East Midlands Members Day, Lisa Scottoline and AC/DC - March 26th - 30th

I must resolve not to start each blog with “Another busy week has passed”, it gets very tedious! The highlight of the week was the East Midlands Branch Members Day, held again at the Quad in Derby. It was the third one I’ve been to and probably the best one in terms of the speakers – Jonathan Douglas from the National Literacy Trust and Phil Bradley who whizzed through a host of social networking tools. I need to write up my notes and have a go at some of the resources mentioned. For anyone who is interested, notes from this talk can be found at:-

http://www.slideshare.net/Philbradley/social-media2012andsearch

Going back to Jonathan Douglas’s talk, the central theme running through was the idea that there was a link between poverty and low literacy levels and how public libraries could help bridge this gap. Marketing was looked at, particularly the idea of targeting the audience and taking reading to these groups such as working with the tabloid newspapers, football clubs, Lloyds Pharmacy and Iceland Supermarket. Perhaps the public library could work with their local McDonalds or Pizza Hut and have a lending shelf where customers could browse on the shelf and read while drinking their coffee. One finding of the research which interested us was the idea that the middle classes saw reading as a creative thing while the working classes saw reading in more practical terms ie you need to be able to read to get a job. For more details the website is:-

http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/.

Another highlight of last week was our team’s book selection meeting. The library service as a whole is now only selecting every 2 months but our team thought it would be best to still meet monthly and pick some titles to save some time. We only get an hour off each Wednesday and we can just about do a monthly pick in that time. We’ve managed to do the collection development – this time it’s engineering, science and technology biographies and legal crime fiction. We get fed up of keep being asked for books similar to John Grisham! As expected, ISIS has nabbed the best authors but we’ve managed to find a few – early Scott Turow and Lisa Scottoline. We were struggling to find British legal crime fiction authors so if anyone could recommend any good authors – particularly none ISIS authors – feel free to drop down some ideas in the comments.

We found some notable gaps in the engineering and science biographies including James Watt and Isaac Newton so we should be able to resolve this problem. The customers have as usual thrown us a varied bag to choose from. Where else would you find a title from Danielle Steel’s back catalogue, AC/DC’s lead singer’s autobiography, the first one in Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle’s series and Sylvia Nasar’s A Grand Pursuit: a Story of Economic Genius.