London Meeting

I had a really positive meeting yesterday up in London about a project that I have been working on for a while. I'm hoping that is going to become a big thing and another way in which the federation can get more people reading and enjoying books and in particular all types of books!

There will definately be more to come on this but at the moment I am keeping things under my hat!!

St Albans Literary Dinner

We held on Thursday the 2nd July our second Literary Dinner at the beautiful setting of the St Albans Abbey. As with most groups we run a lot of events for children throughout the year and decided last year that it would be really good to hold something for adults. I reprised the role of compere again this year and think I did a pretty ok job! We were really lucky to have a great line up of authors who all spoke about their books and writing and read from their books.
To open the evening Philip Ardagh gave us some anecdotes about his writing and his love for Aussie tv show Neighbours. Next Leander Deeny, actor and author, read from his book Hazel's Phantasmagoria' and acted out the scene from the film Atonement which he appeared in alongside Keira Knightley. To round the evening off we had Kevin Crosseley Holland - a writing hero of mine! - who told us about his writing and his love of myths and legends and old england!

On the whole it was a brilliant evening and one which we hope will be happening every year!!

Alan Gibbons Conference

I attended the Alan Gibbons conference at the weekend with a stand for the Federation. As a Federation it was great to be able to support the work that Alan is doing for the whole library sector. It was also great to see so many people passionate about the causes attend. The conference itself was full of heartfelt stories about the system failing but also about hope of what can be achieved. I am a school librarian myself so Alan's work is something that is very important to me as an individual, but also what Alan is calling for and what the campaign is trying to achieve as affects the work that we do as a charity. A lot of our groups work with school librarians and public libraries in holding events for authors and in encouraging people to read. Libraries are the place where we hold strong links through the country to help complete our own aims and a destruction of these and a de-professionalisation of the role of libraries can only have a bad effect on what we are trying to achieve and make our job a lot harder.

From the conference a lot of things sprang to my mind about ways in which there might be something we can do but one of the most upsetting things was the average age of the people that were in attendance. This is by no means a mark against anyone that there was there and as librarianship as a profession but if all this great work that is going on does manage to achieve something who is going to be taking this on in the future when the majority of the profession is no longer around? Unfortunately as a profession librarianship isn't seen any more as a career, now whether this is because of the way the job has steadily been deprofessionalised over the years, or the stigmas that surround librarians or any other issues. If you want to study to become a librarian there are very few places where you can do this. Only really Aberystwyth can offer this and that is a crying shame for the profession.

I hope that from the work that Alan is doing one of the factors that comes out of it is the work that can be done by a librarian - that it isn't just shelve stacking and not something that might be a career. We need more people wanting to become librarians and we need more people of a younger age to decide to take it up as well otherwise all the hardwork that is going on at the moment through campaigns such as Alan's will be lost.

Carnegie

It's great news to see Siobhan Dowd's book Bog Child win the carnegie. It's a brilliant book that doesn't have to have a fast moving plot that has adventure at every turn, but a book that you can enjoy reading because of the high quality of the writing. There is so much to think about in all her books which makes it even more of a shame that beyond Solace we will have no more of her books bless our library shelves.

We had our own carnegie party with our shadowing group in the library. 40 odd students with strawberries, pizza, prizes and a whole afternoon of fun. As always we didn't pick the right winner and we voted instead for Knife of Never Letting Go to win the Carnegie and Varmints winning the Greenaway. We weren't too disappointed though, we all enjoyed it, especially the pizza!!

Our Book Week

The RHCBA Ceremony

A quick video of some of the highlights from the RHCBA 2009 Award Ceremony

School Website

I've been getting some people asking about our school library and the kinds of things we do. Basically for a bit of info if you want to check out what we do look at www.ReadAllOver.moonfruit.com!!