Another week has gone, and as usual it was very busy apart from Friday morning. Sport biographies was the surprising most popular enquiry this week and rivalled authors who write like Catherine Cookson and Golden Age and TV Crime authors. There have also been a worrying number of enquiries from readers asking where their New Books magazine was. They all were supposed to have received it in Daisy CD. We now stagger the dates when we send the magazine out in the different formats to try and spread the calls over a few weeks but it’s been over 2 weeks since they initially went out.
We had our monthly team book selection on Wednesday morning. It’s a good pick this month though as predicted, we struggled with picking suitable customer requests. There’s a good collection of titles ranging from heavyweights such as Melvyn Bragg’s Credo, popular authors such as Lesley Pearse and William Boyd’s latest titles, a number of the latest TV Club titles and a variety of missing series for crime fiction, science fiction and fantasy – Ann Cleeves, Peter James, Alistair Reynolds and Robert Jordan. The non-fiction picks are varied too including a biography on Ayton Senna, some true crime Escape from Alcatraz and a historical political book The Lion and the Unicorn which focuses on the relationship between Gladstone and Disraeli. We ended up doing 2 genres for collection development – War Stories and Country Life. We had quite a few suggestions to work through so we will carry this on for next month.
It was our Book Group on Wednesday and it was Simon Kernick’s No Time To Die to come under scrutiny. It received very mixed views from wonderful page turner and loving the main character Dennis to a page turner but a bit shallow to hating it because of the mindless violence and the fact that Dennis thought he had the right to kill someone if he thought they deserved to die. Certainly one for Lee Child fans.
To promote awareness of the range of calls the RNIB Helpline get, somebody from Customer Services tweeted the different enquiries received. This could be something the Reader Services Team could do one day. Perhaps we could tie it in with A Day In The Life in a Library Project which is coming up very soon (note to check the website and include an entry myself), or tie it in with National Libraries Day or World Book Day.
On the professional development front, I received my acknowledgment for my revalidation log from CILIP at last. We definitely have a CSG Committee meeting next month. My role as Assistant CSG Quarterly and Web Editor is also starting to kick off as it is my turn to email the rest of the committee members about the monthly newsletter, collate it and email it to CILIP by a given deadline. I’ve also got some proof reading to do on the website once I can get the log in to work and I’ve been sent some comprehensive notes on Constant Contact to digest and try out. I’ve now booked myself on a free taster session which is running one dinner hour to look at how RNIB use Facebook and Google Plus. I’ve got a little bit of knowledge with Facebook from the CPD 21 Steps and the Reading 4 Life Course I recently attended but I have zero knowledge of Google Plus.
Sunday, 29 January 2012
Sunday, 22 January 2012
The Green Man and The Lion and the Unicorn - January 16th-20th
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.
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.
Monday, 16 January 2012
Frenzy to a fizzle - January 9th-13th 2012
I got to admit I found it hard to motivate myself this week to blog about my week at work. Probably because in general not a lot happened! The week started in a frenzy but fizzled out by Friday, helped by the unusually sunny weather for January. Judging by the calls received, I think a circular letter had been sent out to readers that had less than 10 books on their list.
The break from the routine for me was that it was my turn to represent the Reader Services Team which is just a formality since we preselect in advance. One of the important things is that we have a representative from the Production Department attend to keep us up to date with issues that can affect selection ie monthly quotas or we are selecting books that are too complex to produce in a particular format. The big issue at the moment is that we can’t pick any braille or giant print at the moment due to lack of capacity in production with the fear that we may have to deselect titles. This seems to be a recurring problem over the years and something that irritates me in that we have a service agreement with Production, yet they overestimate the quotas and don’t seem to build in a contingency plan to take into account of things like staff shortages due to redundancies. Although they have a representative at the meeting, we don’t get enough feedback to make decisions in advance. Although Production have got it wrong, it’s the customer - the National Library Services - that suffer and ultimately - the readers themselves as we end up losing a few months’ worth of selection and titles slip through the net. Thankfully talking books haven’t been affected and titles are being selected as normal. After the book selection meetings, it’s then my job to go through all the titles and move any customer requests to a different spread sheet. We did well this month as I moved an impressive 123 requests over altogether. It’s one of those jobs that takes longer than it sounds.
I managed to email my revalidation log for my second year to CILIP and am busy going through my log looking for gaps in my evidence to put in my portfolio. My next job is to look for a mentor as I’m going to need some guidance as I’ve never put a portfolio together before. My Chartership was in the days of the 6,000 word report. I’m a bit concerned that there’s not been enough professional development, my portfolio is looking rather slim. I’m hoping that’s where the mentor will come in and put me on the right track.
The break from the routine for me was that it was my turn to represent the Reader Services Team which is just a formality since we preselect in advance. One of the important things is that we have a representative from the Production Department attend to keep us up to date with issues that can affect selection ie monthly quotas or we are selecting books that are too complex to produce in a particular format. The big issue at the moment is that we can’t pick any braille or giant print at the moment due to lack of capacity in production with the fear that we may have to deselect titles. This seems to be a recurring problem over the years and something that irritates me in that we have a service agreement with Production, yet they overestimate the quotas and don’t seem to build in a contingency plan to take into account of things like staff shortages due to redundancies. Although they have a representative at the meeting, we don’t get enough feedback to make decisions in advance. Although Production have got it wrong, it’s the customer - the National Library Services - that suffer and ultimately - the readers themselves as we end up losing a few months’ worth of selection and titles slip through the net. Thankfully talking books haven’t been affected and titles are being selected as normal. After the book selection meetings, it’s then my job to go through all the titles and move any customer requests to a different spread sheet. We did well this month as I moved an impressive 123 requests over altogether. It’s one of those jobs that takes longer than it sounds.
I managed to email my revalidation log for my second year to CILIP and am busy going through my log looking for gaps in my evidence to put in my portfolio. My next job is to look for a mentor as I’m going to need some guidance as I’ve never put a portfolio together before. My Chartership was in the days of the 6,000 word report. I’m a bit concerned that there’s not been enough professional development, my portfolio is looking rather slim. I’m hoping that’s where the mentor will come in and put me on the right track.
Saturday, 7 January 2012
Christmas, portfolios and Ken Dodd - January 3rd-7th 2012
Christmas soon comes and goes with all the excitement of having a week off from week (more important than Christmas itself). I always have big unrealistic plans in the break which only get half fulfilled. I managed to catch up with my revalidation log to the end of the year (currently a very long word document reflecting on all my professional activities). I’ve taken the philosophy of reflect on everything and then when the time comes to sort out my final portfolio, just pick out the most relevant. I think it will be easier to take out than try and add after three years when the memory starts getting blurry. I managed to complete my log form for my second year ready to email to CILIP. I’m going to have another quick check for spellings and then send it off. I‘ve also started to assemble my portfolio and went through my evidence so far in the last 2 years and made a list of where I had gaps. I treated myself to a new box file and a couple of packets of plastic folders to organise everything after a recent course on building portfolios. I’ve given myself a deadline of the end of the month to get my form sent and gaps sorted. I’ve put this as one of my EARNs in my professional development plan for next year – Essential as opposed to Achievable/Realistic and Nice to do aims.
I’ve put engage in a professional activity each month as one of my Achievable/Realistic aims and now trying to plan ahead for these next few months to try and make sure I can put something down. I was going to put starting blogging about my work for December and keep a tab on the hours spent each month on my blog. I also had an email from the Communications Officer of the CSG Branch asking if I was still interested in helping out, I had initially volunteered in our last meeting and was christened the title of Communications Assistant. I’m initially helping out with the CILIP monthly emails – chasing committee members for ideas, collating the info and then emailing the finished result to CILIP by a given deadline. There’s also going to be some proof reading in the near future. It will be good experience and something else to include in my professional activities.
It’s been a busy week on the phones as expected and it has taken up most of my week. We had our Reader Services Team book selection meeting at last with all the usual arguments. I’m not sure that we got the mix quite right this month; we seem to be top heavy on non-fiction. It doesn’t help that the collection development topics were feminism, black issues and military history (non ww1 and ww2). I think we’ve restored the balance with the imports as we concentrated on crime, thrillers, romance and family stories. The selections are varied and include titles from Max Hastings – The Korean War to George R Martin’s A Game of Thrones and biographies as diverse as Ken Dodd and Malcolm X.
It’s my turn to go to the main book selection meeting next week and whoever goes, gets the bonus job of picking the Mills and Boon and Western titles. One of the titles has caused great hilarity – The Highwayman by Michele Hauf. One of our readers was keen to see more titles by this author, particularly the vampire ones – this one is vampire meet historical which will also please our Taken by the Viking fans (One of the big favourites with the readers).
I’ve been doing my least favourite job this week, catching up with the completed customer requests. It’s the job that gets me complaining the most. There has been a few weeks backlog due to the cataloguer being off in the last couple of weeks and for some unknown reason there was a lull in titles going “live” in general. There are pages of them and worse still, a lot of the titles that are ready are ones with loads of requests on them (the real must haves with the customers) - Jean M Auel’s latest, one of the many Diana Gabaldon Outlander titles, likewise Peter Robinson ( Inspector Banks) and The King’s Speech.
Friday saw a break in the routine as there was a realisation that we still had our Christmas display up on our Noticeboard. It was my turn to do the next display. The topic was our best reads for 2011. I found it difficult to pinpoint 2 standout books and had to cheat a bit and pick 2 books I had read recently and enjoyed – The Unseen by Katherine Webb and Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd. It made a nice change, designing a few quick posters and trying to think how to make the display eye-catching but not too cluttered.
Finally, after a few weeks rest, my son's blog crazy about chickens is back in operation again. Check it out on
http://mattcrazyaboutchickens-jane.blogspot.com/.
I’ve put engage in a professional activity each month as one of my Achievable/Realistic aims and now trying to plan ahead for these next few months to try and make sure I can put something down. I was going to put starting blogging about my work for December and keep a tab on the hours spent each month on my blog. I also had an email from the Communications Officer of the CSG Branch asking if I was still interested in helping out, I had initially volunteered in our last meeting and was christened the title of Communications Assistant. I’m initially helping out with the CILIP monthly emails – chasing committee members for ideas, collating the info and then emailing the finished result to CILIP by a given deadline. There’s also going to be some proof reading in the near future. It will be good experience and something else to include in my professional activities.
It’s been a busy week on the phones as expected and it has taken up most of my week. We had our Reader Services Team book selection meeting at last with all the usual arguments. I’m not sure that we got the mix quite right this month; we seem to be top heavy on non-fiction. It doesn’t help that the collection development topics were feminism, black issues and military history (non ww1 and ww2). I think we’ve restored the balance with the imports as we concentrated on crime, thrillers, romance and family stories. The selections are varied and include titles from Max Hastings – The Korean War to George R Martin’s A Game of Thrones and biographies as diverse as Ken Dodd and Malcolm X.
It’s my turn to go to the main book selection meeting next week and whoever goes, gets the bonus job of picking the Mills and Boon and Western titles. One of the titles has caused great hilarity – The Highwayman by Michele Hauf. One of our readers was keen to see more titles by this author, particularly the vampire ones – this one is vampire meet historical which will also please our Taken by the Viking fans (One of the big favourites with the readers).
I’ve been doing my least favourite job this week, catching up with the completed customer requests. It’s the job that gets me complaining the most. There has been a few weeks backlog due to the cataloguer being off in the last couple of weeks and for some unknown reason there was a lull in titles going “live” in general. There are pages of them and worse still, a lot of the titles that are ready are ones with loads of requests on them (the real must haves with the customers) - Jean M Auel’s latest, one of the many Diana Gabaldon Outlander titles, likewise Peter Robinson ( Inspector Banks) and The King’s Speech.
Friday saw a break in the routine as there was a realisation that we still had our Christmas display up on our Noticeboard. It was my turn to do the next display. The topic was our best reads for 2011. I found it difficult to pinpoint 2 standout books and had to cheat a bit and pick 2 books I had read recently and enjoyed – The Unseen by Katherine Webb and Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd. It made a nice change, designing a few quick posters and trying to think how to make the display eye-catching but not too cluttered.
Finally, after a few weeks rest, my son's blog crazy about chickens is back in operation again. Check it out on
http://mattcrazyaboutchickens-jane.blogspot.com/.
Thursday, 29 December 2011
HRT, Martina Cole and the Christmas post - December 19th-23rd 2011
F1 Mania has continued to grip our household as Matthew frightens everybody else off the road - still loads of 10 grid penalties and disqualifications but we do now have a 12th and a 16th to our name. Matthew even got a pole position in qualifying but he had so many grid penalties he ended up back in 24th. Worse still, he has been relegated to HRT (Hispania Racing Team as opposed to Hormone Replacement Therapy) - the worse team on the grid.
The start of the week continued to be frantic with readers trying to get their books for Christmas though by Wednesday afternoon, things finally quietened down as readers became resigned to the fact that they may have left things abit too late for their Christmas books. Unfortunately we did get a small minority of readers who rang up to chase books that they had only ordered the day before and couldn't accept that Christmas does actually slow the post down. We also made sure that we cleared our in-tray ready for next year. Luckily the majority of the enquiries were just requests for print Talking Book lists. Unluckily, it was the week where it was the hunt for a photocopier that actually worked. I spent the majority of Wednesday having to keep dismantling the photocopier to rescue bits of paper that seem to get stuck in every place imagined.
The last few days gave me the opportunity to have a real good go at catching up with the customer requests. Claire Tomalin's biography on Charles Dickens has now fit 11 requests while we're gathering requests for Martina Cole's The Faithless as a rate of knots. More dilemma as ISIS will be doing this so we would have to buy this in.
We were going to have our Reader Services Team book selection meeting on Wednesday morning but thankfully we didn't get the infamous Mastersheet (list of titles to select from) back in time. Unfortunately, we're going to have to do it in the first week we're back. Something to look forward as it's the one thing that causes the most arguments in our Team. We also couldn't agree on what subject to have for collection development, one person wanted war but not WW1 or WW2, somebody else wanted black history while we had also received some feedback from a customer about the lack of books on Feminism in the library. We've gone for a compromise of picking 2 titles in each to start with and if we end up with a good pile, carry on for February. Fortunately it was quiet on Friday so I had a good attempt to look for some suitable titles. I also had a look in the old now defunct cassette library to see if there were some suitable titles for digitalisation and found some Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer in there. This job took longer than anticipated and it looks like I'm going to be continuing with this on my first day back at work.
The start of the week continued to be frantic with readers trying to get their books for Christmas though by Wednesday afternoon, things finally quietened down as readers became resigned to the fact that they may have left things abit too late for their Christmas books. Unfortunately we did get a small minority of readers who rang up to chase books that they had only ordered the day before and couldn't accept that Christmas does actually slow the post down. We also made sure that we cleared our in-tray ready for next year. Luckily the majority of the enquiries were just requests for print Talking Book lists. Unluckily, it was the week where it was the hunt for a photocopier that actually worked. I spent the majority of Wednesday having to keep dismantling the photocopier to rescue bits of paper that seem to get stuck in every place imagined.
The last few days gave me the opportunity to have a real good go at catching up with the customer requests. Claire Tomalin's biography on Charles Dickens has now fit 11 requests while we're gathering requests for Martina Cole's The Faithless as a rate of knots. More dilemma as ISIS will be doing this so we would have to buy this in.
We were going to have our Reader Services Team book selection meeting on Wednesday morning but thankfully we didn't get the infamous Mastersheet (list of titles to select from) back in time. Unfortunately, we're going to have to do it in the first week we're back. Something to look forward as it's the one thing that causes the most arguments in our Team. We also couldn't agree on what subject to have for collection development, one person wanted war but not WW1 or WW2, somebody else wanted black history while we had also received some feedback from a customer about the lack of books on Feminism in the library. We've gone for a compromise of picking 2 titles in each to start with and if we end up with a good pile, carry on for February. Fortunately it was quiet on Friday so I had a good attempt to look for some suitable titles. I also had a look in the old now defunct cassette library to see if there were some suitable titles for digitalisation and found some Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer in there. This job took longer than anticipated and it looks like I'm going to be continuing with this on my first day back at work.
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
3 christmas dinners and a 10th grid penalty - December 12th-16th 2011
A week after Matthew's birthday and the F1 game is still going strong. He has signed for Force India and there was huge excitement when he reached the dizzy heights of 19th on one of the qualifying sessions but it's been a week of 10 grid place penalties, disqualifications and a consistent 24th.
It's also been a succession of Christmas dinners with my Book Club's meal kicking off the proceedings - a decent helping of mussels and french fries at the Beehive, followed by a traditional roast the next day at my son's school(in my role as parent governor) and rounded off with fishcakes and salad for our Team meal out at the cuckoo. I'm going to go on a strict diet next week ready for Christmas.
We were supposed to have talked about Precious Bane for our Bookclub but only 2 people had managed to finish the book with not many good things to say. I read the first paragraph and decided that life was too short to decipher the Shropshire accent and left it. Definitely wins the award for the most unpopular book we've had, beating Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian which previously held this dubious record.
Workwise it's been a week dominated by New Books, RNIB's bimonthly magazine advertising the new titles in the library. Everyone has a section which they are responsible for - from running a report for their format for the last 2 months and then editing it to a set format. This isn't just for consistency and to make it professional but also to take into account that the magazine is produced in different formats. For example, to make the daisy version navigatable, we have to set the text out using different formats.
My role is to pull all the sections together and proof read it across the formats including checking the formatting, consistency and adding missing information. It's been a tighter deadline than usual so have found that a copy seems to be constantly at my side.
The calls for extra Christmas books still keep coming in. I've also had a string of wholesale changes to reader's lists. I'm guessing that as people begin to get more dependent on their books over the winter months, they are becoming more discerning on what they read. It can be a lengthy process, particularly if they're really specific in their taste and worse still, they've read everything we have to offer. The calls for Claire Tomalin's biography keep coming in, definitely need to select this next time around though there is a dilemma that Audiogo may pick this up and we may have to wait for this to come out as an Import.
We've managed to acquire noticeboard space in a prime spot near the canteen for a few months. This has given us a good and easy opportunity to promote the Reader Services Team. Last month, we had new films/TV drama tie-in's to books where we had some good titles available in alternative format including The Slap, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Help.
Last week we decided on books with a Christmas theme, my 2 books were Tolkien's Letters to Santa and Fannie Flagg's - A Redbird Christmas. We're taking it in turns to do the final display, my colleague went to town with loads of Christmas images to give the display a Christmassy finishing touch. It's my turn next month and we're talking about doing a display advertising our Bookclub as we're getting short of participants. I'm already getting my thoughts together.
It's also been a succession of Christmas dinners with my Book Club's meal kicking off the proceedings - a decent helping of mussels and french fries at the Beehive, followed by a traditional roast the next day at my son's school(in my role as parent governor) and rounded off with fishcakes and salad for our Team meal out at the cuckoo. I'm going to go on a strict diet next week ready for Christmas.
We were supposed to have talked about Precious Bane for our Bookclub but only 2 people had managed to finish the book with not many good things to say. I read the first paragraph and decided that life was too short to decipher the Shropshire accent and left it. Definitely wins the award for the most unpopular book we've had, beating Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian which previously held this dubious record.
Workwise it's been a week dominated by New Books, RNIB's bimonthly magazine advertising the new titles in the library. Everyone has a section which they are responsible for - from running a report for their format for the last 2 months and then editing it to a set format. This isn't just for consistency and to make it professional but also to take into account that the magazine is produced in different formats. For example, to make the daisy version navigatable, we have to set the text out using different formats.
My role is to pull all the sections together and proof read it across the formats including checking the formatting, consistency and adding missing information. It's been a tighter deadline than usual so have found that a copy seems to be constantly at my side.
The calls for extra Christmas books still keep coming in. I've also had a string of wholesale changes to reader's lists. I'm guessing that as people begin to get more dependent on their books over the winter months, they are becoming more discerning on what they read. It can be a lengthy process, particularly if they're really specific in their taste and worse still, they've read everything we have to offer. The calls for Claire Tomalin's biography keep coming in, definitely need to select this next time around though there is a dilemma that Audiogo may pick this up and we may have to wait for this to come out as an Import.
We've managed to acquire noticeboard space in a prime spot near the canteen for a few months. This has given us a good and easy opportunity to promote the Reader Services Team. Last month, we had new films/TV drama tie-in's to books where we had some good titles available in alternative format including The Slap, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Help.
Last week we decided on books with a Christmas theme, my 2 books were Tolkien's Letters to Santa and Fannie Flagg's - A Redbird Christmas. We're taking it in turns to do the final display, my colleague went to town with loads of Christmas images to give the display a Christmassy finishing touch. It's my turn next month and we're talking about doing a display advertising our Bookclub as we're getting short of participants. I'm already getting my thoughts together.
Saturday, 17 December 2011
Pizza, Cake and A Tiny Bit Marvellous - Dec 5th-9th 2011
Well it's week 2 of my week at work blog, (though a week late!) and the phones have been intensive, with the cold weather and Christmas holidays looming, the winter readers have arrived en masse. Fortunately for me it's been a 4 day week so some respite. It was my son's 13th birthday so in amongst the mass Christmas card writing and wrapping presents, I've had a sleepover and birthday food to contend with. I'm a "domestic ungoddess" where cooking and housework is concerned, that's why I'm better off at work! As usual disaster struck and I forgot to separate my egg yolks in my ice cream, my home made pizza ended up in a sea of liquid, my chocolate icing swam off my cake and my crumble topping swapped places with my rhubharb! The boys didn't kill each other and ate the food though so I call that a success.
We're mastering the world of the F1 computer game where it's a miracle if anybody finishs a lap yet alone a race and we haven't moved above 24th. The good thing is that we all like taking it in turns to be Vettel so it's sweet revenge to see him last, unable to stay on the track and black flagged in most of the races.
Back to work matters, top topics this week still seem to be mass ordering from New Books and sorting themselves extra books for Christmas. I've been making sure that I've asked each reader if they need extra books over the holidays and it's surprising how many readers hadn't realised about the extra books and it's like Christmas has come early for some of them!
I've also spent abit of time catching up with the customer requests and it's always interesting to see which titles come up each month. We get approximately 150-200 requests a month and while some titles are pretty obscure, out-of-print or very expensive to purchase, there has been some real gems that have slipped through the net over the years. I guess this isn't so surprising given the small allocation we have each month (currently 41 new titles and 16 imports) with customer requests taking a good proportion of these once we start including missing series, retranscription requests and collection development into account. It's not an easy job as we are catering for a diverse taste, for example, this month's requests that have hit the magic "3" requests have ranged from Susan Boyle's autobiography to Jan Morris's Britannica Pax Trilogy and Dawn French's A Tiny Bit Marvellous to Melvyn Bragg's Credo.
We can always tell which books are being heavily plugged, particularly Radio 4, requests for Claire Tomalin's biography on Dickens keeps cropping up all over the place. Other books that recently caught the readers' imagination were Vasily Grossman's Love and Fate and Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes.
I also spent some time going through a batch of recent booksellers and Saturday Guardian's to get a nice long list of suggestions for future Talking Books. It's one of those jobs where I don't mind doing in the evenings and as well as keeping abrest of what's happening in the book world, there's some good articles about public libraries with current issues being library closures and libraries lending e-books.
We're mastering the world of the F1 computer game where it's a miracle if anybody finishs a lap yet alone a race and we haven't moved above 24th. The good thing is that we all like taking it in turns to be Vettel so it's sweet revenge to see him last, unable to stay on the track and black flagged in most of the races.
Back to work matters, top topics this week still seem to be mass ordering from New Books and sorting themselves extra books for Christmas. I've been making sure that I've asked each reader if they need extra books over the holidays and it's surprising how many readers hadn't realised about the extra books and it's like Christmas has come early for some of them!
I've also spent abit of time catching up with the customer requests and it's always interesting to see which titles come up each month. We get approximately 150-200 requests a month and while some titles are pretty obscure, out-of-print or very expensive to purchase, there has been some real gems that have slipped through the net over the years. I guess this isn't so surprising given the small allocation we have each month (currently 41 new titles and 16 imports) with customer requests taking a good proportion of these once we start including missing series, retranscription requests and collection development into account. It's not an easy job as we are catering for a diverse taste, for example, this month's requests that have hit the magic "3" requests have ranged from Susan Boyle's autobiography to Jan Morris's Britannica Pax Trilogy and Dawn French's A Tiny Bit Marvellous to Melvyn Bragg's Credo.
We can always tell which books are being heavily plugged, particularly Radio 4, requests for Claire Tomalin's biography on Dickens keeps cropping up all over the place. Other books that recently caught the readers' imagination were Vasily Grossman's Love and Fate and Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes.
I also spent some time going through a batch of recent booksellers and Saturday Guardian's to get a nice long list of suggestions for future Talking Books. It's one of those jobs where I don't mind doing in the evenings and as well as keeping abrest of what's happening in the book world, there's some good articles about public libraries with current issues being library closures and libraries lending e-books.
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