9. The Honesty Library
Part of People Making Things Happen, a Big Lottery funded project exploring the history of The Mill.
Due to the history of the building, there was always a desire to keep some form of library in the building, and an important aspect of The Mill is the Honesty Library, where books can be borrowed informally, and donations arriving to top up any books that have not been returned.
Oral History extracts
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1. Ingrid Abreu Scherer
Everybody was very clear that we had to have books in the building. We knew we weren’t going to be able to set up a rota and a volunteer structure to do a lending library, so what we decided in the end was to have effectively a book swap. People donating books, taking books, you didn’t have to have a card, you didn’t have to sign anything out, you just borrowed what you liked and brought us what you liked. Sometimes people remember to bring the books back but quite often they don’t and then they just bring three others, so it’s always worked really well. It’s always reflected local people very well because it’s what they’re reading at that time, and what they’re swapping at that time, and it means we have really great content.
2. Isabel Simons
What I thought was possible, which was more of a kind of enlarged book swap, you know, without, without, and I think other people also thought there ought to be some kind of restriction on the way that people would borrow books and, and felt that there should be some kind of administering of it, so that, and recording. And I knew that that just wouldn’t work with such disparate volunteers and such a lot of extra admin. And so having worked in all kinds of libraries before, I knew that actually what a lot of work it was trying to log books in and out, in an old fashioned way with tickets, the Browns system. I knew it wouldn’t work. So I was just happy for it to be free for all and like you would lose books. You know, inevitably even if you’ve got a controlled situation, you lose books, and more would come in and that’s the way it’s been really. We get more books and we can actually accommodate that. Given that the Mill is there for all sorts of reasons, not just to be a library. And, yeah, so, so it’s more been kind of managing the books that come in and displaying them to their best advantage given limited resources.
3. Isabel Simons
I managed to keep the fiction, roughly in alphabetical order and categorised, that’s what the main category is. novels of all descriptions, light and more heavyweight. And then, so that probably, probably at least a third of the stock is that, then quite a lot of non-fiction, which is very, very, very roughly organised by the so called Dewey system. And and so there’s, there’s not an awful lot of it. So you don’t have to do this type of micro classification that you would get in a in a public library. So I think, I think probably people can find what they need, and children’s books, get in a mess very quickly and so, but I tried to keep them in a rough kind of order so that people can sort of go for what they want. And that’s about it really. So just keeping it ticking over isn’t, is not a lot of work. It’s a great way of keeping books circulating and giving them a life beyond their original owners, which is great, I think, so long as you keep that book going and being read by as many people as possible for as long as possible.
4. Natasha MacFadzean
The honesty library, for example, I’m not quite sure whose idea that was, initially. Obviously, we wanted to keep a book element here. Because, you know, because – and there were various people involved as well, right at the beginning, who felt very strongly about that, that, you know, that we definitely should have, you know, sort of books for people to borrow. So actually, I think it came from those people. But at first, I didn’t get the concept of an honesty library, I thought, it’s not gonna work, you know, we’ll people will come and say, all the nice books, and we’ll just be left with all the ones that nobody, you know that nobody wants. It doesn’t work like that, at all, the honesty library is amazing. And we always get like a constant batch of amazing books.
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