Sunbird Calendar

The situation: Staff from various departments needing to book the "community room" and expanded use of the former "story hour" room as it was repurposed to an "activity room" which will host computer classes, story hour, teen group meetings, and more!

With two rooms in more frequent use, how would Circ keep up with what was where?

Current Community Room calendar was created in Publisher.
An additional 'working' copy kept in a notebook, then later updated on the computer.

Downsides to method: 1 physical location of the notebook. Staff working at the off-desk area to book programs would need to check for several date options, then finalize a date with presenter.

Entire days often blocked out months in advance, due to sharing the room with the public groups that meet here. Of those days booked, some are not ultimately used.

Circ needs advance notice of major events to schedule accordingly, calendar put out at beginning of the month, yet shift schedules were made a few weeks prior.

Using publisher...Very time consuming, no easy way to enter repeating events.

One person responsible for keeping calendar up to date & entering all the info.

Enter the Mozilla Sunbird Calendar

Sunbird is installed locally on several machines, in several different departments.
Calendar files are stored remotely on the server, in a secured folder.
Sunbird is set to auto-sync with the calendars when launching.

I created a separate calendar file for each room events are held in, and gave them different colors so it's easy to see availability on the monthly view.
We also entered holidays, election days (room is used as a voting site) and then created a separate calendar for "special events" such as Banned Books Week, National Library Week, Teen Read Week, Teen Tech Week, etc. making it easier at a glance for staff trying to book an event to coincide with a special week.

Circulation does not need to enter events, so they have access in 'read only' mode.
They can print the week's event listing, and are keeping that by the phones, and at all public service desks to route patrons to the correct room.

Staff have actually used the words "easy" and "fun" when describing entering events!

Events can repeat according to a set pattern, making it very easy to enter our regular groups.

Each staff member is responsible for booking the room for the event they are hosting.

The program does not currently check for double-booking, but the interface makes it easy to see what's available.

So far, staff who have used it are very excited, and think this is a useful change!

Did I mention it's free?