Checking in...and checking out again!

I'm checking iiiiin!

Time for an update, methinks. It's been a hectic two months back at my substantive post, with a few problems I've had to sort out with only a very tight deadline to do it in. Our serials aggregator declared itself bankrupt after we'd already prepaid, so there have been a lot of headaches caused by working out which periodicals we could spare for a year and which we couldn't, getting in touch with individual suppliers, and setting up new subscriptions while we dealt with the fallout, and taking the opportunity to sort out some periodicals which for one reason or another had fallen by the wayside. Then there was the cataloguing backlog which increased suddenly when we'd just received a huge delivery of books from a reactivated standing order along with all the other books we get in regularly. So that, combined with the usual reader enquiries, sorting out book orders for staff and the more routine tasks - like I said, a busy two months! Still to be accomplished are all the new things I wanted to set up following my return from secondment, like a library blog and an online graffiti wall, but as the museum website is undergoing a major overhaul, now was not going to be the best time to hassle our overworked IT staff! Still, I can keep plotting, maybe liaising with other Cambridge Museum libraries in the meantime about potential opportunities for collaboration and come back with fresh energy at a more convenient time.

Also currently taking a bit of a hit is my CPD. All the conferences are happening now, and I can't go to any of them! In particular I was most disappointed about missing the UX conference taking place in Cambridge over the last few days. UX and Ethnography in libraries is the hot new thing, and I was keen to learn more, but alas, I've had to make do with the twitter feed alone. Others I'm missing include both the UK and International music libraries conferences, so many workshops for art librarians, rare books, special collections, and the more generic library conferences like Lilac - most of these I can at least try next year, there's not much specifically drawing me to this particular year for a lot of them, but I do feel very aware that I'm looking at a year where I'm not taking on anything new or learning anything. To make up for this, I've accomplished two smaller things. The first is my first ever MOOC - Digging Deeper, which was a manuscripts and palaeography course run by Stanford with the UL, which is an amateur interest of mine. This was a brilliant course for my first MOOC, and I really enjoyed it; so much so I've immediately registered for the next one, which also covers music manuscripts (a slightly less amateurish interest of mine)! Once that's over, I'll no doubt be hitting up the Queen of the MOOCs (aka @ces43) for advice about other good courses to take!

Libraries and cake work together so well...

The other small thing proved not so small, really, which is why it's taken me so long to actually get round to writing about it, and that's CaKE 2. Cambridge Knowledge Exchange is the brainchild of two super librarians in Cambridge. Lots of conferences get attended by many of the librarians throughout the university, and there are even more librarians who don't get to go but who'd love to hear about them, so we get together (over cake, naturally) and the attendees share their impressions of the conferences they've attended, and any useful advice or information they've acquired.The first one of these was great because it introduced me to a few conferences and groups I'd not heard of before, but which sounded worth pursuing, while this time around, I think I'd heard of most of them, but had wanted to attend a few, so was really pleased that they were being reported on. This is basically going to be my CPD for this year, as I said, so it was definitely worth attending just for that. I made copious notes, so I think CaKE deserves its own separate post. I should have time now, seeing as I'm on leave for the next few months, leaving the library in capable hands! So hopefully it won't be much longer before my next post...