How to host the best trivia library program that your city has ever seen
I am not a programming librarian by business, but during my last job, I was able to help manage the evening of the monthly anecdotes of our library for more than five years. As a certified Trivia Nerd, it was one of the most entertaining things that I was able to do in my career, and our customers have appreciated even more than us! Our program was so popular that online registration sometimes filled less than 60 seconds.
We welcomed anecdotes once a month for 6 to 9 months of the year, but rather than hosting it at the library, we have teamed up with a local brewery, which gave us a larger space and an excellent community partnership. Meanwhile, the brewery experienced an evening of very solid profits. They even created a signature beer for the library each fall (with a Pangue name) and donated part of the profits for us!
On his face, the management of a Trivia event seems quite simple, but our version had some elements that really distinguish us from the other local Trivia evening offers: we were able to use these events to promote solid relationships with our participants, and we leaned in our personalities and our senses of humor to make the program unique.
Do you think of organizing a trivia program in your library? Here are some tips and tricks that have helped succeed in our program:
Find the right time of the program
You really have to find this ideal point in the structuring of your Trivia program. Too few rounds do not seem satisfactory, while too many rounds become a burden. Our nights in Trivia lasted two hours, and we had six “traditional” laps of 10 questions each, plus an image lap on which the teams could work throughout the evening. We have experienced other options, but this configuration worked well for staff and customers.
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Define the basic rules early
It is not a secret for anyone that Trivia events can become super competitive, especially if you hold them in a place that serves alcohol. A healthy sense of competition creates a fun and engaging moment, but too much competition can make it difficult to maintain the program on the right track. Some of our useful basic rules included “limiting the waste course”, “send a representative of your group to speak to a staff member if you have concerns about a response” and “do not reprimand yourself or do not charge the person who read the questions”. (Yeah, we found this rule after a memorably noisy evening.)
Present a wide variety of subjects
Unless you create a program with a very specific theme like “Marvel Comics” or “” 80’s films “, you will want to integrate several subjects to make sure that there is something for everyone. Here are some strategies that we have found useful:
- Be creative! For example, we learned that we did not have a ton of sport buffs among our regulars in Trivia, so some of the subjects on the theme of sports that we used were “superstitions in sport” and “March Madness”, where the torsion was that all the questions concerned basketball players, but had nothing to do with their sporting performance.
- Add your personalities. One of my favorite names which Tunes consisted in songs of the personal lists of Spotify of each staff member, and for pleasure, we left the groups to guess which song came from the list of the staff.
- Make your customers heard. We encouraged each team to submit ideas for future categories, because it helped us during our planning meetings, and it was hilarious to see some of the suggestions. We have also obtained many suggestions that would be really difficult to transform into 10 complete questions (think of “symbols on the stock market” or “the things that only the Scottish knew”), so we have collected these ideas and created a recurring theme entitled “The guys, we cannot take a whole tour on this subject”, where every question in the Tour had a different subject.
Write strong questions
One of the things that made our nights of Trivia so special is that we have written almost all of our own questions. Yes, it was a lot of additional work, but it was a ton of pleasure, and it really separated our program from your average bar anecdotes. Here are some of our best questions to write questions, if you want to make an additional effort with your program:
- Include a mixture of easy, medium and hard questions for each round. And in case of doubt, wander the easier side of the spectrum.
- Include context clues in the question so that people have a chance to guess the right answer, even if they do not know the answer. For example, “what author of classical children was a librarian for young people before publishing his first book?” Forces you to have this knowledge squarely, while “this classic children’s author was a librarian for young people before publishing his first book, Henry Hugginsin 1950. ”Give you a chance to respond to the book if you know who wrote Henry Huggins. (Answer: Beverly Cleary.)
- Our customers loved the bonus points! See if you can find opportunities to help them increase their scores. (Example: “Nirvana released three studio albums before the death of Kurt Cobain in 1994. Name one of the albums, and for a bonus point, name the three of them.” Answer: Javel, Nevermind, in utero))
- Avoid questions where the answer is a specific number or date. If you write a question like this, authorize the correct answers in a specific beach. (Example: “What year did James Patterson published Came a spiderThe first book of Alex Cross series? The answers within five years will be accepted. »Answer: 1993 (1988 – 1998)))
I knew that our program was special the first time I attended anecdotes and our customers applauded as soon as we entered the brewery. If you have staff and time to devote to a program like this, I think you will find many opportunities for significant boss and community connections, and a ton of pleasure along the way! (And if you need an additional cost for your Trivia team, hit me!)
The following comes to you from the reimbursement.
This week, we highlight an article that made our type of editor -in -chief Vanessa Diaz feel. Now, even five years after her publication, Vanessa is still salty American dirt. Read the rest for an extract and become an All Access member to unlock the full message.
Imagine it: The United States, January 2020. A book with a pretty blue and white blanket made the rounds on the Internet Bookish. Blue ink forms a beautiful hummingbird pattern on a creamy background, a bird associated with the solar god Huitzilopochtli in Aztec mythology. Black barbed wire, both delicate and threatening, cuts the motif into a grid resembling an arrangement of the Talavera tiles. The whole is catchy, ostensibly Mexican in sensation and evocative of the borders and the experience of migrants.
The book tells the story of a bookstore owner in Acapulco, Mexico, who is forced to flee his house when a cartel of drugs assassinates everyone in his family, with the exception of his young son in a quinceañera. She and the boy are forced to become migrants and embark on a treacherous journey north towards the American border, to escape the cartel and to befriend the other migrants along the way. The book is praised not only as the “IT” book of the season, but as THE History of immigration. He obtains the treatment of Oprah and is rented by everyone from Salma Hayek to the Grande Sandra Cisneros, who called him “The great novel by Las American.“”
It’s been more than five years, and this book is always the scourge of my existence.
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