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.
Showing posts with label cpd23. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cpd23. Show all posts
Monday, 21 May 2012
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, 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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/.
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/.
Thursday, 29 December 2011
HRT, Martina Cole and the Christmas post - December 19th-23rd 2011
F1 Mania has continued to grip our household as Matthew frightens everybody else off the road - still loads of 10 grid penalties and disqualifications but we do now have a 12th and a 16th to our name. Matthew even got a pole position in qualifying but he had so many grid penalties he ended up back in 24th. Worse still, he has been relegated to HRT (Hispania Racing Team as opposed to Hormone Replacement Therapy) - the worse team on the grid.
The start of the week continued to be frantic with readers trying to get their books for Christmas though by Wednesday afternoon, things finally quietened down as readers became resigned to the fact that they may have left things abit too late for their Christmas books. Unfortunately we did get a small minority of readers who rang up to chase books that they had only ordered the day before and couldn't accept that Christmas does actually slow the post down. We also made sure that we cleared our in-tray ready for next year. Luckily the majority of the enquiries were just requests for print Talking Book lists. Unluckily, it was the week where it was the hunt for a photocopier that actually worked. I spent the majority of Wednesday having to keep dismantling the photocopier to rescue bits of paper that seem to get stuck in every place imagined.
The last few days gave me the opportunity to have a real good go at catching up with the customer requests. Claire Tomalin's biography on Charles Dickens has now fit 11 requests while we're gathering requests for Martina Cole's The Faithless as a rate of knots. More dilemma as ISIS will be doing this so we would have to buy this in.
We were going to have our Reader Services Team book selection meeting on Wednesday morning but thankfully we didn't get the infamous Mastersheet (list of titles to select from) back in time. Unfortunately, we're going to have to do it in the first week we're back. Something to look forward as it's the one thing that causes the most arguments in our Team. We also couldn't agree on what subject to have for collection development, one person wanted war but not WW1 or WW2, somebody else wanted black history while we had also received some feedback from a customer about the lack of books on Feminism in the library. We've gone for a compromise of picking 2 titles in each to start with and if we end up with a good pile, carry on for February. Fortunately it was quiet on Friday so I had a good attempt to look for some suitable titles. I also had a look in the old now defunct cassette library to see if there were some suitable titles for digitalisation and found some Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer in there. This job took longer than anticipated and it looks like I'm going to be continuing with this on my first day back at work.
The start of the week continued to be frantic with readers trying to get their books for Christmas though by Wednesday afternoon, things finally quietened down as readers became resigned to the fact that they may have left things abit too late for their Christmas books. Unfortunately we did get a small minority of readers who rang up to chase books that they had only ordered the day before and couldn't accept that Christmas does actually slow the post down. We also made sure that we cleared our in-tray ready for next year. Luckily the majority of the enquiries were just requests for print Talking Book lists. Unluckily, it was the week where it was the hunt for a photocopier that actually worked. I spent the majority of Wednesday having to keep dismantling the photocopier to rescue bits of paper that seem to get stuck in every place imagined.
The last few days gave me the opportunity to have a real good go at catching up with the customer requests. Claire Tomalin's biography on Charles Dickens has now fit 11 requests while we're gathering requests for Martina Cole's The Faithless as a rate of knots. More dilemma as ISIS will be doing this so we would have to buy this in.
We were going to have our Reader Services Team book selection meeting on Wednesday morning but thankfully we didn't get the infamous Mastersheet (list of titles to select from) back in time. Unfortunately, we're going to have to do it in the first week we're back. Something to look forward as it's the one thing that causes the most arguments in our Team. We also couldn't agree on what subject to have for collection development, one person wanted war but not WW1 or WW2, somebody else wanted black history while we had also received some feedback from a customer about the lack of books on Feminism in the library. We've gone for a compromise of picking 2 titles in each to start with and if we end up with a good pile, carry on for February. Fortunately it was quiet on Friday so I had a good attempt to look for some suitable titles. I also had a look in the old now defunct cassette library to see if there were some suitable titles for digitalisation and found some Andrea Dworkin and Germaine Greer in there. This job took longer than anticipated and it looks like I'm going to be continuing with this on my first day back at work.
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
3 christmas dinners and a 10th grid penalty - December 12th-16th 2011
A week after Matthew's birthday and the F1 game is still going strong. He has signed for Force India and there was huge excitement when he reached the dizzy heights of 19th on one of the qualifying sessions but it's been a week of 10 grid place penalties, disqualifications and a consistent 24th.
It's also been a succession of Christmas dinners with my Book Club's meal kicking off the proceedings - a decent helping of mussels and french fries at the Beehive, followed by a traditional roast the next day at my son's school(in my role as parent governor) and rounded off with fishcakes and salad for our Team meal out at the cuckoo. I'm going to go on a strict diet next week ready for Christmas.
We were supposed to have talked about Precious Bane for our Bookclub but only 2 people had managed to finish the book with not many good things to say. I read the first paragraph and decided that life was too short to decipher the Shropshire accent and left it. Definitely wins the award for the most unpopular book we've had, beating Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian which previously held this dubious record.
Workwise it's been a week dominated by New Books, RNIB's bimonthly magazine advertising the new titles in the library. Everyone has a section which they are responsible for - from running a report for their format for the last 2 months and then editing it to a set format. This isn't just for consistency and to make it professional but also to take into account that the magazine is produced in different formats. For example, to make the daisy version navigatable, we have to set the text out using different formats.
My role is to pull all the sections together and proof read it across the formats including checking the formatting, consistency and adding missing information. It's been a tighter deadline than usual so have found that a copy seems to be constantly at my side.
The calls for extra Christmas books still keep coming in. I've also had a string of wholesale changes to reader's lists. I'm guessing that as people begin to get more dependent on their books over the winter months, they are becoming more discerning on what they read. It can be a lengthy process, particularly if they're really specific in their taste and worse still, they've read everything we have to offer. The calls for Claire Tomalin's biography keep coming in, definitely need to select this next time around though there is a dilemma that Audiogo may pick this up and we may have to wait for this to come out as an Import.
We've managed to acquire noticeboard space in a prime spot near the canteen for a few months. This has given us a good and easy opportunity to promote the Reader Services Team. Last month, we had new films/TV drama tie-in's to books where we had some good titles available in alternative format including The Slap, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Help.
Last week we decided on books with a Christmas theme, my 2 books were Tolkien's Letters to Santa and Fannie Flagg's - A Redbird Christmas. We're taking it in turns to do the final display, my colleague went to town with loads of Christmas images to give the display a Christmassy finishing touch. It's my turn next month and we're talking about doing a display advertising our Bookclub as we're getting short of participants. I'm already getting my thoughts together.
It's also been a succession of Christmas dinners with my Book Club's meal kicking off the proceedings - a decent helping of mussels and french fries at the Beehive, followed by a traditional roast the next day at my son's school(in my role as parent governor) and rounded off with fishcakes and salad for our Team meal out at the cuckoo. I'm going to go on a strict diet next week ready for Christmas.
We were supposed to have talked about Precious Bane for our Bookclub but only 2 people had managed to finish the book with not many good things to say. I read the first paragraph and decided that life was too short to decipher the Shropshire accent and left it. Definitely wins the award for the most unpopular book we've had, beating Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian which previously held this dubious record.
Workwise it's been a week dominated by New Books, RNIB's bimonthly magazine advertising the new titles in the library. Everyone has a section which they are responsible for - from running a report for their format for the last 2 months and then editing it to a set format. This isn't just for consistency and to make it professional but also to take into account that the magazine is produced in different formats. For example, to make the daisy version navigatable, we have to set the text out using different formats.
My role is to pull all the sections together and proof read it across the formats including checking the formatting, consistency and adding missing information. It's been a tighter deadline than usual so have found that a copy seems to be constantly at my side.
The calls for extra Christmas books still keep coming in. I've also had a string of wholesale changes to reader's lists. I'm guessing that as people begin to get more dependent on their books over the winter months, they are becoming more discerning on what they read. It can be a lengthy process, particularly if they're really specific in their taste and worse still, they've read everything we have to offer. The calls for Claire Tomalin's biography keep coming in, definitely need to select this next time around though there is a dilemma that Audiogo may pick this up and we may have to wait for this to come out as an Import.
We've managed to acquire noticeboard space in a prime spot near the canteen for a few months. This has given us a good and easy opportunity to promote the Reader Services Team. Last month, we had new films/TV drama tie-in's to books where we had some good titles available in alternative format including The Slap, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Help.
Last week we decided on books with a Christmas theme, my 2 books were Tolkien's Letters to Santa and Fannie Flagg's - A Redbird Christmas. We're taking it in turns to do the final display, my colleague went to town with loads of Christmas images to give the display a Christmassy finishing touch. It's my turn next month and we're talking about doing a display advertising our Bookclub as we're getting short of participants. I'm already getting my thoughts together.
Saturday, 17 December 2011
Pizza, Cake and A Tiny Bit Marvellous - Dec 5th-9th 2011
Well it's week 2 of my week at work blog, (though a week late!) and the phones have been intensive, with the cold weather and Christmas holidays looming, the winter readers have arrived en masse. Fortunately for me it's been a 4 day week so some respite. It was my son's 13th birthday so in amongst the mass Christmas card writing and wrapping presents, I've had a sleepover and birthday food to contend with. I'm a "domestic ungoddess" where cooking and housework is concerned, that's why I'm better off at work! As usual disaster struck and I forgot to separate my egg yolks in my ice cream, my home made pizza ended up in a sea of liquid, my chocolate icing swam off my cake and my crumble topping swapped places with my rhubharb! The boys didn't kill each other and ate the food though so I call that a success.
We're mastering the world of the F1 computer game where it's a miracle if anybody finishs a lap yet alone a race and we haven't moved above 24th. The good thing is that we all like taking it in turns to be Vettel so it's sweet revenge to see him last, unable to stay on the track and black flagged in most of the races.
Back to work matters, top topics this week still seem to be mass ordering from New Books and sorting themselves extra books for Christmas. I've been making sure that I've asked each reader if they need extra books over the holidays and it's surprising how many readers hadn't realised about the extra books and it's like Christmas has come early for some of them!
I've also spent abit of time catching up with the customer requests and it's always interesting to see which titles come up each month. We get approximately 150-200 requests a month and while some titles are pretty obscure, out-of-print or very expensive to purchase, there has been some real gems that have slipped through the net over the years. I guess this isn't so surprising given the small allocation we have each month (currently 41 new titles and 16 imports) with customer requests taking a good proportion of these once we start including missing series, retranscription requests and collection development into account. It's not an easy job as we are catering for a diverse taste, for example, this month's requests that have hit the magic "3" requests have ranged from Susan Boyle's autobiography to Jan Morris's Britannica Pax Trilogy and Dawn French's A Tiny Bit Marvellous to Melvyn Bragg's Credo.
We can always tell which books are being heavily plugged, particularly Radio 4, requests for Claire Tomalin's biography on Dickens keeps cropping up all over the place. Other books that recently caught the readers' imagination were Vasily Grossman's Love and Fate and Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes.
I also spent some time going through a batch of recent booksellers and Saturday Guardian's to get a nice long list of suggestions for future Talking Books. It's one of those jobs where I don't mind doing in the evenings and as well as keeping abrest of what's happening in the book world, there's some good articles about public libraries with current issues being library closures and libraries lending e-books.
We're mastering the world of the F1 computer game where it's a miracle if anybody finishs a lap yet alone a race and we haven't moved above 24th. The good thing is that we all like taking it in turns to be Vettel so it's sweet revenge to see him last, unable to stay on the track and black flagged in most of the races.
Back to work matters, top topics this week still seem to be mass ordering from New Books and sorting themselves extra books for Christmas. I've been making sure that I've asked each reader if they need extra books over the holidays and it's surprising how many readers hadn't realised about the extra books and it's like Christmas has come early for some of them!
I've also spent abit of time catching up with the customer requests and it's always interesting to see which titles come up each month. We get approximately 150-200 requests a month and while some titles are pretty obscure, out-of-print or very expensive to purchase, there has been some real gems that have slipped through the net over the years. I guess this isn't so surprising given the small allocation we have each month (currently 41 new titles and 16 imports) with customer requests taking a good proportion of these once we start including missing series, retranscription requests and collection development into account. It's not an easy job as we are catering for a diverse taste, for example, this month's requests that have hit the magic "3" requests have ranged from Susan Boyle's autobiography to Jan Morris's Britannica Pax Trilogy and Dawn French's A Tiny Bit Marvellous to Melvyn Bragg's Credo.
We can always tell which books are being heavily plugged, particularly Radio 4, requests for Claire Tomalin's biography on Dickens keeps cropping up all over the place. Other books that recently caught the readers' imagination were Vasily Grossman's Love and Fate and Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes.
I also spent some time going through a batch of recent booksellers and Saturday Guardian's to get a nice long list of suggestions for future Talking Books. It's one of those jobs where I don't mind doing in the evenings and as well as keeping abrest of what's happening in the book world, there's some good articles about public libraries with current issues being library closures and libraries lending e-books.
Monday, 5 December 2011
1984, Reading-4-life, I've finally got started - Nov 28th-Dec 2nd 2011
At last, I've finally got a chance to write on my blog (a month later than planned) as I've spent alot of time helping my son set his own blog up about his hens.
I wanted to get in to the habit of blogging on a weekly basis about my previous week at work for a number of reasons. Firstly, it will be a chance to reflect on my work while secondly, it will give people an idea of working in a library, albeit slightly an unconventional one. Also I just like writing.
The phones were pretty constant, dealing with phone enquiries takes up the majority of my time. The popular calls have been readers ordering extra books for Christmas, such as the faith of the postal service, and ordering from the latest issue of the 2 library magazines - Read On (particularly from the article about Scandinavian Crime authors) and New Books. New Books is particularly interesting as the Team can see which titles are appearing to be the most popular which is useful as I'm involved in book selection and it gives us an indication if we're getting it right. I also seem to have a run where I feel like I'm dealing with the same enquiry - a feeling of deja vu. Last week I had a run of people wanting authors who write like Catherine Cookson where I find myself going round the UK and reeling off the authors as I reach each city in turn, golden age crime authors and British TV crime authors. I did volunteer to contribute to the next issue of the Who writes like book but they were overrun with volunteers so I missed out.
Another job that takes up another large chunk of my week is managing the customer requests where we get 150-200 suggestions a month. I circulated last month's requests to all of the Team to vote on them. The ones that reach a certain amount of votes then go on to the "MasterSheet" - the spreadsheet we use each month for book selection. Unfortunately due to various reasons I only had 5 out of 8 people voting and to make matters worst, we all voted for completely different titles! I finally managed to narrow it down to a final 15 suggestions, an eclectic mix as well from Waiting to exhale - Terry McMillan, a misery memoir from Cupcake Brown, autobiographies by Ray Charles and Andy Kershaw, Pure by Andrew Miller, a much needed up-to-date suggestion on NLP and some old favourites such as Audrey Howard and Minette Walters.
Last week also saw our 6 weekly stock familiarisation meeting where we read something in a given genre or explore authors that we wouldn't normally read ourselves but we find ourselves constantly putting them on readers' lists. If you're advising readers about books, you need to not only know your stock but also be knowledgeable about the genres and authors themselves. It was Political Fiction's turn to be explored and a good selection of titles were covered including Alan Furst (Spies of the Balkans), Michael Dobbs (House of Cards), Ian McEwan (Amsterdam), Robert Harris (Fatherland) and George Orwell (1984) which was my offering. I quite like political fiction myself though 1 or 2 of my colleagues weren't looking forward to this. They were pleasantly surprised, the biggest one coming from Alan Furst where he turned out to be more literary than expected and was described as beautifully written. The least liked was Amsterdam which was described as shallow with unlikeable characters. I quite enjoyed 1984 myself as it made me think and there was an element of truth in it though most people had been put off this as they had to read it for school. It was bleak and relentless though, abit like Cormac McCartney's The Road.
As it is supposed to be technically quieter at this time of the year, there's a mass attempt to update our Talking Book genre/subject lists of selected titles which we send out to customers. I worked on the new War list which covers both fiction and factual titles (100 of each). It looks a good mix and includes the manly war authors like Douglas Reeman, Leslie Thomas and Patrick Robinson to family books set in the war like Elizabeth Elgin, Lilian Harry and R F Delderfield - An avenue goes to war. I've also tried to cover a mixture of wars from Bernard Cornwell's Azincourt to Karl Marlantes - Matterhorn. Non fiction also goes across the board from Crimean to Afghanistan, Boer War to the Falklands though the 2WW dominates as this is the one that mainly gets requested as a lot of our readers were actively involved in it.
I also finally finished my report on a recent course I attended in Derby called Reading 4 Life, ran by CILIP East Midlands Group. It was a chance to see the different reader development activities going on in the public libraries and to see if any of these were feasible and could be adapted for ourselves. I thought the most usable one was the Northamptonshire Libraries “Guiding Lights” - how books can change a person’s life. Leicester City - Health Day/Libraries are good for your health also looked promising for ourselves to adapt.
The course also covered a couple of workshops - Using Social Media and Talking about books. Again, there were a few ideas in the Using Social Media course that we could develop there. Derbyshire Reading Detectives Blog looked at literature written about the area by authors in that area. Particularly interesting was that alot of these authors have never been published so the blog had provided an avenue to get their work exposed. We get alot of readers sending in their unpublished material in the hope that we will put it in the Talking book Library. Maybe we could have a blog which promoted their work instead.
Westminster Libraries was also recommended as having a good blog. I liked their idea of an advent calendar of books (a bit late to set up this year) and getting their staff's children or members of their family to recommend books.
We've also had some posters of various initiatives from various library authorities emailed afterwards. North Kesteven had a food festival linked in with books, perhaps we could do a World Book Day event and link it in with a world food festival.
I wanted to get in to the habit of blogging on a weekly basis about my previous week at work for a number of reasons. Firstly, it will be a chance to reflect on my work while secondly, it will give people an idea of working in a library, albeit slightly an unconventional one. Also I just like writing.
The phones were pretty constant, dealing with phone enquiries takes up the majority of my time. The popular calls have been readers ordering extra books for Christmas, such as the faith of the postal service, and ordering from the latest issue of the 2 library magazines - Read On (particularly from the article about Scandinavian Crime authors) and New Books. New Books is particularly interesting as the Team can see which titles are appearing to be the most popular which is useful as I'm involved in book selection and it gives us an indication if we're getting it right. I also seem to have a run where I feel like I'm dealing with the same enquiry - a feeling of deja vu. Last week I had a run of people wanting authors who write like Catherine Cookson where I find myself going round the UK and reeling off the authors as I reach each city in turn, golden age crime authors and British TV crime authors. I did volunteer to contribute to the next issue of the Who writes like book but they were overrun with volunteers so I missed out.
Another job that takes up another large chunk of my week is managing the customer requests where we get 150-200 suggestions a month. I circulated last month's requests to all of the Team to vote on them. The ones that reach a certain amount of votes then go on to the "MasterSheet" - the spreadsheet we use each month for book selection. Unfortunately due to various reasons I only had 5 out of 8 people voting and to make matters worst, we all voted for completely different titles! I finally managed to narrow it down to a final 15 suggestions, an eclectic mix as well from Waiting to exhale - Terry McMillan, a misery memoir from Cupcake Brown, autobiographies by Ray Charles and Andy Kershaw, Pure by Andrew Miller, a much needed up-to-date suggestion on NLP and some old favourites such as Audrey Howard and Minette Walters.
Last week also saw our 6 weekly stock familiarisation meeting where we read something in a given genre or explore authors that we wouldn't normally read ourselves but we find ourselves constantly putting them on readers' lists. If you're advising readers about books, you need to not only know your stock but also be knowledgeable about the genres and authors themselves. It was Political Fiction's turn to be explored and a good selection of titles were covered including Alan Furst (Spies of the Balkans), Michael Dobbs (House of Cards), Ian McEwan (Amsterdam), Robert Harris (Fatherland) and George Orwell (1984) which was my offering. I quite like political fiction myself though 1 or 2 of my colleagues weren't looking forward to this. They were pleasantly surprised, the biggest one coming from Alan Furst where he turned out to be more literary than expected and was described as beautifully written. The least liked was Amsterdam which was described as shallow with unlikeable characters. I quite enjoyed 1984 myself as it made me think and there was an element of truth in it though most people had been put off this as they had to read it for school. It was bleak and relentless though, abit like Cormac McCartney's The Road.
As it is supposed to be technically quieter at this time of the year, there's a mass attempt to update our Talking Book genre/subject lists of selected titles which we send out to customers. I worked on the new War list which covers both fiction and factual titles (100 of each). It looks a good mix and includes the manly war authors like Douglas Reeman, Leslie Thomas and Patrick Robinson to family books set in the war like Elizabeth Elgin, Lilian Harry and R F Delderfield - An avenue goes to war. I've also tried to cover a mixture of wars from Bernard Cornwell's Azincourt to Karl Marlantes - Matterhorn. Non fiction also goes across the board from Crimean to Afghanistan, Boer War to the Falklands though the 2WW dominates as this is the one that mainly gets requested as a lot of our readers were actively involved in it.
I also finally finished my report on a recent course I attended in Derby called Reading 4 Life, ran by CILIP East Midlands Group. It was a chance to see the different reader development activities going on in the public libraries and to see if any of these were feasible and could be adapted for ourselves. I thought the most usable one was the Northamptonshire Libraries “Guiding Lights” - how books can change a person’s life. Leicester City - Health Day/Libraries are good for your health also looked promising for ourselves to adapt.
The course also covered a couple of workshops - Using Social Media and Talking about books. Again, there were a few ideas in the Using Social Media course that we could develop there. Derbyshire Reading Detectives Blog looked at literature written about the area by authors in that area. Particularly interesting was that alot of these authors have never been published so the blog had provided an avenue to get their work exposed. We get alot of readers sending in their unpublished material in the hope that we will put it in the Talking book Library. Maybe we could have a blog which promoted their work instead.
Westminster Libraries was also recommended as having a good blog. I liked their idea of an advent calendar of books (a bit late to set up this year) and getting their staff's children or members of their family to recommend books.
We've also had some posters of various initiatives from various library authorities emailed afterwards. North Kesteven had a food festival linked in with books, perhaps we could do a World Book Day event and link it in with a world food festival.
Monday, 28 November 2011
Crazy about chickens - my life after 23 steps
So much for continuing my blog on a regular basis after 23 steps, I've not had a chance to touch it. Instead I've been helping my 12 year son set up his own blog about his chickens. He isn't very keen on writing normally but the idea of writing about his hens and posting pictures of his hens on the web for the world to see has captured his imagination. We're posting blogs on a regular basis and constantly redesigning his page to add more gadgets. I've actually gone back and added a few extras to my site and have learnt a few new things like adding photos to postings. We did try to add a video clip but it kept failing so any suggestions on how to get this to work will be very welcome.
My son's website is http://mattcrazyaboutchickens-jane.blogspot.com/
My son's website is http://mattcrazyaboutchickens-jane.blogspot.com/
Sunday, 30 October 2011
Thing 23 - I've finally made it
I’ve finally made it though there were times I thought I might just quietly stop and hope nobody would notice.
My professional development plan reads more like a To-do list for next year and I've decided to split it into a more manageable 3 categories - Essential/Time-specific, Realistic/Achievable and Nice to do if have the opportunity.
Essential/Time-specific
Continue with revalidation
Find mentor
Realistic/Achievable
Carry on with blog - ie Revalidation and general work
Improve my blog
Continue to tweet
Improve my LinkedIn Account
Contribute to online library discussions
Contribute to a “library day in a working life project” wiki
Continue with CSG committee
Try to participate in a CPD activity each month
Nice to do if have the opportunity
Investigate online course on podcasts mentioned in one of the 23 Things
Look into Prezi and Slideshare
Get involved in advocacy work
Organise a library event
Do some voluntary work or job shadowing
Try to get involved in some project or extra activity at work
I also did a SWOT analysis and came up with the following:-
Strengths
Currently have a library job
Professional development is encouraged
I'm chartered
Don’t mind which library sector I work for
Always keen to look for opportunities to widen skills and develop professional awareness
Weaknesses
Very little opportunity to do professional work in current job
Quality and depth of my professional library experience is limited
Not skilled enough for a lot of the library jobs on offer - can stretch it to get to the interview stage but interviewers can soon find the gaps
Can’t move to a different area in the country to find work, tied to the East Midlands
Opportunities
Being made redundant may offer opportunities including voluntary work
Nearly paid off mortgage so may be able to consider part time work in the future
Threats
Job isn’t very stable
Wider economy - lack of library opportunities in general
Getting too old
My professional development plan reads more like a To-do list for next year and I've decided to split it into a more manageable 3 categories - Essential/Time-specific, Realistic/Achievable and Nice to do if have the opportunity.
Essential/Time-specific
Continue with revalidation
Find mentor
Realistic/Achievable
Carry on with blog - ie Revalidation and general work
Improve my blog
Continue to tweet
Improve my LinkedIn Account
Contribute to online library discussions
Contribute to a “library day in a working life project” wiki
Continue with CSG committee
Try to participate in a CPD activity each month
Nice to do if have the opportunity
Investigate online course on podcasts mentioned in one of the 23 Things
Look into Prezi and Slideshare
Get involved in advocacy work
Organise a library event
Do some voluntary work or job shadowing
Try to get involved in some project or extra activity at work
I also did a SWOT analysis and came up with the following:-
Strengths
Currently have a library job
Professional development is encouraged
I'm chartered
Don’t mind which library sector I work for
Always keen to look for opportunities to widen skills and develop professional awareness
Weaknesses
Very little opportunity to do professional work in current job
Quality and depth of my professional library experience is limited
Not skilled enough for a lot of the library jobs on offer - can stretch it to get to the interview stage but interviewers can soon find the gaps
Can’t move to a different area in the country to find work, tied to the East Midlands
Opportunities
Being made redundant may offer opportunities including voluntary work
Nearly paid off mortgage so may be able to consider part time work in the future
Threats
Job isn’t very stable
Wider economy - lack of library opportunities in general
Getting too old
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
Thing 22 - Volunteering
I have volunteered in the past to get the necessary library experience before I applied to go to library school. I tried to apply for library jobs but was unsuccessful as I didn't have any relevant experience so voluntary work was the other alternative. It was quite hard finding a voluntary placement at the time and I ended up writing to several libraries in the East Midlands before I was offered an initial 6 week placement with Gedling Libraries. This gave me a good insight into not only the role of the Community Librarian but also experience across the board - from working on a busy reference desk/local history area at Arnold Library to general library duties (I had no experience whatsoever in the library so everything was a plus). I continued to volunteer at Carlton Library on Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings which benefitted everybody as not only did I gain additional experience, there was an extra pair of hands helping at the busy Saturday morning counter and my quick typing skills meant that I gained the job of typing out the overdues on Tuesday evenings (it was pre-computer days).
I think this stood me in good step to gain a bursary, in addition to having a good degree. I also think I may have struggled with some aspects of the course if I hadn't done the voluntary work and not seen some of the library work in practice.
I also did voluntary work again after I finished my course to try and boost my experience as I found that I still didn't really have enough experience to get a library job straight away. This time, it was Mencap and Dial (UK). I think this experience helped me to get the job at the RNIB rather than my paid work at the FE Colleges.
I have also put on my list of things to do a small stint of volunteering next year ie perhaps 1 day a week for a month, particularly if I have enough holidays saved up to use. It's something that I'm going to look into and see what options are available as it's a way of developing new skills, making new contacts and also just getting a chance to work in a different library sector. I will certainly volunteer again if I'm made redundant from my current post.
Volunteering should be something that benefits both parties, unfortunately I've seen people being made redundant and then a few months later, volunteers are doing that same work. It's that abuse that gives volunteers (and also temporary staff) a bad name.
I think this stood me in good step to gain a bursary, in addition to having a good degree. I also think I may have struggled with some aspects of the course if I hadn't done the voluntary work and not seen some of the library work in practice.
I also did voluntary work again after I finished my course to try and boost my experience as I found that I still didn't really have enough experience to get a library job straight away. This time, it was Mencap and Dial (UK). I think this experience helped me to get the job at the RNIB rather than my paid work at the FE Colleges.
I have also put on my list of things to do a small stint of volunteering next year ie perhaps 1 day a week for a month, particularly if I have enough holidays saved up to use. It's something that I'm going to look into and see what options are available as it's a way of developing new skills, making new contacts and also just getting a chance to work in a different library sector. I will certainly volunteer again if I'm made redundant from my current post.
Volunteering should be something that benefits both parties, unfortunately I've seen people being made redundant and then a few months later, volunteers are doing that same work. It's that abuse that gives volunteers (and also temporary staff) a bad name.
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