McCracken County Pub­lic Library: Text Live Home­work Help
Orig­i­nally uploaded by The Shifted Librarian

Bril­liant mar­ket­ing idea from the McCracken County Pub­lic Library

Allen County Pub­lic Library has a cool way to browse its “new books” sec­tion online. Super­pa­tron Ed Viel­metti first coded a “wall of books” a cou­ple of years ago, and Mike Cun­ning­ham wrote a book cover browser for the 2006 Talis Mash­ing up the Library Con­test, but this is the first pub­lic library imple­men­ta­tion I’ve seen of some­thing like this.

Books We Added to the Cat­a­log Yesterday

Per­son­ally, I’d pre­fer to go straight to the cat­a­log record when I click on a cover, but this is a great way to trans­late some of the warm fuzzies sur­round­ing phys­i­cal books in our build­ings to our online cat­a­logs. As some­one who never goes to my home library for new books because they are embar­goed from check­out for a week (even when I am hold­ing them in my hand), this would be a far eas­ier way for me to browse new books remotely with­out hav­ing to strain my eyes read­ing through three hun­dred lines of text. As a user (not a librar­ian), I’d also love to see the sum­mary of the book appear in a mouseover and have this list bro­ken out by genre. If my library offered these things and threw in NetFlix-style deliv­ery, they’d have a devoted fol­lower for life.