I just noticed ...

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 ...

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

(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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I remember

silver lining

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

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