Day 14: Shanachie Tour of New Zealand

This morning I beetled off into town to the Town Hall where the two Shanachie guys were giving a presentation prior to their one week tour of New Zealand. (Why only one week!?  I know we're a small country but...)

Here's to prove I was there. Along with a bunch of other librarians whose faces I have blurred. Thanks Kris for taking the photo!

See... I was breathing the same air as these guys. I never got to say hello personally but it would have probably been too embarrassing for all involved.   *picture me struck dumb with awe*

I think I want to work at DOK.  *Sweeeeetie?  Would you like to move to the Netherlands?*
I love how their focus is the people in their community.  They look for ways to bring the collection to them as well as ways to bring their community's interests into the library.  They actively seek ways to partner with their local community businesses.  Some of the things they have done which I thought very cool were

•  Hosted a LAN party
• Their furniture (you can see some in David Lee King's  Flickr stream here or from Jenny Levine here)
• Collaborate with the supermarket across the square by providing a recipe from the collection. The supermarket supplied the ingredients in a special 'fridge (with the library's logo) and if patrons swipe their library card at the checkout, they got 25% off their bill.
• Invent a gaming flightcase
• Take a specially marked combi van to a summer camp where kids create content during the day to present to their parents at night.
• Solicit stories from their patrons about the community where they are living (Agora: storyboard of your life)
• This brilliant multi touch surface which makes me wish MPOW had some sort of collection we could show off

Multitouch Microsoft Surface: Cultural Heritage Browser from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.

Now I need to think about how some of what I saw can be brought into MPOW.