Dumpling in a Hanky

Recently, for the first time, I’m involved in a stressy legal transaction. I’ve sold one property, and I’m buying another – when I bought the first property, I was a first time buyer: no chain, no issues, just finances to get sorted, and conveyancing fees to pay. This time around, I have the finances of the property I’m leaving (along with any final bill from the Totally Incompetent and Deeply Hated Factoring Company) to deal with, a new mortgage to apply for, the transfer of the old mortgage from the old mortgage company to the new mortgage company, the transfer of mortgage cash and deposit to the owner of the property I'm buying, and legal/conveyancing fees for buying and selling to cover. So, while one property's definitely sold, I'm still waiting for confirmation of the one that I've bought is officially bought. Now, as a librarian, I deal with information. My users ask me for information all the time, and I try and get it for them. Sometimes, this information can...

For Thing 22 , we're being asked to discuss the idea of volunteering, and whether we have ever done this in a professional capacity. I have to admit that, since qualifying, I've not actually done anything in the way of volunteering in libraries, but it was probably my volunteering in a library that got me onto my library course in the first place. After realising during my uni course that science was not going to be the career for me, and locating a postgrad course that looked interesting, and local (Scotland is not exactly swamped with universities that run library postgrad courses), I bumbled my way through my undergrad, and got ready to apply for a course that I had heard had far more applications than available places. So I needed to convince the organisers that I was committed to the idea of being a librarian, and that they should let me on the course. Due to the "interesting" approach of my uni and personal advisor (i.e. they didn't manage or advise in a...

Image credit Whatever happened to 21 being a big deal? You don't get anything exciting when you turn 21, other than, for some reason, a lot of cards with a key on them. It's a bit of a cheat, really - all the good stuff happened at 16, or 18. Hopefully, Thing 21 won't be like that. Oh. It's about promoting myself. I hate that. I think I'd rather have a card with a key on it, to be honest... Anyhoo, I'm meant to be compiling a list of my interests, my strengths, and examples of when I've done things demonstrating a skill that stemmed from an interest. And then update my CV database with those. And share interview tips or experience I've had in my career. Well, it's been a long time since I was last interviewed and (fingers crossed), I'm not planning to need to be interviewed in the near future, so any tips or experiences are in the distant past. Although the HR manager who kept accidentally playing footsie with me under the table whe...

For this Thing , I'm meant to be blogging or thinking about my Library Route/Root, or the path that brought me to librarianship, back in the Good Old Days. However, I was involved in the discussions that kicked off the creation of the wiki, and have blogged both my library route , and my root  previously, so if anyone was particularly excited to find out, they can have a look at those - there's been no major changes since I wrote them. I haven't however had a look at many of the other entries since the wiki was established in 2009, so I went over to poke about in some of the newer entries. From reading a good few of those, it seems that librarian career paths can mostly be summed up as: I didn't ever consciously think of libraries as a career, but ended up in them by accident, and it was a happy accident. I started off as/qualified in something else, but I realised eventually that libraries were for me. I always knew I wanted to be a librarian. It seems that ...

Old law books are the like the ginger children of the book world: they exist, but nobody likes to acknowledge the fact. Along with other factual texts for areas like science and medicine, an old law book is immediately discarded with joyful glee by users as soon as a new edition appears in the library, because relying on old law books is a dangerous thing - you don't want to be the lawyer caught out because new case law or legislation that contradicts the point you want to make has been created since the edition you're using. Often, the preceding edition of a text will be retained for reference if a substantial amount of the contents remain unchanged (with big warning stickers on the covers stating that it's not current, please check the current version for more recent information), but any books older than that preceding edition are usually despatched to the Great Big Recycling Box. Stingray skin, one option for making an interesting book cover! However, certain text...