Glasgow Women's Library
Anniversaries: A Time for Reflection
As we join in the Department of Marketing’s 50th anniversary celebrations, we also find ourselves marking an important milestone for another Glasgow institution. Nearing the end of a two-year project which focuses on a case study of Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL), we have recently had the pleasure of participating in events to mark their own 30th anniversary.
Our project, Transformative Servicescapes and Consumer Vulnerability, is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and based around a case study of GWL. It explores the transformative role that service and community spaces can play in people’s lives, using methods that take in both long-term (archival research, media analysis) and more contemporary (interviews with GWL staff/volunteers/users/external networks) views on how one organisation has developed over the years.
In March 2022, in addition to holding an exhibition and ‘Meet the Researcher’ sessions at GWL, we delivered an online research dissemination event to share some of our project findings. In this event, ‘30 Years of Transformations’, we discussed the various ways GWL has had a transformative impact on individuals, groups, and communities over the past three decades. The ‘visual minutes’ from this event shown above reflect some of our project findings and the stories shared by staff, volunteers and users of the Library as they reflected on this important anniversary.
Thinking over both of these anniversaries has prompted us to recognise the importance of considering personal achievements by individuals within an organisation, alongside the organisations’ roles in broader societal changes and cultural achievements. For example, we have seen how GWL has been at the forefront of equalities activism and wider change in Glasgow’s social fabric, but also witnessed the transformational impact of tiny, everyday micro-interactions on individual lives.
Milestone anniversaries offer a wonderful opportunity to create time and space for contemplation, for sharing memories, for taking stock of achievements, and for reflecting on successes and failures. Such opportunities can be very rare in our fast-paced world! However, it is clear that reflecting on the past is crucial in planning for the future.
Professor Kathy Hamilton, Dr Juliette Wilson & Dr Holly Porteous
Department of Marketing
