Firstly, I and a few dozen other library staff in Cambridge attended a communication meeting at Selwyn College yesterday. There's a lot of useful information for librarians in Cambridge available, but there are two fairly significant problems:
- New librarians (and insignificant grunts like me) don't know that there is information available.
- Even if people are aware that there is information available, it's hard to know where to look.
Anyway, these two points had been made, and there was quite fruitful discussion about where information should be stationed and how it should be made accessible. I'm very optimistic that the
actions that will be taken as a result of the meeting are going to significantly improve the communication process amongst library staff (and I myself will be making more of an effort to be proactive about seeking out the information now that I know it's there).
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| I'll go to the ends of the earth for my readers! |
The other thing is that I found another use for LibraryThing today. Some of the books we have are still only on short records in the catalogue, so it can be hard to know what to look for when hunting a book (knowing how many pages it is and how tall isn't much, but it's a start). Books held in the different departments aren't always kept in order either. This particular book I searched for on Google, then Amazon, and while I could dig up more bibliographic details about it, there was "no image available". But LibraryThing had the image of the book, and we were able to find it much quicker (though the process still took 25 minutes!).
Image from cwgoodroe on Flickr.
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