Transcript

SARAH:

I used to work in market research, and do you know I still use quite a lot of the techniques I learned in that job for attracting customers and for getting them to use the resources that I've got in the library? And I think this is true whatever job you've had or even if you've been on a career break. You can use those skills and bring them to the job.

Another way we can do it is to have a look and see what other librarians are up to. We can look at their websites, have a chat with them online, or even better still, meet them in person at a meeting and talk to them. We can also make our resources attractive by putting displays in the library, but I think with a display, it's important that they've got some degree of intrigue or they're exciting so that people will want to engage with them.

I remember once, we had these magic eye posters that we put up. It was to try and get students understanding the way in which you could look at different perspectives on a topic. And we had such fun because at break time, we would have crowds of people lined up against the back wall, trying to see if they could see the hidden image inside these pictures.

Displays have got to have purpose. You've got to think, what are you going to be getting out of them? And maybe we might put in a competition element into our display. So we might have something whereby it's got a poster, and it says, what kind of a reader are you? And you've got to follow through the flow lines like you would in a magazine to find out what your next exciting story is going to be.

We want to try and encourage engagement, not just from the students, from the staff, as well. And putting incentives in there like a golden ticket at the end of a scavenger hunt might be really useful. And what about technology? There's so much technology out there that we can use to make things really engaging. We could put QR codes that link to videos on the backs of some of our books, say, an author talking about that book.

Or we could use other more exciting apps which have even got portals that you can walk through into other worlds. Imagine if you were doing something like the Narnia series, and you could actually walk through a cupboard into that new world.

So making displays and keeping them interactive and exciting is important, but it's also useful to get some feedback. Are they working? So maybe we could use a display with a sticky note so that people could paste on a board saying about what they've got out of the display or what they think of particular books.

And we can push out the contents of some of our resources through reading lists maybe, or if we're working with a young age group transitioning from the primary school to our senior school, we could work a little pack or an event that we could use around that, or maybe just going from a senior school to the sixth form. We can look at things like emojis that you can use, and we can use social media posts as well to have a whole range of different ways to promote our resources.

I remember once on Instagram doing a book face, where you took the cover of a book, and then you superimpose your own face on part of the cover so it looks as if the cover and your face become one thing. And that, again, caused great intrigue and great interest. It's really up to you, but with a little thought, we can be really creative, and we have the autonomy in our roles to do that.