Comment

One of the services that our South Wairarapa Libraries have provided residents has been a delightfully straightforward website. Open the web site and with a single click on ‘catalogue’ the user is offered a choice of selecting available books by author, title, genre, new books, fiction or non fiction.

Sadly this has changed. Now to open the catalogue one has to have a library card from which must be entered a nine digit number. Evidently it is no longer acceptable for any old resident to be sifting through the library’s collection, one must first be a registered.

However, having acquired the required card and entered the unique number there was further disappointment. The former straightforward catalogue section has been replaced with screeds of all kinds of unnecessary guff. Among this is half hidden an instruction to click on an icon at the top left hand corner to open the catalogue. I clicked as instructed but nothing happened.

Being ever so slightly stubborn I kept scrolling away until I eventually came across a ‘find by author’ slot. So I entered Ian Rankin and was informed that none of the four libraries had any books by this popular author. Never deterred I tried Quinton Jardine, another popular author, again no books. I tried a couple more popular authors with the same result. Now this is very odd as I know for sure that the libraries have many books by these authors.
That a perfectly straightforward system has been replaced by this gobblygook is bad enough, but that it has been unleashed on users completely unannounced adds to the insult. We were forewarned that the libraries would be closed for a computer update but nobody mentioned that this would include what we are now being offered.

This is just another example of the all too familiar: convoluted web sites set up by unimaginative IT experts who are locked into their technological view of the world. None among them would have though to run their effort passed a few Joe Blows or Mary Bloggs to see how practical it was for the average user before inflicting it on the public.
And, as a ratepayer, I have to wonder how much this is all costing.

It appears that the computer ‘update’ is part of our library service joining up with a much larger (seventeen library) network including New Plymouth, Palmerston North, Hastings etc.

Do our councillors see the irony of on one hand warning us of the consequences of joining a much larger local body and on the other doing exactly that with our libraries? Oh well, they will be able to use the libraries as a good example of what happens when you do.

And maybe it’s time for me to invest in a Kindle.