F1 Mania has continued to grip our household as Matthew frightens everybody else off the road - still loads of 10 grid penalties and disqualifications but we do now have a 12th and a 16th to our name. Matthew even got a pole position in qualifying but he had so many grid penalties he ended up back in 24th. Worse still, he has been relegated to HRT (Hispania Racing Team as opposed to Hormone Replacement Therapy) - the worse team on the grid.
The start of the week continued to be frantic with readers trying to get their books for Christmas though by Wednesday afternoon, things finally quietened down as readers became resigned to the fact that they may have left things abit too late for their Christmas books. Unfortunately we did get a small minority of readers who rang up to chase books that they had only ordered the day before and couldn't accept that Christmas does actually slow the post down. We also made sure that we cleared our in-tray ready for next year. Luckily the majority of the enquiries were just requests for print Talking Book lists. Unluckily, it was the week where it was the hunt for a photocopier that actually worked. I spent the majority of Wednesday having to keep dismantling the photocopier to rescue bits of paper that seem to get stuck in every place imagined.
The last few days gave me the opportunity to have a real good go at catching up with the customer requests. Claire Tomalin's biography on Charles Dickens has now fit 11 requests while we're gathering requests for Martina Cole's The Faithless as a rate of knots. More dilemma as ISIS will be doing this so we would have to buy this in.
We were going to have our Reader Services Team book selection meeting on Wednesday morning but thankfully we didn't get the infamous Mastersheet (list of titles to select from) back in time. Unfortunately, we're going to have to do it in the first week we're back. Something to look forward as it's the one thing that causes the most arguments in our Team. We also couldn't agree on what subject to have for collection development, one person wanted war but not WW1 or WW2, somebody else wanted black history while we had also received some feedback from a customer about the lack of books on Feminism in the library. We've gone for a compromise of picking 2 titles in each to start with and if we end up with a good pile, carry on for February. Fortunately it was quiet on Friday so I had a good attempt to look for some suitable titles. I also had a look in the old now defunct cassette library to see if there were some suitable titles for digitalisation and found some Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer in there. This job took longer than anticipated and it looks like I'm going to be continuing with this on my first day back at work.
Thursday 29 December 2011
Tuesday 20 December 2011
3 christmas dinners and a 10th grid penalty - December 12th-16th 2011
A week after Matthew's birthday and the F1 game is still going strong. He has signed for Force India and there was huge excitement when he reached the dizzy heights of 19th on one of the qualifying sessions but it's been a week of 10 grid place penalties, disqualifications and a consistent 24th.
It's also been a succession of Christmas dinners with my Book Club's meal kicking off the proceedings - a decent helping of mussels and french fries at the Beehive, followed by a traditional roast the next day at my son's school(in my role as parent governor) and rounded off with fishcakes and salad for our Team meal out at the cuckoo. I'm going to go on a strict diet next week ready for Christmas.
We were supposed to have talked about Precious Bane for our Bookclub but only 2 people had managed to finish the book with not many good things to say. I read the first paragraph and decided that life was too short to decipher the Shropshire accent and left it. Definitely wins the award for the most unpopular book we've had, beating Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian which previously held this dubious record.
Workwise it's been a week dominated by New Books, RNIB's bimonthly magazine advertising the new titles in the library. Everyone has a section which they are responsible for - from running a report for their format for the last 2 months and then editing it to a set format. This isn't just for consistency and to make it professional but also to take into account that the magazine is produced in different formats. For example, to make the daisy version navigatable, we have to set the text out using different formats.
My role is to pull all the sections together and proof read it across the formats including checking the formatting, consistency and adding missing information. It's been a tighter deadline than usual so have found that a copy seems to be constantly at my side.
The calls for extra Christmas books still keep coming in. I've also had a string of wholesale changes to reader's lists. I'm guessing that as people begin to get more dependent on their books over the winter months, they are becoming more discerning on what they read. It can be a lengthy process, particularly if they're really specific in their taste and worse still, they've read everything we have to offer. The calls for Claire Tomalin's biography keep coming in, definitely need to select this next time around though there is a dilemma that Audiogo may pick this up and we may have to wait for this to come out as an Import.
We've managed to acquire noticeboard space in a prime spot near the canteen for a few months. This has given us a good and easy opportunity to promote the Reader Services Team. Last month, we had new films/TV drama tie-in's to books where we had some good titles available in alternative format including The Slap, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Help.
Last week we decided on books with a Christmas theme, my 2 books were Tolkien's Letters to Santa and Fannie Flagg's - A Redbird Christmas. We're taking it in turns to do the final display, my colleague went to town with loads of Christmas images to give the display a Christmassy finishing touch. It's my turn next month and we're talking about doing a display advertising our Bookclub as we're getting short of participants. I'm already getting my thoughts together.
It's also been a succession of Christmas dinners with my Book Club's meal kicking off the proceedings - a decent helping of mussels and french fries at the Beehive, followed by a traditional roast the next day at my son's school(in my role as parent governor) and rounded off with fishcakes and salad for our Team meal out at the cuckoo. I'm going to go on a strict diet next week ready for Christmas.
We were supposed to have talked about Precious Bane for our Bookclub but only 2 people had managed to finish the book with not many good things to say. I read the first paragraph and decided that life was too short to decipher the Shropshire accent and left it. Definitely wins the award for the most unpopular book we've had, beating Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian which previously held this dubious record.
Workwise it's been a week dominated by New Books, RNIB's bimonthly magazine advertising the new titles in the library. Everyone has a section which they are responsible for - from running a report for their format for the last 2 months and then editing it to a set format. This isn't just for consistency and to make it professional but also to take into account that the magazine is produced in different formats. For example, to make the daisy version navigatable, we have to set the text out using different formats.
My role is to pull all the sections together and proof read it across the formats including checking the formatting, consistency and adding missing information. It's been a tighter deadline than usual so have found that a copy seems to be constantly at my side.
The calls for extra Christmas books still keep coming in. I've also had a string of wholesale changes to reader's lists. I'm guessing that as people begin to get more dependent on their books over the winter months, they are becoming more discerning on what they read. It can be a lengthy process, particularly if they're really specific in their taste and worse still, they've read everything we have to offer. The calls for Claire Tomalin's biography keep coming in, definitely need to select this next time around though there is a dilemma that Audiogo may pick this up and we may have to wait for this to come out as an Import.
We've managed to acquire noticeboard space in a prime spot near the canteen for a few months. This has given us a good and easy opportunity to promote the Reader Services Team. Last month, we had new films/TV drama tie-in's to books where we had some good titles available in alternative format including The Slap, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Help.
Last week we decided on books with a Christmas theme, my 2 books were Tolkien's Letters to Santa and Fannie Flagg's - A Redbird Christmas. We're taking it in turns to do the final display, my colleague went to town with loads of Christmas images to give the display a Christmassy finishing touch. It's my turn next month and we're talking about doing a display advertising our Bookclub as we're getting short of participants. I'm already getting my thoughts together.
Saturday 17 December 2011
Pizza, Cake and A Tiny Bit Marvellous - Dec 5th-9th 2011
Well it's week 2 of my week at work blog, (though a week late!) and the phones have been intensive, with the cold weather and Christmas holidays looming, the winter readers have arrived en masse. Fortunately for me it's been a 4 day week so some respite. It was my son's 13th birthday so in amongst the mass Christmas card writing and wrapping presents, I've had a sleepover and birthday food to contend with. I'm a "domestic ungoddess" where cooking and housework is concerned, that's why I'm better off at work! As usual disaster struck and I forgot to separate my egg yolks in my ice cream, my home made pizza ended up in a sea of liquid, my chocolate icing swam off my cake and my crumble topping swapped places with my rhubharb! The boys didn't kill each other and ate the food though so I call that a success.
We're mastering the world of the F1 computer game where it's a miracle if anybody finishs a lap yet alone a race and we haven't moved above 24th. The good thing is that we all like taking it in turns to be Vettel so it's sweet revenge to see him last, unable to stay on the track and black flagged in most of the races.
Back to work matters, top topics this week still seem to be mass ordering from New Books and sorting themselves extra books for Christmas. I've been making sure that I've asked each reader if they need extra books over the holidays and it's surprising how many readers hadn't realised about the extra books and it's like Christmas has come early for some of them!
I've also spent abit of time catching up with the customer requests and it's always interesting to see which titles come up each month. We get approximately 150-200 requests a month and while some titles are pretty obscure, out-of-print or very expensive to purchase, there has been some real gems that have slipped through the net over the years. I guess this isn't so surprising given the small allocation we have each month (currently 41 new titles and 16 imports) with customer requests taking a good proportion of these once we start including missing series, retranscription requests and collection development into account. It's not an easy job as we are catering for a diverse taste, for example, this month's requests that have hit the magic "3" requests have ranged from Susan Boyle's autobiography to Jan Morris's Britannica Pax Trilogy and Dawn French's A Tiny Bit Marvellous to Melvyn Bragg's Credo.
We can always tell which books are being heavily plugged, particularly Radio 4, requests for Claire Tomalin's biography on Dickens keeps cropping up all over the place. Other books that recently caught the readers' imagination were Vasily Grossman's Love and Fate and Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes.
I also spent some time going through a batch of recent booksellers and Saturday Guardian's to get a nice long list of suggestions for future Talking Books. It's one of those jobs where I don't mind doing in the evenings and as well as keeping abrest of what's happening in the book world, there's some good articles about public libraries with current issues being library closures and libraries lending e-books.
We're mastering the world of the F1 computer game where it's a miracle if anybody finishs a lap yet alone a race and we haven't moved above 24th. The good thing is that we all like taking it in turns to be Vettel so it's sweet revenge to see him last, unable to stay on the track and black flagged in most of the races.
Back to work matters, top topics this week still seem to be mass ordering from New Books and sorting themselves extra books for Christmas. I've been making sure that I've asked each reader if they need extra books over the holidays and it's surprising how many readers hadn't realised about the extra books and it's like Christmas has come early for some of them!
I've also spent abit of time catching up with the customer requests and it's always interesting to see which titles come up each month. We get approximately 150-200 requests a month and while some titles are pretty obscure, out-of-print or very expensive to purchase, there has been some real gems that have slipped through the net over the years. I guess this isn't so surprising given the small allocation we have each month (currently 41 new titles and 16 imports) with customer requests taking a good proportion of these once we start including missing series, retranscription requests and collection development into account. It's not an easy job as we are catering for a diverse taste, for example, this month's requests that have hit the magic "3" requests have ranged from Susan Boyle's autobiography to Jan Morris's Britannica Pax Trilogy and Dawn French's A Tiny Bit Marvellous to Melvyn Bragg's Credo.
We can always tell which books are being heavily plugged, particularly Radio 4, requests for Claire Tomalin's biography on Dickens keeps cropping up all over the place. Other books that recently caught the readers' imagination were Vasily Grossman's Love and Fate and Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes.
I also spent some time going through a batch of recent booksellers and Saturday Guardian's to get a nice long list of suggestions for future Talking Books. It's one of those jobs where I don't mind doing in the evenings and as well as keeping abrest of what's happening in the book world, there's some good articles about public libraries with current issues being library closures and libraries lending e-books.
Monday 5 December 2011
1984, Reading-4-life, I've finally got started - Nov 28th-Dec 2nd 2011
At last, I've finally got a chance to write on my blog (a month later than planned) as I've spent alot of time helping my son set his own blog up about his hens.
I wanted to get in to the habit of blogging on a weekly basis about my previous week at work for a number of reasons. Firstly, it will be a chance to reflect on my work while secondly, it will give people an idea of working in a library, albeit slightly an unconventional one. Also I just like writing.
The phones were pretty constant, dealing with phone enquiries takes up the majority of my time. The popular calls have been readers ordering extra books for Christmas, such as the faith of the postal service, and ordering from the latest issue of the 2 library magazines - Read On (particularly from the article about Scandinavian Crime authors) and New Books. New Books is particularly interesting as the Team can see which titles are appearing to be the most popular which is useful as I'm involved in book selection and it gives us an indication if we're getting it right. I also seem to have a run where I feel like I'm dealing with the same enquiry - a feeling of deja vu. Last week I had a run of people wanting authors who write like Catherine Cookson where I find myself going round the UK and reeling off the authors as I reach each city in turn, golden age crime authors and British TV crime authors. I did volunteer to contribute to the next issue of the Who writes like book but they were overrun with volunteers so I missed out.
Another job that takes up another large chunk of my week is managing the customer requests where we get 150-200 suggestions a month. I circulated last month's requests to all of the Team to vote on them. The ones that reach a certain amount of votes then go on to the "MasterSheet" - the spreadsheet we use each month for book selection. Unfortunately due to various reasons I only had 5 out of 8 people voting and to make matters worst, we all voted for completely different titles! I finally managed to narrow it down to a final 15 suggestions, an eclectic mix as well from Waiting to exhale - Terry McMillan, a misery memoir from Cupcake Brown, autobiographies by Ray Charles and Andy Kershaw, Pure by Andrew Miller, a much needed up-to-date suggestion on NLP and some old favourites such as Audrey Howard and Minette Walters.
Last week also saw our 6 weekly stock familiarisation meeting where we read something in a given genre or explore authors that we wouldn't normally read ourselves but we find ourselves constantly putting them on readers' lists. If you're advising readers about books, you need to not only know your stock but also be knowledgeable about the genres and authors themselves. It was Political Fiction's turn to be explored and a good selection of titles were covered including Alan Furst (Spies of the Balkans), Michael Dobbs (House of Cards), Ian McEwan (Amsterdam), Robert Harris (Fatherland) and George Orwell (1984) which was my offering. I quite like political fiction myself though 1 or 2 of my colleagues weren't looking forward to this. They were pleasantly surprised, the biggest one coming from Alan Furst where he turned out to be more literary than expected and was described as beautifully written. The least liked was Amsterdam which was described as shallow with unlikeable characters. I quite enjoyed 1984 myself as it made me think and there was an element of truth in it though most people had been put off this as they had to read it for school. It was bleak and relentless though, abit like Cormac McCartney's The Road.
As it is supposed to be technically quieter at this time of the year, there's a mass attempt to update our Talking Book genre/subject lists of selected titles which we send out to customers. I worked on the new War list which covers both fiction and factual titles (100 of each). It looks a good mix and includes the manly war authors like Douglas Reeman, Leslie Thomas and Patrick Robinson to family books set in the war like Elizabeth Elgin, Lilian Harry and R F Delderfield - An avenue goes to war. I've also tried to cover a mixture of wars from Bernard Cornwell's Azincourt to Karl Marlantes - Matterhorn. Non fiction also goes across the board from Crimean to Afghanistan, Boer War to the Falklands though the 2WW dominates as this is the one that mainly gets requested as a lot of our readers were actively involved in it.
I also finally finished my report on a recent course I attended in Derby called Reading 4 Life, ran by CILIP East Midlands Group. It was a chance to see the different reader development activities going on in the public libraries and to see if any of these were feasible and could be adapted for ourselves. I thought the most usable one was the Northamptonshire Libraries “Guiding Lights” - how books can change a person’s life. Leicester City - Health Day/Libraries are good for your health also looked promising for ourselves to adapt.
The course also covered a couple of workshops - Using Social Media and Talking about books. Again, there were a few ideas in the Using Social Media course that we could develop there. Derbyshire Reading Detectives Blog looked at literature written about the area by authors in that area. Particularly interesting was that alot of these authors have never been published so the blog had provided an avenue to get their work exposed. We get alot of readers sending in their unpublished material in the hope that we will put it in the Talking book Library. Maybe we could have a blog which promoted their work instead.
Westminster Libraries was also recommended as having a good blog. I liked their idea of an advent calendar of books (a bit late to set up this year) and getting their staff's children or members of their family to recommend books.
We've also had some posters of various initiatives from various library authorities emailed afterwards. North Kesteven had a food festival linked in with books, perhaps we could do a World Book Day event and link it in with a world food festival.
I wanted to get in to the habit of blogging on a weekly basis about my previous week at work for a number of reasons. Firstly, it will be a chance to reflect on my work while secondly, it will give people an idea of working in a library, albeit slightly an unconventional one. Also I just like writing.
The phones were pretty constant, dealing with phone enquiries takes up the majority of my time. The popular calls have been readers ordering extra books for Christmas, such as the faith of the postal service, and ordering from the latest issue of the 2 library magazines - Read On (particularly from the article about Scandinavian Crime authors) and New Books. New Books is particularly interesting as the Team can see which titles are appearing to be the most popular which is useful as I'm involved in book selection and it gives us an indication if we're getting it right. I also seem to have a run where I feel like I'm dealing with the same enquiry - a feeling of deja vu. Last week I had a run of people wanting authors who write like Catherine Cookson where I find myself going round the UK and reeling off the authors as I reach each city in turn, golden age crime authors and British TV crime authors. I did volunteer to contribute to the next issue of the Who writes like book but they were overrun with volunteers so I missed out.
Another job that takes up another large chunk of my week is managing the customer requests where we get 150-200 suggestions a month. I circulated last month's requests to all of the Team to vote on them. The ones that reach a certain amount of votes then go on to the "MasterSheet" - the spreadsheet we use each month for book selection. Unfortunately due to various reasons I only had 5 out of 8 people voting and to make matters worst, we all voted for completely different titles! I finally managed to narrow it down to a final 15 suggestions, an eclectic mix as well from Waiting to exhale - Terry McMillan, a misery memoir from Cupcake Brown, autobiographies by Ray Charles and Andy Kershaw, Pure by Andrew Miller, a much needed up-to-date suggestion on NLP and some old favourites such as Audrey Howard and Minette Walters.
Last week also saw our 6 weekly stock familiarisation meeting where we read something in a given genre or explore authors that we wouldn't normally read ourselves but we find ourselves constantly putting them on readers' lists. If you're advising readers about books, you need to not only know your stock but also be knowledgeable about the genres and authors themselves. It was Political Fiction's turn to be explored and a good selection of titles were covered including Alan Furst (Spies of the Balkans), Michael Dobbs (House of Cards), Ian McEwan (Amsterdam), Robert Harris (Fatherland) and George Orwell (1984) which was my offering. I quite like political fiction myself though 1 or 2 of my colleagues weren't looking forward to this. They were pleasantly surprised, the biggest one coming from Alan Furst where he turned out to be more literary than expected and was described as beautifully written. The least liked was Amsterdam which was described as shallow with unlikeable characters. I quite enjoyed 1984 myself as it made me think and there was an element of truth in it though most people had been put off this as they had to read it for school. It was bleak and relentless though, abit like Cormac McCartney's The Road.
As it is supposed to be technically quieter at this time of the year, there's a mass attempt to update our Talking Book genre/subject lists of selected titles which we send out to customers. I worked on the new War list which covers both fiction and factual titles (100 of each). It looks a good mix and includes the manly war authors like Douglas Reeman, Leslie Thomas and Patrick Robinson to family books set in the war like Elizabeth Elgin, Lilian Harry and R F Delderfield - An avenue goes to war. I've also tried to cover a mixture of wars from Bernard Cornwell's Azincourt to Karl Marlantes - Matterhorn. Non fiction also goes across the board from Crimean to Afghanistan, Boer War to the Falklands though the 2WW dominates as this is the one that mainly gets requested as a lot of our readers were actively involved in it.
I also finally finished my report on a recent course I attended in Derby called Reading 4 Life, ran by CILIP East Midlands Group. It was a chance to see the different reader development activities going on in the public libraries and to see if any of these were feasible and could be adapted for ourselves. I thought the most usable one was the Northamptonshire Libraries “Guiding Lights” - how books can change a person’s life. Leicester City - Health Day/Libraries are good for your health also looked promising for ourselves to adapt.
The course also covered a couple of workshops - Using Social Media and Talking about books. Again, there were a few ideas in the Using Social Media course that we could develop there. Derbyshire Reading Detectives Blog looked at literature written about the area by authors in that area. Particularly interesting was that alot of these authors have never been published so the blog had provided an avenue to get their work exposed. We get alot of readers sending in their unpublished material in the hope that we will put it in the Talking book Library. Maybe we could have a blog which promoted their work instead.
Westminster Libraries was also recommended as having a good blog. I liked their idea of an advent calendar of books (a bit late to set up this year) and getting their staff's children or members of their family to recommend books.
We've also had some posters of various initiatives from various library authorities emailed afterwards. North Kesteven had a food festival linked in with books, perhaps we could do a World Book Day event and link it in with a world food festival.
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