The Poetry Library occupies a stunning modern building designed by Malcom Fraser just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, one of the first lottery funded projects.
We were met by the librarian, Julie Johnson, who gave us a brief history of the building and pointed out the stairs and the lectern outside the main entrance, to create an outdoor performance space. As someone who thought they knew the Library well, this was new to me and we hadn't even stepped over the door yet! Many other design elements contribute to the building's uniqueness, such as incorporating part of the old City Walls and and a 16th century gable into the fabric. A theme of nature and oak trees and leaves runs throughout the building, inspired by the quotation from Patrick Geddes which is reproduced at the entrance and gives the twitter account its name.
Membership of the library is free, currently they have about 2000 members and they offer postal loans throughout the UK and Ireland.
They have an extensive periodicals collection,the core of which is Scottish. While printed journal publishing may be declining, pamphlet production is increasing, particularly limited edition, decorative publications. Like most of us they are still struggling with how to collect and epublications. The Library maintains a cuttings collection of reviews etc and every Scottish literary magazine is indexed. They also try to subject index poets, services led by enquiry service. The small children's section is less used, but most of the work is done in schools or with poets.
The Library has only recently only recently moved into rare and archived materials, primarily with the Edwin Morgan Archive.
There was also the opportunity to see close-up the latest mystery book sculpure - a delicate birds' nest.
Colin emphasised that the communication reflected the heart of the general strategy, which is bringing people and poems together. Change ideas of how the library works and think of the Library not only and bricks and mortar but also a hub, for example they linked in with Olympics by featuring poems from each competing country.
Some do and don'ts:
Promote poetry and the Scottish Poetry Library
Twitter is all about the voice, which fits in nicely for teh SPL e.g. they use it for celebrating poets' anniversaries, followed by few lines of poetry.
People want to be acknowledged and he tries to reply to all messages
Have to be careful about individual opinions, e.g. avoid personal politics
Fitting in with the performance element is their use of Soundcloud for podcasts and poems. They produce 3 podcasts per month which get 300 hits/month. At different times each day, they mention the latest podcast on twitter, recognising the transitory nature of the twitter stream. A recent innovation was to podcast their annual 20 best Scottish poems which are picked by a guest editor, which was very successful in SoundCloud. Spoken poetry makes it come alive for many people, and it keeps a place for poetry for transitional life events such as weddings and funerals.
All in all everyone found it a fascinating an informative visit and even those of us who had been many times before all learned something.
A number of us went along to Hemma, for some of their (now famous) Swedish cider and a hearty meal, to socialise and discuss the future of the Edinburgh Tweet-Ups. I'm pleased to say everyone felt it was a success and were keen to repeat it. With the first Scottish LibraryCamp coming up in October, we may have time to squeeze one in before then, so I'll sound out out locations and canvass ideas closer to the time.
Finally 'A Big Thank You' to everyone who came along and made the evening the success it was.