials are shorter than the Data Porting episodes.

Problem with data porting is - you always realize the mistakes in data porting only after you sign on a document which says that the data was ported properly ! Now, Correcting the data which was wrongly ported , usually causes more harm than any help. So you have "publisher" in place of "pages" and viceversa !

So the moral of the story is ....

1. Always have a long term plan about the automation of your library. Never start just because you have a PC is at your disposal.
2. Try to stick to one format for data storage to the extent possible. Having data in multiple format is a major problem when it comes to data porting.
3. Data porting is a very important exercise and hence plan properly.
4. Check Check & Check again after the data is ported.

And most importantly make sure that the application you use allows you to port the data in a MARC record.

Let me talk about the MARC for few of my further posts !

Barcode Zindabad !

Before I start let me first clarify that I am a big fan of RFID and I really love that technology but because of the kind of incidences I am going to describe now , RFID technology gets a bad name. In fact this is an attempt to learn from the past mistakes ...

Well it was sometime in May , I was in Hyderabad attending the Retail conference. There was a very impressive presentation by ITC about the RFID implementation for their brand "Wills Apparels " . In fact they had some real innovative ideas like an enclosed RFID reader for reading the loads of garments coming in etc. They showed a very impressive film about how they went about selecting a special tag which were UHF type and could read from a long distances .... So in short a very rosy picture of a perfect RFID implementation.

This Sunday as usual my wife saw that magic world in the news paper called "SALE" and that too this time it was 50 % at "Wills Apparels" , as usual there was small catch - only if you buy above Rs. 7000 ! After lot of time at the shop and overcoming our guilt by promising ourselves not to buy anything else in the next month , I came to the cash counter. I was waiting to see an amazing action where in the guy at the counter would pick up all the apparels just cross them on the RFID reader and there we would be ready with our bills ....

But

yes a big BUT , I heard that beep which I was never expecting and red beam of light moving like a chameleon eating an insect. The red beam grabbed the barcode and I had nothing else to say ....
"Barcode Zindabad !" (Long live barcode) .

I tried chatting with those guys at the counter "Kuch problem hai , RFID tag se ? " and the usual story "Woh chalata nahi hai" .

My goodness, the bundles of crores of notes that must have gone down the drain started dancing around me. And believe me I was more dejected than the day I saw our politicians dumping those bundles of notes in the assembly during the "No Confidence Motion" .

WOW Effect ...

I am reading a book by Kishor Biyani called "It happened in India !" , it is about the success of Future group who owns Big Bazaar , Pantaloon , Central and many such malls in the country. It is a great book and really a big example of how to turn problems in opportunities.

I always feel Retail is very similar to a functioning of a Library. Think about it. You have to walk in to a retail shop to make a purchase , same is the case with a library. Retail has stacks of items , here we have stacks of books. Retail has barcodes , so do we. Retail has a check out counters and so does the libraries. And security is a major concern for them and same here in the Library. Only difference is in a Retail shop you buy something and in a library you rent it for sometime so there is Return section.

Now Retail has turned into a big science over the year , probably because of the money involved in it and I am sure Libraries can learn a lot from their experience and follow some of the best industry practices.

These days everyone loves to talk about , how the number of visitors to the libraries has reduced and how people prefer to try other ways of sourcing information rather than coming to the libraries and so on and so forth ..... I think it is necessary for us to pick one amazing concept from retail which is called "WOW Effect".

I had been to Mall this Sunday - there was so much traffic on the road and besides it was raining on the way and it was really torture going to a mall on a Sunday morning but that is what the marriages are for ....

But when I walked in - there was pleasant air conditioning - not too cold to freeze me in Monsoon. And then was the perfumes section at the entrance with some amazing fragrance. Beautiful girls all decked up in the cosmetic section .... "WOW" ----- do you know something this WOW is created artificially because of some great research over the years. Because in retail you make your first purchase after settling in time of 7 minutes and till then you need a place which relaxes you and gets you in the mood to buy. That is why the perfumes and cosmetic section is always near the entrance !

Now think of a our Libraries - forget about the WOW , I have seen many libraries who scare you so much as you enter. Rather than talking about what they can enjoy in the library all they talk about is "What you can not do in the library" "Fines for every small wrong thing" ....

I think let us think of the WOW effect that we can give to our users (our internal customers) in the Library and then I do not think we will ever have to worry about less footfalls to the library ...

Being Different

Last two weeks I was in United States for a business visit. Americans are generally very friendly and jovial guys. They have an airlines called as South West. South West Airlines is a budget airline but they love doing things in their own way. Eg. this is the only airlines I have seen where the air hostesses wear shorts and sport shoes !

They have a very funny way of making announcements eg. "This is a No Smoking and No Complaint flight - so please bear with us" or "For take off , the lights in the cabins will be dimmed. Now if you are scared of dark or suspect your fellow passenger to be naughty then you may press the switch on the top. This will turn on the lights. But pressing the Air hostess button will not turn On the air hostesses" or "We are heading for Salt Lake City. If you do not wish to land in Huston Texas then please switch off your mobile phones"

It is really very enjoyable that our usual "Kursi ko peti iss tarahase kholi jati hai ...."

I am sure in South West Airlines Library they might have put a notice like this ...

"In our other branch which is now under Taliban Control we normally chop one finger per day for the delayed books , here we charge 1 dollar. However for those patrons who get habituated for delaying books , we would like to offer a free membership of our Taliban Library"

Why I need RFID for my library ?

One of the Libraries I know has invested more than 2 Crores on RFID almost four years back and the status as of now is , their circulation system is still manual. There is a beautiful RFID antenna at the gate but it is switched off ! This being a public institute (to be precise a University) even there were articles in the news paper about this kind of colossal waste of money but after a few articles nothing has changed much.

Another incidence was a tender by a company who wanted to invest almost 1 Crore for implementing RFID in a Library which was having not more than 1000 books !

I think it is a national loss - and that is the reason , it is very essential that a Librarian should ask himself or herself a question , why am I going for a RFID system ?

If your objective is theft control , then you will have to decide what is the tolerance level you can accept in detecting the stolen book ? Because if you want 100 % accuracy then you may have to think of a UHF solution which can be very expensive than the HF solution which every vendor will suggest you. Before that find out a report about how many books really went missing last year - now unless you do not stack rare books , you will observe that usually the cost of the missing books for last five may be less than the RFID system ! Of course if you stack rare books then this logic will not work. But Theft Control can not be the only purpose for going for a RFID solution.

Next thing that you might want to consider is , how many books your patrons take in one go. If they are not taking more than 2 books every time , the time difference between RFID and Barcode is not going to be great.

So unless you do not have a very large circulation department with people taking multiple books in one go etc. RFID really does not become a very efficient system.

Now there are many Librarians I know who want to have a RFID solution because they just want to tell everyone in a conference that "We have RFID" ..... It is just a matter of pride ,

Well for them there is a very simple solution than investing such huge money.

Call your local carpenter and ask him to make a gate antenna which looks like an RFID antenna (you can get hundreds of picture on the net). Put couple of red lights and do not even connect to an electric point.

Make two rectangular boxes and put some white mica on it and tell you circulation guys to keep the books on that every time they issue the books .

No one in the world will ever think that you really do not have a RFID system !