Investigative Exercise 9 - Community Profiles

The Northern Regional Library service has no web 2.0 technologies that I can see. Add to this the factor that their web catalogue does not function at all for me to search their items and I would say that the Northern Regional Library service definately needs a revamp.

Now, there are number of reasons behind this "library fail."

1. The library service is covering a number of small rural town areas and as such I believe that only basic services are provided to cover a small population over such a large area. (Northern Regional Library service covers 68,905 square kilometers yet serves 28,729 people. Compare this to Blacktown city council which covers only 47 square kilometers and had a population of 271,000 as of 2006!)

2. Collaboration. Northern Regional Library Service isn't a 'library' in itself but a network that comprises of different rural libraries. I can imagine it would be difficult for any of the librarians to actually get together and discuss the introduction of web 2.0 technologies due to the amount of travel and time outside of their working hours. Of course this could be done online too but I am also unsure what kind of resources they actually have for this. Rather narrow minded of me to say but smaller libraries and smaller councils = smaller budgets. This brings me to our next reason;

3. Cost. Whilst we're on the topic of councils; there isn't one councils but 4 different councils covering the span of these libraries and from experience it is usually people working for or in the council that end up making their own websites with a sub-section for their libraries. The fact that this service exists is a testimony that the councils themselves decided not to maintain their own libraries and pay for online searching programs to be integrated tells me that this is both costly and time consuming for them. Much easier to band together like so.