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.