Last year the NPPL received a number of requests for online SRP registration. This year we provided it and it was super easy to do using Zoho Creator. See the Kids Summer Reading program Signup page on the NPPL website to see what I put together. One of the slickest parts of Zoho Creator is the ability to customize what happens when someone submits a form. You can customize a message and chose the next URL they see:
After submitting our form people are taken to an otherwise not linked to page at which they can download the appropriate flyers and reading logs for the SRP. Nice.
Let me hasten to add that despite all of the requests, we haven’t received an overwhelming amount of online registrations. Maybe only 6 or 7% of the total. So, do these small numbers mean that our online registration system is a failure? Not a chance. Being able to serve this 6 or 7% was totally worth the minimal effort it took to create the form. Each time my phone beeped with an email and I saw that it was an online SRP registration I knew that the library had made someone’s life a little bit easier. I’m all for making library services easier to use, but making people’s lives easier is an even better goal. Many of these registrations were submitted well after the library had closed its physical doors:
This is a good example of how useful Web 2.0 applications can be. Fifteen minutes of making a web form and embedding a script into a webpage can expand the operating hours of a library service to all hours of the night.
