Library Lovers Month competition during February

The Marketing and Advocacy Interest Group (MAIG) of the Library and Information Association of South Africa (LIASA) celebrated February - the month of love - by making templates available to all library marketers of posters, bookmarks, social media cover images, Email signature and a “Dear Library love letter”

The Department of Library Services at the University of Pretoria (UP) participated with enthusiasm by hosting a Library Lovers Month exhibition in the faculty libraries and by launching a competition for the UP students.  The creative exhibition on level 3 of the Merensky 2 Library was the work of Lidia Swart, Nadia Grobler, Adrienne Warricker and Christelle Steyn – a warm thank you to them!

University of Pretoria students were invited to participate in the #LibraryLoversMonth competition. They were requested to download the “Dear Library love letter” template and to write about their passion or positive experience of ANY of our University of Pretoria campus libraries or units such as the Research Commons or MakerSpace. We wanted to know what impact our libraries have on the lives of our students.

Almost 200 love letters were received and they were judged according to the following criteria: originality of topic and creativity; humour and entertainment quality; clarity of expression; appropriateness to theme and lastly correctness and spelling.

The following 11 students were the fortunate winners of the R500 Bookmark vouchers and photographs of them and their winning letters were shared on the library’s social media pages:

• Khadija Mansoor
• Rachel Swanepoel
• Meshack Kekana
• Naledi Mpanza
• Delene M van Wyk
• Nkhensani Maluleke
• Carien van der Merwe
• Andrea Kruger
• Alexandro Dreyer Duarte
• Makho Nkadimeng
• Charles Boshomane

Congratulations to our winning students and the Study Collection team who was responsible for 75 of the 190 #LibraryLoversMonth that we received in February!

It was heartwarming to read the beautiful love letters – here is one of them (written by Meshack Kekana) – enjoy!

Shhhhhh!

Dear Merensky Library :)

I love you because you are a home away from home,

I love you because your endless resources teach me about Paris and Rome.

I love you because your staff is forever pleasant,

I love you because your study centre is my antidepressant :)

You are always open whenever I need to unwind

I love you with all my heart and mind!

The winning Study Collection team with their cake