Category Archives: web 2.0

Creating a Facebook page for your business or community group

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Cafe owners with laptop 46982788_ml

When: Monday 18 July from 11:00 am – 12.15pm

Where:  City of Tea Tree Gully Library

Facebook logo It seems that everybody is on Facebook nowadays.

In addition to socialising online with your friends, Facebook can be a very effective vehicle to keep in regular contact with your business’s customers or members of your community group.

You can use your Facebook page to promote products and events, attract a new clientele and build relationships and goodwill with your existing customer or membership base.

If you are you interested in starting a Facebook Page for your business or community group, this free session will teach you the steps involved in creating a Facebook page and how to market to your audience.

Perhaps you have questions you want answered such as:

¨ Can I assign someone else to help manage my page?

¨ What is the best strategy to grow my page?

¨ Should I pay Facebook to advertise my business or community group?

Then this is the course for you!  Bookings are essential and can be made online.  Or telephone 8397 7333.

 

 

Happy Seventh birthday!

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Today the Off the Shelf Library blog turns 7.

7th

It was August 28 2008 when we ventured into the world of social media and haven’t looked back.

However a significant date is a time to look back, so let’s have a gander at some of our blog stats over the years.

  • Our most popular day was October 24th 2011 when we had almost 900 page views. Oddly enough we didn’t post anything that day!
  • The most popular post this year has been about our Dyslexia Friendly collection.
  • The most popular post of all time is about the world’s oldest Library and is one of our early posts dating from March 2009.
  • The blog views dropped noticeably in mid 2011 when we started our Facebook account, illustrating the preferred format of our online audience. However the blog is still a well used format for information and is searchable via Google, unlike other forms of social media.
  • Australia tops the list of our audience view, which is no surprise at 64%, second is the USA with about 14% of views, the other 22% is made up of a number of countries, as far away and as varied as  the UK, Trinidad and Tobago, Morocco, Columbia, Mauritius and Nepal!
  • We’ve had over 210,000 post views since we started.Happy Blog Birthday to us!

6 Years Young!

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6 birthdayToday marks the day 6 years ago that the Library ventured into Web 2.0 territory and launched our Off the Shelf Blog!

In that time we have written 818 blog posts, received 286 comments and have been visited 198,073 times!

Our busiest day was 24 October 2011 when we were visited 892 times, with the Zombies in the Library post being the most popular that day.

 

Our most popular post ever is Bob the Builder storytime, from 2009 being viewed 32,448 times, with a far off second place by Ever wondered what the oldest Library in the world is? with 14619 views.

And if you love statistics as much as I obviously do, the location of most of our visitors is of course Australia, followed by the USA, UK and with Germany coming in 4th place. Those Germans really love Bob the Builder it seems. We’ve also been visited by people in Iceland, Grenada, Guatemala and Tajikistan!

Do you have a favourite blog post from the archives?

Help Tea Tree Gully become Australia’s Favourite Library!

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Tea Tree Gully Library is excited to be a finalist in the Australian Library and Information Association’s  Favourite Library Awards for 2014!

Vote for Tea Tree Gully Library here and help us become Australia’s favourite library.

Voting closes 22 April. ALIA will announce the winners before kicking off Library and Information Week on Monday 19 May.

Australia’s Favourite Librarian

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LibrarianquestspearALIA and Love2Read are in search of Australia’s Favourite Librarian! We want you to nominate a librarian who has made a difference in your life. Nominations close on the 15 March 2013. To nominate a librarian, please visit this website in the link.

Following the nominations if you check back here, you can vote in the poll!

 

The opening line – The top 10

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The folks at Lit Reactor have come up with their top ten best opening lines of novels over on their website.  Some are expected, such as Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Stephen King’s The Gunslinger (the first line of which appears on many a T-shirt), but others came as a bit of a surprise. Tolkein’s The Hobbit came in at 5 with “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” and Ray Bradbury’s famous Sci-fi story Farenheit 451, which incidentally is required reading in any Library related university course, was the runner up!

Dickens  failed to make the cut with “It was the best of times it was the worst of times” and surely Doug Adams’ “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun” should have had a mention?

However, JK Rowling’s 7 book epic starting with: “Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much”  is probably rightfully left off.

What do you think should have made the cut? Are there any you think should be forgotten?

 

 

Bonjour from Canada

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We get some interesting and different requests here at the Library from time to time. Recently we had a request from a university student to provide a debited non-fiction book as their thesis required examples of Library markings on books. The student was from Ottawa in Canada! Postage would have been rather large for something like that so we sent him photographs of our markings for him. We hope this assists with his thesis!

Ottawa of course is the capital city of Canada, in the province of Ontario, which like its neighbouring province Quebec, has a high proportion of French speakers. It also has one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, the Canadian Parliamentary Library as you can see in the photos.

Do you “like” your library yet?

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It’s been less than a month since we went ‘live’ on Facebook and already 136 people have confessed their ‘like’ for the Tea Tree Gully Library. Certainly makes us all feel very warm and fuzzy about the work that we do and the wonderful people who make use of the services we offer.

Looking ahead, we can see two significant milestones approaching rather quickly, much more quickly than we ever could have hoped – 150 and 200 ‘likes’ of our Facebook page. We plan to celebrate these milestones by rewarding the Facebook users who become the 150th and 200th people to ‘like’ us.

So isn’t it time you ‘liked’ your library? It’s a great way to stay in touch with what’s been, what is, and what will be happening at the Library, as well as links to events and information we think may be of interest to you.

We’re on Facebook!

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The Library finally has a Facebook page!

By ‘Liking’ us you can keep up to date on all the Library happenings, events, new resources and other stuff we feel like posting. Click the button to get to our Facebook Page.

Our Off the Shelf Blog will also stream on our Facebook page so you can keep track of us here or there!

The way of the future?

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Most of you have probably heard of two-dimensional (2D) barcodes. The regular 1D barcodes, like you find on supermarket items can only record 20 characters, usually numbers that correspond to a record in a database to provide further information. 2D barcodes can record up to 7089 characters and thus can record much more information in themselves generally negating the need for an outside database to access.  They are becoming more popular as ways to describe web addresses and also to provide  brief biographies of people, businesses and services. Any smart phone has an application either built-in or readily available that can scan these barcodes. 

This is the 2D barcode for the City of Tea Tree Gully Council's website

So what happens when you turn a book into 2D barcodes?
Well it looks like this page does: This is a 2D barcode record of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Probably not the easiest way to read this book, but it’s a great demonstration of the technology.

Reading a book using a smart phone and 2D barcodes