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Aaron Schmidt recommends occasionally taking a break from "deep thinking about your library" and go on a Service Safari to other places that offer customer service. He recommends a series of questions to ask yourself about your experience as a customer. This in turn can help libraries with evaluating their own services. Other techniques for customer service self-evaluation in this article include: Make a Map: Block out paths created by library users to your services. Think Like a Child (a.k.a."5 Whys"): Figuring out root causes of problems by taking a single statement of a problem and asking "why" five times; an example is given.

A ruling was held against the "Meltwater News Service" that using articles from the Associated Press as a "clipping service" violated copyright. Meltwater is a 12 year old service that helped clients monitor how they are covered in the press.

India has shut down it's telegram service, which ran continuously from 1851 until now. I 1985 the service sent 600,000 telegrams a day and as recently as 2008 had 22,000 employees. At the shutdown it had a staff of 968 in 75 offices handling maybe 5,000 a day.

A twofold interest in this article, one that we forget we don't own or manage website content services. With older software installed on a PC we could continue as long as it was supported or useful, an online service can simply be pulled. The other is that with multiple sources and sites now that aggregate material RSS feeds may finally be declining in popularity and use.

Predicted for a long time, this may be either good or bad for libraries. Good as it may drive some traffic back to libraries, bad as it may end up shutting off the archiving of online news articles and aggregation services that allow a quick overview of what the media is talking about. If news articles continue to be archived in services libraries have access to then it would be a win-win.

Every time I look over RUSA's standards, I'm struck by how relevant they are to what we do as customer service professionals.

HP is offering a service to create magazines and other serial publications in the "cloud." What is interesting is both print and digital publishing is offered. Some of the publications listed do use an ISSN number, but it looks like it's up to the author to obtain it. Print options include worldwide shipping and direct mail, while it looks like the digital version requires a MagCloud account to read the material, although it is available as a downloadable PDF. What I find most interesting is how this service effectively replaces a traditional publisher altogether, although some of the features a publisher can offer--such as marketing and industry contacts, are missing. Digital prices to the consumer are substantially less than print, but I can't find anything about pricing to the user without signing up for an account.

In a report released today, Tuesday 6 November 2012, the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee says that some local authorities, under considerable pressure to quickly find cost savings, have drawn up plans without taking proper account of local needs for library services and the variety of options available to provide them, and are therefore in danger of failing in their statutory duty to provide a 'comprehensive and efficient' library service. Other councils, however, have found innovative and cost-effective ways of continuing to supply - and in some cases improve - their library service.

The feature article "The Future of Library Systems" has a section about Sierra and a summary comparison of new library services platforms.

Really cool article that looks at : "Espresso Book Machines can offer two kinds of services: print-on-demand of any title available through the EspressNet database (which includes Google Books, the Internet Archive, all of Ingram's partnered publishers, and more) and self-­publishing services for authors and small publishers."

I sincerely love the idea of these book machines and have ever since they've become available. I don't know why every library doesn't have one (aside from cost).

An interesting article covering some of the many problems in in developing consistency and open standards among discovery services. Notably the article mentions the Open Discovery Initiative and also talks about indexing concerns and resource coverage.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) may invite some public libraries to double as post offices, Susan Hildreth, Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, said on August 1.

I find the "Hour of Power" concept a little new-agey, but I support the ideas of not checking your email in the first hour (Help Desk'ers excepted) and "eat the frog" first thing.

I was amused by the ignoring email in one breath and recommending customer service in the other; was the author not aware of how customer service works these days? Like Christopher, I did like the "eat the frog" concept, though. I also tried a 10 minute version of the "Hour of Power" this morning (light exercise, repeating things I'm grateful for, revving self up for the day), and it has been good for my mood.

Well, he does say "most of us with jobs that don't require constant on-call awareness can trade e-mail for organization and single-focus work," so it doesn't necessarily apply to everyone. I've heard of the doing the hard tasks first concept, but never called "eat the frog"--that makes it sound a little lighter, somehow!

An article that notes the dwindling demand for general information specialists at the Free Library of Phildadelphia, which used to field 400 phone calls a day among a rotating staff of 14 librarians, and is now done to 1 librarian and 9 assistants who deal with only a handful of phone calls and more often do front line customer service and technical support work, with many information requests now handled by online chat.

Also mentioned in this article is the leak from a few months back of LinkedIn. If you have a LinkedIn account the same advice applies. Hopefully you were using a unique password for all of these services and have nothing to fear ;)

"Libraries' most devoted e-users aren't choosing using the web over coming to the library in person. Rather, they are choosing to do both."

This project is moving along...

Ok. I am seriously tired of the popular fiction/non-fiction side of ebooks. Basically Penguin is saying that they will grant libraries access to their ebooks in the way that will tick off your patrons the most, so that they will never want to use your service. Why does 3M say ok to this? Because Penguin dropped OverDrive earlier this year and this is a new way to entice people to their 3M Cloud Library product. Does MOBIUS really want to work with a company that will accept less?

Well, that's an interesting development.

An article that makes some good points about copyright, namely that the information we need to access, repair, or modify equipment we own is often copyrighted in itself. Which means by virtue of copyright we are unable to access the service manuals, error codes, or diagnostic tools we need to do anything with a technological device. The author makes a point that while works of art may be restricted by we own a performance right to it, physical objects we own outright.