What you have told us
Here you can search through numerous patron comments and the corresponding AADL replies. Search by the type of comment, in general by what the comment is regarding, or by a particular issue.
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Filter Patron Comments
Type: other
Regarding: room rental
Patron Comment: Is it possible for our cub scout group to reserve the large conference room at Mallets Creek once a month for our board meeting? Thanks.
AADL Reply: We are sorry, rentals are available only twice per calendar year by individuals and non-profit or for-profit groups. Weekly or monthly requests are not accepted. For more information please visit: http://www.aadl.org/services/publicspace/roomrental Thank you for your interest in the facilities of the Ann Arbor District Library. Karen Wilson Administrative Assistant
Date Received: 2008-04-01
Type: other
Regarding: other
Patron Comment: Greetings Library Folks, Quick question for you. I recently have come across a multitude of old books and media (primarily feature-length movies on VHS) that I no longer have a use for. I was thinking about donating them to the library and was wondering if you accepted donations and what your policy was?
AADL Reply: Yes, we do accpet donations. Donations may be brought to the back of the Downtown Library during library business hours. Enter the Staff Parking lot off William Street, ring intercom buzzer at door and tell receptionist that you have books to donate. Donation bins are directly inside the door. The Friends of the Ann Arbor District Library will then process your donation. For more information visit http://www.faadl.org/ and follow the "How to Donate" link. Thank you. Karen Wilson Administrative Assistant
Date Received: 2008-04-01
Type: programs and events
Regarding: - NONE SELECTED -
Patron Comment: Hello, I was curious when your Spring book sale is. I go every year and am anxious. Please let me know if possible. A. Hourani
AADL Reply: Hi Adnan - Thanks for contacting the Library. Here are the hours for the Friends sale - I have cut and pasted these from the Friends website - faadl.org - - feel free to check out that site for more information about the friends: Shop Opens: September 15-16, 2007 Holiday Sale: December 1-2 Shop Closed: December 22-23 December 29-30 Shop Opens: January 5-6, 2008 Winter Sale: January 26-28 Shop Closed February 2-3 February 9-10 Shop (restocked) Opens: February 16-17 Summer Sale: June 21-22 Shop Closed: June 23 - September 13 Tim Grimes Manager, Community Relations and Marketing Dept. Ann Arbor District Library 343 South Fifth Avenue Ann Arbor, MI 48104 734-327-4265 grimest@aadl.org
Date Received: 2008-04-01
Type: other
Regarding: other
Patron Comment: I have just purchased a Sony MP3 player.What do I need to do to download a book or CD from the library. Thanks for the instruction. Barbara
AADL Reply: Thank you for contacting the Ann Arbor District Library. AADL currently utilizes the Overdrive service through participation in the Michigan Library Consortium. From our website, click on the "Catalog" tab, and then select "Ebooks/Eaudio/Evideo" on the left to access our subscription. The direct link is: http://www.aadl.org/catalog/ebooks . Enjoy your new MP3 player, and please contact me if you have other questions. Best regards, Celeste Choate, Associate Director of Services, Collections & Access
Date Received: 2008-04-01
Type: other
Regarding: other
Patron Comment: I have several issues of several different magazines. These include the National Geographic from the mid 1970s to the late 1980s, The American Woodworker, The Woodworkers Journal. Would the Library be interested in these items?
AADL Reply: Donations may be brought to the back of the Downtown Library during library business hours. Enter the Staff Parking lot off William Street, ring intercom buzzer at door and tell receptionist that you have books to donate. Donation bins are directly inside the door. The Friends of the Ann Arbor District Library will then process your donation. For more information visit http://www.faadl.org/ and follow the "How to Donate" link. Thank you.
Date Received: 2008-03-31
Type: complaint
Regarding: other
Patron Comment: I was sorry to see that the Rosetta Stone subscription was discontinued. Is there any chance that it will be reinstated? It is a wonderful service.
AADL Reply: Thank you for contacting the Ann Arbor District Library regarding Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Stone has made the corporate decision to discontinue service to libraries as their contracts expired. The AADL contract expired on March 31, 2008. Additional copies of language CDs have been purchased. You can find information about Rosetta Stone and other language resources at http://www.aadl.org/research/sites/foreign_languages and at http://www.aadl.org/node/9532. If you have further questions, please contact me. Best regards, Celeste Choate Associate Director of Services, Collections and Access
Date Received: 2008-03-28
Type: other
Regarding: inquiry from other institution
Patron Comment: Greetings from Ireland! Working as a librarian here in Ireland, I am currently investigating various design considerations in relation to revamping our library's presence on my organisation's intranet. As such, I was very impressed by your site and was wondering in particular how you managed to integrate your catalogue with the same design interface as the rest of your site. Grateful for any advise you can provide in this regard. Kind Regards Órla
AADL Reply: Hello, Orla, thanks for contacting us! Our catalogue interface is a bit of smoke and mirrors, I'm afraid. Our public website is powered by Drupal, an outstanding open-source content management system. Our intranet is powered by drupal too. We've developed a module for drupal that accesses the stock Innovative Millennium catalog webserver and pretends to be a logged-in user's browser. The module then takes the HTML that the catalog webserver returns and processes it, wrapping it with additional functions and styles before returing the output to the user through Drupal. So, essentially, we achieved this unified look and feel by cheating. =) I hope this is helpful information; you may wish to take a look through our developer blogs at http://www.aadl.org/devblog where you can find some downloadable code and some discussion of other projects. If you'd like, we could find a time to talk on the phone about this in more detail. Thanks again for your interest, and good luck with your project! Eli Neiburger Associate Director, IT and Product Development Ann Arbor District Library
Date Received: 2008-03-26
Type: reference question
Regarding: inquiry from other institution
Patron Comment: Dear Sir/Madam, I am currently writing a paper to present at the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group in September about the positive and negative impact of social tagging by users on the level of potentially relevant information retrieved. I am really interested in your ideology at Ann Arbor of giving the catalogue to the users and allowing them to tag books. I was wondering if this social tagging operates within a more formal library-generated authority controlled subject vocabulary structure, or whether the subject cataloguing is comprised solely of user generated content. I can see the great benefit of social tagging within fiction catalogues, but are there any limits imposed by how person-specific a tag could be? For example, could a user tag one of the books on the catalogue 'wishlist birthday'? Do you encourage them firstly to look at which tags are there already? Are there any authorised subject headings? Thank you for your time in this matter. This topic is much larger than I at first anticipated. My own feeling at this point is that social tagging is really useful when used in conjunction with authority controlled subject headings to maximise information retrieval. I would really like to know a bit more about what goes on at Ann Arbor and whether it would be ok with you to use your catalogue as an example at the CIG conference at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow in September. Many thanks, Charlotte Smith Newnham College Library Cambridge UK
AADL Reply: Hello, Charlotte, thanks for your interest! We see tags as parallel and in addition to the official subject headings, not really in place of them. The subject headings we've always had remain in the marc records where they've always been, and tagging has not changed our cataloguing practices at all, as of yet. The tags are not stored in the automation system, but in an external database as part of our public website and displayed alongside the information from the catalog dynamically. That means that there are no rules or recommended approaches for tagging; the tags are intended to supplement the catalog data, not replace it, so users are free to tag any item with any text for whatever reason, be it personal or private or even whimsical. Tags are how our patrons can help add value to our catalog without any stuffy cataloging rules required. I hope that helps; please let me know if you'd like to discuss this further, and feel free to use our catalog in your presentation! Good luck with your project. Eli Neiburger Associate Director, IT and Product Development Ann Arbor District Library
Date Received: 2008-03-26
Type: web site feedback
Regarding: Technical Enhancement
Patron Comment: I was on another library website and they had the book synopsis available by placing the cursor over the highlighted book title. It was user friendly and I found it helpful. I'd love to see AADL adopt a similar feature. I usually open another window and look for the book description on another website when looking at titles from the library. Also, I'm excited to see that AADL has created book club kits. Thank you!
AADL Reply: Thanks for contacting us with your excellent suggestion! We're in the process of looking at how best to present this information. We subscribe to a service that provides this kind of information; if the information is available for a title, you'll see a 'Summary' link under the 'Request this item' link on the right side of your search results. However, what you suggest is an interesting way to present that information, and we'll look into it for a future enhancement! Thanks again for your feedback, and thanks for using the library! Eli Neiburger Associate Director, IT and Product Development Ann Arbor District Library
Date Received: 2008-03-26
Type: compliment
Regarding: inquiry from other institution
Patron Comment: Hello, I'm a LIS student at the University of South Florida. I'm very interested in incorporating web 2.0 technologies with library's homepages, and OPACs. Your website is constantly being mentioned as one of the best at doing this. I have also heard you use Drupal to power it. Do you use Drupal to power the folksonomy ability you have empowered your patrons with? Or, is that an in-house customization? I have been unable to find any Drupal modules that would allow me to do what you guys have done. Keep up the great work on the website. I hope the rest of the field catches up with you soon :)
AADL Reply: Hello, Martin, thanks for your interest and compliments! Our website is indeed powered by Drupal, and our catalog access and features are delivered through a Drupal module that we developed. That module includes the ratings, reviews, and tags fucntionality for our catalog and don't require other drupal modules. You may be interested in our developer blog at http://www.aadl.org/devblog where you can download some code and see what else our developers are up to. We hope to eventually release our drupal module, but right now it's still a ways from 1.0 and still heavily customized for our environment. I hope that's helpful information; please let me know if you'd like to discuss this further, we could schedule a call. Thanks again for your interest, and I'll see you around! Eli Neiburger Associate Director, IT and Product Development Ann Arbor District Library