Monday, June 3, 2013

#blogjune post 5 - What is "local" when it comes to authors?

Since yesterday's post was so late, I feel like I'm doing 2 posts in one day.  However, I know if I leave posting till this evening it probably won't get done as I have a lot of other work that I need to complete and it should really take priority.

Yesterday I mentioned that I was at Library HQ for a team leaders meeting.  As usual we had many things to discuss but I thought I'd post about one of those things - local authors.

Ok, it was more about do local author's titles belong in a local studies collection?  Or should they only belong in a local studies collection if they are about the area or about someone in the area that the library is located in?

We often get asked if we have books by local authors and unless you know who they are, it is quite difficult to find them.  I can imagine this gets more difficult in larger city libraries.

The other question is, what determines a "local" author?  How long should they live in the area before they are determined "local"?  Are they only "local" if they were born in the area or what if they were born in the area but then moved away before they started writing?

So you can imagine how interesting and confusing this discussion became.

I'm not sure if we answered all the questions we had but we did decide that Local Studies collection should only have titles that contain content about the particular area no matter who wrote it, and that authors that live or have lived in the area (maybe a bit more discussion to be had) can be marked with a "local author" sticker.

What does your library do?

No comments:

Post a Comment