Tuesday 18 September 2012

Lots of eyes rolling and lip biting, catch up for September

It’s been a long time but I better try and get back into the swing of trying to resurrect my weekly blog about work. It goes without saying that the phones have been busy as usual. A high percentage of the calls have been about not receiving their books, the books have been particularly slow in reaching the readers or in some cases just don’t seem to have reached their destination at all. There must be a black hole somewhere in the postal service full of our Talking Books. Production Department have reported no problems with the burners and we haven’t yet had any more red-faced emails from Royal Mail who recently decided to return our post back to us instead of sending it out to the customers, obviously didn’t understand the concept that they need to look at the different addresses on the CDs instead of the return to sender address!

We had our stock familiarisation meeting last week with the theme being the vague read something you’ve been meaning to read or something you would not normally read. Luckily, this bought a good sample of books to talk about it such as Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex which turned out to be more readable than previously thought, Emma Donoghue’s Room where they didn’t like the subject matter and cracking reviews for Jonathan Barnes’s The Somnambulist and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. My two offerings were Andrea Levy’s The Long Song which has been on my pile of must reads and didn’t disappoint and one of the Jack Sheffield Teacher series which I would not normally have read and was as I envisaged – cosy reading and Sunday tea-time fare. I’m surprised this hasn’t been picked up for a TV series – someone is going to tell me now that they have!

Book selection starts again in earnest this month so I managed to spend some time looking through The Booksellers to catch up with the news. Some good new releases coming through which will attract a lot of customers including titles from J.K. Rowling, Kate Morton, Zadie Smith and Barbara Kingsolver. We’re already getting customer interest for Bradley Wiggins and Claire Balding autobiographies. The two non-fiction books that stood out for me and I think will appeal to a lot of our customers are Clare Mullroy’s The Spy Who Loved and Catherine Bailey’s The Secret Room.

Requests for 50 Shades Darker keep coming in and we’ve now have a record of over 150 requests. I think our customers will be pleased to see the Erotica titles in the bestseller charts though when trying to pick one for book selection, the reviews were quite poor, particularly Eighty Days Yellow. In the end, I went for Porta De Costa’s In Too Deep, I think the Librarian receiving the erotic notes and what happens afterwards did it for me! Talking about bad reviews, it’s worth going on Amazon and reading the reviews for 50 Shades of Grey, Oh my with lots of eye rolling and lip biting, they’re more entertaining than the book itself!






Wednesday 5 September 2012

Catch up about all things except work - August 2012

I'm having huge difficulties in getting my thoughts together after a huge break from my blog (made worse that I've just lost an hour's work already and I'm not sure what I've pressed). Also slightly worrying that I'm feeling more inspired to write about non-work related things rather than work.

Firstly, after a month off from formula one, the Spa Grand Prix lived up to expectations and my crystal ball was right that the 2 worst drivers Grosjean won't make it to a lap and Maldanado will crash/incur some kind of penalty and the world's most boring driver (yes I'm criticising a fellow Brit) Di Resta will eek out a point without bothering to overtake anybody and letting quite a few cars overtake him. Yes, I know he gets the car home in one piece but so can Joe Bloggs get their car from one place to another in one piece. Take your rosy-tinted glasses off BBC!

The start of the football season has been an anti-climax for the ever-frustrated Stags fan. I was expecting better things with lots of interesting new signings with footballers that had good reputations of being able to play football, I was going to think that Paul Cox had had lessons from Billy Dryden, Steve Parkin and Keith Curle over the summer and they had all shown him how you can get your team to play good football. Unfortunately Paul continues to study the John Beck manual of football - pinching players from the local rugby team, intimidating the opposition and stopping them playing and missing the middle of the pitch out in play (at least most of the pitch will still be in pristine condition at the end of the season as it doesn't get touched) though even worse this year, he's forgotten 2 crucial elements - to win, teams have to score goals and stop other teams from scoring. Hopefully he'll continue in this vein and get the sack soon. I can't even make any Lincoln jokes at the moment.

What else can I talk about before I have to think about work? I managed to catch some of the Reading/Leeds Festival last week. Favourite parts - Crystal Castles, Sbtrkt and before I get accused of being a dance freak - Mark Lannegan Band, At the Drive-In and Black Keys. Least favourite - toss up between The Vaccines and Florence and the Machine (just plainly awful), also quite a few non-descript indie-bands which all sound the same.

It feels like an end of an era as probably our most well known reader to all of the RNIB passed away last week. He used to ring up most days so it's like losing an old friend. It was sad that he spent his last weeks in hospital and none of us had a chance to speak to him there; I think his closest friends in his latter years were the RNIB Library Staff and Customer Services.

50 Shades of Grey has divided the readers, although achieving the largest waiting list for a book by reaching 126 requests, some have eagerly phoned back and made enquiries about the rest of the trilogy, others have been just as quick to say no more. One lady thought it was called 50 Shades of Green and it was going to be a nice family story set in Ireland. Couldn't get further from the truth! I think the best positive comment was from one customer who was just pleased to be able to get hold of this book in an accessible format and being able to join in the conversations with their friends and family. A nice example of social inclusion!





Monday 16 July 2012

Rhubarb Pickle, The Reader and Revalidation (again) - 18th June-16th July 2012

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to sit down and blog. It’s that time of the year when the garden takes over and as well as doing some mass weeding, I’ve spent the weekend making spicy rhubarb pickle and summer fruit mixture for the freezer with the excitement of spending my evenings this week freezing cabbage and broad beans. I could also do with some ideas of what to do with red currants. One site that I have discovered recently that looks pretty handy for garden produce is http://www.allotment.org.uk/recipes.

I’ve also had to concentrate on my revalidation portfolio as my 3 year cycle is now complete. I’m slightly worried that my development seems very lacking with my limited role and lack of opportunities in projects and attending courses. I’ve decided to put a paragraph in my statement about my intention to do a management course to acknowledge a gap in that area. It’s been quite hard trying to decide what to include in my appendices, so far I’ve seem to have a pattern - new skills ie social networking and cataloguing, an example of a project I was involved in, development of my core skills needed for my current job and my committee work with CDEG and participation in EMBOC events. I’m also finding that I’m all right writing about what I’ve learnt from an activity but it’s the bit where you have to talk about how you’ve used this knowledge for your job which is proving to be more difficult. I’m also going to have to start filling in my audit sheet for my 2nd cycle.

I’ve been entertained by our forthcoming new reading business system with the constant booking and cancellation of dates for testing the functuality of the circulation module. Now, things have now been put on hold which is a bit of an anti-climax. I’ve had my initial training of how we should be carrying out the testing, the question which remains on everybody’s lips, when will we see this new system? I guess it is better that the data’s correct than rush it through regardless and the system is unusable.

It seems a month for cancellations. We’re being treated to a new carpet, it’s our first one since the building was built well over 20 years ago and with nearly 100 people in the office, it’s well used as you can imagine. We had a mad couple of hours clearing cupboards and filling the skip and shredding box today only to be told late this afternoon that there’s been a delay! We’ve just got to remember where we put the various cupboard contents for the next few days.

I don’t know if it was just me but I thought the Update was particularly dull this month and I struggled to find anything of interest. I keep meaning to go through the Phil Bradley’s column and trying some of the sites but it’s just finding the time.

We had our book club meeting last week. This time it was The Reader to go under the spotlight. On the whole, the book was well received, mainly getting 8’s and 9’s though it did get a 4 from one of our members. There wasn’t much fondness for Hannah except for the bit when she asks the judge “What would you have done?” and perhaps the beginning when she takes Michael home after he falls ill. Some of us couldn’t quite work out why she considered it more of a crime to be illiterate than the atrocities that she was accused off when she was an SS guard and that she preferred to go to jail rather than say she can’t read or write. There was also some confusion about when Hannah and Michael first met, some of the group thought that this had happened before she was a guard while others thought it was after the war. There was a thought that Hannah has a vicious streak in her, the fact that she hit Michael with her belt and cut his lip when he off to get some breakfast and left her a note and also her behaviour on the tram. This was a book that raised lots of questions – why did Hannah suddenly stop looking after herself once she had learnt to read and write, Michael’s relationship with his father that he had to make an appointment to see him, should Michael have told the judge that Hannah could not read or write so could not have written the report and had Michael really betrayed Hannah?

We had to do 3 month’s book selection pick this month to take into account of the forthcoming upheavals with the Stockport staff relocating into a drier place that isn’t falling down around their ears (a bit of an exageration here!) and the braille and giant print books coming back down to Peterborough. There’s a real good mix of new titles with highlights including a bit of true crime Midnight in Peking, Robert MacFarlane’s The Old Way, Hilary Mantel’s follow up to Wolfhall and A Cat Called Bob (including scarf of course). Collection Development titles concentrated on minority sports and include biographies on Barry Sheene, Nadal and Colin Montgomery’s latest autobiography. The imports more or less picked themselves and include new novels by Joanne Harris and Michael Frayn, the latest autobiography by David Essex and Ann Patchett’s A State of Wonder. Missing series is also a good mix from Colin Forbe’s A Savage Gorge (the only Tweed one that we haven’t got), Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments as we bizarrely only had the third one in the Barrytown series and the usual 3 favourites – Lee Child, Peter Robinson and Ian Rankin - that we’re trying to fill in. We’ve also discovered that Donna Leon and Harlan Coben isn't an Import, always a big excitement when one of the big crime favourites hasn’t succumbed to Isis, Audiogo or Oakhill.

We’ve now reached a record 55 requests for people waiting for 50 Shades of Grey to be completed. Hope the studios aren’t going to be too long!

Tuesday 19 June 2012

Lake District, The Savage Garden and Congratulations to England - 1st – 17th June 2012


I always seem to suffer from writers block when I haven’t written on my blog for a few weeks. I've spend the first ½ an hour typing, deleting, retyping and redeleting until I get in the swing again.

I met up with one of my best friends in Nottingham on Saturday. I hadn’t seen her for quite a few years so we had quite a bit of catching up to do. Most of it was done in Pret a Manger. We spent nearly 2 hours there. It’s put me in a good mood and spending the Sunday doing the usual chores didn’t seem quite so arduous as normal.

The month has flown by. We took avoidance tactics for the Jubilee and hid in our tent in Chapelstile (Lake District) until it was safe to come out again. We didn’t get flooded out this time, in fact it stayed dry though it got progressively colder as the competition on who could wear the most layers in the evening became more fiercely fought as the days went by. The only trouble with camping is that you always feel that you need a holiday afterwards to get over the ordeal. You always feel that you are on a fitness fanatic outbound break as you end up going on about ½ dozen walks a day excluding the numerous treks to the toilets and the water tap.

Work has been busy as usual, lots of calls and never a full house in to take them. The latest batch of customer requests was a varied affair, including autobiographies by Sheena Byrom (a midwife), David Jason and Kenny Dalglish, some poetry from Auden, the classic Mary McCarthy’s The Group, A Daughter’s Secret - a saga from Anne Bennett and Louise Foxcroft’s Calories and Corsets which looks at the history of dieting over 2,000 years.

We had our first Committee meeting as the newly formed CDEG last week. I thought it went well with lots of plans for the Committee to work on including an Equal Opportunities Act Workshop, a Library Camp, Libraries Change Lifes, Umbrella, the Diversity Award and a Conference. One of the next big things we need to work on is the quarterly Newsletter though we didn’t come to a final agreement on how we should do this. It would be interesting to see how the other merged groups came to an agreement on this one.

There was an interesting bit in the latest CILIP Update. Hidden in the 60 seconds with…. was a mention to The 25 Research Things which looks similar to the 23 Steps CDP and might be worth going through to refresh myself on some aspects of Social Networking. The website is http://25researchthings2011.wordpress.com.

Another useful link for Librarians and related professionals is http://www.rin.ac.uk/resources/library-and-information-professionals.

We had our stock familiarisation meeting last week where we picked a book out the book cupboard for one of our work colleagues to read. I was given Mick Mills – The Savage Garden – which could be classed as a well written, atmospheric mystery book though some readers may find it a bit slow and lacking a thrill. Other authors reviewed included Sam Bourne’s The Righteous Men which was described as similar to Dan Brown, a page turner and one to take on holiday but weak characters and not very well written. Another book reviewed was Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America where although it was a well written funny book, it was too long and the reader had to work hard to work out what was happening. The Warrior’s Princess by Barbara Erskine was another book up for discussion. Again, this was another enjoyable readable book but was spoilt by being too far-fetched. The last book was Barbara Nadel’s A Noble Killing which again received positive feedback though took the reader a few chapters to get used to Turkey as the setting and they also thought that some readers may find the subject matter – honour killing - difficult to stomach.

Congratulations to England, the final whistle’s just blown and we’ve managed to win 1-0 with a struggle. We’ve got lady luck on our side at the moment – not played very well at times, Ukraine not been given a goal and Rooney getting a goal with about his only good touch of the game. Italy next!






Thursday 31 May 2012

Russian Grannies, Orange Prize and Gina - May 21st-May 31st 2012

Huge excitement as we had a Eurovision sweep stake last week, I thought I'll be in with a chance as I got the hotly tipped Russian grannies. Sadly, it was not to be as I got pipped at the post (only by a few hundred points) by the Swedish entry though I can't really see the point of this one being in the contest as it's got to number one in most countries anyway. It's only sour grapes as I didn't make my fortune. Mind you the time I've bought cakes for everyone with my winnings to celebrate, I will be out of pocket. I didn't come bottom either as there was going to be a special prize made by Phillip the Archivist for the loser.

What was happening in the league one play-off final to take all 11 players having to take a penalty. Did neither team want to get promoted? It was left to the goalies to decide the outcome and Huddersfield's goalie who had been having lessons from Bayern Munich's goalkeeper on how to outwit your opposite number in the art of penalty taking to decide the winner. We were all wondering what would have happened if the score had still stayed the same, would the fans then have to line up and have a go?

Talk about hero to zero awards, this must go to Pastor Maldanado. First in the Spanish Grand prix one week and then forgetting he had something called brakes in Monaco and spent most of his time riding into the back of everyone else. And good old Grojean, I was getting abit worried that he hadn't crashed for a while, back to unable to get one full lap in.

As you've probably guessed from my ramblings, nothing much has happened at work. The next batch of customer requests that made it through to the book selection meeting was a curious mix including the latest one by Martin Amis (Lionel Asbo) mixed in with A Tangled Summer by Caroline Kington (country life fiction) and a fantasy trilogy by Tad Williams. There were quite a good selection of general fiction titles requested but unfortunately Oakhill has snapped up a lot of good titles including Ann Patchett's State of Wonder and Allison Pearson's I think I love you. The non-fiction selection is just as varied including Roger Deakins Wildwood, Rafael Nadel's autobiography, Kate Chisholm's recent biography on Samuel Johnson and the Countess of Carnavon's Lady Amina's Real Downtown Abbey.

It was the Peterborough Orange Prize's Reading Groups event last night. Anne Enright was a much better read than we all had anticipated after her gloomfeast The Gathering. Quite honest, insightful and at times funny. I personally liked the rambling style of writing as if the main character is putting her thoughts together. The book is told in the first person - Gina - but we agreed that we couldn't rely on her account of what actually happened nor get an accurate portrayal of the other characters. She was summed up as being delusional, self-centred and basically not a nice person. I gave it 8/10 with 2 other people from the group but a couple of people didn't enjoy the book at all and only gave it 5/10 which led to an average of 7/10. For the first time ever, all the groups enthused about their books and the scoring was high. As usual the Peterborough Reading Group's winner differed to the proper winner with Half Blood Blues being our winner. Madeline Miller actually came second from bottom, our book came bottom! Last year we would have won such was the dislike for all of the books in general.

I'm off camping in the Lake District for a long weekend. The weather looks suitably cold and wet, can't wait.

Monday 21 May 2012

Not much to say except Drogba is a hero - May 14th-18th

Not much to report workwise except that I spent the week with the phone permanently glued to my ear as there were only 2 of us in for most of the week. It was just a matter of keeping on top of the incoming calls and checking the in-tray for anything that was urgent. It didn’t help that it was our third busiest week of this year. We've had a worrying amount of calls of readers complaining about the slowness of the service and books going missing in the post. Our manager looked into it but both Production and the Peterborough Sorting Office have reported back to say there’s no problems at their end. A complete mystery!

Quite surprised that Chelsea won the Champions League. Not sure how as they were outplayed and offered little as an attacking force but if they have a player like Drogba who’s able to pull something out of the bag and keep their cool anything can happen. Also thought it was nice that after the match while his team mates were celebrating, he was going round consoling the Bayern Munich players whether they liked it or not. Definitely hero of the week. Also congratulations to York City for winning promotion back into the football league after beating Luton 2-1.

Otherwise not alot more to say, my revalidation portfolio has ground to a holt and I haven't sorted out any plans for any form of professional development. I have been given permission to go on a mentor's course in Leicester next month but I'm still in 2 minds whether to go.

Thursday 17 May 2012

The Forgotten Waltz and the underdogs - 7th May-11th May


Not sure if it’s the weather but I spent a lot of last week revamping readers’ lists to “more light reading please”. I’ve done many variations of lists consisting of family saga authors who write like Catherine Cookson, Rosamunde Pilcher and similar, country life fiction, Fred Archer and Gervase Phinn style autobiographies, golden age crime and Mills and Boon romance. It’s surprising how many different combinations you can do for light reading.

It was my turn to attend the monthly book selection meeting which passed by smoothly. There was quite an interesting discussion from our production department who are looking into automating the braille process. We presently conform to the rules set out in The Brailler’s Manual which gives a consistent standard to how a braille book should be transcribed. The obvious advantage would be the speed in getting a book produced into braille. I query the quality of the output though and I think there may be some come back from some of our customers. I think there is a parallel with brailling books to cataloguing in that there are rules and standards to conform to and that you need some manual intervention.

We finally managed to do an overhaul of our noticeboard, this time the focus is on our Reading Group – Bookbabes – to try and drum up some new faces. We managed to attract a couple of new people from a notice on our Intranet but could do with some more people. Good news!, we’ve just found out at short notice that we are going to be taking part in the Orange Prize Event held at Peterborough Central Library again. One of the other reading groups has dropped out last minute. The bad news is that we’ve got to read The Forgotten Waltz – Anne Enright - which we’ve not only got to read but also sell to the audience as a “must read”. We’ve got a 100% record every time we take part so the pressure’s on.

There was an interesting article in the latest CILIP Update about e-readers, particularly the views of the VI pupils. They liked the fact that they were small and easy to carry and more importantly that people couldn’t tell that they were reading a book in alternative format such as a giant print book. It might be something to think about when trying to persuade teenage readers to join the various library services. They don’t want to be seen reading something different or have a special daisy player which will set them apart from their friends. Another useful comment was the dislike of Kindle’s electronic voice. There is one argument for more talking books to be done in synthetic voice in the future as the younger generation would be more used to this and would accept it. The pupils in this survey certainly wasn’t reading the script.

I've been distracted again with the sport with Man City winning the Premier League with almost the last kick of the match and then Pastor Maldanaldo of Williams winning the Spanish Grand Prix. Definitely the weekend of the underdogs.


Monday 7 May 2012

Denise Mina, Revalidation (again) and Scram! - 23rd April-4th May

I know I’ve missed a week again but to be honest, there hasn’t been a lot to report from work. It’s just been a steady flow of calls mixed with book selection. Again, there’s a good variety of titles selected including Scram, a book about the Falklands War, A Rough Guide to the Middle Ages which looks like a good readable history title, the latest ones from Anne Tyler and Marina Lewycka and an autobiography by the chap who used to read the shipping forecast on Radio 4 in amongst the popular names across the genres.

We had our stock familiarisation meeting last week, this time it was popular crime author that we hadn't read but are always putting them on readers' lists. Authors under the spotlight included Donna Leon, Anne Perry, James Elroy, Denise Mina, Reginald Hill and Graham Hurley. We're trying to conceptualise a ladder from a gentle to a gritty crime read with Anne Perry at the bottom (the reader found it too dull because of the lack of action) to James Elroy at the other extreme. I managed to get through both Denise Mina and Reginald Hill with Denise Mina closer to James Elroy on the scale of grittiness - no shortage of violence, language and a bit of sex thrown in as she depicts well a bleak early 1980's Glasgow's landscape. Reginald Hill falls in the middle with not too much violence but with the odd bit of language and the stereotypical Yorkshire males makes it a treat with care to who you send it out too. Graham Hurley fell between James Elroy and Denise Mina though the violence wasn't gratuitous. Donna Leon was closer to Anne Perry with a bigger emphasis on descriptions of food!

I’ve been concentrating on my Revalidation particularly after my recent meeting with my mentor who suggested that I could reconsider the dates I was using (Nov 2009-Oct 2012) as I had made good progress with my portfolio. As I had been sending my yearly log to the CILIP, I contacted them to see if it was okay to bring the dates forward. I also have at least 3 things I could include from earlier on in 2009 which are worth including. CILIP have given me the okay so I’m now frantically trying to sort out my Revalidation Audit Sheet – what did I learn from the activity and how did I apply it in the workplace. Fortunately I did keep a log of everything with my thoughts but although I’ve done the first part okay, there’s not been enough thought so far on the application side. I’ve been surprised that there are over 40 things to include in my Audit but I’m still concerned about the quality of my professional development.

There have also been quite a few emails flying around the new CD&E (Community, Diversity and Equality) Group. We’ve managed to come to a quick agreement with the Logo. There’s still seems that there are plenty of issues such as the financial side while the bit which I’m involved in – Website and Newsletters – has thrown up a few issues – what to do with the monthly and quarterly newsletters, when do we start to merge the 2 websites and how do we develop this area. I’m slightly worried by the fact that the longer we delay sending out newsletters, people will be less inclined in wanting to pick our group as one of their special interest options when they come to subscribe next year as they may feel that we haven’t anything to offer.

I’ve been distracted this last week with the Blue Square Premier Conference play offs but unfortunately I won’t be going to Wembley after Mansfield lost 1-0 to York after extra time. Oddly enough, the lowest placed teams in the play offs have made it to Wembley instead which doesn’t seem right that you can’t get promotion with 98 points! Poor Wrexham!

Tuesday 24 April 2012

The Post Holiday Blues and The Kindest Thing - 16th-20th April 2012

Back to reality, a week back at work and the red squirrels of Galloway Forest seems a dim and distant past. I now could do with another holiday to cope after last week!

It was our Bookclub meeting and the book under scrutiny this time was Cath Staincliff’s The Kindest Thing – a cheery book about the aftermath of a lady’s decision to assist her husband, suffering from motor neurone disease, to commit suicide, and ended up in court for murder after being reported to the police by her 16 year daughter! Although I wanted to complete the book, I found the book lacked depth and gave the impression that it was written with television in mind, similar to the Rosamund Lupton book Sister. There was no surprise to discover that the author wrote a lot of TV dramas in general. I was not alone to complain about the shallowness of the book and the lack of depth to the characters. It was suggested that Jodi Picoult would have done a better job with the subject matter. It led to some interesting debates about whether the law on assisted suicide should be changed, would we have done the same if we were put in her shoes and did we predict the family’s reactions. I gave the book 6 out of 10 while the average was 7 out of 10.

The customer suggestions have gone round for their monthly vote and there are some really good titles in the mix including a book on the Falklands War called Scram, Planet of the Apes, favourites such as Rosamunde Pilcher and Nelson Demille, new titles by Sue Townsend and Anne Tyler and some really autobiographies and biographies such as Gillian Lynne’s A Dancer in Wartime, Peter Jefferson’s And Now The Shipping Forecast, Joan Collins’s new autobiography and biographies on Leonard Cohen and Barry Sheene. There was also a flood of completed new talking books and one week alone resulted in 89 customer requests being ordered.

I spent a couple of evenings catching up with The Booksellers, again more readable than the last couple of editions of The Library Update. It’s depressing to read that a 5th of professional library posts have been cut last year and that Suffolk County Council are handing the running off branch libraries to volunteers. Hopefully, they may find themselves in the same boat as Surrey County Council who have found that their plans to remove paid staff from 10 of the county’s libraries has been deemed illegal. There was also an interesting debate between the Society of Chief Librarians and publishers regarding lending e-books in public libraries. One debate can be found on Bobbi Newman’s blog http://libarianbyday.net/. Questions are raised on whether libraries should stop buying e-books until issues over provision settles down and whether libraries should be lending out e-books at all and that they shouldn’t be offered as a core service as libraries are community spaces. A contentious argument from Surrey County Council is that libraries are not just there to serve the needs of the poor and they have to follow where customers are going. They argue that 1 in 10 people have an e-reader and that 7 out of 10 people use mobile devices to read books. I would like to see these stats in more detail! Also, they are running a pilot scheme involving Koboes as they have closed their mobile library and see this as an alternative. I like to see how some of the mobile library users ie the elderly, physically disabled or a visually impaired person get on with this! I’m hoping that the library lends out the Kobo and doesn’t expect someone to buy one out of their pension unless everyone in Surrey is wealthy and expert in technology regardless of who they are! I can’t get my head round this scheme!





Friday 6 April 2012

Easter Eggs, Galloway Forest and One Direct Stadium - April 2nd - 6th 2012

Not so much to blog about today as the week was mainly concentrating in getting caught up before my holiday next week. I'm off to stay in a cottage in Galloway Forest for a week and looking forward to a break. I've practically packed (plenty of warm clothing and rather optimistically a sundress and sandals) and the cat and hens have all been shipped off to their respective "hotels".

The phones have been extra busy as we've been one down in personnel and Customer Services have also been short of staff which has had a knock-on effect on us and have consequently picked up extra work as they've had to pass through calls they would normally do themselves. The rush has mainly been readers ringing making sure they've got plenty of books over Easter. I've also been checking with each caller that they've got plenty of books, if not would they like extra and if so, what do they fancy reading. It adds a few minutes on to the calls but a bit of customer care goes a long way.

Huge excitement with my son as he has told me that he has bought me a surprise - an Easter egg. He is desperate to show me now and has hinted that it is a big one! Hope it's still a big whole one by Sunday.

Football is hotting up, particularly in the Blue Square Conference. My team - Mansfield Town - are third and looking pretty good for the play offs with the Teams around them dropping points. I'm not sure about the stadium name change to One Direct Stadium though, that will take some getting used to.

Tuesday 3 April 2012

East Midlands Members Day, Lisa Scottoline and AC/DC - March 26th - 30th

I must resolve not to start each blog with “Another busy week has passed”, it gets very tedious! The highlight of the week was the East Midlands Branch Members Day, held again at the Quad in Derby. It was the third one I’ve been to and probably the best one in terms of the speakers – Jonathan Douglas from the National Literacy Trust and Phil Bradley who whizzed through a host of social networking tools. I need to write up my notes and have a go at some of the resources mentioned. For anyone who is interested, notes from this talk can be found at:-

http://www.slideshare.net/Philbradley/social-media2012andsearch

Going back to Jonathan Douglas’s talk, the central theme running through was the idea that there was a link between poverty and low literacy levels and how public libraries could help bridge this gap. Marketing was looked at, particularly the idea of targeting the audience and taking reading to these groups such as working with the tabloid newspapers, football clubs, Lloyds Pharmacy and Iceland Supermarket. Perhaps the public library could work with their local McDonalds or Pizza Hut and have a lending shelf where customers could browse on the shelf and read while drinking their coffee. One finding of the research which interested us was the idea that the middle classes saw reading as a creative thing while the working classes saw reading in more practical terms ie you need to be able to read to get a job. For more details the website is:-

http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/.

Another highlight of last week was our team’s book selection meeting. The library service as a whole is now only selecting every 2 months but our team thought it would be best to still meet monthly and pick some titles to save some time. We only get an hour off each Wednesday and we can just about do a monthly pick in that time. We’ve managed to do the collection development – this time it’s engineering, science and technology biographies and legal crime fiction. We get fed up of keep being asked for books similar to John Grisham! As expected, ISIS has nabbed the best authors but we’ve managed to find a few – early Scott Turow and Lisa Scottoline. We were struggling to find British legal crime fiction authors so if anyone could recommend any good authors – particularly none ISIS authors – feel free to drop down some ideas in the comments.

We found some notable gaps in the engineering and science biographies including James Watt and Isaac Newton so we should be able to resolve this problem. The customers have as usual thrown us a varied bag to choose from. Where else would you find a title from Danielle Steel’s back catalogue, AC/DC’s lead singer’s autobiography, the first one in Stella Rimington’s Liz Carlyle’s series and Sylvia Nasar’s A Grand Pursuit: a Story of Economic Genius.

Monday 26 March 2012

Agent Zig Zag, Portfolios and Romain Grojean - March 19th-23rd

A bit late this week, by 2 weeks!. The truth is I haven’t much to report workwise. The calls keep raining in and everyone around me are dropping down with sickness bugs and colds at home and work. It’s just been one phone call after another with the in-tray in between calls.

I’ve had no committee work to do though I’m still madly working on my portfolio – making sure I’ve got my evidence together and reflecting on everything. I went to see my mentor Kate on Friday and was pleasantly surprised not only how far ahead I was with my portfolio but also that I was on the right track with my idea of what needs to be in it.

My mentor gave me a copy of her portfolio which included her CV, a record of her professional development and her audit sheet which she recommended using as it asks the questions what did you learn from this activity and how would you apply this to your workplace. She had further separated this into different sections which I thought was a good idea. Also included was her personal statement where she had highlighted her five main professional development activities with the main learning outcomes and a summary of what has been learnt in 500 words maximum. There was also a copy of her job description and about 13 examples of evidence of professional development with a summary piece on each in turn relating it to one of the three criteria set out on the CILIP handbook as there isn’t a word limit in the appendices. I have also done this so I was quite pleased that I was ahead of the game on that. After looking through my sample portfolio, I’m worried about the quality of my professional development – there’s no restructuring staff, doing presentations at conferences and contributing to books and anything else impressive.

One thing we did discuss was the dates of my 3 year cycle. I was using Nov 2009 to Oct 2012 but Kate suggested bringing these dates forward, particularly as I was ahead with the portfolio. I’m pretty sure that I have got some evidence of professional development for the preceding months. The only worry is that I have emailed my log in with my dates already so I’m not sure what they would think if I suddenly send my portfolio through 4 months earlier! I also need to go through my evidence and decide which ones I want to put in my portfolio and pick out the ones I want to feature in my personal statement.

We had our stock familiarisation meeting last week. This time it was the readers’ favourite “I want a good biography of somebody who has done something interesting”. Mine was Ben McIntyre’s Agent Zig Zag – a biography of Eddie Chapman - a double agent spy in the Second World War. I would seriously recommend this book, not only to people who like to read war biographies but also readers who asks for true adventure books and perhaps even to someone who likes a good thriller. Other biographies included As Good as God: the impossible life of Mary Benson which was a highly enjoyable book with very colourful characters and one for the more open minded reader. Greg Mortensen’s Three Cups of Tea was also positively reviewed though probably the Amazon rating of 4 and a ½ stars was a little optimistic. The Hare with the Amber Eyes was similarly given glowing feedback and was also one to put on people’s lists as one that “led interesting lives”.

Huge excitement at home with the new F1 season starting. My son, Matthew, is in seventh heaven though at the moment is looking for a new driver to support as his favourite driver of the last four years, Sutil, has lost his seat. It looks like it’s going to be a good season as well, a lot more unpredictable instead of Vettel winning everything and some new drivers to watch. Our main questions are Will Massa last the season? Will Grojean ever complete a race without crashing? Will Hispania ever be off the back row? It will keep Matthew quiet until end of November, plus before every race he goes on his xbox to have a go on the same circuit so he can follow the driving more closely in the race. Watch out Grojean, if you keep crashing, Matthew will be wanting your seat. Mind you, I think I could even do better!

Sunday 11 March 2012

The horse boy, portfolios and trip up to Stockport - March 5th-9th

Another week has quickly gone by. Huge excitement as I’ve had an email from my prospective mentor. We’ve arranged a meeting at Grantham College to include a visit to the library. This will be interesting in itself as it has been years since I’ve set foot in an FE College Library so I will be curious to see how these libraries have changed. I’ll need to get my portfolio sorted out though so I’m going to be busy for the next 2 weeks filling out missing gaps and making sure that everything’s got a piece of reflective writing in there. Mind you, I wasn’t looking forward to going through the mentor list again and try and find another victim.

The phones have been busy again. We’re slightly worried that the talking books seem to be taking longer than usual to get to readers, particularly March 1st yet we’ve had no report from Production to say that there’s been any problems with the burners.

It was also our main book selection meeting though it wasn’t my turn to represent the Team. The big issue was Imports as it was getting ridiculous that one minute we were recording a book ourselves and then we would have to pull it as one of the publishers that we work with have decided to produce it themselves. It was also getting hazy with which publishers we were going to import from and the list of titles that we couldn’t pick was getting longer. It’s quite a thorny area as the Management do not want us to do Imports at all. Their argument is that we need to be investing our money in titles that can’t be obtained in alternative format elsewhere and that we should be signposting readers to public libraries. It’s a logical argument as there are 1,000’s of titles that just won’t get done in alternative format for commercial versions and also some titles are quite complicated to produce and need more expertise to produce them. Also, there is a huge emphasis in this area in campaigning and getting the libraries to meet the needs of VI people with the 6 steps campaign and MANIL.

It’s not that straightforward though as on the flip side of this argument is that a significant proportion of Talking Book members cannot access public libraries – they are elderly, housebound and don’t have any help from family or friends. Also commercial versions are not in DAISY format and come in loads of disks and make it hard for a lot of readers to use. Also, most of the popular authors, particularly crime and family, are readily available commercially which will mean that if we had to ignore these we will be marketing a second-class library. I’m all for signposting readers to different sources, particularly with the advent of e-books, but we do need to provide an inclusive library for everyone.

We’ve come to a decision that we will concentrate on the three main publishers – ISIS, Audiogo and Oakhill – as imports and that if we’ve started to record a book after all the checks to see if it’s not going to be done, we will continue with it. The allocation is only 4 expensive titles (ISIS and Oakhill) and 12 cheap ones (Audiogo) a month. I would be happier if we increased the expensive titles and cut down the Audiogo as most of our readers want the ISIS authors. It’s still cheaper to do an Import than to record a title by scratch so it’s important for us to save money as much as we can.

We had our Team Day on Thursday, a trip up to Stockport. There were some interesting features, one of our younger readers talked about her use of social networks, particularly Facebook, which gave us food for thought. I had reported back from the Reading 4 life day about the possibility of having a Facebook page for the library services as it was a way of reaching some of the younger VI groups. One of the exercises we had to do in groups was to look at ways of increasing our audience. Some of our suggestions were wildly ambitious such as availability of all titles in all formats and a free service. We also got into the world of incentives – such as cash reductions for local authorities if they reach a certain target, a smaller subscription for low users or incentives if you introduce a friend to the service. We were also targeting low vision centres, pension organisations and Surestart to pick people up at the start of diagnosis. However, afterwards I did have the thought that perhaps we should be working with organisations such as National Reading Agency or Adult Basic Education to make reading more appealing and sexy in general as it’s no good reaching all these people if they have no incentive to read.

My evenings have been busy this week as I have had to try and work out my notes for the CSG meeting we had in the afternoon with the Diversity Group. I think they make sense but I’ve emailed them to the Chair to have a look through first before circulating!

It was also our Book Club and it was my turn to lead the group. Unfortunately there were only 3 of us there which was a shame as the book was quite an interesting read. It was Rupert Isaacson’s The Horse Boy turn to come under the spotlight. This was about a father’s son to heal his son’s autism by taking him to the Shamen in Mongolia. At times I found myself getting annoyed with the parents particularly at the beginning where the poor boy was under every therapy under the sun. There were also one or two comments which I disliked such as “we had become one of those families (a family with someone with special needs) and I still felt, although the author said he was accepting his son’s condition and took it as part of his personality, I felt at times he hadn’t as he made a great deal of his son going to mainstream school, having friends that were normal and having a higher than average reading ability. Two of us weren’t so sure about whether it was the shamen that had did the trick. From my experience, autistic children do experience a slight improvement and seem to be better able to function between the ages of 6-10, then the hormones kick in and they tend to regress for a few years. Also that high level of intense attention is likely to bring the best out of him in terms of language. It was also a good travel book as we learnt a lot about Mongolia. It was a shame that so few of us read it to the end as we all gave it 8 out of 10 and the 3 of us managed to keep the discussion going for 3/4 an hour!

Monday 5 March 2012

Broad beans, borstal girl and we bought a zoo - Feb 27th-March 2nd

I’ve decided that I quite like February and March as I had another 4 day week. I had saved a few annual leave days in case of emergency but I didn’t get snowed in this year and my son seems to have inherited the same healthy genes as me. The garden has had a second good spring clean and I’m now turning my attention to the vegetable garden – peppers, tomatoes and lettuce for the green house, onions and broad beans for the allotment itself, spinach and rocket for the pots and spring onions and radishes for the salad patch.

It was a double pick for our book selection meeting this week as NLS has now reverted to a meeting every 2 months. Our team will continue to pick monthly and then send the final list bimonthly after this month. We thought it would be difficult to select 80 titles particularly that we would lose quite a few titles with the imports but it’s another good pick covering a good range of genres and subjects. Non-fiction titles include Borstal Girl by Eileen Mackenney for our true crime fan and collecting customer requests on a regular basis, Duncan Barrat’s The Sugar Girls for our history fans, We brought a zoo for our animal lovers and Jeanette Winterson’s autobiography which has been well received in the papers. The fiction is also a mixed bunch – from Jonathan Barnes The Somnambulist (steadily collecting the customer requests) to a new stand alone from Harlan Coben and from M C Beaton’s Hamish McBeth (we’re only on number 4 so far in this series) to the book of the moment - John Lanchester’s Capital.

We were struggling to select the 10 synthetic speech titles though and had to drop one of the customer requests as it turned out that the book was going to cost us £35 to purchase! We did however choose the Institute of Business Management book of last year The Cult of the Leader, a book about preventing alzheimer’s and the ever popular cook book and gardening book, 2 more customer requests – Gordon Ramsay’s fast food and Jenny Uglow’s A little history of British gardening.

The rest of the week was pretty undistinguished with the phones being busy, finishing the proof reading for New Books and catching up with the intray which was threatening to get out of hand with being short of staff for the last 2 weeks. It was also quiet on the professional development front though I have been given permission to go to the CILIP East Midlands AGM at the end of the month.

Sunday 26 February 2012

firefox, Cardiff City and Google Plus - Feb 20th-24th 2012

With one eye on the Carling cup final (come on Cardiff), another eye on my tea (roast pork) and a third eye on my blog, I’m pleased to report that I’ve survived another week, a busy varied week as well.

It’s proof reading New Books time again which involves not just typo errors and inconsistencies but also the formatting itself so that readers can navigate their Daisy CD version. There still seems to be an absence of series information in the children and young adult section which has taken a bit of time sorting out but in the whole it’s running pretty smoothly. Deadline is next Thursday and there are just corrections and a second proof read to do.

On Wednesday I went to the CSG Curriculum Meeting to continue the discussions between the merger between ourselves and the Diversity Group. The 3 main decisions to make was the new name and the structure and size of the new Committee, things seem to be moving on and everyone seems happy with the progress made. The most contentious part was the new name and took the longest to decide - Libraries transforming lives: community, diversity, equality. To me, it symbolises a new future with new ideals for the 2 groups, will mean something for people when they decide on which group to join and had a good eye-catching strapline. We ended up with a maximum of 12 people on the committee, for reasons of not only being a workable committee (not too big where decisions become hard to make) but also financial as if we were too big we going to be spending all our finances on travelling expenses! There’s going to be 6 from each with the Diversity Group wanting to rotate their members as they have a large committee base and also they want to keep people involved, which is a good point. I think the idea would be that although there will be the main 12 members, there will be opportunities for additional people to do work behind the scenes which I think is important as it would be a shame to lose enthusiastic people. We also picked the 4 most vital posts –Chair, Vice chair, Treasurer and Secretary –with 2 each from the groups being picked. I took the minutes for the CSG for the joint meeting, (Cardiff’s just scored! 1-0) so that will be my next job – trying to decipher my notes.

Thursday dinner time was spent learning about RNIB and Facebook and Google Plus. I was familiar with Facebook though surprised about how many followers RNIB had. Looking at the stats for the different age groups and that Facebook is engaging the younger audience more, I think the National Library Services need to capitalise on this. It will be a way in engaging the younger readers as there is a general feeling when speaking to them on the telephone that we cater more for the older talking book readers. Google Plus is a relatively new thing but RNIB have got in the act right at the beginning unlike Facebook where there were queries regarding accessibility. There are surprisingly 500 followers for Google Plus (Cardiff’s just equalised 2-2!!) though for something this new, it’s not that surprising that the majority of the followers are students, IT buffs and managerial types. There’s a lack of apps and adverts at the moment but no doubt with the influence of Google, Google Plus may end up overtaking Facebook for popularity.

Trying to work out how to do emails on my new lap top as I don’t have any standard email software. I’ve downloaded Firefox for free which looks good for sending email but haven’t yet worked out how to access my emails with this software.

Sunday 19 February 2012

Getting Rid of Matthew and Mobile Libraries - Feb 13th-17th 2012

It’s been an easier week this week – probably because I was in for 3 days only. Monday and Tuesday were both intense but Wednesday was quieter and I managed to break up with a clear conscience. I spent Tuesday evening catching up with the recent Booksellers and the latest CILIP Update. It all made depressing reading with all the news of public library closures, libraries having to be run by volunteers to survive and general cutbacks to public spending on libraries. My own county Lincolnshire is monitoring mobile library use, an essential you would have thought with Lincolnshire being a large rural county with poor public transport to the towns. I sometimes wonder if there was any call for a mobile library to run in the evenings as there are a lot of people commuting to work like myself and finding that the libraries close too early. The mobile library could run reading groups and work with colleges running evening classes and adult literacy programmes.

There was also an interesting article by John Pateman in the Bookseller who makes the point that no other professions such as architects and accountants would accept volunteers to do their job for them. There was also a useful article in the Update which caught my attention about #UK LibChat – a live fortnightly discussion held on Twitter for library and information professionals to discuss cutting edge issues and to network on "http://uklibchat.wordpress.com". I had come across this before when I was doing the 23 steps and had put to follow an online chat or similar as one of my aims this year. This article was a good reminder for me. The biggest problem would be the start time of 6.30 as I’m rarely home by that time.

I also got caught up with new titles coming out in the next couple of months and what was doing well in the various charts knowing that half of these titles will be snapped up by the commercial publishers, some will end up with bad reviews while others will be difficult to transcribe into alternative format. I’m still trying to visualise how the Bradshaw’s Railway Guide will translate into Daisy or Braille if it was selected as I know that it would actually be very popular with the readers. A trip to Waterstones is on order here. I need to have a look at a print copy and see what it looks like.

It was also that time of the month – the circulation of the month’s customer requests – and a real mixture we had too! I don’t know if it was just the time of the year but there was a lot of true crime, misery memoirs and gritty crime of the “Martina Cole” variety – Kimberley Chambers and Jessie Keane are the 2 authors in demand this month. In amongst all of this “Darkness”, we had Hugh Walpole, Alan Partridge’s autobiography, several requests bizarrely asking for Jane Fallon’s Getting Rid of Matthew and even more weirder 2 customers asking for Jim Corbett who writes a lot about hunting tigers etc in India in the time of the Raj!

I attended an HTML Refreshers Course on Wednesday, ran by the RNIB. It was supposed to be 3 hours but lasted just 1 and ½ hours. It was a good reminder as I had forgotten the most basic codes. We had a go at coding pages and spotting errors and then covered a few extras such as how to incorporate images into pages. Most of the class used html on a regular basis so we went at quite a pace. My knowledge is well over 10 years old but I felt I kept up with them. It’s always good to try and refresh old skills as well as learning new ones.

In between trying to clear the garden for Spring, I’ve been getting to grips with Constant Contact, a bit worried though that I may accidently send out a test email to CSG members. The manual so far makes sense though I would be happier once I’ve had a go with it. The notes regarding links definitely need a good practice before being let loose on a newsletter.

Monday 13 February 2012

Not much to report - Feb 6th-10th 2012

Not much to report from last week. It was just one call after another, made worse by the fact that we were short of staff. On the one hand, it’s good that our number is advertised quite widely, in particular, when we send out info out to new members. I had quite a few calls from new members asking for advice on how to choose books and ideas for authors which is good as we are putting new readers on the right path at the beginning. The downside is that we are spending an increasing amount of time doing basic customer service work such as just ordering and returning lost books. If there were more of us, it would also be beneficial if we worked harder to retain readers – those that don’t use the service much and are in danger of their local social services withdrawing their service or working with those passive readers who you never talk to and rely on the computer to pick their books and just accept what they receive.

I feel I’ve made a big step forward with revalidation. I’ve sorted out my CV and mentee form and emailed this across to my first victim. I’ve not heard anything as yet but it’s still early days. My next task is to work through some Constant Contact notes to see if they make sense.

Sunday 5 February 2012

Snuff and mentors - Jan 30th - Feb 3rd 2012

Despite being a busy week, I feel strangely refreshed and not needing to have such long lie-ins over the weekend. Then I suddenly remembered, I was on annual leave on Monday! Appointment at my son’s school beckoned instead.

The main concern this week for the readers has been the change of the wallets we send the CDs in. They are now sent out without the plastic in the middle which has seems to have confused everyone, particularly the readers that have been using the service for a long time. One reader joked that he blamed his wife for damaging the wallets with her long nails and that he had always been nagging at her to keep her nails shorter. The main concern is the worry that the CD may fall out of the wallet or will get damaged more easily. On the whole they are realistic and understand that the change of packaging is a cost cutting exercise but they usually end the conversation “But I still don’t like them”.

We had our stock familiarization meeting this week where we have to read a book in a chosen genre, category or popular author which is in our library and talk about it with our reader in mind. As we recommend titles on a daily basis we need to be familiar with a wide variety of genres and authors, not just our own reading preferences. So far, we’ve covered political fiction, travel, family stories, war, prize science fiction, popular thriller authors and popular female authors amongst other things. This week it was the Galaxy Awards and the general consensus was how did half of these books get on the shortlist! My book was Terry Pratchett’s Snuff, an author that I haven’t read before. It started off well and the one-off lines made me smile and I didn’t even mind the fantasy element with all those goblins. I liked Vine, his wife Sybil, his young son and his butcher Willikins. I think the book lost the plot at the end when Vine and Co were after the villains. The book started to ramble, the humour became a bit Carry On/Tom Sharpe and it lost its way. I found this also happened with the Robert Rankin book I had to read when we looked at the fantasy genre.

On the revalidation front, I’m making it my aim to sort out a mentor. I’ve found a victim to email and am busy updating my CV and filling out my mentee form. Hopefully should get this sorted this week. I managed to do some proof reading for the CSG Website and sent out a circular email to the rest of the committee for input for the monthly email bulletin.

Sunday 29 January 2012

Credo, Senna and Escape from Alcatraz - January 23rd - 27th 2012

Another week has gone, and as usual it was very busy apart from Friday morning. Sport biographies was the surprising most popular enquiry this week and rivalled authors who write like Catherine Cookson and Golden Age and TV Crime authors. There have also been a worrying number of enquiries from readers asking where their New Books magazine was. They all were supposed to have received it in Daisy CD. We now stagger the dates when we send the magazine out in the different formats to try and spread the calls over a few weeks but it’s been over 2 weeks since they initially went out.

We had our monthly team book selection on Wednesday morning. It’s a good pick this month though as predicted, we struggled with picking suitable customer requests. There’s a good collection of titles ranging from heavyweights such as Melvyn Bragg’s Credo, popular authors such as Lesley Pearse and William Boyd’s latest titles, a number of the latest TV Club titles and a variety of missing series for crime fiction, science fiction and fantasy – Ann Cleeves, Peter James, Alistair Reynolds and Robert Jordan. The non-fiction picks are varied too including a biography on Ayton Senna, some true crime Escape from Alcatraz and a historical political book The Lion and the Unicorn which focuses on the relationship between Gladstone and Disraeli. We ended up doing 2 genres for collection development – War Stories and Country Life. We had quite a few suggestions to work through so we will carry this on for next month.

It was our Book Group on Wednesday and it was Simon Kernick’s No Time To Die to come under scrutiny. It received very mixed views from wonderful page turner and loving the main character Dennis to a page turner but a bit shallow to hating it because of the mindless violence and the fact that Dennis thought he had the right to kill someone if he thought they deserved to die. Certainly one for Lee Child fans.

To promote awareness of the range of calls the RNIB Helpline get, somebody from Customer Services tweeted the different enquiries received. This could be something the Reader Services Team could do one day. Perhaps we could tie it in with A Day In The Life in a Library Project which is coming up very soon (note to check the website and include an entry myself), or tie it in with National Libraries Day or World Book Day.

On the professional development front, I received my acknowledgment for my revalidation log from CILIP at last. We definitely have a CSG Committee meeting next month. My role as Assistant CSG Quarterly and Web Editor is also starting to kick off as it is my turn to email the rest of the committee members about the monthly newsletter, collate it and email it to CILIP by a given deadline. I’ve also got some proof reading to do on the website once I can get the log in to work and I’ve been sent some comprehensive notes on Constant Contact to digest and try out. I’ve now booked myself on a free taster session which is running one dinner hour to look at how RNIB use Facebook and Google Plus. I’ve got a little bit of knowledge with Facebook from the CPD 21 Steps and the Reading 4 Life Course I recently attended but I have zero knowledge of Google Plus.

Sunday 22 January 2012

The Green Man and The Lion and the Unicorn - January 16th-20th

Grand Prix mania is still dominating the household though there’s been an improvement, a promotion to Lotus and even a 2nd place at Valencia though there’s still a lot of 10 place grid penalties. Slightly gutted that The Big Chill has been cancelled this year and I’m struggling to find a replacement. I was super organised and booked a summer holiday cottage in the South Downs, only to find that I had picked the week when the Green Man Festival takes place which was my second option. I did contemplate going to the Latitude Festival instead but there’s something about it that puts me off.

Another week has passed by though this time there’s been a reversal of trends, steady at the start of the week and manic on Friday, possibly due to the very wet day. It’s left with me with some outstanding enquiries for Monday which I’m not that keen on, particularly that we’re likely to go back to the normal trend of being frantic on Monday and will take me a few days to catch up. Judging by the nature of the calls, the next issue of New Books has just come out though the trend this week, was not to order books but to order genre listings and suggest new titles. A lot of readers are obviously reading or listening to the introduction rather than skipping straight to the new titles which is a good thing.

It was also the week for getting suggestions for book selection on the mastersheet, circulating the next batch of customer suggestions round the Team for votes and getting some titles together for collection development. There was the usual disagreement for topics for collection development. From various conversations with some of the members of the Team, there was an idea to look at missing classics again. We had done this before but we only touched the surface last time. Not everyone was in agreement though so after a lot of debate we have gone for 2 genres -war stories and light fiction particularly country life. We have decided to pick one missing classic a month in the same way as we do for Westerns and Mills and Boon and try and filter them through. I started going through the customer requests to see if there was anything suitable but a lot of the titles so far have been imports. Also, the type of reader who likes the gentle reads is also the reader who wouldn’t normally suggest titles. It tends to be their carers ringing on behalf of them and they just happen to mention that they like people like Miss Read and Gervase Phinn. It’s a time consuming job and I still need to put a little bit of time aside to find some suitable titles myself. I’ll probably spend a bit of time tomorrow night on this.

I spent my Wednesday evening scouting round various book sites for ideas. Unfortunately my favourite source The Bookseller hasn’t turned up for several months and after several attempts with different log ins to read it online, I failed completely. It seems that the log ins only work for the Stockport staff and not Peterborough! With the combination of The Guardian’s culture page, Waterstones and Amazon, I managed to get together a very varied list - from William Boyd’s latest one, Mary Quant’s autobiography, Essie Fox’s The Somnambulist (TV Club title), The Art of Fielding by Chad Harding (a big title in America) and a biography on Ayton Senna that has been reissued amongst other titles.

It was the monthly vote for the customer requests to see which ones were up for consideration in next week’s book selection meeting. I’m having real difficulties here remembering which ones actually went through! I think there was one called Lion and the Unicorn about the relationship between Disraeli and Gladstone, a recent book on the Churchill family and something that had Darcy in the title by Victoria Connelly. I also seem to remember Cecelia Ahern and a lengthy sea stories series by Alan Mallinson being in the mix along with several titles that had already been snapped up by the commercial publishers. I hope this doesn’t mean that we going to struggle on Wednesday to find enough decent customer requests to select.

I was quite pleased to see that the man behind the Public Libraries News Blog (http://www.publiclibrariesnews.com/) was named as this year’s IWR Information Professional of the year. It is a blog that I look at to keep up to date of what’s happening in public libraries. Another useful website I use a lot is the Voices for the Library site at http://www.voicesforthelibrary.org.uk/wordpress/.

I’ve managed to send my revalidation log to CILIP but still haven’t had an acknowledgement. Perhaps this might be to do with the reorganisation of CILIP itself or that the qualifications are going through change. January may be quiet on the professional development front but February looks better. I’ve booked myself on a html refresher course run by RNIB and CSG have a committee meeting planned. They should look good for the Portfolio. The CILIP Big Day in Newcastle looks good in September but I'm not sure if I'll be able to go to this - our new library system should be coming out then. Perhaps if the new system is delayed, I could take a day off as annual leave and pay for myself to go up. I've not made much progress in my search for a mentor. I must try harder here.

Monday 16 January 2012

Frenzy to a fizzle - January 9th-13th 2012

I got to admit I found it hard to motivate myself this week to blog about my week at work. Probably because in general not a lot happened! The week started in a frenzy but fizzled out by Friday, helped by the unusually sunny weather for January. Judging by the calls received, I think a circular letter had been sent out to readers that had less than 10 books on their list.

The break from the routine for me was that it was my turn to represent the Reader Services Team which is just a formality since we preselect in advance. One of the important things is that we have a representative from the Production Department attend to keep us up to date with issues that can affect selection ie monthly quotas or we are selecting books that are too complex to produce in a particular format. The big issue at the moment is that we can’t pick any braille or giant print at the moment due to lack of capacity in production with the fear that we may have to deselect titles. This seems to be a recurring problem over the years and something that irritates me in that we have a service agreement with Production, yet they overestimate the quotas and don’t seem to build in a contingency plan to take into account of things like staff shortages due to redundancies. Although they have a representative at the meeting, we don’t get enough feedback to make decisions in advance. Although Production have got it wrong, it’s the customer - the National Library Services - that suffer and ultimately - the readers themselves as we end up losing a few months’ worth of selection and titles slip through the net. Thankfully talking books haven’t been affected and titles are being selected as normal. After the book selection meetings, it’s then my job to go through all the titles and move any customer requests to a different spread sheet. We did well this month as I moved an impressive 123 requests over altogether. It’s one of those jobs that takes longer than it sounds.

I managed to email my revalidation log for my second year to CILIP and am busy going through my log looking for gaps in my evidence to put in my portfolio. My next job is to look for a mentor as I’m going to need some guidance as I’ve never put a portfolio together before. My Chartership was in the days of the 6,000 word report. I’m a bit concerned that there’s not been enough professional development, my portfolio is looking rather slim. I’m hoping that’s where the mentor will come in and put me on the right track.

Saturday 7 January 2012

Christmas, portfolios and Ken Dodd - January 3rd-7th 2012

Christmas soon comes and goes with all the excitement of having a week off from week (more important than Christmas itself). I always have big unrealistic plans in the break which only get half fulfilled. I managed to catch up with my revalidation log to the end of the year (currently a very long word document reflecting on all my professional activities). I’ve taken the philosophy of reflect on everything and then when the time comes to sort out my final portfolio, just pick out the most relevant. I think it will be easier to take out than try and add after three years when the memory starts getting blurry. I managed to complete my log form for my second year ready to email to CILIP. I’m going to have another quick check for spellings and then send it off. I‘ve also started to assemble my portfolio and went through my evidence so far in the last 2 years and made a list of where I had gaps. I treated myself to a new box file and a couple of packets of plastic folders to organise everything after a recent course on building portfolios. I’ve given myself a deadline of the end of the month to get my form sent and gaps sorted. I’ve put this as one of my EARNs in my professional development plan for next year – Essential as opposed to Achievable/Realistic and Nice to do aims.

I’ve put engage in a professional activity each month as one of my Achievable/Realistic aims and now trying to plan ahead for these next few months to try and make sure I can put something down. I was going to put starting blogging about my work for December and keep a tab on the hours spent each month on my blog. I also had an email from the Communications Officer of the CSG Branch asking if I was still interested in helping out, I had initially volunteered in our last meeting and was christened the title of Communications Assistant. I’m initially helping out with the CILIP monthly emails – chasing committee members for ideas, collating the info and then emailing the finished result to CILIP by a given deadline. There’s also going to be some proof reading in the near future. It will be good experience and something else to include in my professional activities.

It’s been a busy week on the phones as expected and it has taken up most of my week. We had our Reader Services Team book selection meeting at last with all the usual arguments. I’m not sure that we got the mix quite right this month; we seem to be top heavy on non-fiction. It doesn’t help that the collection development topics were feminism, black issues and military history (non ww1 and ww2). I think we’ve restored the balance with the imports as we concentrated on crime, thrillers, romance and family stories. The selections are varied and include titles from Max Hastings – The Korean War to George R Martin’s A Game of Thrones and biographies as diverse as Ken Dodd and Malcolm X.

It’s my turn to go to the main book selection meeting next week and whoever goes, gets the bonus job of picking the Mills and Boon and Western titles. One of the titles has caused great hilarity – The Highwayman by Michele Hauf. One of our readers was keen to see more titles by this author, particularly the vampire ones – this one is vampire meet historical which will also please our Taken by the Viking fans (One of the big favourites with the readers).

I’ve been doing my least favourite job this week, catching up with the completed customer requests. It’s the job that gets me complaining the most. There has been a few weeks backlog due to the cataloguer being off in the last couple of weeks and for some unknown reason there was a lull in titles going “live” in general. There are pages of them and worse still, a lot of the titles that are ready are ones with loads of requests on them (the real must haves with the customers) - Jean M Auel’s latest, one of the many Diana Gabaldon Outlander titles, likewise Peter Robinson ( Inspector Banks) and The King’s Speech.

Friday saw a break in the routine as there was a realisation that we still had our Christmas display up on our Noticeboard. It was my turn to do the next display. The topic was our best reads for 2011. I found it difficult to pinpoint 2 standout books and had to cheat a bit and pick 2 books I had read recently and enjoyed – The Unseen by Katherine Webb and Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd. It made a nice change, designing a few quick posters and trying to think how to make the display eye-catching but not too cluttered.

Finally, after a few weeks rest, my son's blog crazy about chickens is back in operation again. Check it out on
http://mattcrazyaboutchickens-jane.blogspot.com/.