Starting The Year in Your Library
January is here and with it a welcome opportunity to extend the resolutions we make in our personal lives – maybe a fresh hobby or health regime – into our libraries!
What can you do to make the start to 2024 a wonderful, fresh, new beginning?
Your borrowers are a great place to start – bring your records up to date and check for any students or staff who have moved on. Many library management systems, such as Accessit, support an automatic borrower synchronisation that will alert users when staff or students have left, so offering the opportunity to deal with those borrowers as well as any items they had on loan.
Check what your library management system can do and, if you don’t already have an automatic synchronisation, perhaps now is a good time to find out if and how you can get one!
You’ll have students who are still very much at your school and are waiting feverishly for their turn with your latest page-turner! Take a look at the list of overdue items that have been reserved and send an instant recall to keep those coveted titles circulating amongst the school population. Your students will thank you!
Student interaction is one cornerstone of a bustling school library, so use January as an ideal time to look for new ways to engage with your students.
If your library management system has an interactive, front-facing page – such as Accessit’s Web App – think about a refresh to attract your students. Create eye-catching news items from recently-catalogued titles, promote specific series that you know your students will love, or simply design a Happy New Year message from the library to give your borrowers something different and dazzling. Ringing the changes keeps your students returning to see what’s new.
Perhaps your system allows borrowers to post book review? If so, this is a good time to check that you’ve published all your outstanding – and suitable! – reviews so they can be read and encourage other students to pick up that book. The reviewer will enjoy seeing their hard work published for all to see.
It’s not only online interactions that might form part of your library’s resolutions, talking is always good! The next time your students are at the issues desk, check whether any overdue items are on-hand to be returned or just a give a gentle reminder to return them if not; In the Accessit issue screen for each borrower, overdue items are clearly visible, making it easy to follow up. Or keep an eye on the comments or alerts on their profile, to see whether these are still valid and up-to-date, instantly editing any as needed. Any reason to interact with your borrowers will pay dividends.
And remember – a major reason for creating new resolutions is the chance to do things differently or more efficiently. Perhaps you’ve been thinking about generifying your library’s fiction or carrying out a stocktake, and January has given you extra motivation to finally get these done. Signing up to an online forum for librarians, such as Accessit’s online forum – Community – provides the perfect opportunity to seek advice and inspiration from fellow Accessit users. Community is a collaborative space allowing Accessit customers to share ideas and meet new people with a similar passion for books, libraries and ultimately improving student literacy.
