Miss Alice

Fun with numbers

2012-01-03T18:58:00.000Z

The first day back at work seems like an excellent time to check in on the circulation stats from last semester.

We made a lot of changes last semester - the Fall group moved into new student accommodation, the building hours here at the classroom centre changed, and my library moved from the 1st floor to the 3rd, into a very different space - so it's almost impossible to attribute causation, but still interesting to look for patterns. (I'll be getting the results of our general student feedback surveys tomorrow, and the comments there may help me figure out some possible whys.)

Pure circulation numbers confirm that one of my fears about the library move did not come to pass. If the move the 3rd floor had made the new library 'out of sight, out of mind', or too much effort to visit, you would expect to see a drop in circulation figures. The stats say, that didn't happen. Last Spring was our highest ever circulation semester, both in raw numbers and in terms of items per student per teaching week, and we didn't hit those highs, but both measures were higher this past Fall than they were in Fall 2010. There's always more I can do with promotion, advertising, and making sure we have good resources available for people to borrow, but there's no collapse in circulation figures that would indicate that the move was a major problem on that front. (This matches my observations about the space in use throughout the semester, but it's nice to have some numbers to back them up!)

Mondays were, unsurprisingly, the busiest days for all sorts of transactions - loans, returns and renewals - and I wonder if the pattern of Tuesday's being the second highest loan day, but Wednesdays being the second highest returns day indicates a lot of people returning books after 6pm on Tuesdays, which then wouldn't get processed until the next day. There's a fairly solid band of loans going out over the weekends - hurray for self-check! Renewals get a spike on Sundays, which I'd guess is people getting ready for a new week of classes, and Thursdays are a popular day for dvd loans - something for the weekend, I wonder? Travel book check out is pretty even across the teaching week, but non-existent on weekends, which makes sense, as that's when the readers of travel books are doing their travel.

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

Reflection

2011-11-28T23:13:00.000Z

CILIP in London organised a pair of half-day training days a couple of weeks back, and I'm really glad to have been able to go - the afternoon session on copyright is the one that was the most obvious selling point to my boss - and did, indeed, confirm some things, clarify some other things, and lead to a flurry of action items on my to-do list, but the morning session on reflective practice was, I think, the one which has had the most impact.

It wasn't so much new news - although there was some of that - as hearing the needed thing at the right moment. At the risk of sounding like a hippie, of being re-enforced and replenished, and having the framework of the course and time outside of my everyday, to think about the question in the abstract as well as in the specific through the exercises.

I'm busy - we're all busy - and this year seems to have been a real exercise in stress-testing and load balancing, with major changes in buildings, processes, and personnel at work as well as everything that's going on in the wider world. I know, intellectually, that reflective practise and iterative improvement are powerful tools, but this session made it so concrete to me - the speakers' passion and kindness, and working the exercises - being given permission to spend five minutes to breathe and reflect and re-focus... I came back full of ideas and energy and enthusiasm, and have been making use of some of the framework questions as I've run into things since.

Also - to tie this back to CPD23, which I am still slowly, oh so slowly, working my way through - the idea of 'Communities of practice' resonates so much more strongly than that of 'networking'. Maybe it's just me, but 'networking' and 'contacts' seem cold, harsh, kind of slippery - a totally different focus than building and nurturing and growing a community, or group of overlapping communities, which in turn support and nurture us. That last - that makes sense to me.

The last CILIP in London event I went to was the networking evening they arranged for Thing #7, which was, I must admit, a total wash for me. I managed to put my foot firmly in mouth in front of two of the three speakers, and while I did give my cards to a couple of people who I got chatting with, never heard from them again. Getting together with a group of fellow professionals all interested in learning about the same topics seemed much more organic, and the personal nature of the Reflective Practise session in particular lent itself to getting to know people, so I feel a lot more confident following up with my fellow participants.

(Photo by Camille, used under Creative Commons with thanks)

Not a thing ...

2011-09-28T22:05:00.005+01:00

Between the Facebook furore, and Avos' "upgrade" to Delicious which has essentially wiped out the carefully curated sets of useful open-web sources I'd assembled for my students, I'm not really feeling the cloud-based techno-joy this week!

(I *know* this is the risk we take when we commit our energy, our work, our words and pictures and communities to projects and products that will be bought and sold and monetised above our heads, but so often the opportunities are worth the risks, at least for a while.)

The Delicious thing could not have been more comically badly timed if they'd done it too us on purpose, though! The webstats say that the curated links master page isn't used that often, but, sure enough, Delicious manages to set all our links to private while it was busy loosing the tags, bundles and associated meta data, and I get two emails within a couple of hours from students who'd fallen into the newly created information pothole.

Those two students got a hand-picked list of resources (open web, subscription online, and physical) and hopefully the delay while I put the lists together didn't throw their plans too much. On the one hand, that's a better service: on the other, the hypothetical students who hit the dead links but *didn't* get in touch, have zilch.

Reviewing and re-thinking that curated-web sources section has been on my long range to do list for a while, waiting patiently in line behind my day-to-day job, and the One Big Thing project, and the slightly-more-urgent projects. It's just jumped up that list, somewhat. At least, reviewing the process has.

I'm not sure I want to invest the time it will take to pick an alternative and import my back-up file somewhere else until I've taken some time to review, and to think about how best my curating web resources might help my students find the information they need. Is this something I even need to do? What's the best way to do it with the tools I have now, vs the ones I had four or so years back when I started using Delicious because that was the best fit at the time?

The short term fix of just evaporating the links on our site, at least for the time being, is really tempting. If nothing else, to give myself time to reflect and review before I react.

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

Small things

2011-09-15T13:36:00.000+01:00

Small frustrations - seeing links to an interesting Google Search Education Webinar after the event.

The links all go to the Webinar page (because they were written before the event) - which dead-ends.

Would it be so hard to put the line "Presentation will be archived here" in the description, automatically, always, for every webinar, so that people don't dead-end?

I mean, I know I found that link to the archive in minutes, but I had to *assume* that there would be an archive somewhere to find it, and what do marketing people say about assume?

(Irony factor of mentally lecturing Google on making information easily findable - high. Yes, I know.)

It does prompt me - again - to keep trying to see our own online content without my background knowledge, to try and avoid leading people into similar dead ends on our, much smaller, scale.

And to find an hour to sit down and listen to the presentation.

CPD23 update and things#8 & #9

2011-09-14T20:57:00.001+01:00

I could have predicted that I was going to fall off the CPD23 wagon during August, but I have managed to squeeze in various bits of progress, though, as well as keeping all the other balls I'm juggling up in the air.

For example, I've given Evernote (thing #9) a good solid test run over the past weeks, and it's currently fitting very neatly into my work flows. Specifically, I'm one of team of three keeping our program's Facebook page stocked with several-posts-a-day about free and interesting things going on in and around London. Being able to stockpile webpages and articles in Evernote as I find them - whether that's at home, at work, or out and about using my phone - has been a real boon.

(I already did the 'taking photos of notices to remind myself' thing, so having my photos turned into easier-to-find-again notes that I don't have to transliterate by hand is also easy win.) I've got in the habit of titling each 'note' in that notebook with the date in YYYYMMDD format, so a quick sort by title pulls the events-happening-soonest to the top, and also makes weeding old notes out very easy.

Two other organisational tools I wouldn't want to be without are spiral bound notebooks, because I've yet to find an electronic to-do list manager that works for me better than my paper process, and Google Calender (thing #8).

I can't really claim Google Calender as a CPD23 discovery, though, as it's been about three years since I gave up on paper diaries, and started layering up Google Calenders. Being able to toggle various 'layers' in and out is a fantastic tool for me, for planning my time, for scheduling both professionally and personally, and for keeping track of 'things to have in mind' but which don't warrant a firm scheduled slot on my main calendar, but which I want to be able to layer in easily when it's appropriate. To be honest, I wasn't particularly sold on keeping my calendar online until a friend of mine pointed out that you could have *multiple* calenders, and that was the killer feature for me.

We also started using Google Calenders for program calenders for use with the public and with students just over a year ago - all our students are on Google Apps for Education accounts, so making it easy for them to subscribe to our program events, and the calenders relevant to their specific classes seemed like an obvious step to take.

_________

As the new semester beds down and the teething difficulties with the new library get fixed, it's starting to look as though I might be able to draw breath, get back to blogging more regularly, and try and catch up with the program before it draws to a close. Here's hoping!

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

Loads of links

2011-09-01T12:38:00.005+01:00

This post is basically a links list - 100% of our students arrived with a laptop, tablet, or other personal computing device, which made me think about the sites I have at my fingers tips on mine.

These are my personal - I stress, personal - recommendations for the essential sites to bookmark, subscribe to, or otherwise have to hand for tackling London.

Getting Around

TfL - for the journey planner, and for the all-important disruption maps, especially when making weekend plans, when the engineering works kick into high gear.

GoogleMaps - obvious, but true. I still carry an A-Z sometimes, but now I have a smartphone...

WalkIt: London - my other go-to for walking directions, especially as the less busy and lower pollution choices often turns up good alternative routes through parks, or using the riverside.

What's On

Time Out : London - again, obvious, but for good reason! Tip: once you have searched for something - say, events in the category music, happening in the next 7 days - you'll be able to select 'Free' to limit the results, which is a great tool for turning up free activities and events.

Londonist - huge sprawling team-run blog on all things London. Subscribe for a steady flow of news, reviews, and what's-on posts.

London's not short of fantastic opportunities for free things to do, but I haven't found one single 'freebies' website that I could recommend as The One - I check in on a few, and generally do a little searching around to confirm events, particularly recurring events which may keep showing up in the listings long after the events themselves cease. http://www.freelondonevents.co.uk/ and Free London Listings are the two I use most.

I also connect directly with venues and organisations who host events I'm likely to be interested in - Twitter, Facebook and mailing lists bring me regular updates on things I might want to see and do. There are some suggestions for venues to try in the London on a Budget: Entertainment Edition post I wrote for the program blog here.

Meetup.com can be useful for tracking down people who share common interests, and if you're interested in photography, Flickr's London Meetup Group can be a good source of information. (Safety note - if you're going somewhere to meet up with people you don't know, take the usual precautions for your safety - take a friend, meet somewhere public, let people know where you're going and when you expect to be back, etc.)

News & Weather (online)

- BBC Weather for Central London
- BBC News
- The Guardian

Suggestions for essential sites I've missed welcome in the comments!

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

SpringBen

Testing, testing,

2011-08-17T17:45:00.004+01:00

The blog-silence can't entirely be put down to being super-busy - I also went on holiday for just over a week - but I have been ferociously busy, getting the new library space set up and ready to go. Yesterday was my first 12 hour day of the academic year, and the semester hasn't even begun yet! The early crunch point is my own fault, though, as I'd scheduled a library test day for today.

I might have had my doubts, as I worked late last night, that spending a whole afternoon on test-driving the new library might not be the best use of my time, but thanks to my six sixth-form-student volunteers I can say now that it was absolutely worth it. Worth it both in terms of the feedback I've gathered, and in terms of reminding me why all this matters - students. Spending time with students, even if they're not "my" students, is energising and rewarding.

The photo illustrating this post is those students very first impressions of the library space - I had them hit the post-it notes as soon as we walked into the space and sat down: "welcoming", "organised", "fresh", "open", "inviting", and my favourite "nice environment for learning". I also had them do some individual tasks, and a small group project, to test out how the library would work in use, and had them critique my library orientation talk, before and after using the library. They asked excellent questions, jumped on the roll-play tasks with enthusiasm, and came up with some really good suggestions.

It's a new space, with a different balance of advantages and problem areas, and I want to avoid "fighting the last war". Between their feedback, and what I picked up observing them, I think I know what my priorities are for the next week (signs, display, navigation), and what to watch out for during the semester. I suspect the old clash-point between silent and social study is going to continue to be an issue. The spaces are much more clearly defined, but the acoustics aren't helping, so developing a community expectation of quiet behaviour even in the non-silent spaces is still going to be an important goal. I'm hoping the other changes in the building might help, though - the proximity of study rooms for group work, and the more convenient computer classroom for social computing.

Suggestion-wise, there's a couple of things I'm definitely going to work into my orientation, and one larger idea that needs more conversation, but that I really hope comes together. My test-drivers were asking if there was any way they could come back, so obviously we've done something right!

Overall, a very productive afternoon indeed, and now I just need to send a few thank you notes to everyone involved in making it work; the test-drivers, their school, and my colleagues here.

Moving in

2011-07-23T15:42:00.003+01:00

Once again, the list of things I want to blog about is getting longer and longer and the amount of actual blog posts tends towards zero. What can I say: it's been a busy couple of weeks with the Umbrella conference, and the building project at work moving on at speed, as well as the usual pre-semester work. I spent most of this week moving in to the new library space, and associated new office.

I'm saving photos of the library for a proper post when it's all done, but here's a sneak peek of the new LUP Librarians' office

It's quite a lot smaller than my old office, but more compact, more efficiently designed, better lit, and while I no longer have air-con, I do have an actual window. More to the point, it's in the perfect location relative to the new library. The team who did the renovations have done a really nice job: hard to believe this was a poky over-heated computer lab a few weeks ago!

It's not quite finished - the noticeboards are waiting to go up on the wall over the desk, and I'll be adding a couple of chairs for visitors - but it already feels like a good place to work. I'm really pleased with how it's come together. I hope it will feel open and welcoming to my students and faculty, too, as that's key to everything I plan to do out of the space!

Thing #3 again - cards

2011-07-08T16:30:00.000+01:00

There was a certain amount of synchronisity with Jo's CPD23 Thing #3 post touching on business cards. I've never really had the need for them, but over the past couple of months there have been two or three occasions where they would have been really useful, and I'm off to Umbrella 2011 next week, so now's clearly the time.

Somewhere back in the mists of time I remember reading about a music fan who had made business cards out of old record sleeves (something akin to this idea, although these are not they). I remember wondering how well the idea would transfer to books at the time - if it would carry the same sort of messages, or if, given how strongly many people feel about the sanctity of the printed book, you'd just come across as an evil book murder.

One of the things I've been working on in recent weeks was a full stock weed, ahead of moving the library, and amongst the books I pulled off the shelves were a few paperbacks where the binding had simply collapsed. They were no longer of any use to anyone as books, so some stickers and guillotine-wielding later, I have these (see photos)

So - what do you think?

CPD23 things #3 and #4

2011-07-07T19:01:00.003+01:00

Thing #3 is 'Consider your personal brand' and #4 is 'Current awareness - Twitter, RSS and Pushnote', and I'm considering them together, not as a short cut but because of the inter-relationships between the tools we use for both.

For example, I use Twitter, but not as part of my public profile. I have a locked personal account, which is a great source of incoming news and links, a really useful tool for current awareness, and is invaluable for bouncing ideas off people.

A few years ago, I also had a public Twitter account set up under a random pseudonym (an account which has long since been deleted) which I set up to learn on. Twitter was one of those things I really had to try on for a while to see how it could be useful. Setting up a test drive account, not tied to my "personal brand" in any way, gave me the freedom to experiment and learn by doing, without the worry that I'd somehow do something that would be inscribed forever on the permanent record of the internet.

I do occasionally feel a bit boxed in by the decision to keep Twitter personal rather than professional - at least in terms of what I'm posting, rather than reading - but at the moment the balance of costs and benefits still isn't pushing me to go public in full.

I have a lot of respect for the benefits of 'living in public' ala Jeff Jarvis , but I think pseudonymity and 'constructed publics' - like a locked Twitter account - give many of the advantages with a lower level of risk.

Searching for myself online showed both that the personalized search bubble issue isn't particularly affecting this search, and that I need to do a little work. The University biography page that's been anchored as the first result in my vanity searches for several years vanished in the re-vamp of the department's website at the start of the year, and it's new location, hidden inside my library's OPAC pages, doesn't have quite the same SEO juice.

This blog doesn't show up in general searches (only a couple of the people-specific search sites had made the connection), so I need to tweak the meta-data to better represent the fact that this is one of the spaces where I choose to be public-broadcast.

The name 'Miss Alice' is, I admit, firmly tied to my current post - one of my past students started calling me by the title, and it all went from there. It's one notch more formal than just 'Alice' but less so than 'Ms Tyrell', and I'm not faculty so the generic 'Prof' isn't appropriate. The name landed here, because I started the blog for a student audience, and my using it for library-related thoughts is a relatively new development.

My LinkedIn profile, which is now the first substantive thing you find when you search for "Alice Tyrell", isn't as inviting and informative as I'd like it to be. I've done a little tidying up, but not being able to re-order my 'current' positions to list my primary post above my two part time volunteer gigs without fudging the dates fairly spectacularly is ... frustrating.

I think it's relatively clear that I'm not any of the other Alice Tyrell's that show up in the search results, though - I didn't die in 1422, I'm not a thoroughbred horse, nor was I a vaudeville dancer in the 1920s.

thing #2 - blogs

2011-07-03T15:15:00.005+01:00

The 600+ blogs listed on the CPD23's delicious list is, I admit, somewhat daunting when taken as a whole: my approach was to filter by tags and then browse through looking for names that caught my eye. Not exactly scientific, but it's better than giving in to choice paralysis, and has led me to some interesting blogs.

(Props to The Library Scull for drawing my attention to Reading's ThisIsMe project, which I'll be coming back to in Thing #3.)

Heading out to leave comments on a selection of new-to-me blogs did remind me just how much I loath captchas, though. I know why people use them, but the extra step is off-putting, and the accessibility issues are manifest. (I'm mildly dyslexic and sometimes really struggle with them; I know others find them essentially impossible.)

Also it really struck me how distancing having a comment referred for moderation can be. Again, I recognise why people choose that setting, but the past couple of hours reading did prompt me to go and check my Blogger settings.

I had moderation set only for posts over 14 days, and I've tweaked that up to 30 days. Most of the issues I've had with spam comments, both here and on the group blog I manage for work, have been on older posts, so that seems like a fair balance, especially once you add in Blogger's automatic spam comment filtering, which I've found pretty decent (only one false-positive to date).

* Man Blogging, after Gabriel Metsu, by Mike Licht, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

CPD23 - late, but not absent.

2011-06-27T14:56:00.006+01:00

I've been going backwards and forward on this for the past two, three weeks, but - late to the party, I know - I'm going to jump on the CPD23 (23 Things for Professional Development) bandwagon.

The timing's the issue. Both the summer schools that I'm supporting wrap up this week, so I'm end-of-semester busy and end-of-the-year tired. This is going to be a pretty intense summer, too: we start packing to move the whole library on Saturday, and launch the new library space in August. Not to mention that I've got the builders in at home, just to make sure that there's disruption on all sides.

On the other hand, maybe this is the ideal time to sign up to a project designed to keep evaluation and reflective practise front and centre? A reminder not to let the bigger picture slip out of view amongst all the busy?

So here I am - a solo librarian in a small academic library, serving 3 cohorts of undergraduate students each year, always looking for ways to improve the services that I can offer my students and my colleagues. Hi.

three quick things

2011-06-16T20:14:00.004+01:00

The busy hasn't got any less busy, and the list of things I want to post about grows ever longer, so - squeezing in a couple of quick snippets:

Thing #1 - Apparently, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Library uses - or maybe used - Library of Congress shelfmarks. I've been having a second-hand splurge recently on books for a course on the history of the British Empire, and have ended up with two of their weeded books, both from different sellers. Somehow it seems particularly apt to be studying the rise and fall of the empire from books with that provenance.

Thing #2 - this article on student opinions about libraries and librarians caught my eye today, not least because I spent last week combing through and considering feedback given by last semester's students. When even my colleagues say things like 'you're more than just a librarian' when I do things that are eminently the realm of a librarian, you have to conclude that the image issue our profession has is far from fixed! It seems strange to me that being student-focussed, friendly, welcoming, helpful, and pro-active is somehow seen as something other than 'librarian normal'. It's fantastic to be appreciated, but still. Is that really a noticeable deviation from their experienced norm? Especially when every single person I've ever talked to in the campus library has been both lovely and helpful!

Thing #2.5 - I am working through a faculty member's extended bibliography at the moment, to produce an annotated version for next semester's students (all the better to guide them to resources in both our own collection and those held by external libraries), Chasing down the article references does remind me that, however magnificent it is to have such a wealth of journal materials available electronically, it's still a long way from obvious and simple for students to know how to access them all.

Thing 2.5b - Senate House Library's new Encore search is noticeably impressive and has yet to put a foot wrong for me. (I've been giving it a good work out whilst working on that bibliography)

Thing #3 - I'm off to the British Library's Out of This World : Late at the Library tomorrow night, and really looking forward to it. I've been wanting to get to the exhibition, and this was the perfect opportunity.

a moment of gratitude

2011-05-12T19:09:00.001+01:00

I have a whole list of things I want to come back and post about - it's been an intense few weeks - but today I played host to a colleague from another academic library considering Koha, to give them an on-the-ground tour of the system, and a review of our conversion process. I hope it was useful for them - it was certainly good for me to have a reason to sit down and review.

I suspect I may have come over a little evangelical, because there are so many things about Koha that I've come to depend on. I really don't think I could have handled my workload in recent weeks without the time savings that Koha gives me - more efficient work-flows, and more automated almost-everything than our old DIY system.

So here's today's 'thank you' list:

- Z39.50 copy cataloguing (with heartfelt thanks to the Library of Congress, and my colleague on campus who helps me with tricky titles)
- Adding multiple copies of a title with a couple of clicks (multiple copies in a fraction of the time, which is invaluable for our textbook loan stock)
- 'Edit as new' record duplication, both for the 'the only difference between these editions is the year of publication' updates, and for juggling textbook records for mass decommissioning in combination with the 'Attach copy' function.
- I know I've mentioned this before, but - lists. Really - being able to put together reading lists so simply has been a huge, huge boon.
- Customisable reports (and the assistance of our support company!) - all the better for getting the exact answers I need without a lot of pen-and-paper number crunching.
- an OPAC that actually works reliably, for me and for the students and faculty.
- Circulation stats that could confirm in a couple of mouse clicks that there really were a lot more books returned on Friday than a usual last-Friday-of-the-semester, and that no, it wasn't just a subjective feeling.

Of course, there are down sides to having your LMS entirely online - one of the reasons last Friday was so busy was that our building had no net connection for much of the previous day, thanks to a clutzy JCB driver cutting a cable!

A Quiet Volume

2011-04-26T00:08:00.004+01:00

I took advantage of the long weekend to head over to Hackney Central Library and seize the opportunity to take part in / attend The Quiet Volume with a good friend.

There's a brilliant review here, which is far more eloquent than I can be at this time of night, so I will simply say this: it was fabulous.

Once you check in, you get assigned Right or Left, given an ipod and led to a desk in the study area of a library, and then you're on your own, with just the voices in your headphones to guide you. It's about libraries as places, and about books, and reading, and the nature of meaning, and the nature of texts and it slips from page to audio and back again so seamlessly, it's like magic.

If there's any chance you might be able to catch this next week, when they're running it at Senate House Library, go and book your tickets right now!

quick quote

2011-04-17T13:00:00.001+01:00

"Libraries like all other institutions must grow and adapt to changing requirements and conditions. The rate of change in the world today and in our knowledge of it is incredibly fast. We cannot afford to let our libraries slip behind."

-John F. Kennedy, 1963

(found via Swiss Army Librarian)

Don't panic

2011-03-31T15:03:00.002+01:00

Currently listening to students talking about town planning, planning permission etc, and all I can think of is Hitchhikers Guide...

"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."

"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."

"But the plans were on display ..."

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."

"That's the display department."

"With a flashlight."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But, look, you found the notice didn't you?"

"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

5 things

2011-03-30T20:25:00.000+01:00

It's been a ferociously busy couple of weeks since the students got back from break, as the deadlines began to mass - for me as well as for them.

5 things I am grateful for:

- interesting questions. There's no better kind of busy than getting research requests that give me cause to think and learn and explore something from a different angle as I go. My to-read list has been getting longer all month.
- Koha's list feature, which makes putting together a convenient shelf list of material in the LUP library for someone a snap, and allows me to re-use them where that's appropriate.
- organisations that catalogue to content-page level, plus those that provide index page previews; all the better for ruling a potential book in or out.
- e-prints, institutional research repositories, open data and open research.
- the London Library team, who I've been visiting daily - occasionally twice-daily - and the ILL team on campus who have helped several students out of tight corners at short notice

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

Frankenstein

2011-03-02T08:23:00.000Z

Frankenstein's one of my favourite classic novels, and with all the buzz around the NT production of Nick Dear's adaptation, my expectations were high - and then surpassed.

We had Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature - absolutely incredible, and so intense - and Benedict Cumberbatch as Victor Frankenstein, and I am planning to try for day tickets during my break week to try and catch the alternate casting, because I'm so intrigued now about how much - or how little - difference that would make.

If you have the chance, this would be well worth waiting in the morning queue for day tickets.

I just noticed ...

2011-02-23T08:25:00.001Z

I'm going to see Frankenstein at the NT next week, and wanted to re-read the novel before hand. Instead of reaching for my much-read annotated-close-reading-through-Uni print copy, I pulled down the Gutenberg epub, and have been cheerfully reading that on the tube this week. I feel slightly guilty - as if I have crossed some kind of ebook Rubicon...

* Not my book, nor my laptop - photo by Branduno, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Tiny tweaks

2011-02-22T11:04:00.004Z

Little things - I happened to be walking past the PCs in the library just as a student was logging in several times yesterday. The home page is the OPAC, but an overwhelming majority of them logged the machine in, and immediately went to the address bar to type in the URL for their university webmail.

The OPAC already had a link to InsideND which is supposed to be everyone's initial point of contact, and which links through to webmail, but I generally believe in following the actual use path rather than the theoretical use-path, and that small random sample was pretty conclusive!

I've just added a link to student webmail to the OPAC navigation bar - I don't know how many students will notice, at this point in the semester, but at least it's there now, in addition to the InsideND link.

5+ new London places #2 and #3

2011-02-13T14:12:00.003Z

New London place #2 in my challenge was one of the ones I had planned from the start, as I'd already booked a spot on a scavenger hunt organised by the London Transport Museum's Collection & You team around Croydon, celebrating the extension of the Overground line to that part of the world. Croydon is about as far south as you can go while still being in London, and although it has a bit of a reputation for being a concrete jungle, there was a surprising amount of history around to explore - no shortage of Victorian civic pride, for one thing! (If the Clocktower - now home to the Croydon Museum, arts centre, library, cafe, etc etc - wasn't enough, check out the water works!)

The scavenger hunt itself was a lot of fun - and the rain held off, thank goodness. Kudos to the clue-setters for a set of cryptic clues that were impenetrable at first, but which made immediate sense as soon as you saw the thing referred to, even though no one on our team knew Croydon at all! As well as solving the clues, there were bonus points for photos of tram stops, and of pubs - Croydon is not short of pubs: I think we got about 30, but the winning team had found 10 more!

If you're interested, you can find my photos here, and the scavenger hunt's group pool here.

__________

For place #3, I took advantage of a visit that one of my colleagues in the Law program set up to join students on a tour of The Mansion House. I've admired the outside often enough, but never had the chance to see inside before. (Unfortunately, photography is not permitted inside, so this is as much of an illustration as I can muster.) I'm very grateful for the opportunity, because it's a stunning building inside - as might be expected for the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London; opulent but elegant. I wish I'd remembered to ask our guide about accessibility in the most recent renovations (1990s), though, as it's very much still a working building hosting thousands of guests over each year's events.

As I was across the road, and on a day off, I also took the chance to dive into the Bank of England museum, which I've never visited before thanks to it's opening hours. I'm fairly familiar with the development of the building itself, but seeing the history of the notes and coins and their designs laid out was fascinating - it's such a ubiquitous part of daily life, but one you hardly ever think about.

UK Freeview news sources

2011-02-03T18:54:00.004Z

For any of my students who have not yet discovered the various news options available to them on Freeview tv, you should have access to:

24 hour news channels

- BBC News24 (Ch.80)
- Sky News(Ch.82)
- Al Jazeera English (Ch.89, available between 6 and 11pm)
- Russia Today (Ch.85)

BBC World Service radio also broadcasts 24 hours, although not always news, and can be accessed via Freeview on channel 710.

Morning news

BBC1 and ITV both have weekday breakfast shows with regular news content. Similarly, the Today Show on Radio 4, which you can listen to via Freeview on channel 704.

Evening news

- BBC1 (Ch.1) at 6 and 10pm
- ITV (Ch.3) at 6.30 and 10pm
- Channel4(Ch.4) at 7pm.

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

News from Egypt.

2011-02-03T18:49:00.000Z

Like almost everyone else, I'm watching the news from Egypt with particular attention.

It's odd, the small ways that large events are made real - for one thing, the last few days have been busy with preparations to welcome several of the students evacuated from the University's Cairo program . Pitched battles in the streets, and I'm running through checklists to try and make sure that I've remembered all the potential loose ends, trying to make their arrival here as smooth as possible... so strange.

Another is that I did some work for the UK Friends of the New Alexandria Library several years ago, during my Masters. The mailing list - dormant for many years - has lurched back to life, sharing messages from the Librarian and library staff. Today's?

"This is just a brief message to let you know that the Library is safe...a statement by Dr. Serageldin that has been posted on our website. It still represents the current situation."

"The library is safe thanks to Egypt’s youth, whether they be the staff of the Library or the representatives of the demonstrators, who are joining us in guarding the building..."

If any of my students reading are not yet familiar with the Freeview tv options for news, I'll put together a brief list in another post.

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

We have a winner.

2011-02-03T13:42:00.000Z

I have a winner for the treasure-hunt map contest - congratulations Carly, who's going to be exploring some of London's city farms, as well as solving a murder mystery over the coming weeks. And thank you for jumping in!

***

Thinking in terms of the experiment element of that post?

The outcome I wanted was to get the idea of setting yourself a personal goal out there amongst our students, as I personally think it can be a useful way of getting deeper into London, and thinking about what they want to get out of their time here.

The contest post got a big surge in page-views, and I know from conversations that at least some of those readers were my students: so far, so good.

On the other hand, I got very few comments or emails. Maybe the prize wasn't interesting enough, or the idea of setting a self-challenge for the semester came up too soon, or too late, or isn't the sort of thing many people are comfortable discussing in public, or with someone who isn't part of their social circle. Maybe it just wasn't relevant to people, because they don't approach situations the same way I do!

Plus, it takes a certain amount of bravery to be the first person to post a comment in public, and I don't know how intuitive commenting on blogger is for folks who don't regularly read blogs, and I don't know how many of my students do. (I was genuinely startled to discover that less than 10% of last semester's students used RSS or subscribed to blogs, even though about 40% of them were thinking about writing one. It's such a key tool in my information handling toolkit, it's hard to imagine not using them!)

So - not an abject failure, but not a roaring success either: worth the punt, anyway.

5+ new London places #1

2011-01-31T13:22:00.002Z

Thanks to a kind invitation from a friend, I picked up my first London-place-I've-not-been-before last week, finally getting inside the BBC's iconic Broadcasting House for a recording of Radio 4's News Quiz. (I've been to several recordings before, but none at Broadcasting House, which was familiar to me only from the external Eric Gill statues). Any evening with Sandi Toksvig and Sue Perkins in it has to be fantastic, and this was no exception. The Radio Theatre itself is a wonderful space - I wish I could have taken photos of the friezes!

Applying for audience tickets is a true bargain - you really can't argue with world class performers for free and it's always neat to see 'behind the scenes'. I was listening to the broadcast show this weekend, trying to spot what they'd cut, and marvelling at the editing.

How to apply? I'll let the BBC tell you directly:

Day in the life ...

2011-01-24T21:22:00.006Z

It's Round #6 of the 'Day in the life of librarians' project, and I am still a solo librarian in a small academic library. In many ways, today is a much more 'usual' day for me - students are here, classes in sessions, and Koha, the new LMS I mentioned in my last 'Days post, has been up and running for a full semester.

- first thing: library set up - check on self-check (still logged in!), lights, newspapers, quick shelf tidy of the decimated London Focus and Travel collections.
- clear the returns drop box.
- check email on three accounts - lots of it as this weekend was the deadline for students to send me information about condition records! Skim for urgent messages, forward on those that need to be passed on to my colleagues, answer the most urgent couple.
- Friday was the last day for students to change their class selections, so I've done a certain amount of swapping textbooks to match, and generally trying to make sure they have any resources they need to 'catch up' missed first classes.
- process a couple of book requests for a lecturer - and take delivery of a kind donation from the same.
- work through the emails about textbook condition notes, updating the notes in the system (this is so much easier to do in the new LMS!)
- after speaking to a couple of students who'd missed the deadline, email all the students offering an extension. I would much rather be processing corrections now than bills later!
- field questions about where to find specific books, where to find the local Post Office, hand out a few membership cards to our local public library, and walk several students through using our self-check station for the first time. It's radically less high-tech than the self-check stations they're used to on campus, but it does the job!
- update online calendar, and take care of a list-serve mystery for a colleague.
- work through the first half of a bibliography for one of our faculty members, annotating it to show where to find the resources, either here in our library or through one of our partner libraries.
- brief meeting with one of our students who is pursuing an independent research project, followed by an email with info and links about gaining access to the archive resources they hope to use.

- lunch hour - which involves doing a circuit to the London Library, to pick up an ILL book for a student, then to the supermarket to pick up supplies for tomorrow's Library Tea (and my lunch) before heading back to the office.
- arrive back just in time to catch the break between class sessions, so am here to take several more rapid-fire questions, library related and not, deal with more textbook exchanging, and hand out a few more public library cards - all good.
- wrap up the ILL administration, and notify the student that their book is available.
- the next class session starts, quiet descends, and I get to eat my lunch (at my desk)
- go back to that bibliography
- divert for a few minutes to help someone who's come in to reception trying to find another US university's London program. Always nice to be able to help!
- bibliography, continues, generating some book orders to balance the places where our partner libraries can't supply. Finished and sent off to lecturer
- blog admin - posting today's entry (written by one of my colleagues, but needing illustration etc) and writing and setting up tomorrows. In an ideal world this is a job I'd do as a batch once a week, but - none of us live in an ideal world!
- check email again, reply to a couple of students, and a mail from my boss, with an unexpected and positive proposal that inspires some brainstorming.
- take care of the mail that's arrived over the weekend - a handful of new arrivals for the library.
- add six new books to the catalogue, so they can go out onto the shelves. (Original cataloguing now takes longer, because the records are more detailed, but copy cataloguing in the new LMS is so much faster than in our old one the average comes out well ahead - I appreciate this fact often!)

- welcome the return M, who's coming in to shelve.
- take a second to check the circulation stats to confirm that yes! Items were checked out on Saturday, so the ongoing problem we've been having with the self check station timing out seems to be fixed. Email LMS support team to share the good news, and thank them for finding the fix!
- transfer a report over to my e-reader, so I can read it on the way home ahead of a meeting tomorrow.
- update my rolling to-do list, and prep tomorrow's 'must dos', so I can get a clean start in the morning.

Ideas and prizes

2011-01-18T13:47:00.003Z

(Two ideas came together to form a third, so I'm going to try something, and if it's a giant flop I will pick myself up and carry on, because the only way to find out is to try ... Right - pep talk over.)

Idea one - a friend of mine mentioned these London treasure hunt / mystery maps, which look like a lot of fun, and something my students might be interested in.

Idea two - My friend and I were talking about London resolutions - mine is to do at least five London things/places over the next five months that I've never done before (I already have two things arranged, but that's for another post.)

Some of the ideas we came up with as we were talking were:

- photo-a-day (which I did for two years, and might yet go back to, because it's a brilliant way of getting in the habit of both carrying a camera and really looking at what's around you.)
- blogging at least (1/2/3) times a week (Tired of London's daily posting being quite the ambitious undertaking!)
- writing a weekly long letter about your experiences
- keeping a daily or near-daily diary
- weekly video or audio recording (daily, if you had the kit and commitment?)

visit each end of every tube line
do something in each of London's 31 boroughs (+ the City)
join a choir / team / class and make it to x% of rehearsals/services/games/etc
compile a list of 100 things you thought were notably different or notably the same as your expectations
shop at 10 different markets and talk with 2 different stall holders at each one
work towards a 'big goal' event, like signing up for a distance race, or to perform at the Union Chapel with the Exmoor Singers
the 'collect them all, live' sampler: go to at least one opera, classical music, non-classical music, ballet, and theatre performance outside of class trips.
tour all the Parliament/Assembly buildings you get close to - (Houses of Parliament, Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, Greater London Council, local councils - maybe a trip to Brussels?)

Idea three - what if I asked you - any of my students who read this - to comment with your suggestions for challenges and resolutions, and awarded a prize of the treasure-hunt-of your choice to the neatest suggestion I receive by the end of the month?

So let's try that. Comment here, or drop me an email if you'd rather keep your resolution private, and be in with a chance of winning a London treasure hunt.

NB - please feel free to comment, but the contest is only open to LUP students - sorry, wider internets.

* Photo by dr_john2005, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Fourth plinth announcement

2011-01-15T19:05:00.004Z

Walking back to the flats with a group of students yesterday, we talked a little about the Fourth Plinth project* - what I hadn't realised was that they'd just announced the 2011 and 2012 commissions just that morning!

Both the proposals I voted for ('Sikandar' and 'It’s Never Too Late And You Can’t Go Back') made the short list, but not the final cut, but the two chosen were probably my 3 and 4 of the final six. I am quite glad it wasn't th ATM/Organ, as someone who'd have to live with it long after the novelty would have worn off!

(*We were talking about One & Other, which was one of my all time favourite public art pieces.)

Experiments with textbooks

2011-01-13T19:20:00.002Z

Today was something of an experiment, with a whole new way of handling Textbook Loan distribution, made possible by some changes to how registration is done. Instead of spending a whole day over the weekend checking out textbooks, we front-loaded the work, so by the time I headed off to the cinema last night the library was stacked with crates and boxes, full of 129 personalised bags of books (and loan phones) ready for each student to collect today.

As expected, the actual moment of handing over the bags was a little chaotic, but with some help from my colleagues we had the queue moving at a fair pace. I don't think anyone had to wait too long, and the only reason it took us 45 minutes to distribute several hundred books was because some groups of students had prior appointments to keep! (We'd set that up intentionally to break up the flow of people, and minimise waiting times.)

On the whole, I think the students got the 'work flow' - taking care of loaned books, phones, travel passes, and then optional purchased books: lots of business got taken care of, and it's a whole day of the orientation weekend freed up for the students - and me - to spend doing something more fun in London.

It also created plenty of opportunities to students to ask questions and start conversations informally with the whole team here, for them to be able to sit down and figure out the new phones, get connected to the wifi, and to coordinate with each other about what they were doing next - heading home, going out to dinner, and so on. A much gentler end to the first day than being in a lecture theatre and just being told 'OK - that's it - we're done'.

Obviously, it will take a few days for any problems to show themselves. So far, it's just that I managed to give one student one book for a class they're not taking, which was just a case of my eye slipping a line on a spreadsheet during the set-up. Fortunately the student was most forgiving, and at least it was an extra book, not a missing one.

I don't want to get too ahead of myself, especially without more feedback from students, but personally, I think I'd call the experiment at least a conditional success. (Any students reading this - feedback always welcome!)

Things I'd do differently if there's a next time:

- something to confirm the original emails were received, be that a second email, notification in a prep session, or something else - a couple of people hadn't received that, which was less than ideal. Nothing that can't be solved, but something to improve on.
- print out and include in the bags each students' complete textbook info (not just the loan list) for ease of reference for the student.
- also, print a copy of my textbook masterlist, so I can answer queries on the fly without relying so much on memory.
- include a demo phone pack in the demo book bag for the presentation (was in the plan, but the incoming flight's travel delays meant that didn't quite come together)
- point out in the presentation a) the log-in info on the sheets and b) the student copy of the agreement. (also in the plan, but skipped in the attempt to shorten everything on the fly to mitigate the delayed start to the sessions. I can cover it in my sessions tomorrow, but the before-collection session would be better, I think.)

Small - or far away

2011-01-13T18:30:00.005Z

The run up to the start of any semester is always a busy time, so I have a personal tradition to make plans for the evening before the semester starts, to make sure I take at least that much of a break. (This time I went to see Tron:Legacy in eyeball-saturating 3D - IMAX, which was significantly more impressive than regular 3D, and absolutely perfect for the film.)

Crossing the river - excuse the not-great photo - I discovered that the Shard's construction has now reached the stage where it's messing with my depth perspective in the dark! I know, in my head, that it's a very tall building quite far away, but it really looked for a moment as though someone had wrapped the spire of St John's, Waterloo in fairy-lights - the fairy lights being the lit windows all the way over in London Bridge. Blame the long day, but it did take me a moment to work out what I was seeing.

silver lining II

2010-11-12T19:52:00.003Z

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

2010-11-11T10:55:00.000Z

silver lining

2010-11-10T13:06:00.000Z

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

2010-10-31T22:59:00.002Z

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

2010-10-21T22:33:00.004+01:00

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:

2010-09-28T19:24:00.001+01:00

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

2010-09-02T23:56:00.002+01:00

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!

2010-08-29T18:41:00.004+01:00

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

2010-08-21T17:32:00.004+01:00

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

2010-07-26T23:00:00.006+01:00

(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

2010-07-05T18:51:00.000+01:00

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

2010-07-02T16:05:00.004+01:00

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

2010-06-24T14:06:00.005+01:00

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

2010-06-21T18:09:00.001+01:00

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

2010-06-15T13:39:00.003+01:00

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...

2010-06-03T13:59:00.001+01:00

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

2010-05-31T17:54:00.003+01:00

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.)

2010-05-30T13:28:00.004+01:00

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

2010-05-29T16:09:00.004+01:00

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.

2010-05-18T16:29:00.004+01:00

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

2010-04-08T15:04:00.007+01:00

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

2010-04-07T14:57:00.006+01:00

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

2010-03-26T14:00:00.004Z

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

2010-03-23T17:48:00.005Z

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

2010-03-18T17:37:00.003Z

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

2010-03-11T18:45:00.004Z

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

2010-03-08T19:48:00.001Z

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

2010-03-04T18:54:00.000Z

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 ....

2010-02-26T17:42:00.004Z

"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

2010-02-25T18:01:00.004Z

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.

2010-02-01T21:46:00.003Z

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

2010-01-26T13:00:00.000Z

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

2010-01-19T12:55:00.002Z

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

2010-01-14T17:18:00.005Z

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

2010-01-04T22:27:00.000Z

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.

2009-12-14T16:29:00.002Z

Like a flashmob, but - more subtle.

For any of our students looking to squeeze one more London-ish thing into their final week, there will be a subtlemob event on Wednesday, near the London Centre - check this page for your instructions.

I am an agent

2009-12-07T00:08:00.004Z

This past Thursday I was over at the Wellcome for another of their 'Exchanges at the Frontier' series. (They're being broadcast on the World Service on Wednesdays through December & available on iplayer).

This time was Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer of the SETI institute, who was a very entertaining speaker indeed, and he and A.C. Grayling get a great many points for their very gracious handling of the crazier audience questions. Their events are always interesting, and this was no exception.

I also managed to get there in time to take a look around their new Identity exhibition. In brief: highly recommended - go if you can.

I keep thinking I'll have time to write an actual review, but reality suggests that I won't, so here's the Londonist one, which I think covers the ground well. It's impressing me with how different they make the usual exhibition space feel from theme to theme. As an ex classicist and ex lit student, one of my favourite touches were the ancient mirrors from Freud's collection that were tucked into corners outside the eight 'rooms' - something so evocative about them and their provenance.

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

Ghost Forest

2009-11-16T11:43:00.002Z

As I was coming across Trafalgar Square this morning, I was stopped in my tracks be Ghost Forest, by Angela Palmer - there's something very powerful about this assembly of downed trees - their sheer scale, for one thing. (There's a handful of my photos here)

It's in place until Friday, and well worth a side trip to see in person.

life takes turns like fiery shadows

2009-11-05T14:58:00.002Z

Last night I had the privilege of going with a friend to the award ceremony for the first Welcome Trust Book Prize - a new and extremely generous prize, intended to stimulate interest and debate about medicine and literature.

You might think that with medicine and illness being such a central common experience in human life, such a prize would be redundant, so I was most surprised that the winner - Andrea Gillies - mentioned during her speech that the Guardian had declined to publish a review of her book because it wouldn't have suitably general appeal. Keeper is a story about living with someone who's living with Alzheimer's, and it's startling to think that that's considered a niche thing - I know so many people who's lives have been touched both by the disease itself, and by how that illness has changed people they love. It's certainly a book that's now on my reading list, along with several others from the short list.

since they took down your name

2009-11-04T15:33:00.003Z

Foyles have posted their events listings for the run from tomorrow (Martin Bell with his new book on the MP's expenses scandal) through to December (Redefining a Classic - Making Classics Relevant in the Modern Age) - there's a rich vein of free events, with a sprinkling of paid ones, all brought to you by one of my favourite London bookshops.

Check them out, and email your reservations soon before they run out of tickets.

(Unrelated: post title comes from '95 Charing Cross Road', by The Penny Black Remedy, and is relevant only by accident of address.)

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

Feed your mind

2009-10-29T11:22:00.003Z

Can you get to Gower Street at lunchtime? If so, check out these free lunchtime lectures - what a wonderful richness of subjects: today, Vampires, new week the interaction of courts and hospitals in the nation's health, and the list goes on.

(Unfortunately, I can't get to Gower Street in my lunch break, so I'll have to settle for watching the video versions they provide.)

So, the Spear-Danes in days gone by...

2009-10-28T11:19:00.002Z

Free tonight? There are still a handful of tickets available to see/hear Benjamin Bagby giving a performance of Beowulf in Old English, at the British Museum, in honour of the one thousandth anniversary of the epic.

If you're not free tonight, the performance goes with a free exhibition, where the original manuscript will be on display until January. (The Heaney translation is in our library, too, if any of my students are reading this)

* Photo by dunechaser, used under Creative Commons, with thanks. (Check out his gallery of Literary Minifigs!)

But summer`s gotten away from us

2009-10-14T12:54:00.003+01:00

So, One and the Other ended yesterday, and I must admit as I came into work this morning, the plinth looked not just empty but somehow bleak and bereft. I'd gotten used to the always looking up as I cross the square to check who was there and what they were doing.

It's been grand - not just the plinthers themselves, but the wider conversations, especially as it seems to have outlasted the 'modern art is rubbish' knee-jerk. As I was walking home the other day, I saw a policeman explaining what was going on, and talking about some of the other plinthers who he'd seen to a little girl, about 6 or 7 years old, while her mum was taking photos of the square. How often do you get policemen talking to kids, at length, about modern art? Not often enough, I'd guess.

In totally unrelated news: Angels - costumiers for film and tv and fancy-dress suppliers to the stars - are holding a uniform sale next month. 250,000 items, almost all genuine issue, dating from 1900 onwards. I predict that the queue will be huge, and entirely worth it.

* Photo by chrisjohnbeckett, used under Creative Commons.

runs on without you

2009-10-08T23:44:00.006+01:00

Today is National Poetry Day, and I'm just squeaking in before midnight...

~~

I keep coming back to this as a favourite London poem, and this is both a fabulous reading, and a fabulous presentation of it : Benjamin Zephaniah reading The London Breed

~~

For a total change of pace, here's some John Burnside: a contemporary Scottish poet whose work has a way of winding its way into my memory and my heart.

Dark Green
(From Myth of the Twin)

There is always a place on the way
where the path curls in the dark,

into the smell of dust
and the stillness of nettles.

There is always a litter of stones
or a broken roof

a few steps into the shade;
an empty skull, a ribcage stitched with grass,

barely a trace of vapour that had lived
before you came:

a remnant of mucus and water, hatched on a bone,
like the silver-and-eggshell perfume after a birth,

or the whisper that swells and recedes in the quick of your mind
when you wake in the day, and the bright dream runs on without you.

********

Or something more traditional? Maybe Christina Rossetti?

This section of Goblin Market, for example:

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries--
All ripe together
In summer weather--
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy;
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye,
Come buy, come buy."

~~~~~~~

* Newspaper blackout poem 'All In A Night's Work' by Austin Kleon, used under Creative Commons.

Like the ribs of a broken umbrella

2009-10-02T12:10:00.003+01:00

London, like many big cities, is already made up of many overlapping versions of itself, so the idea of one more, just a slip-though-the-cracks away, is fertile ground for fiction.

A while back, I picked up Black Tattoo, by Sam Enthoven , which is a YA fantasy book, set not just in London, but in parts of London I'm very familiar with. (The author used to work at a bookshop just up the road.) While talking about it with a friend, they were started to discover I'd not read Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville. I hadn't even heard of it; had no idea he'd ever written a YA book, but I'm really glad I tracked it down. I haven't been so charmed or entranced with a London story since Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

Gaiman's London Below is quite different to Miéville's Ab-Cities (London is not alone in having an alter-ego - there's also mention of No York, Parisn't, Lost Angeles, Sans Francisco, Helsunki, Hong Gone, Romeless ...) but they share that same kernel of one more 'other London' which is so terribly tempting. After all, the London experienced by premiership footballers is just as unfamiliar and impenetrable to me as Un Lun Dun, and rather less interesting to me!

Not only does Un Lun Dun touch on many of my favourite fantasy elements, subverting the standard 'prophesy and the chosen one' line, for example, it's also alive with Miéville's love of language. This is a space where the puns can run wild (quite literally) - 'un-brellas' and the very word 'binja' amuse me far more than I should probably admit in public.

I wish I could buy all of these books for work's collection, but leisure reading isn't our focus, so, instead, if there are any of my students reading this: Westminster Libraries have multiples of all three.

* Photo by m.by, used under Creative Commons.

We are the office block persecution affinity

2009-09-16T11:39:00.002+01:00

Over on the LUP's group blog, we're talking about favourite buildings, ahead of this weekend's Open House Weekend events.

It feels like almost everywhere else is talking about the launch of Dan Brown's new book, though, and the combination reminded me of something: Freemasons. Specifically, Freemasons’ Hall in London, which is an imposing art deco building near Covent Garden, and the headquarters of the oldest Grand Lodge in the world.

You might be surprised to hear that this secret society offers free public tours, but they do, so if Dan Brown's fictional account of Freemason ceremonies has piqued your interest, you can get inside the Grand Temple with no subterfuge required.

Down by the Thames, lights that sparkle like gems

2009-09-10T11:34:00.003+01:00

Planning ahead - the BFI London Film Festival will be running through the second half of October, and ticket bookings open soon, not just for the film screenings, but also for the range of talks, workshops, and other events that go with them.

Also, confirmation that the Trafalgar Square screening will run again this year - free, fascinating short films from the BFI National Archive and London's Screen Archives, in London's living room.

***

In less long-range planning news, it's the Thames Festival this weekend, which offers loads of free events to get involved in, like the Feast On The Bridge and the Night Carnival

Follow Friday, aka twitter resources

2009-09-04T10:48:00.002+01:00

Two of my colleagues have started using Twitter as a way of getting timely info to students this semester, and as a result a bunch of students have joined Twitter for the first time.

(This Telegraph blog post is a decent general run through of how to get started on Twitter.)

'Follow Friday (or #FF) is a Twitter 'tradition' where users post recommendations of people they follow. Personally I don't find a list of just account names particularly helpful, so I'm going to take a whole blog post to put together some suggestions of accounts our new-to-Twitter and new-to-London students might want to check out:

General

The BBC, the Guardian and the Times all do a range of feeds, from just the big breaking news stories (eg @bbcbreaking) to more in-depth subject focussed feeds like @bbchealth or @guardiantech.

@DowningStreet - official account for the UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown

London

@londonist - if you're not reading this site regularly, the twitter stream is a great way to keep an eye on London news and upcoming events

@londonwestend for West-end focussed updates, including lots of free events

Museum and gallery accounts in cultural areas you're interested in - @BarbicanCentre, @Tate, @V_and_A, @Sadlers_Wells, @RoyalOperaHouse etc etc

@londonweather for your daily forecast

@towerbridge (see this Londonist post for the best summary of why, or why not)

@BBCLondonNews - London news from the BBC

@gigsinlondon - gigs in London, including the free and the 'secret'.

Libraries

@nd_lup_library for updates on the LUP library (shameless self promotion - check)

@WCClibraries for news on Westminster Library events and promotions

@SenateHouseLib to keep up to date with the building works if you're thinking of taking out membership there

@BritishLibrary - Britain's national library.

Personalities

@stephenfry In the words of the song 'thou shalt not question Stephen Fry' - there is a very good reason that he's one of the most followed people on Twitter.

@EddieIzzard - comedian, currently running a ring of back-to-back marathons around the UK.

@neilhimself - author Neil Gaiman

@JohnCleese - the man himself

@MayorOfLOndon - Boris Johnson

Readers who are on Twitter: who or what would you add to this list?

Up and down the City Road, in and out the Eagle

2009-09-01T14:19:00.002+01:00

On the one hand, there's an argument to be made that the demise of thelondonpaper, scheduled for the end of this month, is a good thing for London's streets. There's the opposing argument, though, that it's the wrong half of the free-evening-paper brigade that's going, and there's no question that it's a loss for everyone who works on the paper.

They are at least going out with a bang, though - their Headliners mini festival gives you over 50 acts, in 13 central London venues, over two days (16th and 17th Sept) and it's not too late to get a ticket. Check out the website for venues, line-up, and ticket info : http://thelondonpaperheadliners.com/

We wait in the shadows

2009-08-31T14:12:00.002+01:00

I'm at work today, despite the bank holiday, and at 8am this morning, the streets of east London were deserted. Really, eerily, did-I-miss-the-zombie-apocalypse deserted.

I think my sensitivity to the empty streets and lack of traffic might have something to do with one of the books I read this weekend - Stephen Baxter's Flood, in which the world ends, starting in London. Well, starting in London from the perspective of the characters in the book, at least. The descriptions of the the early floods in central London are really vivid, which I'm sure I'll remember them next time I walk down the Embankment at high tide, plus now I'll have something to think about whenever I'm stuck on the Dartford Crossing bridge looking over at Lakeside! (glug, glug, glug)

It's not Romanitas or Neverwhere, which are two of my favourite alternative Londons, but it certainly lingered in my mind this morning!

To the safety of the town

2009-08-27T14:59:00.003+01:00

It's not good to get home, turn on the late night news, and find yourself thinking 'Oh - so that's why there were all those police officers at the station.' Still less so when the news is about rival football fans in a street-battle that sent several people to hospital.

It's particularly startling to me because West Ham fans are the people who, over the years, have convinced me that living next to a football club isn't such a bad thing.

I used to live right down the road from another football club - a smaller one, lower down the leagues, and I learned pretty quick to plan my weekends around their games so I wasn't sharing a tube station with fans on their way to matches if I could avoid it.

The experience almost put me off moving into a house so close to a much larger club, but I went back to view it a second time on a match day, and was pleasantly surprised. The tube was busy, sure, and a bit loud, but it wasn't threatening. There were whole families wearing team colours, and a big burly guy with a can of beer in his hands leapt to his feet to offer his seat as soon as an elderly lady got on at the next station. Very different from my experiences before. My neighbour goes to matches with his kids - and his youngest girl was only about 6 when I moved in next door.

I'm not a football fan, but I've recommended Upton Park to friends as a place to see a match in the past, and I've never felt uncomfortable when I'm sharing my streets and my tube carriage with people on their way too or from a match.

But the news on Tuesday told a far different story; one that saddens and worries me.

Crowds are always volatile things, and it's always good to be aware of how quickly the mood can change. Maybe it's just a few bad apples. Maybe it was just this match, with it's historical rivalry.

I really do hope that it was a one-off, an aberration, and that my neighbours, and the other fans and families like them will make it clear to the guys who were out for a fight that they're not welcome.

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter

2009-07-30T15:07:00.003+01:00

Dan Zambonini's alternative tube map has got me thinking about suggestions to make for the right hand side of the map, which is looking a little thin compared to the Northern Line and zone 1.

Test tubes and Tesla coils

2009-07-28T12:25:00.003+01:00

As it happens, there's a copy of this book in my office waiting to be catalogued and added to the cultural travel section of the library when my holiday is over. If there wasn't, though, Bill Thompson's blog post about The Geek Atlas would have persuaded me to order it.

It looks like an excellent companion to the (now out of print) The Scientific Traveler: A Guide to the People, Places, and Institutions of Europe by Charles Tanford and Jacqueline Reynolds from John Wiley, and will hopefully provide some balance to the more literary and art-history focused travel books.

[The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come Alive, was written by John Graham-Cumming and is published by O’Reilly Media.]

Enter and rejoice this pedestal

2009-07-20T17:04:00.007+01:00

Thanks to being on summer break, I've missed a lot of the ambient One & Other exposure I'd be getting if I was in work as normal, although I did finally manage to time my tea break today to be wandering past at a change over!

The live-feed on the website, and the Guardian's @plinthwatch on Twitter has been keeping me up to date, though.

I think my favourite in-person plinther so far was the gentleman conducting a small group of musicians below him, which must have been last Monday? - this afternoon's bubbles also pleased me.

It's a fascinating project, and it's a lovely thing to see something on that corner that makes me smile every time I cross the square. The only frustrating thing is that, unless you have a decent zoom, it's practically impossible to photograph of any of the things people get up to up there!

* OK, so that's not One & Other, in this bottom image, but it is an excellent photograph - too good to resist.

it's time for tea

2009-06-12T12:19:00.002+01:00

It's my current student group's last day tomorrow - but they get to leave London in style. Tomorrow is not just their last day, it's also the annual Trooping the Colour celebration of the Queen's birthday - it's too late to get tickets for the Horseguards seats, but it's free to take your place by the roadside to watch the parade, and get your dose of traditional pomp and circumstance.

And, of course, this puts me in mind of the AA Milne poem, Buckingham Palace.

They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace -
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
Alice is marrying one of the guard.
"A soldier's life is terrible hard,"
Says Alice.

They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace -
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
We saw a guard in a sentry-box.
"One of the sergeants looks after their socks,"
Says Alice.

They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace -
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
We looked for the King, but he never came.
"Well, God take care of him, all the same,"
Says Alice.

They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace -
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
They've great big parties inside the grounds.
"I wouldn't be King for a hundred pounds,"
Says Alice.

They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace -
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
A face looked out, but it wasn't the King's.
"He's much too busy a-signing things,"
Says Alice.

They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace -
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
"Do you think the King knows all about me?"
"Sure to, dear, but it's time for tea,"
Says Alice.

2009-06-10T22:10:00.001+01:00

The big news today is the tube strike, which has had knock-on effects on almost everyone in London, but I particularly want to point you to this take, from an ambulance dispatch allocator It's almost impossible to overstate how vital the tube (public transport in general, but the underground in particular) is to the smooth functioning of my city.

London Tip of the Day #5

2009-05-22T11:29:00.000+01:00

London Walks are *the* walking tour company. Accept no substitutes!

I know, these guys get splashed all over the guide books, but they really are excellent - and not just for tourists. Some of the west-end ones are weighted that way more than the rest, but I've been on a good number of London Walks walks, always learned something, and never been the only Londoner in the party.

(I wanted to link you to the upcoming Story of London Walking Weekend on the 6th/7th, but as there's exactly no information about the specifics on the site, there's not much point. I'll report back when that changes!)

London Tip of the Day #4

2009-05-21T10:39:00.000+01:00

More audio tours - Visit London offers free podcast audio-tours, either by region (Greenwich, Primrose Hill etc) or by theme (the arts, outdoor London etc).

Soundmaps' audio around Brick Lane, Camden, Kings Road, Soho and Brixton are more expensive than free, but get really good reviews and have an excellent pedigree.

London Tip of the Day #3

2009-05-20T10:28:00.002+01:00

(today's tip is unashamedly lifted from Londonist, a resource of much goodness. In fact, London Tip of the Day 3a - read Londonist!)

Free London Audio Guide - hit the map, click an image, hear what they've got to say about your landmark of choice. (Or download the whole lot for a fiver)

London Tip of the Day #2

2009-05-19T11:41:00.001+01:00

Free stuff! Most everyone likes free, and London has a lot of free to offer - and not just museums and galleries, either.

Check out Free London Listings or Time Out's advanced search section for a convenient one-stop guide to free events that are going on.

London Tip of the Day #1

2009-05-18T17:39:00.002+01:00

I have been neglecting this blog terribly recently - too little time, too much to do - but as I have just welcomed a new batch of students at work, I'm going to try and remedy that with short, sweet, London Tip of the Day posts for - lets say for a week and see what happens from there?

London Tip of the Day #1 : (Covent Garden based and sweet indeed)

Candy Cakes on Monmouth Street for when you really don't want to have to choose between candy or cake

Cyber Candy - for candy from around the world

and

Hope and Greenwood - purveyors of splendid British confectionery, aka the ultimate sweet shop.

Budget day

2009-04-22T14:23:00.002+01:00

Is it good news or bad news for you, your friends and family, or the country in general?

Intute collect the best resources on and about the budget hereand the BBC's Budget 2009 page reports the news and reactions.

2009-04-21T10:32:00.001+01:00

Westminster Police have just reminded me that today's the queen's birthday. The real one, rather than the official one that gets celebrated with the Trooping of the Colours in June.

41 gun salute in Green Park at noon, and happy 83rd to Elizabeth II.

We could listen

2009-04-09T13:03:00.001+01:00

On Tuesday, we had the privilege of Anne-Marie Fyfe reading at my workplace. Especially having been to a couple of readings by novelists this year where the audience was reminded that performing skills and writing skills do not come evenly matched, it was really lovely to hear someone read their work so well.

You can read one of the poems she read for us, Curacao Dusk, on the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition website, or if you'd like to listen, there are recordings of her reading some of her poems at poetcasting.co.uk

Still moments

2009-04-07T17:05:00.001+01:00

Sometimes, I really do just fall in love with my city that little bit more.

Like yesterday evening, walking across Trafalgar Square in the warm evening sunshine, when it was busy but not crowded, when it was populated by pavement artists, and buskers, and a b-boy crew showing off for the crowd, and guys practising skate tricks, and tourists, and locals, when it was impossible not to smile.

Like yesterday evening, walking down the Thames Path in the cooling twilight, listening to the rubbish barges clashing against their moorings, and voices spilling out from the pubs, and smelling the chlorine under Cannon Street, and sharing the path with no one, when it was impossible not to smile.

Like yesterday evening, walking home from the tube station, past the tiny historic cottage orphaned amongst the 1960s council flats, past my neighbours' kids bikes piled in the front gardens, past my neighbour sitting out on his front step with a cigarette and a wave, to my front door, when it was impossible not to appreciate living in this place.

For all its problems, for all its downsides, I do just love this place.

G20 - drive-by-blogging

2009-04-01T12:43:00.001+01:00

Map-based coverage of G20 related events and protests; from the Telegraph via GoogleMaps and from the BBC.

For more in-depth information on the meetings themselves, go straight to source at http://www.g20.org, or for even more detail, you could read Macroeconomic Stability and Financial Regulation: Key Issues for the G20 (Dewatripont, Freixas and Portes, eds)

2009-03-31T15:52:00.001+01:00

The Guardian's DataBlog is an interesting source of fact and figures - today's data set is looking at the figures on people applying for British Citizenship.

Does a passport make you British? Sunny Hundal writes that the nature of this debate must be controlled by progressives.

I've always maintained that we decide whether to call ourselves British, English or whatever other identity, not the racists. I have a Sikh mate with a large beard who sports his English football shirt with its big St George's flag with pride. Who am I to argue with him?

The figures below are from a written answer and show UK citizenship applications being processed at the beginning of this month.

Ten years gone

2009-03-16T11:21:00.001Z

/> Has it really been ten years since the Metro hit London?

It's such a ubiquitous part of the morning commute, I don't know if I'm more startled that I can remember commuting 10 years ago (to college! I point out) or that it's *only* ten years.

The pictures of time and space are rearranged

2009-02-27T20:56:00.000Z

Way back when the next round of Fourth Plinth works were up for selection, I was really enthused about Antony Gormley's 'living statue' plan. Now One and Other been chosen as one of the two pieces to go forward, I still am. I've already registered, in hopes of being picked to stand my hour on the plinth. How about you?