Moving in

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

"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

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

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:

1. - 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.
2. - 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.
3. - 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.
4. - e-prints, institutional research repositories, open data and open research.
5. - 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

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 ...

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.