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As part of my involvement in the CILIP Career Development Group Yorkshire and Humberside (and in conjunction with the University of Sheffield Library and Information Professionals Social Society), my colleagues and I are arranging a career event with speakers from course alumni and other local professionals.

Putting together the poster was good fun, and you'll be pleased to hear that the picture is of a real librarian, who blogs as the Librarian by Day. Picture is used courtesy of Creative Commons Licence and the same rights apply to this poster.

I quite like how the poster turned out, and I'm looking forward to the event as well - hopefully there'll be a good turn out, and proceeds are heading to charity, so it'll be good all round if it's a success. I'll probably update more after the event (on 11th February) to reveal how it went.

Otherwise, the coursework is ongoing (due in the day after tomorrow and should be polished by the deadline) and I've got a meeting tomorrow about possible dissertation projects, so everything's running to schedule. I'll be glad for a rest next week before lectures commence nonetheless!

Labels: CILIP, displays, jobs, MA, professional development

One final thread to tie up from the Essex job before I leave at the end of the week and that's the public library display we were trying to set up as a part of the National Year of Reading - see this previous post. Our materials finally arrived and we put them up in the foyer of the library. As you can see on the left, it was a fairly basic display, just covering the services that the public libraries in the area offer that we felt didn't overlap too much with our own: a wider range of fiction, CD / DVD rental, and bookable computers. It was important to us that we neither gave the impression that we wanted our patrons to leave us and use the public libraries instead, nor confused them by describing services that were too similar to ours. In fact a major consideration while making the display was to make sure that our circulation desk weren't going to be inundated with queries about DVD lending services we didn't offer. I just hope we made the PUBLIC LIBRARY bit prominent enough, or the staff will be cursing our names for months!

The response to the display among our library staff was really interesting - I'd say the instinctive reaction was to be slightly defensive about promoting a different library. However, when they saw that we'd focused on the things that made us different it reduced the element of competition. Lots of staff seemed interested in finding out more, and we even had a member of staff or two suggest they might check out some of the services! I think it's a good idea to some kind of dialogue between different library services in this way: there is the potential for traffic to pass between academic and public services, and perhaps even a small gesture of friendship like this between the two might make us a little bit more likely to think of each other as comrades in arms!

Labels: displays, public libraries, traineeship

I was reading the CILIP magazines this month (the twice-monthly Gazette and once-monthly Update) and was inspired by a section on the National Year of Reading, specifically looking at how non-public librarians can get involved. There was the suggestion that academic librarians could add support by promoting their local library to students. Anyway, to cut a long story short, my fellow trainee and I have come up with a plan to try and put together a display in for our library promoting the National Year of Reading and local library service. It might even lure one or two of our students into reading some books over the summer when their exams are over. I'll keep you updated on our progress!

Labels: displays, public libraries

So, how did I get kicked out of university? Not in real life, thankfully. Library Regulation 11.40 in the Albert Sloman is the one that says "the marking and defacing of books is strictly forbidden" and my co-trainee and I were tasked with producing a display to advertise to library users what a bad idea it is to deface books.

To do this, we produced two comic strips, one detailing the fantastic things that might happen if you were a good library user, and another detailing the karmic troubles befalling a bad library user. The picture on the right, with my quality acting, shows the end of the 'bad' strip, and I've included a shrunken version of the whole 'bad' strip below (low fidelity to protect the innocent co-workers bullied into participating). I found a tutorial online for making speech / thought bubbles at http://tinyurl.com/y466s7 which is well worth a look if you want to try something similar using the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Programme) - it's an open source programme with similar functionality to Photoshop.

Our colleagues helped out with acting and photography, and then I spent probably-too-long putting together the comic strip last Friday afternoon. We're pretty proud with the results. I've not made a display in quite some time, although I did take a course during my PhD on putting together poster presentations. The hardest bit, I think, was the layout of the display board itself to complement the comic format with other information - we ended up including a summary of what the comic strips showed, and some copies of defaced books. Also - a tip for anyone making a defacing books poster - we had to laminate the comic. Someone with postmodern mischief in mind defaced my face in the 'good' comic.

Labels: displays, marketing, traineeship