Back to librarying!

Today I posted off my second assignment for Studies in Management, part of the Aberystwyth course. In between training for the new job and moving house, this one module has taken me 18 months to complete, so naturally, I'm a little relieved. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed management - I'd done business studies and sociology at school, and a lot of this stuff linked the two really nicely. But 18 months, when it should really have been four...I'm so glad it's over!

How do I intend to celebrate? By throwing myself con brio into the next module (Information Organisation and Retrieval, or for those in the know, Cat & Class) with the intention of finishing both it and another twenty credits by March so that I can attend my third study school in April. A tall order, I realise. Particularly now term's started up in a big way, and every weekend until mid-March is occupied. On the bright side, two of my orchestras have their concert on the same day, so I'm going to have to pick one, which means there'll be no point me rehearsing with the other one, which gives me another evening free each week.

pcorreia at Flickr

I mentioned my joy at being able to return (cue hasty counting on fingers) seven books to the UL and to the Judge Institute to a friend, and he likened it to a ritual burning (in fact, 'returning' is almost a portmanteau of 'ritual' and 'burning' now that I look at it). I've only ever actually burnt one book in my life - following an arduous year of failing to learn German, I chose French as my GCSE option and disposed of my German exercise book in the barbecue at home. Fun times.

*blows the dust off the computer*

Er, yes, haha. Um. Well, all right. It's been a while, hasn't it? Wonder if I can remember how this whole thing works still.

I've not been blogging for roughly 2 months. I've been ill. I've been away, living it up in Christmasland with the family. I've been slaving away over Management Studies (still). And the main reason is that I've had nothing to say. But excuses aside, thought I'd write a little about yesterday, which was the annual libraries@cambridge conference.

The theme was "Working Together". There were a number of speakers, and a few really stuck out for me. The first was a guy from Microsoft Research, who talked a bit about what they were currently working on. It sounded like the semantic web for academia, in a workable format, so I'll try and keep aware of that.

The next was Ned Potter, aka "The Wikiman", who talked about "Escaping the Echo Chamber". Brilliant stuff - because we blow our own trumpet well enough within librarial (I still intend that to become a word) circles, but fail at getting the message out to others. He pointed out some failures and some successes, and offered some simple guidelines for library advocacy. He also played us the fantastic "Study like a scholar, scholar" New Spice video, from the hugely successful viral marketing campaign. Best. Libraryvid. Ever.

One thing he mentioned as being a success surprised me, though. I'm sure every librarian heard about Frank Skinner's vitriolic words about libraries in the Times some months ago - it seemed to spread through the community like wildfire. However, I hadn't realised that some time later he visited a library and recanted his words - a real shame, but entirely typical of mass media, which seems to glory in bad news and catastrophic events, but can't be bothered to celebrate success in the same way at all. Bah, humbug and all that.

Another good bit was the discussion of copyright and special collections (as it turns out, I don't think that was the session I had originally booked in for, but couldn't remember and thought it sounded interesting, and didn't involve moving rooms). I've taken away some useful cribsheets about determining copyright and shared them with my offline colleagues.

Finally the afternoon session was a bit of an exercise in self-congratulation (but why not? There were a number of things about which we could be proud). I was very pleased to hear that TeachMeet would be happening again (but still can't think of anything I'd be able to talk about!), and it was good to be reminded about the 23 Things. I was interested in hearing about the 23 Things for Researchers taking place in Huddersfield, and if that goes ahead in Cambridge I'll probably sign up to that if it will help me in my degree.

OpenCambridge sounded great, and I might consider talking to the librarian about setting up a display and opening up our library. The museum is already involved, so it would probably depend on whether or not I felt like working a weekend at the library as to whether it would go ahead. Fresher's Fair sounded great too, although I was appalled that it costs so much to be involved when you're not a student society. (I have a number of other gripes about the fair too - CUSU taking up too much space (seriously, why bother?), sports societies being shoved away together even though a sport like archery has a more lateral appeal &c.)

A good day, overall, despite the triteness of the title ;) The highlight was recognising two of my answers to a questionnaire being used in Andy Priestner's talk on 23 Things! It's like being cited or something =)