Just a quick fun idea, from our Marketing department! They wanted a way to show our customers how many people had signed up for our summer reading programs. They also wanted to show weekly growth, and wanted a way to nudge people who were “on the fence” to sign up.
Here’s what we ended up doing – they created an image displaying our summer reading signup numbers. It also lists the Summerfest URL where people can go to sign up (and get more info – summerfest.tscpl.org).
My Digital Services department has turned that image into the public PC desktop background image on all our public PCs (about 187 of them). We’ll change the image out every week, to show growth. It’s a simple solution – no programming required – we just update the image file once a week, and it changes on all 187 PCs.
Will it help convince some of our computer-using customers to sign themselves or their kids up for Summer reading? Not sure. Is it a simple and fun solution that has Marketing and IT working together? Definitely!
Jim Peterson says
What a great idea! Once this was implemented, even a small library like mine could easily do this. I’ve got a slideshow-type screensaver planned for new releases as well, and this type of graphic could easily be included.
Patrick McVicker says
Just curious, what software are you guys using to lock down your public internet computers? Â Deep Freeze or another similar system imaging tool?
davidleeking says
Deepfreeze and good public profile settings, mainly.
Gifty Chung says
What an idea!
seriously..
Very easy and managed way of making plans for libraries!
alexzealand says
My staff loved this idea, but we didn’t want to hijack all the catalogs, so we put it on our homepage instead: http://library.arlingtonva.us The widget updates, so each time you visit the home page you see the latest stats.
This is a great way to let Library users understand just how big the summer reading program is, and why we spend so much time and effort talking about it.
Anna says
Thank you so much for the idea, David! I made a post based on it on our program blog (Bibliomist) http://bibliote4nyj-autoban.blogspot.com/2011/06/blog-post_23.html Hopefully our librarians will make use of it. Greetings from Ukraine!
Julie Jurgens says
I stole this idea for my library. We have a television in our lobby that essentially shows a powerpoint slide show, so I made a pie chart showing our number of summer readers (teen, kid, adult). Thanks for the inspiration!
davidleeking says
Very cool!