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Reading for Wellbeing is a course specifically designed to support workers who are delivering a fantastic project, founded by Ann Cleeves, across 10 local authorities in the North East of England.
Xanthe’s assessor on this course was very impressed with the the impact she made in applying merchandising techniques to different areas of her library - her work on this course was some of the best we have seen.
Some of the online courses that we offer are self-assessed and many of these are used in large rollouts for staff throughout a library service. There are many benefits to this approach, particularly when a service aims to train a staff cohort to understand and adopt new ways of working and to be able to support each other into putting new ideas into practice.
Matt is one of 39 staff taking Understanding book appeal across Essex Libraries. The aim of the training is to build book knowledge in order to boost staff confidence to work creatively with books and readers across the service. Matt has certainly proved he can do that.
Star Learner Eleonor Gordon is part of a cohort of Essex Libraries staff completing Understanding book appeal. The aim of the training is to build stock knowledge and boost staff confidence to work creatively with books and readers in their libraries.
Neil works in the library of a university and college in Gloucestershire specialising in the education of 4,500 students and researchers working with animals, agriculture, sport and veterinary nursing.
Laura’s work on two courses, Dynamic Readers’ Advisory and Merchandising Library Shelves, has been very impressive. She has taken the opportunities to apply the work to make a real difference for her library and her reading community. Laura has been resourceful in using new ideas even though the pandemic has made doing so very difficult.
Paula set out to use the Practical Outreach course to plan improvements to the Library Home Service. During lockdown she worked to plan how to widen and enrich readers’ choices once the service was up and running again.
Laura worked on the Understanding Book Appeal course during the first lockdown and so faced a considerable challenge, but she made a strong commitment to working digitally and achieved outstanding results.
The quality of the work that Rachel contributed on the Creating Powerful Promotions course was exceptionally high. Rachel has used the course, and the time away from the day to day running of the library during lockdown, to grow her creative ideas and plan for the time her library will re-open.
Megan completed the Merchandising the Bookshelves and the Creating Powerful Promotions course while her library was closed. She tackled the work in both with wonderful energy and creativity. Megan used the ideas on both courses as starting points to develop her own ideas and plan new directions for the way she will work with readers and books in her library.
Jo has completed work on four courses with personal feedback so far, and is currently tackling a fifth. Jo’s commitment to online learning is exemplary. She has worked hard to overcome the barriers involved in remote working.
Mark’s thoughtful and creative work on the Creating Powerful Promotions course was driven by a passion for helping readers discover something great to read and his broad knowledge of the collection.
Thomas worked on our course Understanding Book Appeal, exploring how to use the reading experience and the look of the books themselves to help readers discover something new to them.
Tina Callaghan was the first person to try our course on Merchandising the Shelves that we had adapted for just such a situation and her work on the course set the bar very high indeed.
Lynne used her time working from home during lockdown to take the course on creating powerful promotions. It’s not easy to take online training, especially when away from work, but Lynne did a wonderful job.
Sepe took our Practical Outreach course as part of a large rollout to more than 100 staff across the State of Victoria in 2019. She works in a small country library that is very popular with its readers.
Linda took the opportunity of a partial library refurbishment project to use our Observation Research training to look at the way her customers were using the library.
The impact that our training courses achieve has a great deal to do with the individuals who use them. Every week, large numbers of library staff all over the world, who are taking one of our courses, put their learning into practice by making practical changes in their workplace. It’s not always easy to fit coursework into day-to-day library work, nor is it simple to achieve sustainable change. So this feature will highlight the hard work and creativity of our learners - their experiments, successes and what they learn from the ideas that didn’t work out. We are delighted to honour Sepe Illig and Linda Longley as our first Star Learners. If you’d like to nominate somebody for this feature, please contact Anne Downes.