Since moving across to Koha in September last year the Operational Team at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals have been trying to promote the library catalogue to make users aware of the huge amount of books they now have access to through this consortia.
When we joined Koha we did the usual posters up in the libraries, information was sent to those on our mailing lists and we added it to our monthly newsletter ‘Library News’ as well as telling new joiners at the desk and through our various inductions. We then thought of another idea which could quickly show people already browsing the shelves that they had more choice. We decided to create QR codes that were strategically positioned amongst the books.
We searched Koha for specific clinical subjects such as Ophthalmology or Cardiology and used the link to create a QR code which would take people to books on that subject on Koha, so showing users that as well as the books in front of them they have more choice through the catalogue. For some areas that were bigger such as Nursing, we separated out the different sections, so we have renal nursing for example or drug calculations as a QR code. We did the same for our leadership and management sections which are shown in the picture below. We also decided to provide another QR code which shows a short video we made on how to reserve books.
We initially looked at buying some stand out shelf dividers for the job but decided that was too expensive so we looked at how we could make our own. Sarah Lawrenson, one of our library assistants came up with the design and Niamh Tierney, another of our library assistants, manged to get the information lined up on both sides of the paper so all our ‘wibblies’ (which is our name for them!) are double sided with the same information on each side. To make them more durable we laminated them and managed to get 2 on a page so we didn’t have any wasted paper!
The ’wibblies’ have only been on the shelves for a few weeks so we aren’t able to measure their success at the moment but hopefully we will start to see an increase in books from other Koha libraries being posted to us! This is the goal anyway.
If would be good to hear from other Koha libraries about their promotional activities for the new catalogue and whether they have been successful, as it would be great to share these ideas!
Sarah Woodhall
Library Operations Manager
Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
