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.
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