CHRISTCHURCH PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Bloggers Unite

I have written previously of my admiration of the electronic saviness of the Christchurch Public Libraries and also of my gratitude to them for allowing me to use their facilities to post to my blog about the Christchurch Writers Festival . It is fair to say that the greatest amount of media coverage of the recent Festival was achieved by our combined blog coverage.

I know from e-mails received how much the Festival coverage we jointly provided was appreciated by people in other parts who were unable to be present.

I asked fellow blogger, and Christchurch Library staffer Richard Liddicoat how they went about providing their extensive coverage of the Festival, here is his response:

Christchurch City Libraries sent a team of eight to the Writers'
Festival - attending sessions, appearing on panels, writing blog posts
and recording audio interviews and daily wrap ups.

We wanted to better what we did in Auckland. The real work began several weeks ahead of time - creating profiles of every author we could, including links to our library catalogue, literary reference sources and the New Zealand Book Council website - as well as publishers or personal websites. We also interviewed several authors and festival organisers ahead of the event.

Some writers were interviewed in person, others via email - the idea was
to provide a range of information that could connect people with
author's work in different ways.

We worked with the festival team to ensure we had photographs of each
author and linked to individual events on the festival website wherever
possible.

Libraries also hosted events from the Young Writers School and the
Hagley Writers institute.
Online content author Donna Robertson acted as editor and co-ordinator
for the blog posts, as well as appearing on the blogging session panel.
Richard Liddicoat, a fellow online content author, hosted a conversation
with Ben Hills at the central library and edited the daily festival
audio round.

Both Donna and Richard joined the rest of the team at events, reported,
took photographs and wrote author profiles and did interviews. The
festival was used a used as a professional development opportunity and
as a way of connecting the library with people and people with the
library.

Some seventy posts were put up that related to the festival, as well as
audio and photographs. The activity paid off in terms of traffic, with
traffic more than trebling normal weekend visitor stats.

We found that asking writers and readers about libraries added something
fresh to our discussions, and getting them into the wonderful libraries
in Christchurch was also something they enjoyed.

We hope that we can continue to be involved with books festivals - if
libraries can't get excited about them, and provide great content to
their customers, who can?