Spread the Word!

Spread The Word — the organisation set up by The Bookseller's Association to encourage a love of reading — has set up a web site called Books To Talk About, which does what it says on the tin. Amongst the features on the site are competions and a discussion forum.

You'll also find links to the web site for this year's World Book Day on March 6th. This site will be listing events and activities for World Book Day but you don't have to wait until then to have a look at the games and links.

We've added links to titles from the Books To Talk About list on our Web Catalogue. Borrowers registered with Rochdale Library Service can reserve any of these titles by clicking on the "Request item" button and it won't cost you a penny. All you need is the barcode from your library card and your PIN number (if you don't have a PIN, or can't remember it, you can ask a member of staff to set one up for you next time you're in the library).

Christmas at the library

Opening times

All of our libraries will be closed on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. They will be closing at 4pm on Christmas Eve.

Belfield Library will also be closed on Saturday 29th December.

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Web Catalogue links:

Christmas cookery

Music for Christmas

Christmas crafts

Christmas carols

Winning Reads

We've added this year's William Hill Sports Book of the Year longlist to our Web Catalogue. This year's winner is "Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years With Brian Clough" by Duncan Hamilton.

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Elsewhere in the Web Catalogue, we've updated the Quick Reads list and Authors of the Month.

Authors of the Month

We've just updated the "Authors of the Month" feature on our Web Catalogue. This is a list of the authors featured in some of our libraries, click on any entry in the list and you'll see which of their books with got in our libraries. If you then click on any particular title you'll see which libraries have copies and whether or not any are available.

If you're a member of our libraries and have your barcode and PIN to hand you can reserve a copy to be picked up at your nearest convenient library. This is a free service to our customers. If you don't have a PIN, next time you call into the library please ask for one to be set up for you.

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Not all of our libraries run "Author of the Month" features. Some prefer to run features celebrating particular genres or subject areas. Others prefer to run features that cut across genres and collections, including both fiction and non-fiction. These last can be particularly difficult to turn into searches that can be build into the Catalogue, the Love Stories list in "Themed Reads" being one of the few examples we've done so far. (As its name suggests, it's also the easiest!) Every so often we'll include one of these wider-ranging features in the Blog o'Reading.

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!

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.

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.

The first 5,000 online reservations!

Our online services are taking off! — The 5,000 online request on the Library Services web catalgoue was made on the evening of Friday 6th July.

This service gives the customers the opportunity to browse the library catalogue on the web at home and reserve copies of titles they want, to be picked up from their local library at their convenience. In the two years since the service was launched on http//libraries.rochdale.gov.uk we have seen an average of seven requests per day, since reservation fee charges were removed in February this has increased to twenty one requests per day.

Besides providing an improvement to the service to our customers, free online requests have made a significant positive impact on some of the Library Service’s Performance Targets.

Rochdale Libraries have been working hard to bring services online to our customers over the past few years. Currently, our customers can view the library catalogue and their personal account online, renew their books, reserve items and access online resources such as Oxford Reference online.

Our Library Catalogue

Rochdale Library Service uses its web catalogue to act as a portal: as well as providing access to records on the Library Catalogue it also links to resources on the web that might be useful to our customers. Very generally speaking we do this three ways:

• Library Catalogue searches -- you choose the type of search you want, enter the search term(s) and get a result. The Library Catalogue includes books; cassettes; CDs; videos; pamphlets; local studies ephemera; newspaper index records; and web documents.


• Pre-set searches -- search routines performed as hyperlinks -- a selection of the more popular searches done on our in-library OPACs plus a few examples of the more unusual items we have in stock to give you an idea of the wide range of materials we have in our libraries.


• Links to resources elsewhere on the web -- reading resources; authors' web sites; and other useful services.

We are also using the web catalogue to provide interactive services for our customers:

• You can build and print out reading lists.
• If you are registered as a borrower in our libraries you can reserve titles online.
• You can renew your loans online.
• You can let us know if your borrower details are wrong.

All of these services are available online day or night at http://libraries.rochdale.gov.uk.

We have published four "editions" of the Library Catalogue:

The "general" Library Catalogue, including everything except newspaper index records.

"Kids' Portal" -- a version of the Library Catalogue aimed at children, with some searches confined to stock in our Children's Library collections.

The Local Studies Catalogue -- a version of the Library Catalogue aimed at people interested in local studies and geneaology with some search results confined to Local Studies collections.

The Newspaper Index -- a searchable catalogue of newspaper articles held in our Local Studies collections.

The Library Catalogue is a work in progress; at the moment we are literally adding new functions and features every other day. Please feel free to have a look around.