congratulations!!! Thanks for sharing your innovative approach.. Its really very cost effective... On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 4:06 PM, Emmanuel E (RBEI/ETI) < Emmanuel.EC@in.bosch.com> wrote:
Dear All,
Electronic media is omnipresent & omnipotent now and there is no escape from this, we can only ignore this at our own peril. Libraries have to work on a strategy to be competitive, relevant in this electronic/information age. As internet, mobiles, e-book readers, tabs have given more content in users hand. This leading to change in user's reading habits and user experience(rich content) and taking away some library users from the libraries.
While welcoming the electronic media as our future, some of us may ask ourselves a question as to what to do with our print media that we already have ? as the good number of users (Gen X) still demand printed books. And the younger generation (Gen Y) /tech savvy users prefers electronic resources. The best solution could be to balance both, the printed collection & electronic media. If so, how to achieve this with the same limited staff ?
There could be several approaches to handle this situation, but I am sharing what we tried at our corporate library. We decided to retain and continue with the print media & its related services and also to add electronic media (e-books to start with)/electronic media based information services.
This we had to do with the limited staff or with no additional staff. We had to save the time of our team from the mundane activities and utilize the saved time in handling e-resources.
We achieved this through complete library automation, in simple words: 1. We put barcode labels to the library resources 2. Installed a barcode based "User self service Kiosk" (with book drop-in box) 3. Installed "NewGenLib Touch application" on this Kiosk.
It is less expensive as each label costs less than a rupee and the approx cost of a Kiosk is less than Rs. 1.5 lacs- cost may increase based on the features that you want to have in kiosk and the "NewGenLib Touch Application" is open source( free of cost).
Now user themselves check-in & check-out the books, search OPAC on Kiosk and our team free from routine activities and is involving themselves in electronic newsletter designing, information/database search, e-books procurement and related activities. RFID based kiosk is also one option but it is expensive and not affordable for the large number of libraries in India.
If you have similar experience or better ideas on this, then please share with all (LIS community) so that we can learn from each other's best practices.
Thank you !
Regards Emmanuel
Deputy Manager K-Centre & Information Services, Robert Bosch Engineering and Business solutions Ltd, #123, Industrial Layout, Hosur Road, Koramanagala, Bangalore-560095, INDIA
Tel: 918061013229 / Mobile: 09886677094
-- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.