Back to reality, a week back at work and the red squirrels of Galloway Forest seems a dim and distant past. I now could do with another holiday to cope after last week!
It was our Bookclub meeting and the book under scrutiny this time was Cath Staincliff’s The Kindest Thing – a cheery book about the aftermath of a lady’s decision to assist her husband, suffering from motor neurone disease, to commit suicide, and ended up in court for murder after being reported to the police by her 16 year daughter! Although I wanted to complete the book, I found the book lacked depth and gave the impression that it was written with television in mind, similar to the Rosamund Lupton book Sister. There was no surprise to discover that the author wrote a lot of TV dramas in general. I was not alone to complain about the shallowness of the book and the lack of depth to the characters. It was suggested that Jodi Picoult would have done a better job with the subject matter. It led to some interesting debates about whether the law on assisted suicide should be changed, would we have done the same if we were put in her shoes and did we predict the family’s reactions. I gave the book 6 out of 10 while the average was 7 out of 10.
The customer suggestions have gone round for their monthly vote and there are some really good titles in the mix including a book on the Falklands War called Scram, Planet of the Apes, favourites such as Rosamunde Pilcher and Nelson Demille, new titles by Sue Townsend and Anne Tyler and some really autobiographies and biographies such as Gillian Lynne’s A Dancer in Wartime, Peter Jefferson’s And Now The Shipping Forecast, Joan Collins’s new autobiography and biographies on Leonard Cohen and Barry Sheene. There was also a flood of completed new talking books and one week alone resulted in 89 customer requests being ordered.
I spent a couple of evenings catching up with The Booksellers, again more readable than the last couple of editions of The Library Update. It’s depressing to read that a 5th of professional library posts have been cut last year and that Suffolk County Council are handing the running off branch libraries to volunteers. Hopefully, they may find themselves in the same boat as Surrey County Council who have found that their plans to remove paid staff from 10 of the county’s libraries has been deemed illegal. There was also an interesting debate between the Society of Chief Librarians and publishers regarding lending e-books in public libraries. One debate can be found on Bobbi Newman’s blog http://libarianbyday.net/. Questions are raised on whether libraries should stop buying e-books until issues over provision settles down and whether libraries should be lending out e-books at all and that they shouldn’t be offered as a core service as libraries are community spaces. A contentious argument from Surrey County Council is that libraries are not just there to serve the needs of the poor and they have to follow where customers are going. They argue that 1 in 10 people have an e-reader and that 7 out of 10 people use mobile devices to read books. I would like to see these stats in more detail! Also, they are running a pilot scheme involving Koboes as they have closed their mobile library and see this as an alternative. I like to see how some of the mobile library users ie the elderly, physically disabled or a visually impaired person get on with this! I’m hoping that the library lends out the Kobo and doesn’t expect someone to buy one out of their pension unless everyone in Surrey is wealthy and expert in technology regardless of who they are! I can’t get my head round this scheme!
Tuesday 24 April 2012
Friday 6 April 2012
Easter Eggs, Galloway Forest and One Direct Stadium - April 2nd - 6th 2012
Not so much to blog about today as the week was mainly concentrating in getting caught up before my holiday next week. I'm off to stay in a cottage in Galloway Forest for a week and looking forward to a break. I've practically packed (plenty of warm clothing and rather optimistically a sundress and sandals) and the cat and hens have all been shipped off to their respective "hotels".
The phones have been extra busy as we've been one down in personnel and Customer Services have also been short of staff which has had a knock-on effect on us and have consequently picked up extra work as they've had to pass through calls they would normally do themselves. The rush has mainly been readers ringing making sure they've got plenty of books over Easter. I've also been checking with each caller that they've got plenty of books, if not would they like extra and if so, what do they fancy reading. It adds a few minutes on to the calls but a bit of customer care goes a long way.
Huge excitement with my son as he has told me that he has bought me a surprise - an Easter egg. He is desperate to show me now and has hinted that it is a big one! Hope it's still a big whole one by Sunday.
Football is hotting up, particularly in the Blue Square Conference. My team - Mansfield Town - are third and looking pretty good for the play offs with the Teams around them dropping points. I'm not sure about the stadium name change to One Direct Stadium though, that will take some getting used to.
The phones have been extra busy as we've been one down in personnel and Customer Services have also been short of staff which has had a knock-on effect on us and have consequently picked up extra work as they've had to pass through calls they would normally do themselves. The rush has mainly been readers ringing making sure they've got plenty of books over Easter. I've also been checking with each caller that they've got plenty of books, if not would they like extra and if so, what do they fancy reading. It adds a few minutes on to the calls but a bit of customer care goes a long way.
Huge excitement with my son as he has told me that he has bought me a surprise - an Easter egg. He is desperate to show me now and has hinted that it is a big one! Hope it's still a big whole one by Sunday.
Football is hotting up, particularly in the Blue Square Conference. My team - Mansfield Town - are third and looking pretty good for the play offs with the Teams around them dropping points. I'm not sure about the stadium name change to One Direct Stadium though, that will take some getting used to.
Tuesday 3 April 2012
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)