Write A Book In A Day

The biggest news of course is that the Library hosted the annual Write A Book In A Day (WABIAD) competition on GAT day (15 June).

WABIAD is a wonderful fund-raising program for The Kid’s Cancer Project and this year was our biggest turn out to date! 13 teams and over 80 students (nearly 10% of the student population!) participated and raised $2,410 for the charity. 

WABIAD is a fun, creative and collaborative competition for students in Years 5 to 12. Teams of up to ten people have just 12 hours (8.00am to 8.00pm) to write and illustrate a book from start to finish. Each team is given a unique set of parameters within which to create their story. The stories are intended to be uplifting as they are shared digitally with children in hospitals across Australia. For further information see lines below.

The Library staff would like to thank all the staff members and older students who helped the teams with editing and encouragement – and also a big shoutout to La Porchetta for dinner – a leaning tower of pizzas!

Sustainability

The Library has begun using the new Raeco Bioguard 80 Biodegradable Adhesive Book Covering. This features an ‘active biodegradable ingredient’, which will not activate until it is placed into anaerobic-digestion conditions such as a landfill or compost. It is fully biodegradable and recyclable and will not leave toxic microplastics.

The Library has about 20,000 volumes in its collection and many of these will, at some time over the next several decades be deleted to make way for new titles. An indication of how large an issue this is, can be found by looking to the statistics provided by the public library services for New South Wales over 2021 – 2022. There are about 12,000,000 books in their collections and if we conservatively say that they discard 5% per year, then that equates to around 600,000 books.

One library service provider, James Bennet co., noted in a recent library webinar on sustainability, that they had covered over 50,000 books in Bioguard 80 – that’s a lot of single use plastics / toxic microplastics saved!

Angus Pearson, Di Saugy and Yvonne Langford
Library Team