At CMLE, we so enjoy all our different types of libraries, archives, and other members! Seeing all the work you are doing is so inspiring; and we want to return the favor by helping you to find some of the great programming going on around the profession.
Each week we will share an interesting program we find. It may inspire you to do exactly the same thing; or to try something related; or just to try out some different programming ideas. (On November 9, 2017, we will drop a podcast episode on Library Programming; you can tune in here to check it out! Or, of course, subscribe or stream to enjoy any of the episodes!)
Library blankets for the win
by Ned Potter
I’ve had a number of emails recently asking after our blankets in the library at the University of York, so I thought I’d blog about them.
Getting blankets for the library is probably one of the best things I’ve ever done in libraryland, honestly. It took almost no effort and very little money. The students LOVE them. Everyone’s a winner.
The quote in the title is from our feedback board where we asked students for tips for their peers…
We bought 30 blankets for each of our sites. We get them from a local laundry who also launder them for us – but you can also buy perfectly serviceable and cheap examples from for example IKEA if you have your own laundry service to hand. They’re laundered termly unless there’s a reason to bring that schedule forward…
They sit in a bucket near the entrance of each library, and people can help themselves to them as they come and go….
You’ll notice the blankets are a fairly drab grey – this is deliberate, to make them less tempting to abscond with…
Origins
Like all academic libraries, our number 1 complaint for users is about the temperature – and it’s equally split between too hot and too cold most of the time. We don’t actually control the temperature anyhow, so we adopted the UX mentality of ‘if you can’t fix the problem at least make the user experience better in any way you can’ and tried to improve things in what small ways we could…
The students involved were really pleased but the great thing is EVERYONE was really pleased.
So as we head into the colder months, see if you can do this for your library. Or even better, get your students SLANKETS so their arms are still free for reading. 🙂 ”
(Read the entire article here!)