One of my responsibilities is to update the library hours we present on our website. As I mentioned last week in my post about our move to use LibCal to present library hours, it makes sense to try to centralize your efforts in typing out the hours (wherever that may be) so that some level of automated dissemination can take place. One way that I had hoped the library hours could be set in LibCal and then fed out was to have them update the hours we have to maintain in Alma. As it turns out, I had the direction of that feed backwards. It sounds like you set the hours in Alma and can then use the Alma API to feed them into LibCal. I’m not sure that workflow is gonna work for us, as the Alma hours are likely not entered in at the same level of detail that the LibCal hours are. In LibCal, I’ve got the hours set for not just the library, which Alma needs to know so it understands what days don’t count as due dates because the library is closed, but in LibCal I am also entering the hours for the circ desk, the tech loan desk, and the ref desk. I haven’t looked into the Alma–>LibCal documentation yet, but I have a sinking feeling it’s not worth the bother, as I’ll have to be in LibCal anyway setting hours for the three service desks as well.

The other workflow I want to look at more closely is how our library hours are presented in the Google My Business service and the similar ones from Bing and Yelp. One challenge is that the hours shown there are binary: we’re either closed or we’re open during specified hours. What is hard to convey in that binary are those times when the library kinda, sorta open but only for students returning items or paying fines; they can’t print, use the computers, check out materials, or study. These periods when we’re in this mode fall between semesters and usually last just a handful of days or a week. It’s when the buildings and grounds folks get a chance to do a deep clean of our public spaces and the circulation staff to get ready with cleaning up the course reserves collections and any backlogs of reshelving, etc. On Google My Business, the best I can do to notify visitors there that our library is just kinda sorta open but also kinda sorta closed is to post an announcement on the Google service and hope that users will see that after they’ve googled our library and scanned the hours display.

Another thing I’d like to figure out is what appears to be a way to have the Bing service (if you’re authorized to update the Bing listing for your library) update itself based on the Google service (I’m amazed that this is even something Microsoft offers on the Bing listing service). Yelp, like Google and Bing, also lets you claim your business listing and then manage the hours, but I haven’t seen any similar “we’ll copy Google’s data for you” feature. I wish we didn’t have to worry about Google and Bing and Yelp, as is it a lot of extra work, but I do know, at least from the analytics that Google shares with you when you have claimed a business on its service, that lots and lots of folks do rely on Google’s presentation of hours (and directions and contact links). If we don’t manage our library hours for others, some folks are going to start getting wrong info and possibly show up when we’re closed, something that would be a seriously annoying for someone who may have taken a bus and two different subway lines just to come to our library.