A rather windy August day saw the Knowledge and Library Services in the Serenity Garden at GETEC, celebrating South Asian Heritage Month with staff.
Having anchored everything down due to the blustery weather (making us feel rather less than serene!), we were ready. It was great to have a constant stream of people and we were happy to be rather busier than at last month’s Pride event. I put this down to two things – a more human-friendly temperature, and the provision of delicious samosas and jalebi! Obviously the chocolate cake didn’t hurt either…
This event saw our stall displaying a mixture of leadership and allyship books, along with novels, and biographies. Books such as ‘It’s not about the Burqua’, and ‘The Boy with the Topknot’ grabbed people’s attention, as did ‘The Good Immigrant’ and ‘Partition Voices’. We had resource newsletters available – #SouthAsianHeritageMonth, #SayMyName, and #Menopause, all of which had some interest. We also had posters with the building blocks of the KLS – QR codes for how to join the library, sign up to KnowledgeShare (our current awareness alerting service), and how to register for Open Athens.
Other stalls at the Mela had a range of beautiful gold jewellery, clothing, soothing hand massages, amazing food and drink, and of course the traditional henna hand painting (which I opted to test so that Stephen wouldn’t have to!)
We got to discuss the benefits of BMJ Best Practice with some new clinical staff who hadn’t yet joined the library – they left our stall loaded down with bookmarks, resource newsletters, colouring in sheets, and the chocolates we were handing out. Other staff, rather more familiar with our clinical side from their studies were surprised to hear that we had leisure and Wellbeing collections and left saying that they would have a look.
As the library at GETEC has recently benefitted from a complete refurbishment, it was very positive to hear people say that they would stop by to see the changes and take a look at our new layout and new books. All in all, the Mela was great fun, and a fantastic networking opportunity. We’ve also been invited to attend additional events in the next few months, which is a very positive outcome for the Knowledge and Library Services!