The Forgotten Waltz and the underdogs - 7th May-11th May

Not sure if it’s the weather but I spent a lot of last week revamping readers’ lists to “more light reading please”. I’ve done many variations of lists consisting of family saga authors who write like Catherine Cookson, Rosamunde Pilcher and similar, country life fiction, Fred Archer and Gervase Phinn style autobiographies, golden age crime and Mills and Boon romance. It’s surprising how many different combinations you can do for light reading.

It was my turn to attend the monthly book selection meeting which passed by smoothly. There was quite an interesting discussion from our production department who are looking into automating the braille process. We presently conform to the rules set out in The Brailler’s Manual which gives a consistent standard to how a braille book should be transcribed. The obvious advantage would be the speed in getting a book produced into braille. I query the quality of the output though and I think there may be some come back from some of our customers. I think there is a parallel with brailling books to cataloguing in that there are rules and standards to conform to and that you need some manual intervention.

We finally managed to do an overhaul of our noticeboard, this time the focus is on our Reading Group – Bookbabes – to try and drum up some new faces. We managed to attract a couple of new people from a notice on our Intranet but could do with some more people. Good news!, we’ve just found out at short notice that we are going to be taking part in the Orange Prize Event held at Peterborough Central Library again. One of the other reading groups has dropped out last minute. The bad news is that we’ve got to read The Forgotten Waltz – Anne Enright - which we’ve not only got to read but also sell to the audience as a “must read”. We’ve got a 100% record every time we take part so the pressure’s on.

There was an interesting article in the latest CILIP Update about e-readers, particularly the views of the VI pupils. They liked the fact that they were small and easy to carry and more importantly that people couldn’t tell that they were reading a book in alternative format such as a giant print book. It might be something to think about when trying to persuade teenage readers to join the various library services. They don’t want to be seen reading something different or have a special daisy player which will set them apart from their friends. Another useful comment was the dislike of Kindle’s electronic voice. There is one argument for more talking books to be done in synthetic voice in the future as the younger generation would be more used to this and would accept it. The pupils in this survey certainly wasn’t reading the script.

I've been distracted again with the sport with Man City winning the Premier League with almost the last kick of the match and then Pastor Maldanaldo of Williams winning the Spanish Grand Prix. Definitely the weekend of the underdogs.