It’s the time of year again when I devote a week’s worth of blog posts to my daily librarianly activities. Yes, it’s Library Day in the Life time again. So far I have taken part in rounds 2, 3 and 4. I find the process of writing about my week at work a useful reflective tool. I don’t write a diary, I just don’t have the will power to keep going day after day but I love the idea of creating these snapshots of my life every now and again.
In my post introducing round 4 I wrote a list explaining the reasons why I was taking part again. Looking back at it now those reasons remain pretty much exactly the same:
- Yet again I am in a new job. Looking back on the previous rounds I’ve taken part in I have been in a different job for 3 out of the 4. Reading back through the posts from my old jobs provides an interesting picture of my evolution in my early years in the profession.
- Now even more so I see library day in the life as a way of busting out of the echo chamber. Following my post about what I do where I asked my non-librarian friends and family to comment on what they thought I did on an average day I have been contemplating ways of expanding the research. One idea involves creating profiles of librarians in different sectors and asking the public to guess what their roles and responsibilities are. I wasn’t entirely sure how to go about writing these profiles but I wonder whether this run through of library day in the life might be a good source.
I’m brand new to Library Day in the Life, and while I don’t disagree with its usefulness for librarians and potential library studies students, it would seem a criminal waste not to also use it to break out of the echolib.
I completely agree that Library Day in the Life presents a great opportunity to break out of the echo chamber but the question is how we practically use it for that purpose.
Indeed. I can imagine it would make a lovely little newspaper piece – ‘Inside the Secret world of librarians’, or something – but I don’t know anything about how to go about getting a paper interested.
I touched on this in the echo-chamber presentation – exactly the same applies to the Library Routes Project. Great for internal use, would be even better if we could get it external too. Laura and I have plans for how we’ll do that, but don’t know if any of them will come off… (essentially the plans are to get the Project listed on some ‘neutral’ – rather than library specific – sources of information about career paths)
Someone should try and do a newspaper piece, or get a newspaper to do a piece. Part of me thinks it’s Bobbi’s baby so only she could sort that out, but a big theme of the echolib presentation is that we all have an ongoing responsibility to make things happen for ourselves…
I did try and get the Guardian interested in Library Routes incidentally, but failed. Boo.
Yes, I could definitely see this making a good newspaper piece! Think we’d have needed to contact any papers in advance though – probably a bit late to try and get coverage since we’re a couple of days in now. I could see this being in something like the Guardian’s G2 supplement – especially during the summer, when there’s less “real” news to cover, and especially if we could play up the Twitter angle (the Guardian really hearts Twitter at the mo!)
Really, no idea how we’d go about that though. Maybe it’s worth getting in touch with Bobbi to see if she’s got any ideas for publicity for the next round (which should be in February, right?).
The whole thing is only my baby in so much as I got it started and officially declare when the next rounds are, July & January. So feel free to use it (and abuse) however you’d like. I think its worth trying to get newspapers interested and I think we still could do it this time as it goes on all week.
Go for it!
Thanks Bobbi. Just a couple of v quick thoughts re: promotion in UK. Could Radio4 programmes such as Broadcasting House or iPM be approached? They actively encourage listener interaction, though I don’t know when the deadlines for this weekend’s editions would be.
OK folks I’ve done a bit of research and if we want to get something in the Guardian the way to do it is to contact the comissioning editor of the section that is most appropriate for the content of the article – WoodsieGirl I like the idea of G2 and I was also wondering whether it would fit well with Careers too.
The downside is I can’t for the life of me find the names of the comissioning editors for these sections – Librarian FAIL!
For the radio 4 programmes I think a similar approach of contacting the editors with a pitch is best. As far as I can see the only way to do that is from their website.
So we need to write some sort of pitch highlighting what, where, who, why, when, and interesting/ecclectic snippets that might grab attention (and then send this to paper/programmes)? Am having madly busy day, so can’t work anything up this evening. Anyone else?
I shall put something together – Girl in the Moon would you have time to read it through later, or tomorrow?
Will do my best to read it tonight. I’m maedchenimmond at Google’s popular email service if you want to email something over.
Ack. I typoed the message before last – I’m busy today, so won’t be able to do anything *until* this evening, so should pretty much be able (barring disasters) to look over something tonight.
I reckon you’ve got a lot more chance of Careers than G2 but it’s definitely worth a shot!
My Dad’s manager (as in, artist management rather than boss) is also, bizarrely, the editor of the Obits section of the Guardian so I’ve talked to him before about pitching stuff. No absolutely golden insights but he did say, what unites all editors is they are time poor – so the first contact email needs to get straight to the point, and not be massively long.
That said, feel free to ignore this cos when I pitched Library Routes to the Education editor, I didn’t even get a reply!
Did anything happen with this in the end?
We’ve not heard a squeak from either the Guardian or Radio4
A very belated follow up comment to say that ‘Beyond books: what it takes to be a 21st century librarian’ has just been published in Guardian Careers: http://careers.guardian.co.uk/job-of-21st-century-librarian. Better late than never, eh?
Katie
[...] one. It is a proper bonafide Echo Chamber escape. I believe the genesis of the idea came from this post on Emma’s blog, and the comments that [...]
[...] idea to write an article about what it really means to be a librarian came from the comments on my Library Day in the Life Round 5 blog post. We wrote a pitch and sent it to Radio 4 and Guardian Careers. Then we waited. And waited. Finally [...]