Visit to Huddersfield Library

I had an interesting time at Huddersfield library yesterday, we had a packed programme hearing about their experience in customer service excellence, enquires, staff development, reading lists, marketing, the library catalogue and much more.

We also had a tour of the recently refurbished library which I felt was a very welcoming, light & colourful space with great features, such as shelf ends with pictures of student work to really help define that area of the library floor.

One of the highlights of the day was hearing Dave Patten talk about his work on the library catalogue, where he has been able to tweak, add & remove features. He has introduced some great customer focused enhancements such as

• spell checker
• serendipity search
• RSS feeds for keyword search
• borrowing suggestions
• Email alerts for search terms
• tag cloud of search terms

This constant tweaking and trying out new things on the catalogue is really refreshing to hear about and I think chimes with the type of implementation of  Prism that Talis propose.

A big thank you to the staff at the library for such a warm welcome and useful day, it provided me with lots of food for thought and things to be envious about.