Recently I was asked to give a tour to my counterparts from the Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin libraries. It was a bit nerve wracking, to be honest, because I completely forgot my summer’s worth of experience in tour giving, and that was for children so I’m not exactly sure that it would be useful. Although I have found myself using the tour guide voice on occasion, so something stuck!
They were a lovely bunch, very tired from all the walking they’d been doing – we were their last stop on a busy day – and I really did enjoy showing them round. It forced me to really look at the library again, and think about how far I’d come since I started. Since we’re spread out over a few buildings, and everything was built at different times, it’s a very strange library to navigate. Once you’ve got the basics down you’re alright, but people have a tendency to turn a corner and get completely lost. (For some bizarre reason, that never happened to me, but apparently I have inherited my dad’s completely spooky sense of direction, so.)
It was also nice to see people reacting to the library. We have a number of “ooo” moments, from taking people out onto the very grand main staircase, showing them the fancy art room, and especially bringing them out onto the grille floors of the back stacks, where you can see right down to the basement through the floor. We’ve got some lovely photos of us here and the third and fourth images give you some idea of what I mean.
As a result of the tour, and after some fab feedback from one of the trainees (thanks, if you ever read this!) I have since been asked to take over some of the public tours we run once a month.
(One of the trainees wrote up the visit here and the library seemed to do its usual job of both impressing and confusing visitors!) I’m not sure when this will be starting, or how many I’ll do, but I’m really flattered to be asked! It also means that I’ll be getting a couple of hours of TOIL every month, so yay for slightly longer weekends! On a slightly related note, I have 8 hours of TOIL to take now, I should probably get on that…
date stamps and papercuts 