Saturday, January 17, 2004
What's Chinese for coffee morning? Not so much the translation of the words into a Chinese dialect, but what's similar to the idea?
Management is trying to start a coffee morning for the Chinese community at the Greenhouse and yesterday was the first day. We had a grand total of one and a half people turn up, (half being a lady that turned up halfway through). The most obvious thing to look at was how we advertised the event, although the Greenhouse is used by a local Chinese community are they the sorts of people that would find a coffee morning appealing, do we have to do more to reach those people that don't use the library? But the other thing pointed out by our latecomer was that there isn't really a cultural equivelent for 'coffee morning' for Chinese people, it wouldn't mean anything to people who might be interested in what goes on. So now we have to find an alternative way of describing the event so we can try and get the community engaged.
And we need that more than ever. Two other branch libraries are closing this year, with at least one more as a possible next year. Two day care centres for disabled people, the only ones in the area, are being shut down too. The council are making redundant some two hundred people at the moment and when librarians came back from the Chief Executive's Motivational Day to describe it more as a 'Dismotivational Day' (the impression he gave was that if he was allowed to shut down the library serice completely he would) people are wondering how secure our jobs are.
No one is sure whether we're going to have any money in the next financial year. We have a ring-fenced budget for the refurbishment of the Closed Library which is safe and cannot be touched. But we don't know whether we'll have any money after that. We could end up in the same situation as other library authorities in the country over the last decade or so, the slow bleed of resources which has immediate effects on lowering the measures we use for evaluating how the service is being used which is then extremely difficult to climb out of.
The Chief Exec, and this is hearsay but I seem to remember him saying similar things at last years Day when I went, was asking how we could justify getting our money when our borrowing figures are down. But take the Greenhouse yesterday morning, we had very few issues or returns yet we were very busy with the coffee morning, a drop-in organised by the Bookstart project to encourage parents to read to/with their kids, a creche for those kids, a drop-in with someone from the local college for people to talk about computer courses, and people wanting to use the library computers for Office and The Internet. How does that use, and all these sorts of activities which don't get offered anywhere else, get measured in the Chief Executive's Issue stats?
Management is trying to start a coffee morning for the Chinese community at the Greenhouse and yesterday was the first day. We had a grand total of one and a half people turn up, (half being a lady that turned up halfway through). The most obvious thing to look at was how we advertised the event, although the Greenhouse is used by a local Chinese community are they the sorts of people that would find a coffee morning appealing, do we have to do more to reach those people that don't use the library? But the other thing pointed out by our latecomer was that there isn't really a cultural equivelent for 'coffee morning' for Chinese people, it wouldn't mean anything to people who might be interested in what goes on. So now we have to find an alternative way of describing the event so we can try and get the community engaged.
And we need that more than ever. Two other branch libraries are closing this year, with at least one more as a possible next year. Two day care centres for disabled people, the only ones in the area, are being shut down too. The council are making redundant some two hundred people at the moment and when librarians came back from the Chief Executive's Motivational Day to describe it more as a 'Dismotivational Day' (the impression he gave was that if he was allowed to shut down the library serice completely he would) people are wondering how secure our jobs are.
No one is sure whether we're going to have any money in the next financial year. We have a ring-fenced budget for the refurbishment of the Closed Library which is safe and cannot be touched. But we don't know whether we'll have any money after that. We could end up in the same situation as other library authorities in the country over the last decade or so, the slow bleed of resources which has immediate effects on lowering the measures we use for evaluating how the service is being used which is then extremely difficult to climb out of.
The Chief Exec, and this is hearsay but I seem to remember him saying similar things at last years Day when I went, was asking how we could justify getting our money when our borrowing figures are down. But take the Greenhouse yesterday morning, we had very few issues or returns yet we were very busy with the coffee morning, a drop-in organised by the Bookstart project to encourage parents to read to/with their kids, a creche for those kids, a drop-in with someone from the local college for people to talk about computer courses, and people wanting to use the library computers for Office and The Internet. How does that use, and all these sorts of activities which don't get offered anywhere else, get measured in the Chief Executive's Issue stats?
