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!

The Post Holiday Blues and The Kindest Thing - 16th-20th April 2012

Back to reality, a week back at work and the red squirrels of Galloway Forest seems a dim and distant past. I now could do with another holiday to cope after last week!

It was our Bookclub meeting and the book under scrutiny this time was Cath Staincliff’s The Kindest Thing – a cheery book about the aftermath of a lady’s decision to assist her husband, suffering from motor neurone disease, to commit suicide, and ended up in court for murder after being reported to the police by her 16 year daughter! Although I wanted to complete the book, I found the book lacked depth and gave the impression that it was written with television in mind, similar to the Rosamund Lupton book Sister. There was no surprise to discover that the author wrote a lot of TV dramas in general. I was not alone to complain about the shallowness of the book and the lack of depth to the characters. It was suggested that Jodi Picoult would have done a better job with the subject matter. It led to some interesting debates about whether the law on assisted suicide should be changed, would we have done the same if we were put in her shoes and did we predict the family’s reactions. I gave the book 6 out of 10 while the average was 7 out of 10.

The customer suggestions have gone round for their monthly vote and there are some really good titles in the mix including a book on the Falklands War called Scram, Planet of the Apes, favourites such as Rosamunde Pilcher and Nelson Demille, new titles by Sue Townsend and Anne Tyler and some really autobiographies and biographies such as Gillian Lynne’s A Dancer in Wartime, Peter Jefferson’s And Now The Shipping Forecast, Joan Collins’s new autobiography and biographies on Leonard Cohen and Barry Sheene. There was also a flood of completed new talking books and one week alone resulted in 89 customer requests being ordered.

I spent a couple of evenings catching up with The Booksellers, again more readable than the last couple of editions of The Library Update. It’s depressing to read that a 5th of professional library posts have been cut last year and that Suffolk County Council are handing the running off branch libraries to volunteers. Hopefully, they may find themselves in the same boat as Surrey County Council who have found that their plans to remove paid staff from 10 of the county’s libraries has been deemed illegal. There was also an interesting debate between the Society of Chief Librarians and publishers regarding lending e-books in public libraries. One debate can be found on Bobbi Newman’s blog http://libarianbyday.net/. Questions are raised on whether libraries should stop buying e-books until issues over provision settles down and whether libraries should be lending out e-books at all and that they shouldn’t be offered as a core service as libraries are community spaces. A contentious argument from Surrey County Council is that libraries are not just there to serve the needs of the poor and they have to follow where customers are going. They argue that 1 in 10 people have an e-reader and that 7 out of 10 people use mobile devices to read books. I would like to see these stats in more detail! Also, they are running a pilot scheme involving Koboes as they have closed their mobile library and see this as an alternative. I like to see how some of the mobile library users ie the elderly, physically disabled or a visually impaired person get on with this! I’m hoping that the library lends out the Kobo and doesn’t expect someone to buy one out of their pension unless everyone in Surrey is wealthy and expert in technology regardless of who they are! I can’t get my head round this scheme!

Easter Eggs, Galloway Forest and One Direct Stadium - April 2nd - 6th 2012

Not so much to blog about today as the week was mainly concentrating in getting caught up before my holiday next week. I'm off to stay in a cottage in Galloway Forest for a week and looking forward to a break. I've practically packed (plenty of warm clothing and rather optimistically a sundress and sandals) and the cat and hens have all been shipped off to their respective "hotels".

The phones have been extra busy as we've been one down in personnel and Customer Services have also been short of staff which has had a knock-on effect on us and have consequently picked up extra work as they've had to pass through calls they would normally do themselves. The rush has mainly been readers ringing making sure they've got plenty of books over Easter. I've also been checking with each caller that they've got plenty of books, if not would they like extra and if so, what do they fancy reading. It adds a few minutes on to the calls but a bit of customer care goes a long way.

Huge excitement with my son as he has told me that he has bought me a surprise - an Easter egg. He is desperate to show me now and has hinted that it is a big one! Hope it's still a big whole one by Sunday.

Football is hotting up, particularly in the Blue Square Conference. My team - Mansfield Town - are third and looking pretty good for the play offs with the Teams around them dropping points. I'm not sure about the stadium name change to One Direct Stadium though, that will take some getting used to.

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!

The horse boy, portfolios and trip up to Stockport - March 5th-9th

Another week has quickly gone by. Huge excitement as I’ve had an email from my prospective mentor. We’ve arranged a meeting at Grantham College to include a visit to the library. This will be interesting in itself as it has been years since I’ve set foot in an FE College Library so I will be curious to see how these libraries have changed. I’ll need to get my portfolio sorted out though so I’m going to be busy for the next 2 weeks filling out missing gaps and making sure that everything’s got a piece of reflective writing in there. Mind you, I wasn’t looking forward to going through the mentor list again and try and find another victim.

The phones have been busy again. We’re slightly worried that the talking books seem to be taking longer than usual to get to readers, particularly March 1st yet we’ve had no report from Production to say that there’s been any problems with the burners.

It was also our main book selection meeting though it wasn’t my turn to represent the Team. The big issue was Imports as it was getting ridiculous that one minute we were recording a book ourselves and then we would have to pull it as one of the publishers that we work with have decided to produce it themselves. It was also getting hazy with which publishers we were going to import from and the list of titles that we couldn’t pick was getting longer. It’s quite a thorny area as the Management do not want us to do Imports at all. Their argument is that we need to be investing our money in titles that can’t be obtained in alternative format elsewhere and that we should be signposting readers to public libraries. It’s a logical argument as there are 1,000’s of titles that just won’t get done in alternative format for commercial versions and also some titles are quite complicated to produce and need more expertise to produce them. Also, there is a huge emphasis in this area in campaigning and getting the libraries to meet the needs of VI people with the 6 steps campaign and MANIL.

It’s not that straightforward though as on the flip side of this argument is that a significant proportion of Talking Book members cannot access public libraries – they are elderly, housebound and don’t have any help from family or friends. Also commercial versions are not in DAISY format and come in loads of disks and make it hard for a lot of readers to use. Also, most of the popular authors, particularly crime and family, are readily available commercially which will mean that if we had to ignore these we will be marketing a second-class library. I’m all for signposting readers to different sources, particularly with the advent of e-books, but we do need to provide an inclusive library for everyone.

We’ve come to a decision that we will concentrate on the three main publishers – ISIS, Audiogo and Oakhill – as imports and that if we’ve started to record a book after all the checks to see if it’s not going to be done, we will continue with it. The allocation is only 4 expensive titles (ISIS and Oakhill) and 12 cheap ones (Audiogo) a month. I would be happier if we increased the expensive titles and cut down the Audiogo as most of our readers want the ISIS authors. It’s still cheaper to do an Import than to record a title by scratch so it’s important for us to save money as much as we can.

We had our Team Day on Thursday, a trip up to Stockport. There were some interesting features, one of our younger readers talked about her use of social networks, particularly Facebook, which gave us food for thought. I had reported back from the Reading 4 life day about the possibility of having a Facebook page for the library services as it was a way of reaching some of the younger VI groups. One of the exercises we had to do in groups was to look at ways of increasing our audience. Some of our suggestions were wildly ambitious such as availability of all titles in all formats and a free service. We also got into the world of incentives – such as cash reductions for local authorities if they reach a certain target, a smaller subscription for low users or incentives if you introduce a friend to the service. We were also targeting low vision centres, pension organisations and Surestart to pick people up at the start of diagnosis. However, afterwards I did have the thought that perhaps we should be working with organisations such as National Reading Agency or Adult Basic Education to make reading more appealing and sexy in general as it’s no good reaching all these people if they have no incentive to read.

My evenings have been busy this week as I have had to try and work out my notes for the CSG meeting we had in the afternoon with the Diversity Group. I think they make sense but I’ve emailed them to the Chair to have a look through first before circulating!

It was also our Book Club and it was my turn to lead the group. Unfortunately there were only 3 of us there which was a shame as the book was quite an interesting read. It was Rupert Isaacson’s The Horse Boy turn to come under the spotlight. This was about a father’s son to heal his son’s autism by taking him to the Shamen in Mongolia. At times I found myself getting annoyed with the parents particularly at the beginning where the poor boy was under every therapy under the sun. There were also one or two comments which I disliked such as “we had become one of those families (a family with someone with special needs) and I still felt, although the author said he was accepting his son’s condition and took it as part of his personality, I felt at times he hadn’t as he made a great deal of his son going to mainstream school, having friends that were normal and having a higher than average reading ability. Two of us weren’t so sure about whether it was the shamen that had did the trick. From my experience, autistic children do experience a slight improvement and seem to be better able to function between the ages of 6-10, then the hormones kick in and they tend to regress for a few years. Also that high level of intense attention is likely to bring the best out of him in terms of language. It was also a good travel book as we learnt a lot about Mongolia. It was a shame that so few of us read it to the end as we all gave it 8 out of 10 and the 3 of us managed to keep the discussion going for 3/4 an hour!