Clogs and shawls

Fiction genres are sometimes a bit bewildering, especially when they are very-locally defined. Negotiating the thin-but-lethal minefield that is the boundary between Science Fiction and Fantasy is a tricky thing, as is the argument with the reader as to whether or not that Thriller is really Crime Fiction. But it is the local genres that bemuse…

When I first started working in Rochdale Library Service I bumped into Family Sagas for the first time. I had no idea. I'm not alone, many of my colleagues had the same experience. When my partner came to work for the library service she was told to shelve the family sagas in "that bay over there."

"How do I know which are family sagas? Do they have a sticker on?" 

"No. They have a dirty-faced woman with a shawl and a baby on the cover." 

"How about this one? There's no baby." 

"She's got a dirty face and she looks sad so the baby must have died."

I think the strangest thing about this is that for twenty years you could rely on there being enough new titles with dirty-faced women and babies on the cover to keep that bay stocked up aplenty.

Books in a box...

A picture of a Lighthouse Keeper's library gave me an idea: we do a lot of outreach work of one type and another and we’re looking at doing a lot more in future.

It occurs to me that the containers we use for delivery don’t actually say “Rochdale Library Service” or that acts as a unifying element to the collections of books, etc. that we’re sending out. It’s probably the wrong year to suggest this but it could be a good idea to have a robust package like this (one dreams of varnished oak!) that could hold a couple of dozen or so books or similar at a time and that could be issued as group items on the system — “Books In A Box.”

The advantages would be:

• There’d be a robust container that carried the Rochdale Library Service brand.
• The package could be designed to hold a set number of items, so it would be obvious to the borrower when something’s missing because there’d be a gap where it ought to be.
• The interior of the doors could include display information about the Library Service and/or the stock in the box. Which means that when it’s not being a package in transit it could be a miniature display cabinet, which would be particularly useful for situations with deposit collections.
• “Spare” boxes could be used as props in displays and at exhibitions and conferences.
• Each box would contain different materials so it should be easy enough to ensure that loans to nurseries, nursing homes, etc. were refreshed — staff would only need to know that the site’s had boxes 1, 4 and 6 so far this year instead of the 72 or so titles that had been loaned in the process.

Periodically, somebody would need to check the state of the stock in the boxes; the prompt for that could be set automatically on the system. And of course there’d be no reason why the site couldn’t borrow additional items to complement the “Books In A Box.”

It seems too obvious for us not to already be doing it. Perhaps I'll spot the snag if I sleep on it.

Derring-do

While I'm on the subject of adventure, the British Library's just added Captain Scott's Diary to its collection of virtual books.

Minette gloves not mandatory!

The grandeur of life

A friend works at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City. I was extremely impressed when I went to visit him, not least by the very friendly and helpful staff who let me have a look at some of their rare books. At the time they were running an exhibition on polar exploration, which gave them the opportunity to display some of the classic texts of Victorian adventure (and which leads me to wonder what the rest of the world really refers to instead of "Victorian"). Their Darwin exhibition is just coming towards the end of its run now. It makes me wish we could do something similar with some of our special collections. I'm a voice in the wilderness on that one but I'll keep banging on about it.

Guilty pleasures I

I'm a big fan of the Awful Library Books blog.

And yes, we do have a copy of "A Passion For Donkeys."