The 6th to 13th March is Local History Week and I've now started to work on a small display that can be placed in the new junior library. The theme for the year is shops and shopping and I've been busy trying to devise something for kids in our local area.
I believe it's time to get the kids involved in their local heritage and history, it is also a topic covered within the curriculmn for excellence. I've already organised with local schools a drawing competition on this years theme and my thoughts are now firmly on the display.
I'd been looking through the photo archive and came across a whole bunch of local advertisments for shops in the local area, circa 1910. These are a great find as it's the main libraries centenary this year, so I could actual combine my two themes. The picture shown here is an advertisment for 'Mrs. Campbell Teeth Specialist', I just loved the smiling faces of the caricatures used in the advert . It's just one of the adverts I'm going to use in the display, including several historical notes on how the High St has changed over the past 100 years to coincide with the library centenary.
I'd never really thought about why people used or found benefit from those thermal, screw top travel mugs, until this week. Now that I'm surrounded by a large basement (the dunny) of very old, precious books, maps, opr's etc, I've realised 'the why', is the prevention of spillage of hot liquid onto my books, desk, pc or cords and the 'benefits' are no more cold coffee and no spilt liquid. The little mug comes to the rescue of this coffee damsel every day especially when I put the fresh coffee on my desk then somehow lose an hour on a query,only to know that my little mug has kept my coffee warm.I'm proud of my little travel mug, sitting on my desk with Sam written in large black permanent marker.
I've started my new job as Information Services Librarian for a small Scottish local authority. The job has several areas of responsibility one of which is the local studies enquires and the local collection for the area,the past few weeks have been at times overwhelming when I realise the array of information that is stored within the devision. I thought of the 'find of the week' as a way of displaying weekly the little gems that I find whilst perusing the shelves for query answers.
The first find of the week was found whilst I was replying to an enquiry on the 72nd Highlanders being in the area. I looked over to my left and saw lying on the shelf a little leather bound book that looked mottled by damp, I picked it up to realise it was a scout diary from 1932. From the evidence in the book the lad was about 16, sitting his highers and attendning the local scouts group, he had also included some football scores from the era on local teams.
Near the back of the diary they had to enter dates for nature events throughout the year such as first blackbird, open flower etc The gem of this diary or the find of the week was reading the handwriten sentence at the bottom of the nature page;
Event: seen a woman .........Date: every night of the week
Good to see in 1932 boys were still only interested in 2 things women and football!
It was a very cold start to the day in Edinburgh, walking up to the National Library certainly cleared the head and cooled the hands. The morning session started with Celia Jenkins introducing herself and letting candidates know that she is working on courses and informal gatherings for the Scottish CDG. There was advice on how to find a mentor from Valerie Walker and Paul Hambleton from the National Library shared his experiences of chartering. The main presentations coming from Michael Martin from CILIP and Anna Heron a member of the chartership board, both talked through differing elements of the chartering process. From the session the most important comments were:
Use the framework matrix
Evaluate your service performance
Evaluate your personal performance
Measure your effectiveness Be aware of wider professional context/issues
An informative morning spent in Edinburgh and it was good to see a great turn out for the event.
