Grand Prix mania is still dominating the household though there’s been an improvement, a promotion to Lotus and even a 2nd place at Valencia though there’s still a lot of 10 place grid penalties. Slightly gutted that The Big Chill has been cancelled this year and I’m struggling to find a replacement. I was super organised and booked a summer holiday cottage in the South Downs, only to find that I had picked the week when the Green Man Festival takes place which was my second option. I did contemplate going to the Latitude Festival instead but there’s something about it that puts me off.
Another week has passed by though this time there’s been a reversal of trends, steady at the start of the week and manic on Friday, possibly due to the very wet day. It’s left with me with some outstanding enquiries for Monday which I’m not that keen on, particularly that we’re likely to go back to the normal trend of being frantic on Monday and will take me a few days to catch up. Judging by the nature of the calls, the next issue of New Books has just come out though the trend this week, was not to order books but to order genre listings and suggest new titles. A lot of readers are obviously reading or listening to the introduction rather than skipping straight to the new titles which is a good thing.
It was also the week for getting suggestions for book selection on the mastersheet, circulating the next batch of customer suggestions round the Team for votes and getting some titles together for collection development. There was the usual disagreement for topics for collection development. From various conversations with some of the members of the Team, there was an idea to look at missing classics again. We had done this before but we only touched the surface last time. Not everyone was in agreement though so after a lot of debate we have gone for 2 genres -war stories and light fiction particularly country life. We have decided to pick one missing classic a month in the same way as we do for Westerns and Mills and Boon and try and filter them through. I started going through the customer requests to see if there was anything suitable but a lot of the titles so far have been imports. Also, the type of reader who likes the gentle reads is also the reader who wouldn’t normally suggest titles. It tends to be their carers ringing on behalf of them and they just happen to mention that they like people like Miss Read and Gervase Phinn. It’s a time consuming job and I still need to put a little bit of time aside to find some suitable titles myself. I’ll probably spend a bit of time tomorrow night on this.
I spent my Wednesday evening scouting round various book sites for ideas. Unfortunately my favourite source The Bookseller hasn’t turned up for several months and after several attempts with different log ins to read it online, I failed completely. It seems that the log ins only work for the Stockport staff and not Peterborough! With the combination of The Guardian’s culture page, Waterstones and Amazon, I managed to get together a very varied list - from William Boyd’s latest one, Mary Quant’s autobiography, Essie Fox’s The Somnambulist (TV Club title), The Art of Fielding by Chad Harding (a big title in America) and a biography on Ayton Senna that has been reissued amongst other titles.
It was the monthly vote for the customer requests to see which ones were up for consideration in next week’s book selection meeting. I’m having real difficulties here remembering which ones actually went through! I think there was one called Lion and the Unicorn about the relationship between Disraeli and Gladstone, a recent book on the Churchill family and something that had Darcy in the title by Victoria Connelly. I also seem to remember Cecelia Ahern and a lengthy sea stories series by Alan Mallinson being in the mix along with several titles that had already been snapped up by the commercial publishers. I hope this doesn’t mean that we going to struggle on Wednesday to find enough decent customer requests to select.
I was quite pleased to see that the man behind the Public Libraries News Blog (http://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/) was named as this year’s IWR Information Professional of the year. It is a blog that I look at to keep up to date of what’s happening in public libraries. Another useful website I use a lot is the Voices for the Library site at http://www.voicesforthelibrary.org.uk/wordpress/.
I’ve managed to send my revalidation log to CILIP but still haven’t had an acknowledgement. Perhaps this might be to do with the reorganisation of CILIP itself or that the qualifications are going through change. January may be quiet on the professional development front but February looks better. I’ve booked myself on a html refresher course run by RNIB and CSG have a committee meeting planned. They should look good for the Portfolio. The CILIP Big Day in Newcastle looks good in September but I'm not sure if I'll be able to go to this - our new library system should be coming out then. Perhaps if the new system is delayed, I could take a day off as annual leave and pay for myself to go up. I've not made much progress in my search for a mentor. I must try harder here.
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