Exit through the library gift shop

When I lived in Italy, although my speaking skills were never that great, my understanding was fine, so I could easily follow conversations (as long as they weren't speaking dialect). This is not the case with Swedish! However, there are words which I can pick up on to get the gist of what's being said and then I contribute something in English. At the 3pm coffee break today, I picked up on the words "graffiti" and "Banksy" so mentioned that a Banksy had recently appeared by where I work in London (see Westminster news). A clear sheet was put in front of this work last week to protect it.

Today, I was working with the Lund University Libraries marketing and communications team. Marketing is one of my main professional interests. Unfortunately, I don't get to do much of this at Westminster, but I am the Marketing Officer for the Information Literacy Group. This has recently involved ordering lots of lovely promotional materials for the ILG and Journal of Information Literacy.

I brought some examples of materials produced for my department (Information Systems and Library Services) at Westminster to show the team at Lund. Ours and theirs are quite similar - pens, sweets, bags, etc. All those things students like! We also face similar rules over using approved university images, colours, logos, etc.



Lund University Libraries roll up (produced for IFLA last year)

They have a library marketing working group at Lund. We used to have one of these at Westminster but it seems to have fallen by the wayside. We did have some task & finish groups last summer though which resulted in a nice leaflet promoting the work of the Academic Liaison team (librarians and IT trainers) to academic staff, as well as our own web pages which we have full editing rights over as they're in Google.

I spent the afternoon looking at Lund's internet and intranet pages. It's very complicated because they have lots of different systems and 30 libraries. They're soon to have a revamp of the website so look forward to seeing that. Their intranets are localised to particular departments, so library head office staff can put photos, relevant news, etc. on there, as well as putting their name down to organise the famous Friday morning breakfast :)

Some of Lund's libraries have Facebook and Twitter accounts. This one's also making excellent use of LibGuides. They also allow students to 'book a librarian'. Some of my colleagues at Westminster are using youcanbook.me, which offers a similar service.

Very excited about tomorrow morning's library breakfast - apparently it's huge!