When you’re in Hamburg, of course. Hamburg claims to be the only library in Germany to use this word. OK, but a library is a library is a library.
Hamburg is a city of 1.7 million people, 15 to 20% of whom are immigrants. It is a major port, not only for Germany but all of Europe. It also is the German home of Airbus, the Franco-German aircraft company with French operations in Toulouse.
The central library is housed on two floors of rented space in a building that was a parcel distribution center for the German post office. The library didn’t want to move into the building, but the landlord made a very attractive offer because he hoped the library would provide an anchor for the neighborhood. The landlord’s hopes have been realized and the library is expanding to a third floor.
The library has a budget of €30.8 million, and a staff of 491 (400 full-time and 91 part-time). It has a turnover rate of 7.8 and circulated 12.82 million items last year. It collects in 27 languages and offers 120 language courses. It has issued 141,782 paid cards, but admits that with RFID it cannot control who uses the cards. It hires six to eight librarian trainees each year for whom it offers a three-year training program. In the second year of the program the trainees staff HOEB4U, the libraries telephone, email and virtual reference service.
The library owns 14,000 DVDs and 20,000 CDs. It subscribes to 7,000 periodicals. It offers free wifi, for which users don’t need library cards. Like other German libraries, it charges to reserve books and to check out best sellers. Reserves cost €1.50 and best sellers cost €2.50. The number of best sellers the library gets depends on the books position on the Der Spiegel best seller list. The vendor processes the books for the library.
Having worked in dozens of organizations during my checkered career(s), I have seen first-hand how the leader can affect the culture of an organization, and I think the director of the Bücherhallen Hamburg must be doing something right. Many staff members talked about how the director encourages them to try new things and embrace change; others demonstrated it. I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet her.
The name Bücherhallen is not the only unique thing about the Hamburg library. It has a separate “leisure library,” and its teen center is housed in a separate building. It runs the libraries in the city’s prisons. It is responsible for the city’s school libraries. It has a chat-bot named Ina who brings people to content on its website. It provides audio for the blind and sign language for the hearing impaired on its website. It has an automated book return and sorting system that handles 10,000 check-ins a day at a rate of 1,000 books an hour. In the early morning and late evening hours the system is used to handle reserves and new books. It has a soundproof room in the children’s library that teachers love because, as our tour guide said, it gets the children “away from the hurry, the stress and the noise.” It also has an RFID machine in the children’s room for children to check out their materials themselves.
The Hamburg library works with the Federal office of Immigration and Refugees. It is trying to build a network for immigrant support “to make cultural and educational institutions accessible” and “to help them learn the German language.” It holds German language sessions in the library for immigrants who know some German but need to practice speaking. The sessions are staffed by 60 volunteer discussion facilitators and the library is looking for more volunteers "with similar immigration experience." Recognizing that human contact is another service libraries provide, the Hamburg library has built a volunteer staff of medianboten (item deliverers)who deliver library materials to older, handicapped and immobile customers with whom they spend time reading and talking.
The Hamburg library has an IT staff of three, but 17 people have access to the content management system and can put content on the library’s web page. The library has retained a children’s writer to write and review content for the children’s page. The website’s pages are color coordinated. The main pages are blue. The HOEB4U pages are red, and the children’s page are yellow.
From the HOEB4U page customers can request that their question be answered by a librarian from any one of six Hamburg libraries, by choosing the library from a dropdown menu. This is a service the Hamburg library developed at no cost by working with five other libraries and using an open source ticket system.
The Lern- und Sprachzentrum (Learning and Language Center) at the Hamburg library is a work in progress. The library has adopted the Information Commons idea from English and American universities and hopes with the Center to apply the concept, including e-learning and chat rooms, to the public library setting. The Center provides self-learning, both on site and online, including language study.
DUBib in Wiesbaden, Germany, is the aggregator that provides electronic newspapers, magazines and journals to the Hamburg library. DUBib buys the media from the publishers and the Hamburg library, and 105 other German libraries, including Frankfurt and Munich, buy licenses from the publisher to use the media.
Self-learning or autoformation as the French call it appears to be a much more popular idea in German and French than in American public libraries. One of the most innovative ideas I learned in Hamburg had to do with the library’s online courses, which it obtains from Bipmedia, a German/Austrian firm that provides online training to such companies as SAP and BMW. The library asked Bipmedia, which had never worked with libraries, if it could be on its platform, but Bipmedia offered to create a platform for the library to host instead. The library now offers 102 courses in IT, languages, economics and other subjects and it has contracted with Bipmedia to sell this service to other libraries. The IT staff promoted the service at the recent Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt book fair, the world's largest trade fair for books, where Leipzig and Frankfurt signed on.
The Hamburg library’s eMedia offer includes eBooks, eAudios, eVideos and eMusic, and ePaper (newspapers, journals and magazines), which it obtains from DiViBib GmbH, Wiesbaden, Germany. DiViBib buys the media from the publishers. The Hamburg library and 105 other German libraries, including Bremen, Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich and the Association of Public Libraries in Berlin buy licenses to use the media from the publisher. See http://www.onleihe.net
The ePaper incudes Der Speigel, the German news magazine; four national daily newspapers and Manager Magazin and Wirtschafts Woche, two business magazines. Under terms of their contracts, the libraries can eloan Der Spiegel to only one customer at a time. When I used the temporary Hamburg library card I was given (good for 30 days) to download the 156-page four-color most recent edition of Manager Magazin in pdf format, I was told my loan period was one day, three hours and 13 minutes. For Wirtschafts Woche my loan period was one day three hours and nine minutes.When I requested Der Spiegel, I was put on a waiting list. I received an email a few days later telling me the magazine was available for me to download.
Customrs can also download eBooks to their Sony Reader for a limited time. For some reason, Amazon has not yet introduced the Kindle in Europe, but even if it had, the library could not offer downloads to the Kindle, because Kindle owners are required to obtain their eBooks from Amazon.
Beware of False Cognates
They can get you every time. Here are a few that can cause problems for librarians:
Medien is a German word that refers to any materials, whether in print or electronic format, that a library provides for its customers.
Numerization is a word the French often use when they speak English to mean digitization because numerization is the French word for digitization.
Alphatization is a word French and German librarians often use for literacy training when they speak English because alphabétizer in French and alphabeten in German mean to teach someone to read.
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