Welcome back - 9th February 2013

It’s been a surreal week, a surprise album from My Bloody Valentine, the success of the squatters of Friern Library in winning a 2 year reprieve for the library, an 8-1 win from the mighty Stags and a return to writing on my blog.

Work wise – dare I say it – we’re over busy as usual and it’s one of the prime reasons why I’ve lapsed on my blog. We’ve been another person down since October and working on my blog in the evenings is the last thing on my mind. Just getting through the week in one piece is my aim!

Since I last blogged back in September, we’ve moved in to a new office in a completely different part of the building after 16 years of living with the frantic Customer Services. It’s quiet, in its own contained space which opens up loads of possibilities of doing things like running a regular reading group for staff and is next to the new braille and giant print library which has just moved down from Stockport. It’s probably one of the best things to happen at work since I’ve started! (I’m easily pleased). The downside is the lack of people to fill the office! We should be getting a couple of afternoon part time staff in a few months’ time though in reality we could have done with some extra cover in the morning – our busiest time! We also going to be extending our opening periods in the afternoon though, barring any disasters, the new staff will be picking this up. Looking on the bright side (as I always tend to do) – there may be an opportunity to have a break from the phones for the odd hour in the afternoons. We’re also will be picking up some of the braille and giant print duties which will be good, particularly for the customer so we don’t have to keep passing them on.

Our forthcoming new reading business system is still forthcoming! Unfortunately we had one of our not so finest hours by sending all our members a letter announcing the benefits of the new computerised system where you can select your own books and manage your own lists only to cause a massive panic from customers who thought they had to cancel their subscription as they didn’t have a computer and would therefore no longer be able to use the service. One positive thing that did come out of this fiasco was how the customers valued our services and the horror that they could no longer ring us up to help them choose their books.

Our stock familiarisation and book club meetings are still going strong. Claire Morrall (The Man Who Disappeared) received an almost record 8 out of 10 from everybody, which was pretty credible considering there were a number of members who prefer Crime Fiction. I’ve read a real mixture of authors for stock familiarisation, trying to mix it with books I really want to read and popular authors I keep putting on people’s lists but have never read myself. It’s really widened my horizons as I’ve been introduced to writers who I would not normally have considered such as E V Thomson and Sidney Sheldon.

I’ve finally braved it and sent in my revalidation (first cycle) in to CILIP. It’s gone very quiet so slightly worried that it’s failed! I’m busy collecting evidence and filling in my log for my 2nd cycle in the meantime. The first year is already nearly completed though so I’m going to sit down and write some objectives for the next 2 years – probably split them in to essential, realistic and nice to do goals again.

The newly merged CDEG committee continues to work well together and I feel quite excited and optimistic about the future. I’ve also taken on board the e-newsletter which has given me an opportunity to learn new skills – Constant Contact and Sharepoint - and a feeling of contributing something.

This was the article I contributed regarding the Library Camp (Birmingham) 2012 (slightly belated!)

Helped with a large flask of black coffee to cope with an early start and a freezing Melton Mowbray railway station, I made my way to Library Camp 2012 with some trepidation. Cheered by the sight of all those cakes and more caffeine, I soon forgot the inconvenience of getting up so early on a Saturday morning.

Despite arriving late, I managed to arrive just in time to find out more about the sessions which seemed to involve lots of people jumping up on the stage “selling their pitch” and someone armed with a flipboard and post-its madly trying to keep up with the day’s sessions on offer.

Clutching my library camp timetable, I hastily scribbled the pitches down in the allocated time slots and made my decisions on which ones I wanted to do. With 5 sessions running on the hour from 10.00 to 4.30, there was plenty of choice with topics as wide ranging as cataloguing, book repairs, the happiness index, starting a library from scratch and how to cope with users swearing at you.

My first session was Mental Health in the Library and was probably the best session I attended. We debated whether it was best to be open about your mental illness as people would be more understanding about your problems or whether this would lead to prejudice. The group then talked about however understanding the manager is, the attitudes of other staff could be problematic. Solutions suggested included buddying staff with mental health problems, getting mental health awareness as part of staff training such as a Mental Health First Aid Course (run by MIND) and incorporating mental health awareness in corporate policy. One participant, speaking from personal experience, found that her team were more accepting of her manager making reasonable adjustments to her work because of good communication within the Team.

I also learnt about a couple of interesting initiatives – Make Friends With A Book (Sandwell) – where participants of reading groups held read out aloud sessions and Health in Mind Project (Northern Ireland) which has also recognised the importance of mental health first aid training and read out aloud sessions. Online discussion groups for people with mental illness including http://www.facebook.com/mindelephant and http://www.blackdogtribe.com/ was also mentioned.

The second session I attended was on careers and was led by a couple of librarians who are part of #uklibchat at http://uklibchat.wordpress.com/. Although it was a supportive group though a little subdued, I didn’t really come out of this session feeling that I had learnt anything new. An experienced library camper would probably have left half way and tried a different session.

Next up was Media Literacy and Young People which started with a healthy discussion on young people interpreting media, grainy footage of rioting in Syria was given as an example. The discussion moved on to doing essays in the age of the internet and the problems this created such as plagiarism which concluded that information literacy needed to be embedded in the national curriculum. Somehow this led to a discussion on the Rucksack Librarians of Hammersmith where library staff went out in the community and found the families that wasn’t coming into the libraries to try and get the children to come to the library. Interested, I later looked this up and found out that they were referring to the Doorstep Library Network of Hammersmith and Fulham.

The debate moved on to libraries not stocking particular papers such as the tabloids and dis-encouraging young people in reading papers like the Metro. However, this view was questioned that surely it was better that young people were reading something and they may read other papers in the future and then start to question what they’re reading.

After a really good lunch of veggie bean chilli, couscous, salad and more cake, it was back to the afternoon sessions. Next one up was Living libraries: overcoming prejudices (Living Books Project) where the idea is that you borrow a person and lose a prejudice. This was a project that took place in Malmo, Sweden, back in 2005 as part of a festival on multiculturalism and featured people such as a Jew, Romany, transvestite, homeless person, ex-criminal, Muslim and an animal rights activist. Follow up projects included a female vicar, ex-addict, police man, middle aged straight white man and a senior citizen.

Variations of this were suggested and included borrowing experts of skills and hobbies, borrowing for history purposes ie people that have lived through certain periods ie holocaust and One World Week where you borrowed a person and learn about other cultures.

One problem that was raised was - who was doing the borrowing? Were they open minded already? Also how do we reach people that don’t have contact in the library?

Although people in the room thought that this was something new and hadn’t happened in the UK, I was sure that I had come across this before and later found this useful article http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/dec/03/living-library-communities.

The following session was working with volunteers which polarised the room in opinion. The lady who led the group had worked with volunteers for 2 years and, from experience, found that when she worked closely with staff identifying gaps where they didn’t have time to do the work themselves, it helped to alleviate the attitude “they’re here to take our jobs”.

One of the arguments was that using volunteers helped to involve the community with the library and allowed tasks/events to take place which wouldn’t normally happen; she cited the library being able to run a gardening show with the help of volunteers. Examples of uses of volunteers cited in the group included helping VI people to choose books, being computer buddies, chatting to users and summer reading challenge.

The invisible cost of using volunteers was also discussed including training, expenses including travel and that there were often situations that they may not want to do certain jobs, after all they’re not being paid so you couldn’t really force them to do something they didn’t want to do. Concerns were expressed that we needed to have the library service intact after the recession with library staff that were members of a professional body with professional ethics and values at the core of the service. In fact, somebody argued that she would rather see her local public library close than see it run by volunteers. This debate is continued on the following blog http://johannaboanderson.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/library-camp-pub-chat-dilemma-volunteering-would-you/

The last session was how to run a library camp where people shared their experiences of running camps in the past and inspired others to have a go next year.

More details on Library Camp 2012 can be found at http://www.librarycamp.co.uk/p/librarycamp-2012.html or http://librarycamp2012.wikispaces.com/.

Here are some other perspectives of the day.
http://rachel-s-b.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/library-camp-2012.html
http://neonlibrarian.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/library-camp-2012/

http://bumsonseats.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/my-notes-on-libcampuk12-playing-games-organising-your-own-library-camp/

There’s a lot to like about the Library Camp. It’s on a Saturday which makes it easier to attend, it’s free apart from my train ticket, there’s a distinct lack of suits, the majority of the people are on the same level as me so no awkward faux pas conversations about management, it’s up to the participants to decide on the day and it’s a great opportunity to eat lots of cake.
 

Lots of eyes rolling and lip biting, catch up for September

It’s been a long time but I better try and get back into the swing of trying to resurrect my weekly blog about work. It goes without saying that the phones have been busy as usual. A high percentage of the calls have been about not receiving their books, the books have been particularly slow in reaching the readers or in some cases just don’t seem to have reached their destination at all. There must be a black hole somewhere in the postal service full of our Talking Books. Production Department have reported no problems with the burners and we haven’t yet had any more red-faced emails from Royal Mail who recently decided to return our post back to us instead of sending it out to the customers, obviously didn’t understand the concept that they need to look at the different addresses on the CDs instead of the return to sender address!

We had our stock familiarisation meeting last week with the theme being the vague read something you’ve been meaning to read or something you would not normally read. Luckily, this bought a good sample of books to talk about it such as Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex which turned out to be more readable than previously thought, Emma Donoghue’s Room where they didn’t like the subject matter and cracking reviews for Jonathan Barnes’s The Somnambulist and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. My two offerings were Andrea Levy’s The Long Song which has been on my pile of must reads and didn’t disappoint and one of the Jack Sheffield Teacher series which I would not normally have read and was as I envisaged – cosy reading and Sunday tea-time fare. I’m surprised this hasn’t been picked up for a TV series – someone is going to tell me now that they have!

Book selection starts again in earnest this month so I managed to spend some time looking through The Booksellers to catch up with the news. Some good new releases coming through which will attract a lot of customers including titles from J.K. Rowling, Kate Morton, Zadie Smith and Barbara Kingsolver. We’re already getting customer interest for Bradley Wiggins and Claire Balding autobiographies. The two non-fiction books that stood out for me and I think will appeal to a lot of our customers are Clare Mullroy’s The Spy Who Loved and Catherine Bailey’s The Secret Room.

Requests for 50 Shades Darker keep coming in and we’ve now have a record of over 150 requests. I think our customers will be pleased to see the Erotica titles in the bestseller charts though when trying to pick one for book selection, the reviews were quite poor, particularly Eighty Days Yellow. In the end, I went for Porta De Costa’s In Too Deep, I think the Librarian receiving the erotic notes and what happens afterwards did it for me! Talking about bad reviews, it’s worth going on Amazon and reading the reviews for 50 Shades of Grey, Oh my with lots of eye rolling and lip biting, they’re more entertaining than the book itself!

Rhubarb Pickle, The Reader and Revalidation (again) - 18th June-16th July 2012

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to sit down and blog. It’s that time of the year when the garden takes over and as well as doing some mass weeding, I’ve spent the weekend making spicy rhubarb pickle and summer fruit mixture for the freezer with the excitement of spending my evenings this week freezing cabbage and broad beans. I could also do with some ideas of what to do with red currants. One site that I have discovered recently that looks pretty handy for garden produce is http://www.allotment.org.uk/recipes.

I’ve also had to concentrate on my revalidation portfolio as my 3 year cycle is now complete. I’m slightly worried that my development seems very lacking with my limited role and lack of opportunities in projects and attending courses. I’ve decided to put a paragraph in my statement about my intention to do a management course to acknowledge a gap in that area. It’s been quite hard trying to decide what to include in my appendices, so far I’ve seem to have a pattern - new skills ie social networking and cataloguing, an example of a project I was involved in, development of my core skills needed for my current job and my committee work with CDEG and participation in EMBOC events. I’m also finding that I’m all right writing about what I’ve learnt from an activity but it’s the bit where you have to talk about how you’ve used this knowledge for your job which is proving to be more difficult. I’m also going to have to start filling in my audit sheet for my 2nd cycle.

I’ve been entertained by our forthcoming new reading business system with the constant booking and cancellation of dates for testing the functuality of the circulation module. Now, things have now been put on hold which is a bit of an anti-climax. I’ve had my initial training of how we should be carrying out the testing, the question which remains on everybody’s lips, when will we see this new system? I guess it is better that the data’s correct than rush it through regardless and the system is unusable.

It seems a month for cancellations. We’re being treated to a new carpet, it’s our first one since the building was built well over 20 years ago and with nearly 100 people in the office, it’s well used as you can imagine. We had a mad couple of hours clearing cupboards and filling the skip and shredding box today only to be told late this afternoon that there’s been a delay! We’ve just got to remember where we put the various cupboard contents for the next few days.

I don’t know if it was just me but I thought the Update was particularly dull this month and I struggled to find anything of interest. I keep meaning to go through the Phil Bradley’s column and trying some of the sites but it’s just finding the time.

We had our book club meeting last week. This time it was The Reader to go under the spotlight. On the whole, the book was well received, mainly getting 8’s and 9’s though it did get a 4 from one of our members. There wasn’t much fondness for Hannah except for the bit when she asks the judge “What would you have done?” and perhaps the beginning when she takes Michael home after he falls ill. Some of us couldn’t quite work out why she considered it more of a crime to be illiterate than the atrocities that she was accused off when she was an SS guard and that she preferred to go to jail rather than say she can’t read or write. There was also some confusion about when Hannah and Michael first met, some of the group thought that this had happened before she was a guard while others thought it was after the war. There was a thought that Hannah has a vicious streak in her, the fact that she hit Michael with her belt and cut his lip when he off to get some breakfast and left her a note and also her behaviour on the tram. This was a book that raised lots of questions – why did Hannah suddenly stop looking after herself once she had learnt to read and write, Michael’s relationship with his father that he had to make an appointment to see him, should Michael have told the judge that Hannah could not read or write so could not have written the report and had Michael really betrayed Hannah?

We had to do 3 month’s book selection pick this month to take into account of the forthcoming upheavals with the Stockport staff relocating into a drier place that isn’t falling down around their ears (a bit of an exageration here!) and the braille and giant print books coming back down to Peterborough. There’s a real good mix of new titles with highlights including a bit of true crime Midnight in Peking, Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Way, Hilary Mantel’s follow up to Wolfhall and A Cat Called Bob (including scarf of course). Collection Development titles concentrated on minority sports and include biographies on Barry Sheene, Nadal and Colin Montgomery’s latest autobiography. The imports more or less picked themselves and include new novels by Joanne Harris and Michael Frayn, the latest autobiography by David Essex and Ann Patchett’s A State of Wonder. Missing series is also a good mix from Colin Forbe’s A Savage Gorge (the only Tweed one that we haven’t got), Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments as we bizarrely only had the third one in the Barrytown series and the usual 3 favourites – Lee Child, Peter Robinson and Ian Rankin - that we’re trying to fill in. We’ve also discovered that Donna Leon and Harlan Coben isn't an Import, always a big excitement when one of the big crime favourites hasn’t succumbed to Isis, Audiogo or Oakhill.

We’ve now reached a record 55 requests for people waiting for 50 Shades of Grey to be completed. Hope the studios aren’t going to be too long!

Lake District, The Savage Garden and Congratulations to England - 1st – 17th June 2012

I always seem to suffer from writers block when I haven’t written on my blog for a few weeks. I've spend the first ½ an hour typing, deleting, retyping and redeleting until I get in the swing again.

I met up with one of my best friends in Nottingham on Saturday. I hadn’t seen her for quite a few years so we had quite a bit of catching up to do. Most of it was done in Pret a Manger. We spent nearly 2 hours there. It’s put me in a good mood and spending the Sunday doing the usual chores didn’t seem quite so arduous as normal.

The month has flown by. We took avoidance tactics for the Jubilee and hid in our tent in Chapelstile (Lake District) until it was safe to come out again. We didn’t get flooded out this time, in fact it stayed dry though it got progressively colder as the competition on who could wear the most layers in the evening became more fiercely fought as the days went by. The only trouble with camping is that you always feel that you need a holiday afterwards to get over the ordeal. You always feel that you are on a fitness fanatic outbound break as you end up going on about ½ dozen walks a day excluding the numerous treks to the toilets and the water tap.

Work has been busy as usual, lots of calls and never a full house in to take them. The latest batch of customer requests was a varied affair, including autobiographies by Sheena Byrom (a midwife), David Jason and Kenny Dalglish, some poetry from Auden, the classic Mary McCarthy’s The Group, A Daughter’s Secret - a saga from Anne Bennett and Louise Foxcroft’s Calories and Corsets which looks at the history of dieting over 2,000 years.

We had our first Committee meeting as the newly formed CDEG last week. I thought it went well with lots of plans for the Committee to work on including an Equal Opportunities Act Workshop, a Library Camp, Libraries Change Lifes, Umbrella, the Diversity Award and a Conference. One of the next big things we need to work on is the quarterly Newsletter though we didn’t come to a final agreement on how we should do this. It would be interesting to see how the other merged groups came to an agreement on this one.

There was an interesting bit in the latest CILIP Update. Hidden in the 60 seconds with…. was a mention to The 25 Research Things which looks similar to the 23 Steps CDP and might be worth going through to refresh myself on some aspects of Social Networking. The website is http://25researchthings2011.wordpress.com.

Another useful link for Librarians and related professionals is http://www.rin.ac.uk/resources/library-and-information-professionals.

We had our stock familiarisation meeting last week where we picked a book out the book cupboard for one of our work colleagues to read. I was given Mick Mills – The Savage Garden – which could be classed as a well written, atmospheric mystery book though some readers may find it a bit slow and lacking a thrill. Other authors reviewed included Sam Bourne’s The Righteous Men which was described as similar to Dan Brown, a page turner and one to take on holiday but weak characters and not very well written. Another book reviewed was Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America where although it was a well written funny book, it was too long and the reader had to work hard to work out what was happening. The Warrior’s Princess by Barbara Erskine was another book up for discussion. Again, this was another enjoyable readable book but was spoilt by being too far-fetched. The last book was Barbara Nadel’s A Noble Killing which again received positive feedback though took the reader a few chapters to get used to Turkey as the setting and they also thought that some readers may find the subject matter – honour killing - difficult to stomach.

Congratulations to England, the final whistle’s just blown and we’ve managed to win 1-0 with a struggle. We’ve got lady luck on our side at the moment – not played very well at times, Ukraine not been given a goal and Rooney getting a goal with about his only good touch of the game. Italy next!

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.

Denise Mina, Revalidation (again) and Scram! - 23rd April-4th May

I know I’ve missed a week again but to be honest, there hasn’t been a lot to report from work. It’s just been a steady flow of calls mixed with book selection. Again, there’s a good variety of titles selected including Scram, a book about the Falklands War, A Rough Guide to the Middle Ages which looks like a good readable history title, the latest ones from Anne Tyler and Marina Lewycka and an autobiography by the chap who used to read the shipping forecast on Radio 4 in amongst the popular names across the genres.

We had our stock familiarisation meeting last week, this time it was popular crime author that we hadn't read but are always putting them on readers' lists. Authors under the spotlight included Donna Leon, Anne Perry, James Elroy, Denise Mina, Reginald Hill and Graham Hurley. We're trying to conceptualise a ladder from a gentle to a gritty crime read with Anne Perry at the bottom (the reader found it too dull because of the lack of action) to James Elroy at the other extreme. I managed to get through both Denise Mina and Reginald Hill with Denise Mina closer to James Elroy on the scale of grittiness - no shortage of violence, language and a bit of sex thrown in as she depicts well a bleak early 1980's Glasgow's landscape. Reginald Hill falls in the middle with not too much violence but with the odd bit of language and the stereotypical Yorkshire males makes it a treat with care to who you send it out too. Graham Hurley fell between James Elroy and Denise Mina though the violence wasn't gratuitous. Donna Leon was closer to Anne Perry with a bigger emphasis on descriptions of food!

I’ve been concentrating on my Revalidation particularly after my recent meeting with my mentor who suggested that I could reconsider the dates I was using (Nov 2009-Oct 2012) as I had made good progress with my portfolio. As I had been sending my yearly log to the CILIP, I contacted them to see if it was okay to bring the dates forward. I also have at least 3 things I could include from earlier on in 2009 which are worth including. CILIP have given me the okay so I’m now frantically trying to sort out my Revalidation Audit Sheet – what did I learn from the activity and how did I apply it in the workplace. Fortunately I did keep a log of everything with my thoughts but although I’ve done the first part okay, there’s not been enough thought so far on the application side. I’ve been surprised that there are over 40 things to include in my Audit but I’m still concerned about the quality of my professional development.

There have also been quite a few emails flying around the new CD&E (Community, Diversity and Equality) Group. We’ve managed to come to a quick agreement with the Logo. There’s still seems that there are plenty of issues such as the financial side while the bit which I’m involved in – Website and Newsletters – has thrown up a few issues – what to do with the monthly and quarterly newsletters, when do we start to merge the 2 websites and how do we develop this area. I’m slightly worried by the fact that the longer we delay sending out newsletters, people will be less inclined in wanting to pick our group as one of their special interest options when they come to subscribe next year as they may feel that we haven’t anything to offer.

I’ve been distracted this last week with the Blue Square Premier Conference play offs but unfortunately I won’t be going to Wembley after Mansfield lost 1-0 to York after extra time. Oddly enough, the lowest placed teams in the play offs have made it to Wembley instead which doesn’t seem right that you can’t get promotion with 98 points! Poor Wrexham!

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.

Agent Zig Zag, Portfolios and Romain Grojean - March 19th-23rd

A bit late this week, by 2 weeks!. The truth is I haven’t much to report workwise. The calls keep raining in and everyone around me are dropping down with sickness bugs and colds at home and work. It’s just been one phone call after another with the in-tray in between calls.

I’ve had no committee work to do though I’m still madly working on my portfolio – making sure I’ve got my evidence together and reflecting on everything. I went to see my mentor Kate on Friday and was pleasantly surprised not only how far ahead I was with my portfolio but also that I was on the right track with my idea of what needs to be in it.

My mentor gave me a copy of her portfolio which included her CV, a record of her professional development and her audit sheet which she recommended using as it asks the questions what did you learn from this activity and how would you apply this to your workplace. She had further separated this into different sections which I thought was a good idea. Also included was her personal statement where she had highlighted her five main professional development activities with the main learning outcomes and a summary of what has been learnt in 500 words maximum. There was also a copy of her job description and about 13 examples of evidence of professional development with a summary piece on each in turn relating it to one of the three criteria set out on the CILIP handbook as there isn’t a word limit in the appendices. I have also done this so I was quite pleased that I was ahead of the game on that. After looking through my sample portfolio, I’m worried about the quality of my professional development – there’s no restructuring staff, doing presentations at conferences and contributing to books and anything else impressive.

One thing we did discuss was the dates of my 3 year cycle. I was using Nov 2009 to Oct 2012 but Kate suggested bringing these dates forward, particularly as I was ahead with the portfolio. I’m pretty sure that I have got some evidence of professional development for the preceding months. The only worry is that I have emailed my log in with my dates already so I’m not sure what they would think if I suddenly send my portfolio through 4 months earlier! I also need to go through my evidence and decide which ones I want to put in my portfolio and pick out the ones I want to feature in my personal statement.

We had our stock familiarisation meeting last week. This time it was the readers’ favourite “I want a good biography of somebody who has done something interesting”. Mine was Ben McIntyre’s Agent Zig Zag – a biography of Eddie Chapman - a double agent spy in the Second World War. I would seriously recommend this book, not only to people who like to read war biographies but also readers who asks for true adventure books and perhaps even to someone who likes a good thriller. Other biographies included As Good as God: the impossible life of Mary Benson which was a highly enjoyable book with very colourful characters and one for the more open minded reader. Greg Mortensen’s Three Cups of Tea was also positively reviewed though probably the Amazon rating of 4 and a ½ stars was a little optimistic. The Hare with the Amber Eyes was similarly given glowing feedback and was also one to put on people’s lists as one that “led interesting lives”.

Huge excitement at home with the new F1 season starting. My son, Matthew, is in seventh heaven though at the moment is looking for a new driver to support as his favourite driver of the last four years, Sutil, has lost his seat. It looks like it’s going to be a good season as well, a lot more unpredictable instead of Vettel winning everything and some new drivers to watch. Our main questions are Will Massa last the season? Will Grojean ever complete a race without crashing? Will Hispania ever be off the back row? It will keep Matthew quiet until end of November, plus before every race he goes on his xbox to have a go on the same circuit so he can follow the driving more closely in the race. Watch out Grojean, if you keep crashing, Matthew will be wanting your seat. Mind you, I think I could even do better!

Snuff and mentors - Jan 30th - Feb 3rd 2012

Despite being a busy week, I feel strangely refreshed and not needing to have such long lie-ins over the weekend. Then I suddenly remembered, I was on annual leave on Monday! Appointment at my son’s school beckoned instead.

The main concern this week for the readers has been the change of the wallets we send the CDs in. They are now sent out without the plastic in the middle which has seems to have confused everyone, particularly the readers that have been using the service for a long time. One reader joked that he blamed his wife for damaging the wallets with her long nails and that he had always been nagging at her to keep her nails shorter. The main concern is the worry that the CD may fall out of the wallet or will get damaged more easily. On the whole they are realistic and understand that the change of packaging is a cost cutting exercise but they usually end the conversation “But I still don’t like them”.

We had our stock familiarization meeting this week where we have to read a book in a chosen genre, category or popular author which is in our library and talk about it with our reader in mind. As we recommend titles on a daily basis we need to be familiar with a wide variety of genres and authors, not just our own reading preferences. So far, we’ve covered political fiction, travel, family stories, war, prize science fiction, popular thriller authors and popular female authors amongst other things. This week it was the Galaxy Awards and the general consensus was how did half of these books get on the shortlist! My book was Terry Pratchett’s Snuff, an author that I haven’t read before. It started off well and the one-off lines made me smile and I didn’t even mind the fantasy element with all those goblins. I liked Vine, his wife Sybil, his young son and his butcher Willikins. I think the book lost the plot at the end when Vine and Co were after the villains. The book started to ramble, the humour became a bit Carry On/Tom Sharpe and it lost its way. I found this also happened with the Robert Rankin book I had to read when we looked at the fantasy genre.

On the revalidation front, I’m making it my aim to sort out a mentor. I’ve found a victim to email and am busy updating my CV and filling out my mentee form. Hopefully should get this sorted this week. I managed to do some proof reading for the CSG Website and sent out a circular email to the rest of the committee for input for the monthly email bulletin.

Credo, Senna and Escape from Alcatraz - January 23rd - 27th 2012

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.

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.

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/.

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.

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.

1984, Reading-4-life, I've finally got started - Nov 28th-Dec 2nd 2011

At last, I've finally got a chance to write on my blog (a month later than planned) as I've spent alot of time helping my son set his own blog up about his hens.

I wanted to get in to the habit of blogging on a weekly basis about my previous week at work for a number of reasons. Firstly, it will be a chance to reflect on my work while secondly, it will give people an idea of working in a library, albeit slightly an unconventional one. Also I just like writing.

The phones were pretty constant, dealing with phone enquiries takes up the majority of my time. The popular calls have been readers ordering extra books for Christmas, such as the faith of the postal service, and ordering from the latest issue of the 2 library magazines - Read On (particularly from the article about Scandinavian Crime authors) and New Books. New Books is particularly interesting as the Team can see which titles are appearing to be the most popular which is useful as I'm involved in book selection and it gives us an indication if we're getting it right. I also seem to have a run where I feel like I'm dealing with the same enquiry - a feeling of deja vu. Last week I had a run of people wanting authors who write like Catherine Cookson where I find myself going round the UK and reeling off the authors as I reach each city in turn, golden age crime authors and British TV crime authors. I did volunteer to contribute to the next issue of the Who writes like book but they were overrun with volunteers so I missed out.

Another job that takes up another large chunk of my week is managing the customer requests where we get 150-200 suggestions a month. I circulated last month's requests to all of the Team to vote on them. The ones that reach a certain amount of votes then go on to the "MasterSheet" - the spreadsheet we use each month for book selection. Unfortunately due to various reasons I only had 5 out of 8 people voting and to make matters worst, we all voted for completely different titles! I finally managed to narrow it down to a final 15 suggestions, an eclectic mix as well from Waiting to exhale - Terry McMillan, a misery memoir from Cupcake Brown, autobiographies by Ray Charles and Andy Kershaw, Pure by Andrew Miller, a much needed up-to-date suggestion on NLP and some old favourites such as Audrey Howard and Minette Walters.

Last week also saw our 6 weekly stock familiarisation meeting where we read something in a given genre or explore authors that we wouldn't normally read ourselves but we find ourselves constantly putting them on readers' lists. If you're advising readers about books, you need to not only know your stock but also be knowledgeable about the genres and authors themselves. It was Political Fiction's turn to be explored and a good selection of titles were covered including Alan Furst (Spies of the Balkans), Michael Dobbs (House of Cards), Ian McEwan (Amsterdam), Robert Harris (Fatherland) and George Orwell (1984) which was my offering. I quite like political fiction myself though 1 or 2 of my colleagues weren't looking forward to this. They were pleasantly surprised, the biggest one coming from Alan Furst where he turned out to be more literary than expected and was described as beautifully written. The least liked was Amsterdam which was described as shallow with unlikeable characters. I quite enjoyed 1984 myself as it made me think and there was an element of truth in it though most people had been put off this as they had to read it for school. It was bleak and relentless though, abit like Cormac McCartney's The Road.

As it is supposed to be technically quieter at this time of the year, there's a mass attempt to update our Talking Book genre/subject lists of selected titles which we send out to customers. I worked on the new War list which covers both fiction and factual titles (100 of each). It looks a good mix and includes the manly war authors like Douglas Reeman, Leslie Thomas and Patrick Robinson to family books set in the war like Elizabeth Elgin, Lilian Harry and R F Delderfield - An avenue goes to war. I've also tried to cover a mixture of wars from Bernard Cornwell's Azincourt to Karl Marlantes - Matterhorn. Non fiction also goes across the board from Crimean to Afghanistan, Boer War to the Falklands though the 2WW dominates as this is the one that mainly gets requested as a lot of our readers were actively involved in it.

I also finally finished my report on a recent course I attended in Derby called Reading 4 Life, ran by CILIP East Midlands Group. It was a chance to see the different reader development activities going on in the public libraries and to see if any of these were feasible and could be adapted for ourselves. I thought the most usable one was the Northamptonshire Libraries “Guiding Lights” - how books can change a person’s life. Leicester City - Health Day/Libraries are good for your health also looked promising for ourselves to adapt.

The course also covered a couple of workshops - Using Social Media and Talking about books. Again, there were a few ideas in the Using Social Media course that we could develop there. Derbyshire Reading Detectives Blog looked at literature written about the area by authors in that area. Particularly interesting was that alot of these authors have never been published so the blog had provided an avenue to get their work exposed. We get alot of readers sending in their unpublished material in the hope that we will put it in the Talking book Library. Maybe we could have a blog which promoted their work instead.

Westminster Libraries was also recommended as having a good blog. I liked their idea of an advent calendar of books (a bit late to set up this year) and getting their staff's children or members of their family to recommend books.

We've also had some posters of various initiatives from various library authorities emailed afterwards. North Kesteven had a food festival linked in with books, perhaps we could do a World Book Day event and link it in with a world food festival.