Laura Griffith

Laura worked on the Understanding Book Appeal course during the first lockdown - a considerable challenge, but one she met with a strong commitment to working digitally, and she achieved outstanding results. Her work on the course demonstrated a perceptive and detailed approach to thinking about widening readers' choices and using library resources to greater effect.

Throughout the course Laura developed her thinking about how people were engaging with reading during lockdown, and made practical and creative plans to put her ideas into practice once libraries reopened. The constraint pushed the work in useful directions rather than holding it back.

01 Re-branding tired areas of the collection

Laura looked across a wide range of the library collection to see how to re-brand tired areas and open up new choices for readers. Two specific moves stood out: mixing fiction and non-fiction in tempting ways, and re-branding children's non-fiction away from Dewey categories - to attract more attention both from children themselves and from the adults choosing for them.

02 An audit of audio and e-audio

Laura did very useful work closely analyzing the appeal of the library's audio and e-audio book collection. She identified clear gaps and specific titles that would fill them, and planned to feed this information into the selection process going forward - turning an analysis exercise into something with direct purchasing impact.

03 Bringing e-audio into the physical library

Beyond the analysis, Laura was considering different ways to offer e-audio inside the physical library space - bridging a format that lives entirely on a device with the library that visitors actually walk into. It's a less obvious problem to take on, but it's where the discovery question gets most interesting for digital formats.