Day three of the CILIPS annual conference began for me with a presentation by Fiona Edwards of Opening the Book. The theme for the presentation ‘Turning Browsers into Borrowers: adapting retail techniques for the library’. As you can imagine it was a packed session in the Blythswood Room of the Mitchell Library. Fiona gave us cause for thought with her presentation on improving the browsing/choosing experience of our library patrons, customers, users, visitors. The retail aspect of the presentation focused on bookshops in particular Waterstones, which to be fair still have a hold on the UK High Street book market. Fiona briefed us on where bookshops get it right, mostly through their promotions such as multi buys, bestsellers, top ten and book of the month displays. As library services we don’t have the stock budgets to produce these large scale displays or keep these displays adequately stocked. So, how do we improve our services and turn browsers into borrowers? Fiona gives us some tips:
- Quick Choice – tempts the borrower, makes choice easier
- Recommendations – whether it be reader to reader or staff recommends
- Face-on Displays – in fiction and non-fiction areas, helps to brand non-fiction areas
As mentioned Fiona is from Opening the Book, who provide online library training ‘frontline’ for library staff. The enthusiasm of staff that have completed the course was evident today listening to Elizabeth Farr and Liz Moffat from Stirling Libraries. Their session ‘Marketing Books to readers in Stirling’ described their approach to reader development and marketing after completing the frontline training course. They explained how rewriting their policies on reader development and marketing came from re-evaluating after the training. Through identifying their strengths and weaknesses they have several new initiatives, one being ensuring they have 2 new promotions each month. They have also taken the approach of branding their libraries, having not only a marketing team but a design team who work in conjunction with Stirling Councils corporate communication team, which I thought was an excellent idea.Tips from Liz & Elizabeth:
- Talk to your borrowers
- Just do it! Try things, if it doesn't work drop it
- Remember your 'loss leaders'
- Evaluate constantly
- Keep information positive
- Look outside your comfort zone for stock promotions
I enjoyed the session however as a past employee of Waterstones and a current public librarian I also felt exasperated by it. Only over the past couple of years it seems are public libraries looking at retail techniques that have been about for decades, longer even (I can remember one Scottish authority visiting Waterstones in the late 90’s to discuss with us how to promote stock to both adult and junior borrowers). Although comments heard after the presentation concentrated on the realisation that the majority of us use or have used the techniques mentioned above. So, have we become complacent in our approach to continuous best practice in developing the reading experience and marketing of books? We provide excellent services; we have large diverse ranges of stock, we have fantastic initiatives – too many to mention SO are we just really bad at marketing book stock? Do we need to be making more regular visits to the High St for inspiration? Should I be calling Mary Portas for advice? Have we spent far too much time over the past few years concentrating on our learning provision and lifelong learning initiatives and not enough time on stock promotions and reader experience? As librarians we should not underestimate what we can learn from the retail sector, after all Waterstones is still fighting and winning its retail battle. Many will argue that the retail bookshops learned from librarians, maybe so and it’s a large maybe, but they manage to keep selling books, our issues are dipping. At the end of the day bookshops need to make money and we need borrowers and issues, its cold hard profit which ever way you dress it. If the retail sector holds the key to falling issues and active borrower statistics then I’m all for getting a copy of the key.
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.
After 9 fantastic years with Culture & Sport Glasgow I’m moving on to pastures new with West Dunbartonshire Libraries. I have many great memories of Glasgow Libraries and the people I’ve worked with over the years. I can still remember my first day, nervous, eager and little bit unsure of what to expect. I needn’t have worried as the first two women I met were June Murray and Linda Macpherson both fantastic women and great librarians. I learned a lot listening to both of them over the years and it was with great sadness that Linda passed away earlier in the year. June always said to me “you should never, not be busy in the library” and its true there is always something that has to be done.
I walked into the first branch I worked in yesterday and it brought back a lot of nostalgia, the library seemed smaller but warmer, the staff had all changed and a revamp had occurred but I remembered ghosts of conversations past and of customers by now gone. I was idealistic and passionate about my job, over the years I’ve kept the passion but became more realistic about what we can do and achieve in a climate where change is inevitable and budget cuts loom.
It will be sad to leave the service on Friday but I know that I contributed to lots of little smiles from the storytimes and class visits the kids had when I was in the YP team. Introducing new authors to customers when working in community libraries and becoming part of that community, slowly without noticing. Knowing people within the city have better resources and training courses for information technology as part of the Digital Learning Team. I know there are now customers of aren’t afraid of the internet and who have better information retrieval skills. I made people feel at ease and occasionally made them laugh with tales of my dog, the only dog in Scotland who must have over 50 email addresses.To my colleagues I hold the utmost respect as I work with a very determined and passionate bunch of individuals. I’m sure I’ve probably debated (argued) with many of them, had countless laughs with all of them and learned things from each and every one. I’ve came a long way in my nine years from young people’s assistant to my new role as Information Services Librarian with WDC and I give credit to the people I work with for inspiring me to follow my path.
So, I’m lucky to be walking my path the way I want to, I’m sure I’ll meet new challenges and interesting people but that’s the beauty of my progress, the unknown, keeping it fresh and remembering with great affection all that has passed.
I found this little quote by Gail Sheehy:
“If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow we aren’t really living”.
Yesterday was CILIPS Equality and Diversity Course – promoting good practice in library work, held at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.
The morning session began with Ayub Khan and Marion Huckle talking about the CILIP Encompass Project this is a positive action scheme to encourage more people from ethnic minority groups into the profession, at present only 2% of members are from a black or ethnic background. The course is a graduate training scheme and their aim is to train 50 librarians over a five year period. The scheme would work by converting an existing post into a trainee post over a three year period, they are however aware of financial constraints on all sectors in the coming economic climate and that it may not be possible to convert posts. The traineeship would have benefits such as tax advantages, recruitment costs and support from Path National. The main points to come from the question session were whether this could then be expanded to include people with disabilities and other minority groups. The overall cost of the traineeship, academic expenses to salary for the trainee were discussed. The traineeship seems an excellent opportunity but is it seen as a viable career by many ethnic parents as one member noted many parents wish their children to study law or medicine not librarianship. A fantastic opportunity to join a great profession however lets hope that during the interviews it is truly people wanting a career in librarianship who achieve the trainee posts and it’s not seen as just a job opportunity by young graduates.
Next on the programme Paul McCloskey from Edinburgh City Libraries talked about what makes good inclusive practice? Paul discussed the initiatives that Edinburgh have in place to increase inclusiveness in Edinburgh libraries. Children can join straight away when visiting the library without proof (however a letter is sent to parents if they want to opt out), the Capital Collections a community digital program that empowers the local community to participate in their local heritage. The services they provide to care homes in the city, where they take trolleys into the homes and allow people to browse the books, Paul mentioned that the homes have some of the highest level of book requests in the city. For ethnic communities they have 14 separate collections within the city and have recently done work with the local Polish community and others supported through the PLQIM.
Having worked in young peoples services, I was impressed by the work Edinburgh have done with children and teenagers by seeing them as a minority group, the work they have done in particular at Sighthill Library has reduced the levels of anti-social behaviour. The reading champions initiative for kids in care, working in partnership with Barnardos , Action for Children and Edinburgh Book Festival where the books have been seen to help build emotional literacy.
The message from Paul was not only about inclusive practice but about working in partnership with other organisations to achieve realistic aims and create a more inclusive library service. To not only support the library user but our own staff to ensure that we can help the communities around us.
The last speaker of the morning was Professor Andrea Nolan from the University of Glasgow talking about Internationalisation in the education sector. The emphasis being on creating culturally diverse learning communities, promoting students who are more culturally aware and how by having a system of internationalisation local communities surrounding the higher education facilities will benefit by integrating into the local community. The need to increase educational partnerships as new competitors emerge into the higher education market creating newer places for students to study out with universities in the UK. To create partnerships where students to have the chance to not only study abroad but become more globally aware. I’m afraid I had to leave near the end of Professor Nolan’s talk as my car park meter was running low and I didn’t want a ticket.
The lunch break also consisted of an optional tour round the RUVI Resource Unit for the Visually Impaired at the Mitchell library with both sessions being booked full.
I'll add the afternoon session later in the week
All of the presentations for the morning should be available soon on the Scottish Librares Slideshare page.
Sitting in the library and all I can here are little rants of "F***" from the guy two seats away, it makes you wonder just what he's upset about, has he just checked his bank account and noticed he has no cash? Has his girlfriend just dumped him by twitter? Has he forgotten a password? I'll never know....but he will as he leaves head down. At least he's a visitor this evening most of the local community are outside waiting on the fireworks to begin.
I received certificates today for my last E-citizen group on completion of the final exam.I'm especially proud of the learners as many of them have not sat a formal education exam/test (let alone online) since leaving school. My other great joy today was watching William (95) and James (90) complete the basic PC class in their local library and now have the ability to search online and email whenever and whoever the feel like. The best comment was William mentioning that he wished he had bought his laptop a few years earlier! Learning for all.
