Darnhill disappointment

Disappointing news: our Big Lottery Funding bid for the creation of a new library and learning centre co-located with the clinic and a children's centre has been unsuccessful. By definition a bid process offers no guarantees of success but it still hurts to fail.

What next? Well, we still need to modernise Darnhill Library and we still want to work in partnership with other organisations in the community. We'll be keeping an eye out for opportunities to put some, at least, of the ideas into action in the future, albeit probably on a less ambitious scale. We'll also be reviewing our bid to see what we can learn from the experience that might help our chances in future.

Newspaper Index update

The Newspaper Index is a catalogue of newspaper cuttings and articles held on microfilm in our local studies collections. The Index started as a project in Middleton Library in the 1980s; in the late 1990s we started transferring the data in the old card index to the searchable database that's part of the Community Resources Module of our Dynix library management system. As part of the NOF-funded digitisation project we worked on with Local Studies a few years ago we expanded the remit of the Index to include material from across the Borough and to make a special effort to get most of the original work online. At the moment there are just over eighty thousand entries. There is still a considerable way to go (especially as more articles are being added to the Local Studies collections every week).

The Newspaper Index is available online as part of our Web Catalogue. We've just updated some of the pre-set searches on the "Themes" page. This includes a new list of locality-based searches. These are searches for articles about places around the Borough (as opposed to articles that just mention locations in their text). It's early days yet for parts of the Borough as we're still catching up with 150 years or more of material.

If you're interested in seeing some of the other material derived from the digitisation project, have a look at the Link4Life web site.

Richard & Judy

A few weeks back we were one of the library authorities contacted by somebody from "Richard & Judy" to see if we'd be interested in getting one of our children's book clubs involved in the programme's children's reading promotion. Sadly, in the end the groups we suggested weren't able to get involved but it was nice to be asked and it certainly generated a bit of interest!

Rochdale Readers children's book club has decided to "shadow" the Richard & Judy Book Club by reading and getting back together to discuss the titles in the list. If you want to try it yourself the list's on our Kids' Portal.

European Day of Languages

Today is the European Day of Languages, a Council of Europe initiative, is held annually on the 26 September to celebrate language and cultural diversity.

We hold a wide range of books and audio materials to support people of all ages learning, or brushing up on, languages, European and Asian. We also have literature in foreign languages in our non-fiction collections and also in our Around The World Collection and, of course, the Bengali and Urdu Collections.

And let's not forget British Sign Language and Fingerspelling! (October 1st is the beginning of Learn to Sign Week)

World Heart Day

World Heart Day takes place on Sunday 30 September. It began in 1999 in an effort to create awareness and educate the public about preventative measures to reduce cardiovascular disease and stroke.

Healthy living titles in our libraries include books on preventing heart disease; modifying your diet to reduce the risk of heart disease; and giving up smoking, which can be a major factor in heart disease.

Booktime for children!

Children who started school in Rochdale, Heywood and Middleton this September will shortly receive a free illustrated book - Puffin’s popular children’s classic "Funnybones" by Janet and Allan Ahlberg.

The move is part of a programme known as Booktime, which is designed to promote the pleasure of reading and encourage parents and carers to read aloud with their children. In all, 700,000 pupils across the UK will take part.

This year’s Booktime book pack will contain a copy of "Funnybones" and a guidance booklet for parents and carers on the benefits of shared reading. Every primary school and library in England will receive a free resource pack to coincide with the hand-out of the Booktime book packs to pupils by their class teacher. The packs will be delivered by the library service to schools over the next few weeks.

Cabinet member for children, schools and families, Councillor Irene Davidson said:

"If we can encourage our children to foster a love of reading then we are setting them up for a bright future. Booktime is a fantastic idea and shows that books don’t have to be serious. It doesn’t matter what sort of books you read with your child – it’s the fact that you do it at all that counts."

About Booktime

Booktime was launched in October 2006 by education and publishing company Pearson in association with independent charity Booktrust.

Last year over 270,000 children in 7,500 UK schools received a Booktime book pack with the help of library services. This year, with the support of the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF, formerly the Department for Education and Skills), every reception child in England will receive a free book pack when they start school.

In addition, at least half of all children aged four to five in the rest of the UK will receive book packs during the academic year 2007/08.

More free resources

Resources, including activity sheets, session ideas, a short Booktime film, and a podcast of the author Allan Ahlberg will also be available to download via the Booktime website.

New books

In an average month we add just over 4,000 books to our lending libary stock. These range from board books and picture books for young children to horror stories and science-fiction titles to large-print editions of prize-winning fiction and biographies. We also add a few hundred non-book items each month, including talking books; CDs; story sacks; and subtitled videos for deaf people.

You can see new stock on the Web Catalogue: items that have just arrived and are being checked and invoiced have the status "Available soon." (Items that have been ordered but not yet received have the status "On order"). Once they've arrived at the library they're checked in and have the status "In." You can reserve any lending items with any of these statuses. Please bear in mind, though, that items on order may be subject to publishers' or suppliers' delays — some titles are ordered before they are written (Harry Potter, for instance).

Many of our libraries display the titles of forthcoming new stock. We also have the online equivalent in our Web Catalogue and Kids' Portal. I update these roughly every three weeks, adding a selection of new titles from one of our libraries (a different one each time, to spread the coverage). I try to include titles from as wide a range of our collections as possible, though trying to select a few dozen titles from a couple of thousand makes this easier said than done!

Big Wild Read

Saturday saw the end of The Big Wild Read, this year's national summer reading game for children.

Ray, the Children's Services Manager, is now frantically collecting together all the "finishers' cards" so that the children's certificates can be sent out as soon as possible. Certificates will be presented to children at school or in the library, depending on the choice they made when they completed the game.

Many thanks to everybody involved. We hope it was fun.

Next year's game will probably be on a sporting theme.

Building works update

More news on the works that are going to be done in some of our libraries this autumn.

Work will be delayed slightly at Heywood Library. The delay is because of some good news: there are plans for some development in Heywood Town Centre which will definitely involve the library in some way. Details are currently being finalised so we aren't sure precisely how the library fits into the plans so we've decided to hang fire until details are available. We want to avoid going through the expense and disruption of getting work done in the short term that will have to be undone, or which becomes redundant, in a year or so's time. Once these plans have been finalised we'll be able to see what modifications, if any, we have to make to the library's refurbishment plan and, if necessary, get listed building consent for the work to be done. Realistically, the work will be beginning in late autumn rather than at the end of next month as hoped.

The work at Balderstone and Spotland libraries will be going ahead next month as planned. We will also be doing some work on the accessibility of Alkrington Library later this autumn, dates to be confirmed. At this stage we don't know whether or not we will need to close Alkrington Library while the work is going on.

An online milestone

Some time between midnight and 9 o'clock this morning we had our 200,000th online renewal on our Web Catalogue.

The Catalogue went live in June 2005 and has proved to be a useful tool for encouraging use of our services and stock. We are definitely seeing its impact in our branch libraries which seem to be benefiting by their customers' being able to browse online when the libraries are closed.

Booked up

Year 7 pupils across the borough are being given the chance to get their hands on free books as part of a national campaign to promote reading for pleasure.

Booked Up is a new national initiative designed to encourage 11 and 12 year olds to read more regularly.

It is being run at schools throughout the borough and is organised jointly by the Reading Agency and Booktrust with support from the Department for Education and Skills. All schools in the borough have signed up to the scheme whereby year 7 pupils will each get the chance to choose a free book from a list of twelve specially selected titles.

Libraries in the borough are also supporting Booked Up by making sure the 12 books are available so that youngsters can try all of them before picking their favourite.

Cabinet member for Children, Schools and Families, Councillor Irene Davidson said:

"This scheme builds on the success of Bookstart where very young children are provided with free books to enjoy. Anything that inspires children to read can only be a good thing and I am delighted that our schools and libraries are giving youngsters in the borough the opportunity to take advantage of this free offer. Copies of all of the 12 books are available at libraries across the borough and are well worth a look before deciding which one to go for."

More information on the scheme

For more details about the booked up scheme, please contact your nearest local library; alternatively, if your child is in year 7, please ask at his or her school.

Wordcount

This is a bit of fun, but such a nice coincidence it's worth recording.

Wordcount is a site that tracks the use of words in the English language, showing their frequency of use as a sort of visual barometer. A lot of the point of the site is the creation of serendipitous links between words in the list. Sometimes the effect is funny, sometimes it's rather inspiring: looking for "library" I found it nestling in the company of "lived," "fit," "progress" and "believed." If you can judge a word by the company it keeps then library's doing all right.

Show-stoppers

One of the advantages of working near the Bibliographical Services Team is that I get to see a lot of the incoming stock before it goes out to our libraries. Bibs. are the very small team who do the ordering, receipt and invoicing of all our stock as well as the chasing up, sorting out and tidying up. It can be hard work for them but the up side is their bumping into the occasional book that takes their breath away.

This week's stunner has definitely been Mummy? by Maurice Sendak. It's another of his wonderful pop-up books (which, sadly, tend not to have a long shelf-life in the children's library), the story being a toddler's search for his mummy in a haunted house suitably populated by movie monsters. It is great fun. They've been bought for three of the Storytime Collections to be used in Under-5s Story Times.

Number-crunching

One of my jobs is to keep track of the usage statistics for the Web Catalogue. They're gratifyingly high, a consoling thought given the work we've put into it. These days we're averaging twenty-two thousand searches per month and ten thousand online renewals. I've just noticed that we're approaching another milestone: some time towards the end of next week we should be hitting our 200,000th online renewal, which isn't bad given that it only went live in June 2005.

Good news with online reservations, too: up to the beginning of February we charged for reservations and we'd get a couple of hundred in a busy month. Since then they've been free. The past three months have averaged just under seven hundred. It looks like people are doing an online browse, selecting items that are on the shelves in the library, to be picked up when it's convenient: getting on for two-thirds of our reservations are being filled within a week.

In touch...

In touch... is the free quarterly newsletter that the Doorstep Library Service (formerly the Housebound Library Service) delivers to its customers to help them keep in touch with the Library Service and with each other.

In touch... includes stories, jokes, anecdotes, poems and book reviews contributed by customers of the Doorstep Library Service. It also includes anecdotes and autobiographical notes contributed by the staff in the Special Services Team.

Summer's edition, which is just being delivered, includes:

• an admission by Les the Mobile Library Driver/Assistant that he enjoys going to Old Trafford to watch football;
• some poems celebrating being of a certain age;
• a reader's childhood memories; and
• a version of Sharon's narrowboat holiday that somehow doesn't mention Bailey's Irish Cream!

Autumn's issue will include more staff biographies; Milnrow ladies' poetry; book reviews; and Margaret's Borneo adventure.

For more information about the Doorstep Service for housebound people, please contact:

Doorstep Library Service
Wheatsheaf Library
Baillie Street, Rochdale OL16 1JZ
Tel: 01706 924917

Picture Book Parade

We have thousands of picture books for younger readers in our libraries. The story books include many favourite characters including Postman Pat, Kipper and Maisie. There are also lots of books telling stories in rhyme, which are great fun for reading and sharing (there's some brilliant bedtime reading amongst them!) And many of the books are introductions to the world around us, involving colours and shapes, animals and machines, and people of course!

We've listed a few of these titles in our Picture Book Parade. If you want to find more picture books, follow the links in the authors' names or the series. And you can see far, far more in any of our libraries!

Building works

Services at some of our libraries will be disrupted this autumn due to essential building work:

Balderstone Library will be closed for two weeks from Monday 1st October 2007 while toilet facilities for disabled people are being installed. This will require the temporary removal of the counter and the relocation of the Library Online PCs elsewhere within the building. The library will re-open for business on Monday 15th October.

Heywood Library will be closed from Monday 15th October 2007 for major building work following on from the repairs to the roof earlier this year. The library will re-open in the early Spring of 2008.

We apologise for the inconvenience this will cause to our customers. Please note that all our customers are welcome in any of our libraries. If you've joined any of our libraries your card will let you borrow or reserve items anywhere in the Borough.

Making our stock work harder

We have the best part of a third of a million items in our libraries, most of which are available for loan by our borrowers. We try to have a wide range of stock available for loan in each library but:

• There's only so much you can physically fit on the shelves;
• We couldn't afford to buy a copy of everything for every library;
• We couldn't justify buying a copy of everything for everywhere — there are limited markets for some authors and subjects and there's no point in buying books just to have them sitting stagnant on the shelves forever.

Part of the traditional management of stock in our libraries involves the manual transfer of stock between libraries — if a book's in a good state but seems to have exhausted the local market we move it on to another library. This is a good way of trying to make stock earn its keep but it's a time-consuming business. Over the past few years we've been looking at developing new systems to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our stock management.

A few years ago we launched the first of our Featured Collections: small circulating collections which will periodically move from library to library. The aims of the collections are:

• To increase the variety of stock available at branch libraries;
• To introduce more authors and genres to customers at branch libraries; and
• To create the opportunity to experiment and test the market for new ideas in our libraries.

The collections proved to be remarkably successful:

• The collections' rotating between libraries stopped them getting stale: they were moved on before customers got bored with them.
• Customers at small branch libraries got to see specialist non-fiction, new authors and genre fiction that were usually the preserve of the main libraries.
• We could tie featured collections in to events and activities in the libraries.
• The stock issued well, sometimes surprisingly well at some libraries.
• Anecdotal evidence suggests that the "otherness" of the featured collections may have highlighted the new stock that was being bought anyway and encouraged more use of "ordinary" collections at some libraries.

This experience encouraged us to invest in an automatic stock rotation system for our library management system. This lets us pre-programme a sequence of transfers into each item so that it's moved on periodically. Depending on the type of item, after so many months or issues staff the system tells staff where it needs to go next. New large print stock was the first to be subject to the new system and nearly a year on we're seeing the effects on the issue figures — between 25% and 116% more than this time last year. We're steadily increasing the range of materials that are being added to this system (colleagues elsewhere who had pioneered this system advised us to avoid the problems they'd had by not trying to do a 'big bang' implementation). Items being moved on by the stock rotation system show the status "Transfer/Rotation" on the Catalogue.

The third development involved the possibilities provided by the Web Catalogue and a change in charging policy for reservations. Having all of our libraries on the one circulation system with customers being able to see all the stock in all our libraries on the Catalogue means that for all intents and purposes every library has access to a stock of a third of a million items. They may not all be on view on the shelves but they're available in the same way the the reserve stock we hold backstage is available. If we let borrowers at Alkrington Library, say, reserve a book on the shelves at Littleborough Library free of charge then there wouldn't necessarily be any need to have a copy of that book at Alkrington. This means that instead of buying five copies of a book on papercrafts we could buy single copies of five books on papercrafts, with a good chance that somebody borrowing one of them might want to borrow one of the others.

Council gave permission for us to remove the reservation fee on items in stock or on order at the beginning of the year. Since free reservations were launched on 3rd February we have seen a three-fold increase in the number of online reservations and smaller but, still significant, increases in the number of in-library reservations. We're starting to see some impact in our statistics: issue figures are generally looking healthy, with some collections showing significant increases in use at some libraries. It's also apparent that some of our customers are using our libraries more than usual: they're browsing the Catalogue at home, reserving the items they want to borrow and nipping in to pick them up when it's convenient. This is also very obvious from our reservation statistics: two-thirds of our reservations are filled within a few days of their being placed.

Progress so far is encouraging but there is still much more to do. We've established that a policy involving featured collections and automatic rotation helps to keep the stock refreshed and allows a broader range of materials to be on display for loan in our libraries. We've also established that letting our customers browse and choose online and pick up from their local library at their convenience encourages more use of our stock and probably helps address some of the need of time-poor customers. We know we need to do more work on the marketing and promotion of our stock; we're currently working on a marketing plan as part of the Library Service's overall service planning for the next three years.

Audio items in our libraries

We're often asked why we don't have the current Top 10 available in our libraries' audio collections. Unfortunately, we can't: one of the conditions of the national agreement made between public libraries and the British Phonographic Industry is that we have to hold back new releases for three months so that it's less likely that library stock would be the source of pirate copies. This means that we're nearly always making material available some weeks after they've been in the charts.

The month that we're making a title available in our libraries can be seen in the "Status" column in the Web Catalogue record. Items that will be made available this month have the status "September release."

Titles you can look forward to this month include:

• Bon Jovi: Lost Highway
• Mutya Buena: Real Girl
• Kelly Clarkson: My December
• Enrique Inglesias: Insomniac
• Marilyn Manson: Eat Me, Drink Me
• Oasis: Don't Believe the Truth
• Queens of the Stone Age: Era Vulgaris
• Rihanna: Good Girl Gone Bad
• The Travelling Wilburys: The Travelling Wilburys Collection
• The White Stripes: Icky Thump
• Club Nights: Live It
• Clubbers Guide Summer 2007
• Over The Rainbow
• Twice As Nice Urban Anthems

We currently charge 50p for each three-week loan of audio items (25p for Passport to Leisure holders).

Homework Help

Did you know that we provide free access to a wide range of online reference books and encyclopædias to our readers? All of the online references we subscribe to are available on the Library Online terminals in our libraries.

Some of them are available to you in the convenience of your own home. Your library barcode can provide free access to online resources like:

• The Encyclopedia Britannica
• Grove Art Online
• Grove Music Online
• The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• The Oxford English Dictionary
• Oxford Reference Online.

Links to the services that are available, newsletters, quizzes and users' guides are available on the Web Catalogue.

We also have a wealth of books and other materials to support children's learning and homework. The "Homework Help" section of the Kids' Portal provides subject-based booklists and suggestions for useful websites.

Quick Reads

"Quick Reads" is a national initiative providing fast-paced, bite-sized books by bestselling writers for emergent readers, anyone who had lost the reading habit or simply wanted a short, fast read.

We have Quick Reads titles in all our libraries.

Not sure what to read next? Have a go at The Quick Reads Quiz.

Booked up

Booked Up is the new national programme which encourages Year 7 children to read for pleasure. This autumn every 11-year-old in England will be able to choose a free book from a list of 12 specially selected titles.

The Reading Agency is working in partnership with Booktrust to promote the Booked Up programme to public and school library services in England. The aim is to provide children with the opportunity to read all the Booked Up titles for free at their public library; to encourage and promote opportunities for joined-up working between public libraries, school library services and schools and to give positive library messages through the programme and its website.

To support this programme we've added more copies of the Booked Up titles to our library stock. You can check the Library Catalogue to see whether or not a copy's available at your local library.

Going organic!

Today marks the start of Organic Fortnight, the Soil Association's celebration of organic food and farming. The objective of Organic Fortnight is to encourage those new to organic food and drink to try it and to encourage gardeners to grow their own organic produce.

If you're interested in growing and/or eating organic food we have books in our non-fiction collections which might be helpful.

• Organic food
• Organic gardening