The Virtual Mobile Library: Reaching your Community when they don't Come to you
This paper examines how the Vision Australia Information Library Service, a public library that provides library services to the blind and visually impaired community, manage the communicating, interacting, and receiving feedback from clients. The Vision Australia Information Library Service provides library and related services to around 15,000 clients nationally and covers a range of formats and services to bring the world of information and reading for pleasure to a community across Australia that otherwise would not have equitable access to the written word.
The clients of the Vision Australia Information Library service don’t travel to the library as many of our clients live in rural and remote areas, are house bound, in care or find the challenges of public transport daunting, as you or I might if we lost or began to loose our sight or just enjoy the convenience of a library service that comes to them. The library provides services to our patrons with the philosophy of choices in delivery of information, access to as much information as we can make accessible, a dynamic and progressive collection of recreational reading and varying ways and means of staying in touch over the post ways and the airways.
The unique situation of the Vision Australia Information Library Services presents with the challenges of promoting new services, communicating changes to existing services and empowering our library clients to have ownership of the way they receive their recreational reading, their newspapers for reading on the way to work just as you or I do, staying in touch with the world by keeping up with the latest economic developments or keeping up with the latest gossip in the ‘glad rags’.
This paper will illustrate the ways and means the Vision Australia Information Library service stay in touch with 15,000 clients through 3000 outbound calls as project last year to the digital club, our email outbound service with over 300 subscribers, visits to rural and metropolitan centers, the News On The Go service and New Titles, an audio recording of new and available titles sent to all library members bi annually.