Travel Light.. goes back to the future

After a summer hiatus to reassess the project following the successful pre-Christmas pilot tour of Wellington and Wairarapa, Sally is back on the road now delivering our E2 Experts training sessions for librarians around the country. These sessions began last week in the deep south and will continue throughout March and April.

The reasons for this change of approach came out of the pilot tour: Our two key learnings were: 1) the project was insufficiently resourced to rollout the facilitated roadshow format across the whole country; and 2) the need for all library staff to upskill in this area in order to deal with the influx of customers and technological questions.

So, we are now focussing on training the library staff to better deal with the influx of customers and technological questions. The libraries will then launch their own user education sessions in coming months. The one aspect that has not changed is that public librarians will continue to play a key role in demystifying digital books and audio by offering knowledgeable, practical and impartial digital services and advice.

The new ebook lending services that gave rise to Travel Light launched in November last year. In that time there have already been over 13,000 e-books checked out across the country. With ebooks available at over 70% of New Zealand public libraries to date, there have been some dramatic increases in borrowing. Since the service was launched, some areas are seeing increases in borrowing of up to 400%. Downloadable audio-books have also proved popular with nearly 2,500 checked out over the same period.

This demand was evident during roadshow events in the Wellington and Wairarapa region last December. Nearly 200 people of varying age and digital ability turned out across the region to get the e-book lowdown. So, while the project has changed and we seem to have seen the last of summer, we are still committed to helping library users navigate the ‘e’ world. Please check with your local library as to when their public sessions will be held. Where possible we will help promote publicity of these session via the blog, so stay tuned……