“First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII – and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we’ve realised it’s a brochure”.
- Douglas Adams (quoted in “The reason your church must Twitter“)
Steve Boxwell is a student at Bible college who, among other things, loves books. This week, we’ve asked Steve to share how he stays on top of his large (and growing) book collection. If you have other suggestions for how to stay on top of your book collection, we’d love you to share them.
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It’s one of the cruel architectural realities of Moore College that the fastest way for me to get home from class of an afternoon is through the College bookstore, Moore Books. This coupled with a book reading (and hoarding) habit spanning over a decade has meant that my book collection has become, well…biggish.
With a large personal library containing many gems of wisdom, I wanted to make it a resource that friends from church, College and the like could really benefit from, without the stress for me of having to remember where the books have all gone, and then chase them up.
Enter Delicious Library 2, which is a nifty little programme for Mac that I stumbled across late last year. It enables me to keep a digital record of all the books I own, where they are now and who has borrowed them in the past. Using the built in camera on my Macbook, I scan the barcode and it searches Amazon for the book’s details.
The book then appears on my digital shelf with all sorts of details, including current market value and even its Dewey decimal number for the anally retentive amongst us. CD, DVDs, board games and even power tools can also be kept in the Delicious library.
Delicious has heaps of features that I don’t use yet, but let me tell you how I am using it and three areas where I think it could be a helpful ministry tool.
Delicious does have limitations. As I mentioned, it searches Amazon for details about your books and as there is no Australian chapter (pardon the pun) of Amazon as yet, it means that books published in Australia may not be recognised. This just means you will have to enter them manually, which is quite straightforward. I have been pleasantly surprised by what it has recognised – of my 500ish books, only 20 of them weren’t found and most of those were obscure books put out by tiny publishers. Older books that pre-date the barcode (or even the ISBN) aren’t a problem as there are a range of other search options that mean your digital library accurately reflects your physical one.
Delicious is a free download for trial, and licensing costs $40US. To find out about the full range of features and to download it for yourself visit www.delicious-monster.com.
I’m brainstorming ideas for a video resource I’m producing. It’s to support next month’s poster campaign for Outreach Media.
Whilst I can’t give you the full details of the campaign (all in due time!), I need your ideas.
If I asked you:
“What does God hate?”
How would you answer?
If you asked your non-Christian colleague/neighbour/family member/karate teacher:
“What does God hate?”
How would they answer?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Get amongst it and chat to the people you know who don’t know Jesus, and ask them this question. Not only will it help me with this project (when you report back with their answers) but who knows that gospel conversations might begin with this interesting conversation starter…
Four books have made their way onto my reading list this month (a couple might roll-over to next month!):
Have you read any of these? What did you think?
I’ll be reviewing them in future posts. Feel free to read along with me – it’ll be interesting to compare notes.
There are two things that are absolutely essential to have clear and blazingly obvious on your church’s website:
The first one is a no-brainer. If you want people to come to church, make sure you tell them when and where to come. However, you’d be surprised to see how often websites (and not just churches) make it difficult for people to contact them. Take a look at your own website, and consider it from the perspective of someone who has never visited your website – how easy is it to find contact details?
I’ve been checking out resources for churches who want to develop or re-develop their website and I’ve had a couple of very strange ‘contact’ experiences recently, that illustrate what not to do.
Firstly, on the contact page of one website was the following message:
Interesting.
Then as I started to complete the form with details of my query, this popped up:
Everything on this site was geared towards existing clients. Hopefully they have enough existing clients, because at the rate they’re going, they won’t be getting any new ones.
Secondly, the contact form for another website was ridiculously complex, and didn’t cater for my query which had nothing to do with the information they wanted to extract from me. They thought I had a question about building a specific website. I didn’t – I had a journalistic question about building websites in general.
Instead, I was forced to complete a lengthy form, where nearly all the fields were ‘required’, where I had to make up most of my responses because they wanted me to answer questions that just weren’t relevant to me.
Here is just half of the form I had to complete:
If my preference for contact is email, why does it matter what day and time of day you contact me? Why does it matter how many full-time and part-time staff work at the church? This hasn’t been thought through very well.
So, here are three fives for church websites when it comes to contact information:
