With two days of work ahead, Enssib researcher Raphaelle Bats and Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon librarian, Juliette Abric, turn Enssib classroom noisier than usual:  tables moving, loud voice conversations and the sound of sticking a poster announcing the name of the workshop.  At 14:00 It will take place the workshop “From the live concert to the hip hop section: explore the connections between collections and events”, where both Raphaelle and Juliette are going to introduce a participative workshop to assess the constraints and the facilitators in the task of connecting collections and library events at the same place. Before 14:00, the classroom is rapidly filled with interested librarians, organised in four groups. The activity is about to start.

Smiling, Raphaelle Bats introduces notions and concepts related to both the Placed Project and the Explore Prototype. With the assistance of Juliette Abric, she explains its origins and its potential to address possible problems musical librarians may face.  Then, Juliette explains the three phases of the workshop. First, participants are offered a scenario. By reading it, they must think about the facilitators and constraints to make connections between events and library collections on the individual level. After that, these individual facilitators and constraints must be discussed in the group so as to find common factors that enable or limit the eventual connection of events and collections. Raphaëlle and Juliette assisted the participants in their questions and they give examples. At the end of the groupe exercise, they must think of a solution to a common problem, imagine the path of a potential patron and expose their idea to the others members of the workshop.

Connecting events and collections is not an easy task, but in the group proposal exposition becomes evident how creative musical librarians can be when it comes to the deployment of “connecting” activities and events: their ideas are from musicals siestas, as a way to readapt collections to events, and the programming of an app which makes the library content editing process easier and interactive to potential patrons.  

The end of the workshop was the opportunity to ask the participants what were their views on the activity.  For instance, Catherine Lamarre, from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, highlighted how innovative this approach is and how important is to integrate new tools into libraries.

A source of inspiration, a new interesting game, a never-thought-of-that approach are other expressions eavesdropped by the lecturers. Above all, an exhilarating sense of the work done from Juliette and Raphaëlle’s side.  The work is not finished yet; tomorrow is the poster presentation.

To be continued…