The LAS Membership Committee organized a small networking session for new members who joined LAS in 2016. The event took place on 15 December 2016 at the Esplanade Library.
The evening started off with a tour of the Esplanade Library led by Ms Kong Leng Foong, the manager of the library. It is a niche library focusing on the performing arts in the areas of Music, Dance, Theatre, and Film. It is a beautiful library with a relaxed ambience.
After the tour, we had dinner as most of the participants came from work and were already famished. We were too hungry to take pictures of the food. Haha!
After dinner, we did a simple ice-breaking activity and then got down to something more serious.
We asked our participants to write down things that the association DIDN’t do for them. It was great fun seeing our participants cracked their heads over this silly question. Our final goal, of course, was to find out what our participants think the association should do for members. This activity was inspired by the UX Research Methodologies workshop that a couple of us attended.
We had a handful of ideas and we asked participants to organise them according to whether they think the ideas are normal or original and easy or difficult to implement.
Ideas Generated
- LAS to send welcome email for new member
- Send introductory email
- Provide Welcome Gift
- Free LAS Shirt
- Talk on Singapore Library Industry
- Member card with perks
- Outdoor activities for team bonding
- LAS Gatherings like Chinese New Year or Christmas
- Something for librarians to bond over, not just professional events
- Receive regular newsletters from LAS
- LAS to give out a discount voucher to buy books from Kino etc.
- I know what my membership ID is
- The objectives and purpose of LAS are clear. Is it a union? Can it be an advocate for librarians?
- Fantastic movie night
- Form a reading club
- Public library card
- Organize tour overseas
- Sponsor a PhD programme
We had wanted the participants to help us plan 2 of the ideas using Padlet. Unfortunately, Padlet lets us down and we couldn’t capture all the inputs. Nevertheless, we see some great and implementable ideas here and will definitely bring them back to the LAS Council for discussion.
We believe our participants had a good time because some of them were asking whether we will conduct this event for “old” members. 🙂
Contributed by Ms Phoebe Lim, LAS Publication Chair 2017