Top time savers provided by equipment booking systems

Over 120 university representatives at this year's EDUCAUSE conference shared their opinions on the effectiveness of equipment booking systems for saving staff time. Such software can save staff many hours every week – our poll result lists the ways in which this is made possible.

But firstly, why are these time savings so important? Well quite simply, equipment lending generates a lot of work! Technicians tasked with coordinating equipment loans are often burdened with a raft of administration tasks. These risk eating into the scarce hours available for maintaining the equipment and environment that they’re also responsible for.

Lending out media equipment and hardware for student use requires some rigorous processes. On the one hand, technicians need to ensure their department’s investment is protected, with careful tracking and circulation of these valuable resources. Plus they need to manage adequate access to items that are often critical to students’ academic success. Only with the right equipment booking software in place is the whole system manageable in a practical and efficient way.

The ‘booking’ aspect of the software is what really counts here. According to our findings, this is the most effective way to save a lot of staff time...

Public Library Champion of the Year 2019: Remarkable Community Support at Carrickfergus Library

The PMLG Public Library Champion for 2019 is Jillian McFrederick, Branch Manager of Carrickfergus Library for Libraries Northern Ireland. Lorensbergs is privileged to sponsor this award, with netloan account manager James Mortimer presenting the award to Jillian at the PMLG Conference dinner earlier this month (see photo above).

The ways in which Jillian McFrederick and her team at Carrickfergus Library engage and serve their community are truly inspirational. Particularly noteworthy is the wide range of demographics that are supported through the many library programmes and activities.

Jillian is someone who’s gone the extra mile to develop programmes that make the big difference to people’s lives. She is widely known to be customer-focused, while being a terrific advocate for libraries.

Carrickfergus library’s well-being initiatives are so important at the moment to delivering shared national and local objectives in libraries, and Jillian has shown deep commitment, always keenly responsive to the local community in shaping how they are delivered. She leads on reading groups, develops strong links with local authors (see photo of author event below), and is always sharing her learning and introducing new initiatives to the library.

There are too many projects to name in the space of a short blog, but here are some of the ones that caught the attention of the award judges...