We totally broke the two hundred and twenty five user mark over the holidays, and we’re looking forward to what 2012 has in store for us.  Now that most of the kinks are eliminated, and all major functions are active, by mid January/early February we’re aiming to launch the targeted advertising of Lemontree in the physical library space.

Our little recon mission, looking in the nooks and crannies of the the University of Huddersfield Library gave us loads of ideas about visual placement and presence.

More importantly, we think the holiday itself and not thinking about lemontree/librarygame all waking hours of the day gave us a bit of breathing space and room for elaborating on ideas about where we’d like to head with it, the direct result are some killer new features that we’ll have to keep under wraps for just now. 

Tomorrow, Iman is heading to the Reading Agency, and we’re utterly thrilled to be in their presence! We’ve got lots to learn, some stuff to show and potentially lots to talk about together. Ideally we’d love to work with them in some capacity as they seem extremely switched on, and nice. Ever since we started in fact, they’ve been on our list of people to talk to. Their presentations and reports have almost always illuminated our way, 

Recently we were reading some encouraging statistics from them! 

•    4,125 UK library sites + 573 mobiles
•    321.5million visits to UK libraries in 2009-10
•    77.9% of 5-10 year olds use libraries
•    Children’s book borrowing has risen year on year for six years
•    Web visits to UK libraries have increased by 87.7% over four years
•    The number of volunteers working with libraries rose by 7.7% in 2009/10
•    760,000 children did the Summer Reading Challenge in 2010

source :Miranda McKearney, Director, OBE, Reading Agency 

Incidentally, here is a link to the front end of the summer reading challenge for kids http://circus-stars.org.uk/ (warning has sound ) and a video describing other successful project of theirs groupthing