Cephalonian Method 2: Cephalonia Strikes Back

We've been open to the public a week now (hurrah!) and certainly it feels as though we've been missed. Term had begun at the beginning of the month, but it was only today that we finally ran the induction for postgraduate students. Sadly only three made it along at the ungodly hour of 10 am, but that made for a pleasantly informal chat rather than a hectoring lecture, which I think has three advantages:

1. Smaller groups ask more questions and are less afraid to put their hands up or interrupt to query something.
2. You can bounce off the body language much better with a small group (are they bored? do they look confused? much easier to read signs like that in a small group than a large one).
3. Finding the experience informal and friendly means they'll be more likely to come back again, even if it's just to ask all the questions they'd forgotten to ask during the tour.

I tried to encourage a bit of interaction; asking them to ask me the questions rather than overloading them with information, but adding little snippets of advice with each answer I gave. So, "do you have a copier?" is answered with something like: "yes, it's self-service, coin-operated, so you don't need to buy a card to use it, and it does colour photocopying too."

It was also interesting when I mentioned we use LC classification to see the sighs of relief on the students' faces; I guess that's a disadvantage to an in-house classification scheme that I hadn't thought of - it may suit your books better, but not necessarily your users, who may well have got Dewey or LC all figured out elsewhere.

We'll see if the induction worked over the next few weeks I guess.

In other news, we had our first Novice Squad session with the archery club last night. Lots of promising young talent there, which bodes well for the season. Plus a few joined us in the pub afterwards - also very promising!

Weekend? What weekend?

I can't wait for a day when I can just pootle around doing absolutely nothing...but it looks like December is going to be the earliest that that's going to happen. London this weekend, for a wedding on Saturday (great fun, possibly the best one I've ever been to), and the Archery Test Event for 2012 at Lords' Cricket Ground.

Mospinek of Poland beats Wegh of the Netherlands in the quarter-finals

We only had tickets to the Ladies Individual Finals, since that was the only day we could do and fancied the lie-in (hence missing the knock-outs). Sadly, our one English hopeful following the seeding round, Alison Williamson, got knocked out at the 1/32s. Still, it was a great experience, despite the dire commentating (seriously, get someone who can pronounce the archers' names for a start, and not keep blaming the wind for every arrow not in the red or gold).

On the whole, though, the event ran so smoothly that it bodes pretty well for next year. And having never been to Lords' before, that was a pretty cool thing to tick off the list!

TFI Friday

So it's been a busy old time here in the reference library. We've been closed to the public now for 5 weeks (one to go!) due to building works elsewhere, resulting in the relocation of three other departments (that's right, three!) into our hallowed reading room.

The library looks remarkably like this

Not only that, but as I mentioned previously, we said goodbye to a number of colleagues, two of which were library staff. Given that we were effectively a full-time staff of three...yeah, I've taken over a few extra responsibilities! But now we're looking at the future, and hopefully soon we'll have a temp coming to ease the pressure, so that's good news. Though I'll still have to train them, and supervise them, and they won't be working Mondays at all...

Then we've had a colossal book move, swapping a room of oversized books, dealers' catalogues and art books with some of the archives. Hundreds...maybe even thousands of books being moved in two weeks...ouch. And much as I love not having had to move the books myself, this does mean I wasn't able to stop the movers when they reshelved the oversized books not by classmark, but by size. So now nothing's in order and I have no idea where anything is!

Added to that we've got the usual start-of-term chaos happening out in the real world university - I shall be giving tours to the History of Art postgrads soon. I've also been asked to run tours for the Cambridge Library Group, so I'm ankle-deep in email conversations with the other two libraries here to try and co-ordinate that (but that won't be until April, so I have a little time yet!).

The students I'll be showing around the library are ever so slightly older than these

I am luxuriating in the freedom to make decisions - I'm looking at ways to publicise the library and tie it closer to the general museum experience. So the idea is a person comes in, checks out the exhibition that they came to see. They might take in a couple of other galleries, eat at the café, make purchases from the shop...somewhere in there I think I can insert "visit library to look at further material on the exhibition, or just have a browse of the fantastic resources the library has on various forms of art". Or maybe just "visit library to sit down and allow feet to recover from all that ambling and read the Times Literary Supplement". I'm not fussy.

And finally...
My course is ever-progressing (at snail's pace). I've read 26 articles and learnt Set Theory for my latest assignment - and I'm hoping that that will be sufficient! I want to get it all done in order to go back to Aberystwyth in April, which means basically having completed everything by January. A month for each assignment should be possible, I think. Particularly given I've done so much reading for the next two already. Once I've completed Information Organisation and Retrieval, it's only Collections Management and Research in the Profession to do to be allowed to go back. It would be nice to have done Music Librarianship and one other before then, but we'll see. I'm hoping to have an idea about my dissertation by then too. I'd love to do something to do with music, but I'm pretty stumped for ideas beyond that thought.

And just a last cartoon which seemed pretty relevant to an art library but that I couldn't fit in with the rest of my verbal splurgings.

Happy Friday!