We are recruiting - could you be our next Library Services Manager?

Due to the retirement of the current post holder, we are looking to recruit a librarian to manage the library service for Northamptonshire Healthcare and Northampton General Hospital.

This is a great opportunity to shape services for community, mental health, and acute staff, across the county, ensuring knowledge and evidence are available and accessible to support clinical practice, management, education, research, continuing professional development and all decision making across the organisations we serve.

The service has a well-established team of experienced professional and para-professional staff across three sites, and you would be working for an outstanding trust that understands the value of what the library service offers, within a supportive management structure.

We are looking for a professionally qualified librarian with extensive experience in health to lead on the library service across both trusts. You will be proactive, adaptable and able to identify opportunities for further embedding service provision into the organisations we serve.

For more information about the role, contact details and to apply, please see the vacancies section of the Trust web site.

NHFT virtual book club meeting #28 - There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job

Following on from our absinthe soaked visit to fog-shrouded San Francisco in Jonathan Moore's twisty psychological thriller, The Poison Artist, we are moving across the Pacific to Japan in the shape of award winning author Kikuko Tsumura's surreal comic novel, There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job.

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing – and ideally, very little thinking.

She is sent to a nondescript office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end can be so inconvenient and tiresome. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly – how did she find herself in this situation in the first place?

As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful...

"An irreverent but thoughtful voice, with light echoes of Haruki Murakami... the book is uncannily timely... a novel as smart as is quietly funny" - Financial Times

'Quietly hilarious and deeply attuned to the uncanny rhythms and deadpan absurdity of the daily grind' - Sharlene Teo

The next meeting will be Thursday the 5th of October at 7pm via MS Teams where we will be discussing the novel. You can find the link via the Events Calendar on the Staff Room.

Hope to see you there...

Library catalogue and system out of action Tuesday 29th of August

Our library management system, Koha, along with our online catalogue and our self-issue machines, will be out of action from 7:00 am on Tuesday the 29th of August. This is for a system upgrade.

We expect the the upgrade will be completed and the system up and running again by lunch time, although it may be longer, depending on how the process goes.

During this time users will not be able to search our catalogue or renew their books.

Apologies for any inconvenience.

August bank holiday closure

 All the Libraries will be unstaffed on Monday the 28th of August for the bank holiday.

24 hour access will be available as usual to registered members via our swipe card system at the Richmond Library.

The Berrywood and Isebrook Libraries will be closed over the bank holiday.

We reopen as normal on Tuesday the 29th at all of our sites.