Treasure trove

Every so often we unearth undiscovered riches.

Moving a pile of disreputable old filing cabinets out of an office the other day we discovered a long-forgotten portfolio. Luckily, we're all dead nosy and had a quick look inside before throwing it away. Just as well: it's a collection of original artwork by children's artists who'd visited our libraries in the 1970s and 1980s. They'd come along, talked to the children and did a few illustrative sketches in the process and somebody had the sense to keep them safe for future use.

I'm just starting taking photographs of them (there aren't many smaller than A3 sized so in-house scanning's not an option for us). I'm putting them onto the Library Service's Flickr account in a set I'm calling "Discovered Treasures." (The ones I've put on so far haven't been digitally remastered so look a bit murky. I'll be putting "before" and "after" versions online eventually.)

Being dead bone idle I want to see more than one outcome for this effort. Having a chat with Ray, our Children's Services Manager, we decided that at the very least we'd want:

• The Flickr set.
• A news item on the web site linking to the Flickr set and to the catalogue records for those authors we still stock.
• Ties-in with other children's library activities and promotions (Ray was already planning on doing something on a pirate theme some time, the John Ryan sketches fit in nicely).
• A properly-curated exhibition of some kind of the sketches.

So it's not all doom and gloom at the coal face.