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As you may recall, I have been helping to plan a Staff Development Day for my fellow library employees at our academic institution. During our initial meetings, we came up with the idea of basing the day around celebrating stories of our successes, and leading from that, I suggested an appropriate venue for us to use: The Story Museum which is located in Oxford. Our event is still more than a month away, but I am very excited that we are able to use this venue. I have taken my children there many times, and I also happen to work there occasionally as a Learning Session Leader; in other words, I lead visiting school groups around the museum and facilitate educational activities with them. The other afternoon I was there, pretending to be a giant frog, hopping and ribbeting around while telling a group of children and their grownups an Australian dreamtime story; it is quite the  contrast to my day job of working in an academic library.

If you are ever in Oxford, please do visit The Story Museum. It is a unique place, with wonderful, immersive exhibits, live storytelling throughout the day, and books everywhere that you are welcome to pick up and read (although you can’t take them home). It is not so different from a library, in a way, only it is the most magical library you could ever visit. There is even a wardrobe door you can walk through to enter into Narnia… I can’t wait for my academic library colleagues to experience it.

“Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories we wouldn’t be human beings at all.” – Philip Pullman, author and Story Museum patron