silver lining II

I've been working from home today (my house is currently being somewhat less waterproof than is generally considered desirable) which seems to have had the unexpected side effect of making me more visible/useful to my students.

I sent out an email this morning, to let people know that I'd be out of the office, which actually generated a good number of student research enquiries - far more than I'd usually get on a Friday in the library, which tends to be quite quiet at this point in the semester.

When I'm visible in the London Centre, I'm only visible to other people in the same space - online - no boundaries. I suspect at least one or two of the enquiries I answered today came from students who are travelling this weekend, and history would suggest they wouldn't have thought to email me without the prompt.

The vast majority of the resources I was locating for people were online-access, and many of the books were via ILL, which means they wouldn't be available until next week even if I'd been working out of the office, so I think that was a net win (plus, my house isn't fixed, but we're a stp closer, at least!)

* Photo by HTYYL, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

I remember

silver lining

I was late in to work this morning, thanks to signal failure at Cannon Street, but having walked through my local park to get to my alternate route on a bright, clear, frosty morning, and then crossing Hungerford Bridge, with the Thames sparkling and all London spread out around me, it's hard to be too grouchy. There's nothing like the view across the Thames to remind me just how much I love London.

* Photo by sparkynufc_86, used under Creative Commons, with thanks (because I was hurrying, so didn't stop to take photos myself this morning!).

Automatic hush

While I am kind of pleased to discover that this noise traffic light actually exists, albeit only in the US, I'm less pleased to discover that this is the Librarian I-Phone app. That's the dominant thing that's associated with what we do? Still?

Your city

I spotted this phonebox while I was walking into Stratford earlier today, which caught my eye because of the tagline 'run your city'. I'm not a runner, and I won't be signing up for their contest, but I still kind of love the idea - getting people to hit the streets and expand 'their' London. The whole idea of 'London is your gameboard' is one I can appreciate.

I know they're a running company, but it still bugs me a little that they categorise walking as 'cheating', because walking London is one of the ways that I feel that London is my city - or at least some parts of it are. That's almost my functional definition of which areas I consider 'mine' - areas that I can walk confidently from memory. Areas that I know well enough to notice what's changed, know what's new, how to get around without having to stick to a narrow known route - those feel like my city.

I do approve of people setting up games to encourage people to explore their cities, though - I never wrote it up, but I did a Photo Scavenger Hunt a couple of weekends back around Hackney, which was great fun, and has added a little more area to the parts of London I count as my own.

Two unrelated things:

Thing #1 - our building's been 'under wraps' for a couple of months now, as they were cleaning its historic stone outsides. The LUP Library has two walls made almost entirely from windows, so having them swathed in scaffolding and white waterproof sheeting has made quite an impact on it's appearance.

They're finally unwrapping us, which is a slow process - we're into week two of the careful dismantling at the moment. There are two desks through in the stock room with a view out across the street - set in the two lit 1st floor windows of this photo, in fact. I don't think anyone used them during the whole summer program, or for the first few weeks of semester, but I can't help but notice that at least one of them's been in use most of the last week, since the wrapping came off. What a difference a view makes! Makes me wonder if there might be any way of re-arranging our furniture to make more use of the windows in the main room ...

Thing #2 My App Inventor invitation came through, which was a moment of geek-joy :D

It took me a little while to get set up, compared to my partner's plug 'n play experience, but once I'd finally downloaded the relevant drivers for my handset it really is as simple as it's made out to be.

I've only had time to work through two of the tutorials, but thus far everything makes sense. I'm thinking about some actually-useful-to-me tools I'd like to make - I just love the idea of being able to roll my own.

* Android photo by Svet, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

digital delights

I've had a dedicated e-reader for a few months now, and I love it. (It's not a Kindle or a Sony, rather, it's another brand, which Waterstones used to sell, but doesn't seem to any more.) It's fantastic to have a ton of books at my fingertips, all in something lighter than your average magazine, let alone paperback.

For most of those months I've been meaning to write up a proper review, and link in a bunch of the conversations about ebooks and pbooks, and DRM and format wars and ... I'm never actually going to have the time to do that, so instead you get this set of scrapbook notes, if for no other reason than to clear the decks so I won't feel constrained if something else comes up in the future on a related topic.

- I think I spotted a couple of e-readers being used by students over the summer, and at least 1, and an ipad amongst the current cohort. Several smartphones being used as readers as well.

- I had a play with some of the ebook aps available for my smartphone, and no. Not unless I had absolutely no other choice of reading material. The screen's just too small for any sensible amount of text. (Clearly folks who use their smartphones as readers feel differently, and more power to them!)

- neat to read about ND doing ebook studies, although I read this and all I can think is 'surely that's a study into tablet computers, not ebooks?'

- I had a play with an ipad at the weekend, and, yes, it's pretty impressive, but my first impression was surprise at just how heavy it was, and maybe they had the contrast settings way up, but that's one bright backlit screen. It certainly seemed much closer to a laptop than an ebook reader to me.

- One of the things I love about my reader is the e-ink screen. I can read in bright sunlight, and I can read in low light without giving myself a headache from the screen light. I prefer it to reading on screen by some margin - enough that I've taken to pulling across pdfs and long reports that I need to read for work, just to break up my screen time.

- I really thought the 'flicker' of the e-ink refresh on a page turn would drive me nuts - that was one of my real concerns before I got the reader - but I've realsed recently that I just don't notice it at all, any more than I notice the 'break' in my reading when I turn the page of a pbook.

- It's not ebooks vs pbooks, it's ebooks AND pbooks, at least if you're a word addict like I am.

* Photo by schmidjon, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

it's alive!

The new semester has arrived; classes start Tuesday, and yesterday was the first serious load-test for the new library management system - textbook check out - 748 books to 130 students, and I think things went pretty smoothly. There were a couple of moments where my assistant was scanning barcodes faster than the system could process them, but the whole system was much more robust than it's predecessor, we didn't run into any data-conversion problems, and the whole process was faster.

I had scheduled longer slots for each batch of students, knowing that because we had books for the new core course, we'd be checking out about 260 more items than last semester, and seeing closer to 100% of the students (plus, I had to re-introduce some paperwork), but I think we could have got away with 30 minute blocks instead of 45 after all. Not a bad problem to have, really - having short breaks between groups meant that there was no chance for long lines to build up, and that I and my assistant got moments of downtime to grab a snack or a drink, which made the whole thing less exhausting than it can be.

I've just checked, and the overnight tweak that was to make sure all the due-dates for the textbooks match up with the end of semester has worked, so I think we're off to a reasonably solid start to the semester, at least as far as the LMS is concerned. Hurray!

There are still some loose ends to tie up, and feedback from students may lead us to undiscovered problems, but having the library records converted and accurate, the OPAC set up, the stock check done and processed, and the staff interface ready and working in time for the start of semester is a pretty good goal to hit!

Switching LMS was never going to be a small job, and we started about 6 weeks later than planned, so the last couple of weeks have been really intensive, and I'm really glad that it's a bank holiday tomorrow, to rest and recover so I can dive into the first week of classes with recharged batteries. (I know it's carnival weekend, but I must admit that the closest I'm going to get to the festivities is a cup of Notting Hill tea from YumChaa)

* Textbook photo by Marquette La, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Zoo nation

Work continues apace with the move to the new LMS & catalogue, overlapping with the usual preparations for the start of a new semester, which has rather meant I've been all work and no play recently. I did take a break last night, though, to go up to London Zoo, who are running a series of special late night openings in August.

The queue forming when we arrived was a bit daunting, and some areas of the zoo were really crowded - the lions and tigers were super-popular - but it was fantastic to be able to explore in the twilight.

Some animals were sleeping, but others were maybe more active than they would be mid-day, so that balances out, although my camera really didn't like the active animals in the low light, so - very few photos to share.

It's been many, many years since I last went to London Zoo - I think I was a school trip! - and a lot has changed. The move towards more open enclosures is great, both for the animals and the visitors - the exotic bird and the monkey walk-throughs were two real highlights for me. It was fantastic to be so close to the animals, and to see them without bars - spotting the bright flashes of tiny birds in flight through the greenery and watching monkeys playing through the branches is pretty magical.

It's been a really long week, so we didn't stick around too late for the bars and silent nightclub, but it looked like a lot of folks were having a really good time there, on top of exploring the zoo proper.

Next week's the last late, so if you think it sounds good, book your tickets ASAP!


* Photo by me

A day in the life of a librarian - round 5

(The collected Days make for some interesting reading)

I'm a solo librarian in an academic library. All my students are on their summer holiday at the moment, and the library is closed, but that doesn't mean that it's going to be a quiet day!

Check email on the 3 accounts I monitor. Forward a handful of messages to colleagues, reply to the most urgent of mine, and batch together the rest by project to tackle later, or - as it turns out - tomorrow.

Clarify quotes with potential shelving and furniture suppliers, and pass them on to the rest of the people working on plans to maybe move our library within our building.

Measure up existing library furniture, and start making scale plans for some of the possible layouts that have been discussed.

Phone calls with boss, updates on the library move plans.

Pop out to pick up lunch, and caffeine supplies for the next few days. Collect armful of incoming book orders from my mailbox on the way back in.

One of our faculty members pops in for a chat about how resourcing is coming together for a new course - show him the relevant new arrivals, make some suggestions for titles that would fill the need he describes, and then order the two most likely looking ones. (Frustratingly, there's a brand new book that might be relevant but might be too technical - we can't tell from contents page, and none of our partner libraries have a copy yet. I'll call around local bookshops tomorrow to see if anyone has a copy he or I can go and page through before we order it, as it's a fairly expensive HB)

Check in on progress of another faculty member's course reader - she's finished up her part, so the ball's back in my court to double check the permissions, and send it out for a proof copy.

Call our main book supplier to try and find out why I've got an invoice, but no books - miss our rep both times I call, so - onto tomorrow's to do list with that.

More email and phone calls with suppliers and colleagues about the library move plans - forwarding quotes and requesting clarifications, and trying to make sure everyone involved has the information I've collected, ahead of our meeting later in the week.

Data cleanup - we're in the middle of transitioning to a new LMS, and the test transfer of our data threw up a number of anomalies that need me to investigate and make judgement calls. Today's area for focus was duplicate patron barcodes, and miss-matched bib and item sets. Picky and detailed, but satisfying. Really looking forward to going live on the new system.

Add 9 new dvds to the catalogue - the one thing I'm not looking forward to on the new system is media cataloguing, so I pulled these to the top of my 'to enter' pile to make sure they'll be included in the record transfer!

Stop - at half past leaving time - to look around, see what needs doing and to think about priorities. Make a few notes, and put together tomorrow's to-do list, so I can get off to a clean start tomorrow morning.

Go though reception on the way out of the building to discover a late delivery has arrived, containing those missing books, so I took a quick detour on my route home to drop into the book shop and leave a message for our rep to let her know that all is well after all.

* Photo by robjwells, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

London Lives

London Lives looks like such a new fantastic resource! We don't have any history courses running at the moment that focus on this particular period in the UK, but the assembled biographies tagged with 'transportation' provide some fascinating individual sketches for the British Empire history class, and I hope the site comes in useful for historical context in some of the other classes, too.

* Photo by wirewiping, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

More museums and galleries

I am, admittedly, quite a fan of wandering around museums and galleries, but even for me, four different London locations in eight days is more than I can usually manage unless I'm on holiday. They were a very inspiring eight days, though, London Architecture, the National Gallery, the Summer Exhibition at the RA on Saturday, and the Science Museum's late on Wednesday, where they launched their new 'Who am I' galleries with a fine, if somewhat warm, evening event.

I am a fan of museums in general, but especially a fan of the various Lates - I don't think I've been disappointed by one yet, and I think they're well worth scheduling around. There's a different feel to them, and any time a museum has a queue round the block to get in, you know they're doing something right. Especially if they have staff roaming the queue distributing maps, event guides, and lollies!

Lunch hour location appreciation

One of the many advantages of the London Centre's location is that I can nip out to go to a 50 minute long tour at the National Gallery, pop across the road for a sandwich and be back at my desk inside an hour.

Which is what I just did - thank you to Alan Crookham, National Gallery Archivist, for a fantastic architectural tour, delivered as part of the London Festival of Architecture. I wish we could have been allowed downstairs to peek at the 70s rooms in their 70s splendour, but that's absolutely the only thing I could criticise about it.)

Likewise, yesterday I popped over to the Mall Galleries for their 50 years of London architecture exhibition in my lunch break, which was fascinating. Not so much for the big public projects, many of which were fairly familiar, but for the domestic ones. Who would have thought that the much maligned late seventies would have produced so many beautiful, functional homes!

Interesting for me, to, seeing so many local things - there's a strong showing from east London, including two schools that I'm more familiar with from hearing about the Building Schools for the Future project, my local cinema, the station I go through and the bridge I cross over to get to my *other* local cinema... Plus all the Olympic Park plans, of course.

Stunning photography two, to showcase the work, including this one for the footbridge joining the Royal Ballet School with the Royal Opera House, which I have long admired, but never knew was called the 'Bridge of Aspiration', which is just so perfect for it.

The exhibition closes on Sunday, so if you get a chance, do drop in soon.

An entirely internal milestone

AKA, the power of round numbers on the human psyche - it's fairly meaningless in reality, but it feels significant enough that I want to mark it: I just added item record ten thousand to the library catalogue.

(That's 10000 bibliographic items, not 10000 copies - the copy IDs are currently in the 14000's)

The item in question? Capital affairs : London and the making of the permissive society by Frank Mort.

(Why meaningless? We hold just under half that number of items in reality - the extra record IDs being a mix of deleted records, lost and removed stock, and the artefacts of the last two data conversions, both of which introduced gaps into the sequence.)

Possibly more significantly, the record does seem to function - I wasn't quite sure if it would, or if the change in number length would break something! (Plans are afoot to make questions like that a thing of the past, but said plans have not yet come to fruition.)

removable notes

I don't think these transparent tabbed sticky notes are on sale in the UK, unfortunately, but I wish all our students came equipped with them.

Writing in borrowed books is a huge bugbear for me - one person's highlighter and annotation makes life so much harder for all the readers who come after. Something like this would be perfect - perfect for the current student who learns best by getting hands-on with the text, and perfect for preserving library and textbook books for the future student to use.

way more than 140 characters...

Some of Don Schindler's tweets from a conference jumped out at me yesterday, this pair especially.

"Where to put money/time? 1. scanable text 2. mobile 3. facebook 4. photography 5. student comment 6. sharing ability 7. blogs #bigtenplus"

"Spend less time on 1. podcasts 2. twitter/linkedin 3. chats 4. online video (unless music, sports, instruct) 5. click thru news #bigtenplus"

The priority given to text is particularly nice to hear: I never feel like I can quite trust my own judgement on the issue, because I have a very strong preference for text over video which I suspect is a-typical. Or maybe not. There's work to be done re-writing and updating copy for our sites, though, to make them more web friendly, and scan-able.

It's easy to see the rise of mobile amongst our students in London - we issue them with very basic UK mobiles as emergency contact points, but in the last 18 months, maybe 2 years, I've started to see more and more students who bring their US smart phone with them, using them on an international data plans.

(I think it would be fascinating to be able to issue our students with UK smart phones and encourage faculty to develop their courses and assignments knowing that all their students would have a camera / video / online collaboration tool, modelling some of the research that's being done on using twitter and wikis and so on in teaching. I suspect we're not so many years away from effective smart phone ubiquity, but it'll be much longer before we reach a stage where we can assume/require that everyone has one.)

Relative order of Facebook / blogs / twitter is interesting, too - I'd have guessed blogs / Facebook/ twitter based on our experience, both metrics, formal feedback, and verbal impressions.

We haven't had as high a take up of our fb page as we'd initially expected - although far higher than the last time we experimented with it - but judging from the student feedback, that's at least partially an advertising / awareness issue: we could definitely promote it more. The blog is, so far, our most successful online experiment, but essentially we're only still using Twitter because a couple of us staff use it and find it useful.

On facebook I think it's that a lot of students use the service, but either don't know about or don't want to follow our page - Twitter is just a much smaller constituency of students using the service. ( Podcasts and video are both things that have come up as something we might want to introduce, but - maybe it's ok that we haven't got to them yet.)

Photography - plenty of room for us to improve here - and maybe linked to student comment, as I know we've had some truly superb photographers coming through the program, although I'm less sure what we might do to encourage them to share their images with us.

Plenty to think on...

* Photos by Timmy Toucan (RAF Eagle) and mrwilleeumm (G1 demo), used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Questions answered

From the Albertsons Library at Boise State University, via Travlin' Librarian, because - it's true.

(Although there aren't a lot of silly questions, really. Plenty of questions that the person asking thinks are silly, but - if you don't know and want to, then the question's not that silly.)

quick note to self - I really like the layout / design of the Wellcome Collection's events calendar - beautifully clear, inviting, and stylish.

A confession, of sorts

I finally joined my local public library today - it's only been mumblemumble years that I've been living here, after all!

That sounds quite bad, but I've been an active user of Westminster libraries - who have branches close to work, and who have been very good to me - as well as The London Library and, of course, my own library's collections, but not - until today - my own local library.

This somewhat undermined the strength of my position last week, when I was discussing with a friend how important and usable public libraries are for everyone, including people - like both of us - who work full time out of their local area.

That said, my local does have weekend and evening opening hours, on-line recalls and renewals, and an external book drop, plus their book clubs are primarily in the evening, which makes them an option. I don't think my friends' local library does the book group thing, but they do do everything else, plus offering e-books, so - still provision for people who can't pop in during the weekly working day.

Are you a regular visitor at your local library?



(NB - my local library isn't in Anne Arbour - I just liked the photos, and didn't have my phone with me this morning to photograph my actual library.

* Photo by jhoweaa, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Why does the RSA have so many really interesting things happening at lunchtimes, when I can't quite get there in time? (I really shouldn't grumble - they have lots of evening things as well, and for the 'impact of the internet on the general election' one I was at last week they'd even moved the start time back to 6.30, which is much easier for me to make.)

Also, on a planning ahead note : Walk London's Spring into Summer events are this weekend - 22nd/23rd.

* Photo by Adriana Lukas, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

The only certainty is change

There are a lot of things that are up in the air at the moment, a lot of ideas and hopes and plans and questions flying around. That's good, but it does mean that this poster - and the Usable Libraries site that goes with it - appeared in my RSS feeds at the perfect moment - thanks, jessamyn @ librarian.net!

Supporting students' in their learning and faculty in their teaching.
Creating improvements.

That's my focus, right there.

* Posted by Team INFLUX , used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Without your televisions

I learned something this week. I learned that nothing says 'dodgy' like sauntering across Trafalgar Square carrying a smallish TV, except possibly hurrying across Trafalgar Square carrying a smallish TV.

Which is what I was doing yesterday morning.

(Even a small CRT tv starts to weigh a fair bit after a while, and anyway, I didn't want to be late for work.)

So why was I braving the suspicious looks to cart a tv into work? Context might help.

I record broadcast tv for use in class, under an ERA license. This is a good and fruitful source of resources, and well worth the investment in licence fee and tech, but does mean that I have a tv set up in my office, which isn't exactly standard equipment.

Our old set-up was getting more and more unreliable, so we recently upgraded the key bit of kit - the DVD recorder.

One shiny new DVD recorder - one cranky old tv that didn't want to cooperate. Problem.

Specifically, the cranky old tv is of the age that means it doesn't respond to the signal that new devices send out to signify 'switch to Aux mode now'. Cranky old tv has no remote control, no button for 'Aux', no desire to cooperate with any of the same-brand or Universal remote controls we could scrounge up to test with.

Which is roughly when I discovered that it's no longer possible to buy cheap nasty tvs - one can only buy sleek, flat-screen, lovely tvs, and they're not particularly cheap.

Frankly, I'd rather we spent the money on something we need, that will make life better in some way for our students, faculty, or staff, so I've been keeping an eye on my local freecycle and reuse groups. This past weekend I spotted that someone very local to me was was offering a portable tv. A flurry of emails and a 20 minute walk later, said tv was mine, ready to be donated on to work.

Right now, it's sitting on the side in my office, doing it's job of letting me see that the DVD-R did, in fact, record the test-program I set it to record last night. I think that's worth a few suspicious looks!

* Photo by Susan E Adams, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Magical mystery tours

I must admit, I've never been inside Kensington Palace: the strong associations with Diana have always put me off, and there are so many other fascinating places to go - there are four more Royal palaces just in London for a start!

That said, this article about the new Enchanted Palace exhibition has just catapulted it up my to-do list!

* Photo by Ben Oh, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

One foot in front of the other

Reference by walking around - I think I ran into that concept under that name in the One Person Library / OPL Newsletter, about a decade ago, when I was just starting out as a solo librarian, and at least once a week I'm glad that it's a tool in my tool kit.

It's so simple and yet so effective; reducing the 'friction factor' of asking a question to almost nothing. The questions I get asked when I pass someone in a corridor, or when I'm straightening the newspapers or doing any one of a dozen small jobs I intentionally space throughout the day to give me reasons to be walking about the library being visible and ready to be asked, often start 'I wasn't going to bother you but as you're here' or 'I don't suppose you know, but' or 'this is probably a really dumb question, but' - which is to say, exactly the kind of things that people might *not* ask if they had to come up to a desk, or come across to my office, however open-door and accessable I try to make myself. They're very often questions I can answer, so that people get whatever it is they need, whether that's directions to Abbey Road or advice about how to untangle an unclear citation, or where such-and-such a book is shelved. It also gives me some clues about what people are not asking, which is useful when I'm thinking about signing, or 'how do I...' tips, or reminder emails. And the newspaper rack gets straightened. In short - everybody wins.

* Photo by Ben Werdmuller, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Little things

It's a small thing, but I just managed to put together two MySQL queries that extracted the information I needed from the system, without help, in a reasonably sane amount of time. Several different logic-checks seems to prove they're both giving me what I thought I was asking for, and the numbers match up with the pattern I was expecting. It's a long way from mastery, and it might be a small step, but it's a step in the right direction.

Check point

This has been a very productive three day week, and I did achieve my goal and clear my cataloguing backlog. There are just two copies of a single title still on my 'to process' shelf, and they're waiting for a call number to be generated for it by my wonderful colleague back on campus who lends her expertise with particularly tricky titles.

I also did a spot check on the dvd collection, had a couple of really productive conversations with colleagues, got all my paperwork up to date and filed, chased a batch of outstanding book orders, fitted the new shelf-ends, updated the shelf signs, and generally did everything I was hoping I'd get done to make sure I was starting the second half of the semester on a sound footing (except clear all the shelving created by my cataloguing spurt, but if that's not a task for a Monday morning, I don't know what is.)

So, I may still be here 45 minutes after I should have finished for the day, but I'll be off tomorrow with a clear conscience, and come in on Monday to a clear desk in a more organised office, which feels like a good place to leave things.

* Photo by Stéfan, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll's Alice stories were some of my favourites when I was a child - not my absolute favourite, which was Black Beauty, but books that I read and re-read, and have a great affection for. I never took to the Disney version, but I am a Tim Burton fan, so I've been really looking forward to seeing his take on the stories, and carefully avoiding interviews and reviews so as to go and see it with fresh eyes and an open mind.

Burton's film is not a faithful adaptation of the books, more an 'inspired by' fantasy, and it leaves out some of my favourite moments and characters, but it picked me up and carried me away, and I don't think I stopped smiling or being delighted at any point. The colour-scapes, the design, the use of the 3-d, the costumes, the whole rhythm of the piece, as well as some absolutely fantastic performances - well worth having paid out the extra for the big-screen 3-d screening.

If you want to see just how far both the technical medium and the conventions of our visual language has come since 1903, have a look at the first film version of Alice in Wonderland, restored by the BFI for its centenary. The long version is here, or the 3 minute highlight reel is here.

(If you've been meaning to re-read the originals, Project Gutenberg has the e-text of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.)

* Photo by seriykotik1970, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

World Book Day

Today's World Book Day in the UK, National Grammar Day in the USA, and National Procrastination Week wherever created-by-press-release holidays are celebrated. It's also the last full class day before break week for my students, which is why I'm not using any of those occasions to hang an event on - the library's been getting quieter and quieter all day as people finish their last classes and head off.

I am spending some quality time tonight curled up with my current book, though, which is at least in keeping with the theme of the celebrations.

My break plans are to take a couple of long weekends*, to dig into a couple of ongoing projects in between, and to blitz my cataloguing backlog, so we can start the second half of the semester with the richest possible array of resources on the shelves, and a clean slate in my office to use as I start to focus on resources for the Summer School classes.



*(although, seeing as the last couple of days have been fuelled by the power of Lemsip and hot and sour soup, I suspect I'll be spending the first weekend succumbing to this cold.)

* Photo by Tania Ho, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

I'll just ....

"I'll just" is such a dangerous phrase! All the major projects I'm working on at the moment are in that 'waiting for someone to get back to me' stage, and I was heartily fed-up with the old, clunky, non-accessible library webpages, so I just spent a couple of hours giving them a new CSS layout.

Thank you to Blue Robot's Layout Reservoir for my foundations! (The long term plan is to integrate them more closely with the library catalogue, but who knows how far away that's going to be, and in the mean time, at least they're not still using tables for layout.)

So, why's this dangerous? Because I'm pretty sure I'll go home, look at the pages, and find at least five things I'll need to fix on Monday morning - which is a risk I'm happy to take, really, given that waiting for a time when I can check and re-check and test and test again to make 100% sure it's perfect in every way is almost a guarantee that the update would never get done at all.

(If anyone follows that link and spots something that seems broken or undesirable, please do let me know!)

words, words, and more words

This post about the term graphic novel reminded me that I've been meaning to write something about the vagaries of terminology.

I'm British, but working primarily with American students, so that's one language divide right there, but I've been talking with various people about library management systems recently, which throws up a whole other array of library-specific terminology choices.

"I want to to borrow / loan / check out / book out / take out this thing, so I'll use the self-check / self-issue / self-service machine or point or station."
"Someone else has an item out at the moment, so I'll request / recall / reserve / book / trap / wait-list it."
"The book we all need to read for our paper is in the reference / reserve / non-circulating / no-loan / closed section, so no one can take it away."

At least renew is pretty stable, although I have heard 're-check'!

It would be invaluable to know which terminology is the most meaningful for our specific users, but it's hard to get that kind of feedback - I suspect most people really don't give it that much thought. Common questions and misconceptions do provide some clues, though - something to use as the basis of experimental changes, at least.

Which terms do you use? Anything else to add to the lists, or ones that you'd never heard before?

* Photo by , used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Just got home after a very interesting RSA lecture by and discussion about Jaron Lanier and his new book 'You are not a gadget' - he's speaking again tomorrow evening at LSE, also for free, but on a first-come first served basis, or, if you wait a few days, the RSA will have audio and video up on their site.

Some very interesting stuff, but I need to read the book to really get into the meat of the matter.

You spent the evening unpacking books from boxes

I spent a fair amount of time last week, and the whole of yesterday morning, updating and correcting condition records for books borrowed through our Textbook Loan Scheme. (The Spring semester always has more corrections, simply because I have less time to check the books myself over the Christmas break than I do between May and September) I really appreciate the students' assistance in keeping our records accurate - I'd much rather be correcting condition records now, that billing people for damage at the end of the semester.

I am very much looking forward, though, to this being either the last or the penultimate time I need to do this task with the current computer system.

Updating - and creating - copy condition records is one of the many bits of back end work where the user interface never got properly finished in our current LMS, so I'm making corrections in the raw database, and it's a fairly fiddly process. There are 782 textbooks currently on loan, and more than twice that in the system, so the prospect of being able to streamline this part of my workload is tempting indeed!

(We're meeting tomorrow with one of our shortlisted LMS suppliers, so prospects for the future are very much on my mind.)

* Photo by rnav, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Time for tea

I've just hosted the first Library Tea of the semester, and I want to take five minutes to reflect on why I do them.

It's not a huge event, just tea and biscuits, in the Library, over the lunch break once a week. It is something I think is important, though, which is why I've negotiated for the budget for it, the support from our facilities team, and why I don't mind spending my break time loading the dishwasher!

It isn't about the numbers, but the number of people involved does affect both the feel and the purpose. Some semesters, tea has averaged maybe 20 students each week, last semester was nearer to 70, with an all time high of 86! Today was about 45, almost 1/3 of the student body.

When it's a small group of students attending, it does mean that the teas tend more towards being about the students talking with me, which is an opportunity to spread information about London and about the Program in an informal setting, as well as a chance for me to get to know some of the students.

When it's a very big group, the teas are much more about providing a venue for students to talk with each other, to build a community and make - or catch up with - friends, and for a program like ours, that matters too.

Either way, it encourages students into the library, and makes it very easy for them to ask me questions, academic or otherwise.

Today's tea was a really nice mix of the two things, where it developed it's own social momentum, but I also had the chance to sit down and join the conversation, to start getting to know some of the students a little.

Also, it never fails to impress me that I've almost never had to announce that tea is over, or ask people to quiet down when the end of the lunch break comes around.

One of the concerns about my hosting the teas was that it would encourage people to use the Library as a purely social space, and I'm pleased that the students recognise that, when it's time for their friends to go to class, it's also time for the Library to switch back to being primarily a study space. (I say primarily, because the boundaries between 'studying' and 'socialising' are much less defined that some people think.)

Here's hoping that continues as the semester goes on.

* Photo by me.

No it's time for change

So - new year, and as you may have noticed, not that much in the way of new posts.

That's mostly been because I've been super busy, not just with new students arriving, but also with my new niece arriving. It's also been because I've been thinking about how I want to use this blog, and how that's changed.

When I started this, I basically wanted a way to tell students about some of the nifty stuff going on in London.

We don't want to flood people's email with a thousand and one messages, so email is reserved for the official stuff. There wasn't anywhere to put the more general stuff, so I started blogging here, in the hope that the folks who were interested enough to follow a link in my sig file might find out about something they wouldn't otherwise have done.

And that worked - I've had a few students tell me that they did such-and-such because they saw it here.

It worked well enough that, at the start of last semester, we launched the LUP blog. That gets more regular updates than this blog ever did, because it's a team blog, and because we've made a commitment to daily posts. The rectors also decided to experiment with twitter, tweeting about once a day with links to interesting stuff going on in London - another opt-in offering, which wouldn't swamp the official lines of communication.

That also worked pretty well, but looking at the feedback we got last semester, we've made some changes for the new year.

We're going to continue with the LUP blog, but we've just, today, launched a Facebook page, which also crossposts to a new Twitter account.

The rectors will be retiring their old Twitter account, and I'll be retiring the LUP Library Twitter, and we'll all be using these new accounts instead, to see how that works out. As always, it's an experiment, and a lot will depend on how - and if - our students use the resources.

As well as library related updates, I'm planning to use the facebook / twitter pair for more of the 'nifty thing that's happening in London' content I might once have posted here, and the LUP group blog will absorb a lot of the rest.

So what's left for this blog?

I'm not going to stop loving London, or writing about London, but I think I am also going to post more of this kind of thing: the more reflective, process-oriented, library and librarianship posts that I've not really shared here before, and just - see how that works.

* Photo by David Reece, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Planning ahead - short term

There are two things on the immediate horizon that I need to fix plans for:

- at least one night of the Resolution! dance festival at The Place

- the Walk London Winter Wander Weekend

* Photo by Luis Barreto, used under Creative Commons.