BCLA Conference Report

I attended three sessions at the BCLA Conference on Friday, Apr 17.

Living Library

Two speakers, Hazel Postmas from Douglas College and Rhian Piprell from Coquitlam Public Library, spoke about their implementation of this program. The Living Library uses people (who are called "books") who have chosen to be a public representative of a certain group, and users can "check them out" to have a conversation with them and ask questions. The library finds people in their community who are willing to be "books", and typically is the coordinator of an event/events where several "books" gather to be available to be "checked out" in half-hour increments. Coquitlam and Douglas held such an event at their local Chapters. Their mayor came and was a very popular "book". The program's aim is to promote tolerance and understanding in the community. Go to: www.living-library.org for more information. From the website, I found that Calgary Public Library recently launched this program and theirs is the most ambititous for a single local organizer in the nine year history of the Living Library.

Seeking Synchronicity – Viewpoints of VRS Users, Librarians, and Non-Users on Live Chat Reference
This session was an overview of a survey undertaken by Marie Radford, Associate professor at Rutgers in New Jersey. Although survey results can be rather dry, Radford was an entertaining speaker and her talk highlighted some interesting viewpoints of users (and non-users) of live chat reference services (eg Askaway). For example, users of live chat reference, although they liked the convenience and hours of live chat, also said they were intimidated by "face-to-face" interaction with a librarian. However, non-users of live chat said they preferred the personal contact of face-to-face and would even go so far as to seek out a specific librarian! Another rather astonishing result was that the majority of both users and non-users of chat reference had never used (and were unaware of) phone reference and/or email reference. Radford recommended that libraries market the range of reference options to users, and when promoting live chat, emphasize convenience, safety (ie reference chat is not a chat room) and personal service.
For more information on the survey, go to: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/synchronicity/reports/20080626-final.pdf

The Google Toolkit
Presenters: Kay Cahill and Michele Pye, both from VPL. This session took a look at some Google Tools, of which there are quite a number. One example was Google Trends, which allows the user to see, in a graph form, how often a specific term (input by the user) has been searched on Google. From these results, users can see when topics were in the news, or results can be used for market research. Cahill and Pye also went over such Google tools as: dictionary, calculator, currency conversion, stock ticker, weather, flight data, parcel tracker and Google 411 (business phone directory) All of the features they presented can be found here I very much enjoyed attending the conference and thank NVDPL for the financial support.