Tina Callaghan

Tina was the first person to complete the Merchandising Library Shelves course after the team adapted it to be taken without any access to a physical library. That's not a small thing - it requires real imagination and determination to tackle a course about the visual impact of books on library shelves when the library is closed, you can't meet the readers, and you can't touch the books.

Tina used her library catalogue to research titles and bring them into the course's virtual exercises. Her work set the bar very high indeed, and showed that she's both practical and creative - exactly the kind of learner whose ideas will contribute to real change in her library.

01 Re-examining in-shelf display

Tina used the time away from day-to-day routines to step back and look at how her library used in-shelf display. She decided what practical methods could be introduced to target it more effectively for a wide range of readers - and treated the closure not as a pause, but as an opportunity to plan changes that would otherwise have been difficult to think about under operational pressure.

02 Bringing more readers to YA

Tina was particularly interested in bringing more readers to the YA shelves, and she spotted something concrete that the team had missed: the student area - tables and chairs for studying - was sitting in front of the YA shelves and making them harder to browse. Her observation became a discussion with her manager about how the library managed the collection, and they agreed to relocate the student area and expand the range of YA stock.

Tina also suggested splitting the bay into Teens and YA, the way many bookshops now do. As she put it, teenagers are the hardest demographic to get reading and to keep reading - so it doesn't make sense to put any obstacle in their way, and a clearer split would make choice easier for all ages.

03 Learning from how bookshops display

Tina has an acute awareness of the power of aesthetics and of how face-forward display keeps the library collection looking contemporary and dynamic. She has the insight to see how a library can adapt the way bookshops display books - and use that to make the most of the huge range a library can offer that a bookshop can't.