Taking Measure

The library Theme Camp has been welcomed by participants at the Blazing Swan Event over the years as one of many that broaden the daytime activities on offer and act as a counterpoint to the very popular music and party spaces.

Our gauge of success has always been, ‘simply turning up’ – which given the location of the event and the nature of our gift will always be a challenge.  We have to do a lot of work (and invest in tents and storage) to protect the books from both sun and moisture, and they’re heavy.  We pick up and move around 3 to 4 tonnes of them every year.   

If we can be set up by the time the event starts, without having exhausted our Camp members, we tell ourselves we’re doing well. Beyond that we don’t measure success or failure in terms of numbers of visitors, or the number of books gifted.  Our intention is to provide a chance for people to enjoy a quiet space, and the opportunity for people to enjoy books and take some home with them. We could measure how many ‘units of enjoyment’ we’re creating by asking every visitor to complete a survey (we won’t!) but all we really have to do is look on to get the vibe.

We do have three ‘levers’ we work with:  How many books we put on display at any one time, how many people know we are there, and how long we stay open each day.

We try to put an improbably large number of books in front of people.  Firstly, we’re looking to create contextual absurdity – that so many books could have been brought so far to be at this remote event.  We’re also aiming to shatter people’s preconceptions of what a Little Free Library should look like – our setup is the opposite of a single box of books on a bench.  Mostly, though, we put a lot of books on display hoping to give people a good choice of good books across a very wide range of styles and subjects.  It’s hit and miss, but if word gets around that we’re at the event, we expect that somewhere between a third and a half of all of our books to walk out the door.

We don’t try to drive visitor numbers for their own sake, but any Theme Camp would be disappointed if they heard someone say after the Event, “Oh, I wish I’d known you were there.”   Because we’re a quiet camp we get put in a quiet location and we’re fine with that – but it means less passing ‘foot traffic’.  So we have to think about ways to make ourselves visible.  We could schedule and advertise a lot of activities in the library – and we now have the space with our second bell tent, but we don’t have the crew numbers to do it. So we have to rely on passive messaging, via the ‘Dust’ app, and some signs and samples left around the paddock (what we call the event site).

The final lever we can adjust is our hours of opening.  Our aim is to be predictable from day to day, and offer the same service over the whole seven days.  We’ve discussed whether the library needed to have librarians ‘on duty’ at all.  It’s not as if a library of free books needed to be guarded against theft!  The opposite has been the problem in fact.  We need someone there to let people know it’s OK to take books.  Taking into account that 3 out of our 4  crew are volunteering as Rangers during the event, this year our Hours of Operation will be 9am to 9pm. If we had more crew we would have liked to open up that extra window through to midnight each day, but it is what it is.

If someone during the course of the event wants to have a chat with us about what’s involved in becoming one of our permanent crew,  please make yourself  known to us.  We’d look favourably on people who shared our passion for books and/or science, and who could be available for up to two days post-event to assist with packdown this year.