Auckland Libraries Fit for the Future programme is now ‘live’, meaning improved services to meet our changing customer needs.
Mirla Edmundson, General Manager Libraries and Information, reflects on the eight-month programme to ensure that local and regional library services keep up with global digital trends and changes in customer usage patterns.
“Many aspects of our service will remain the same, such as local library hours of opening, but customers can expect to see more staff in the libraries at the busy times, like weekends when many families visit.
“Many of our librarians will still be working in libraries in the same local area as before, but others have taken roles much closer to home or roles that provide an opportunity to develop and share their skills.
Mirla says local library teams are now working closely together to plan and develop programmes and services that reflect local communities and their individual needs.
“In the Whau area, there are now more opportunities for Mandarin language Story Times with staff sharing their expertise.
“In the south, in the Manurewa and Papakura local board areas, the new team is focusing on profiling our Pasific collections for customers,” she says.
Mirla emphasises that no libraries will close as a result of Fit for the Future and no services are being cut.
More access to library collections online
“One thing our customers continually ask is, ‘Can I access that online?’" says Mirla.
“When we say digital, most people think e-books. In fact, we have e-audio books and more than 100 digital databases that provide access to the world’s information and historical items as well as e-reading.
“More people than ever expect to jump online and call up information, photographs and documents – at speed and in high quality.
“Our reshaped digital team now has more capacity and capability to take the millions – yes, millions – of physical items stored in our collections and make them more easily accessible,” says Mirla.
The Digitised Content and Strategy team has brought skills and passion from other parts of the libraries network to focus on digital production of Auckland’s heritage content.
Digital production specialist Dan Liu has been in his new role for just a few weeks but says he’s delighted with the feedback he’s getting from research enthusiasts who use the library service.
“My job is not to stop libraries owning physical copies of items, but to make inaccessible items accessible to the whole of Auckland and New Zealand.
“DigitalNZ has already harvested over 125,000 images from the 270,000 images available in Auckland Libraries’ Heritage Image Online digital library, with more being added every month, resulting in Auckland’s story being told everywhere,” says Dan.
As Auckland libraries look to the future Dan and the Digitised Content and Strategy team are working on a new inventory platform, ‘Digital Asset Management’. This will enable customers to search the current database and find relevant content much easier, allowing Auckland Council Libraries to tell more Auckland stories.
