The library team at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals were awarded with of the Marketing Excellence Award for their work in developing their project entitled “Summer reading journey – escape with a good book” by the Chartered Institute of Information and Library Professionals (CILIP).
The project encouraged users to engage with the hospital library via their fiction collection. The project was awarded with the bronze award for effective use of resources and well-designed promotional materials.
Every summer the library’s operational team, which consists of Sarah Woodhall, Operational Librarian; Amy Belch, Assistant E-Resources Officer; Louisa Halton, Senior Library Assistant; and Jane Corrigan, Sinead English and Karen Hithersay, Library Assistants, run a reading competition to encourage users to borrow books from the fiction and wellbeing collections. The team ask people to read and review any five of the collection of books between May and September so that they can be entered into a prize draw to win Amazon vouchers.
Sarah said: “We decided to design our own challenge this year, which allowed us to be creative and personalise the challenge using feedback from previous participants. We agreed to call the challenge “Summer Reading Journey: escape with a good book,” and linked it to a summer-holiday theme. The whole team got behind the challenge by promoting it at the library counters and also by having a weekly stand in the hospital where people could swap their books. We saw a 71% increase in our fiction issues compared with the previous year by promoting this challenge.”
“The team are absolutely delighted to win this award as it recognises all the hard work that they have all put in to making this promotion a resounding success.”