100 year jubilee

The building the library is housed in was built in 1907, and we thought we should celebrate this. There have been a lot of preparations and yesterday the festivities took place. Unfortunately, it rained very much. We had tents out in the park in front of the library, where we served refreshments and snacks. It got to be very wet and muddy. There were (some pretty famous) local authors speaking about their personal experiences from the University Library (if Lorraine reads this, she should know that her cousin Tommy Olofsson - a poet - was one of them). One of the authors had met his wife at our library, another talked about the privilege of getting access to the world's knowledge and yet another was impressed by the actual building (a five storey red brick building by a famous architect I can never remember the name of). There had been several books published, one about the history of the library (naturally), one children's book and one containing the author's speeches. The authors were treated to lunch and the staff got dinner after the event was over in the evening.

I don't think people in general understand how much work there is behind an event like this. Part of the staff had worked like mad to get everything ready in time. The books just barely made it out of the printing press - two of them arrived yesterday (the last one only one hour before the festivities started). Narrow margin. The staff fixing the tents and the sound system got completely soaked and ruined their clothes and shoes in the mud. I had it "easy" because I wasn't involved in this part. But most of my staff was, so I had to do almost all of their regular chores. I'm not really complaining, I think it's great that we managed to do this and it meant that the local newspaper paid some attention to us (they rarely do).