Dumpling in a Hanky

Last month, for the first time ever, my library took part in Doors Open Day. My organisation has taken part in DOD for many years, but the library had never been involved before. From my first days in the library, I was aware of the need to raise its visibility, both internally, and externally. We've been working hard internally to raise awareness of the service, so that was being dealt with. To add to that, taking part in Doors Open Day seemed to be a good way to show the public more of what goes on in the organisation, and what resources are available to the service users. My colleague and I worked hard to make sure that the library would be an interesting destination, and the public would know about it. Because the library is in a secure area, the only way to visit was to book onto one of the two tours running throughout the day, and choose at the end to come to the library. We made posters to leave at the booking desk, and another popular visitor area, to tell people how to g...

What do you do when you decide to do what is verging on library-based insanity, and basically scrap your current library service, and relaunch everything - physical layout, LMS, and classification system? In my case, spend a year, planning, developing, preparing….and then a frantic few weeks hauling stock! The background to this apparent madness is this: when I took on this role I inherited a library using a layout that didn’t seem to make sense, a classification system I wasn’t familiar with, and an LMS that had been in place for 20 years but didn’t seem suited to our needs. As I was new to the library, a major part of the time I had available while settling in during my initial few months was dedicated to exploring how well these things were working, both for users, and library staff. I had the benefit of my colleague also being new to the library, only a few months after me, so together we looked at these issues with fresh eyes.We came to the following conclusions: The ...

Let me begin by confessing: I am not a law firm lucky charm. I’ve worked for 2 different firms over a period of 18 months, both of which went into administration or merged with another firm, which left me unemployed twice in a short period of time. Unfortunately, my story isn’t unusual: changes in the legal market mean that these sort of events will happen more and more frequently, especially in the mid-sized law firms. My Nostradamus moment now is to predict that most mid-sized firms won’t exist within 5 years, as they get eaten up by the bigger firms, or split down into smaller, niche firms. So if you’re working in a small or mid-sized firm: you’re in a very risky position right now. So what can you do to both plan for the potential experience of having a job that disappears, and to get through it successfully? I’m going to give you some tips on what to do, when, and how to get through this. And I’ll be honest: a lot of this is unpleasant, but you can get through to the other sid...

Sometimes, you have so much to do, that you can't see what you've actually done. I'm feeling very much that way at the moment, so I thought I'd make a public list for myself of all the work and professional things I've done since taking up my role in mid January. Then maybe I'll feel less like I'm just not very good at anything. It's worth a try. Although for obvious reasons, I can't publicly say much about the baddest/hardest stuff, but...it's in there. Maybe it's not explicit about how hard it's been, but it's there. So: what have I done? Service management and development Replaced someone who ran the library for 21 years, who retired 3 months before I started, and gave me no handover information. Got 6 weeks of company/training on the library from an assistant, who then retired, leaving me as the only person in the organisation who knew anything about how the library actually worked. Done the assistant librarian and libra...

So, you think being a librarian is a sedentary activity, huh? Not so!! Since I started this role, I've worked far harder physically than I've had to do in a job for quite some time! The library building itself has 3 floors, and my office is on the 1st/mezzanine floor, so to get to my desk I go up 1 flight of stairs. To speak to my colleague, I come down 1 floor. Then to go to the bathroom, I have to go down 2 or 3 floors, or up 1, depending on where I choose to go. To see my manager on -1, I have to go down 1 flight of stairs from the ground floor, which makes it 2 floors down from my office. To go to another department, I have to go to -2. For other people, I have to go to -3. Other people are on floor 1, or 2. Other libraries are in another building on the same floor, or 1 floor down. And all of these people and places are in different but interlinked buildings, which don't always link directly. So to get to the 1st floor in one building, you need to go up to the 2n...

I'm just busy! So, in mid January, I started my new role...and was promptly informed that my colleague would be leaving in 2.5 months. YEEK! So I very quickly had to get myself up to speed on a lot of things: how things worked in the library, who our main users were and how they preferred the services to be delivered to them, what I was responsible for, who I should be working with on various cross-department projects, where all our stock is located, how we fit within the organisational structure, where we can offer more or improved services, and core things like how our circulation system works, and what our policies on multiple day-to-day tasks like binding are. Plus I undertook a fairly massive physical and electronic clutter clear out (if I never have to spend another day in a basement with motion sensitive lighting again, I'll be a happy girl) that could only be done while my colleague was here to staff the library when I was buried in old materials in a cellar. Alto...

I noticed an advert on the TV during the summer, and while watching it, I found myself becoming increasingly more irritated by its content as it went on. Then, not long after that, I saw another advert along the same lines, for the same group. I was reminded of my reaction to viewing those adverts last weekend, when I attended Library Camp Glasgow. One of the sessions I took part in covered advocacy, and what can we do to better promote the profession. The existence of these adverts is evidence of, to me, why we need to continue to work hard to show the wider public that "librarian" does not (and never has) equal "timid person who stamps books and says shhhh a lot". So, this is one of the adverts that so annoyed me, for Barclays Digital Eagles : Now, I'm not disputing the fact that the concept is great: Barclays are funding people specifically to assist those who don't have the skills needed to make full use of the internet, and the many opportuniti...

Land Registration (Scotland) Act 2012 seminar notes TUPE update notes Because my new role means that I'm regularly asked do to legal research, it also means that I need to make sure that my level of general knowledge of a wide range of legal topics is pretty high, and that it stays high. Helpfully, my employer runs in-house training sessions on all sorts of things, for all sorts of departments, and these seminars are also open to a range of staff. That means that my colleagues and I can take the chance to get some excellent information from speakers on relevant topics, both drawn from our own staff and from external experts. I've been learning about land law, employment/company law, and there's some environmental training coming up soon too. These sessions are interesting on multiple levels - it's great for me to be able to have access to the level of professional training that the solicitors have, which helps me get my knowledge up to a higher level, but it...

So, the good news is Lego, purveyor of fine, building brick based excitement, have released a "Librarian" minifig . Yay! Lego are a cool company, they're modern, and they make some great educational products, So, we'll be seeing a little figure of a modern information professional, a veritable ninja of knowledge: ready, willing and able to assist their users in any way they need, right? Wrong. Lego have gone with a stereotype of a librarian more suited to 1913 than 2013. Look - a book! A mug that says "shhh"! A cardigan, glasses, pleated skirt, frumpy hair and sensible shoes! Wow - this is really showing the face of the profession today! “Shhh!”   Books are just about the Librarian’s most favorite thing in the entire world. Reading them can take you on exciting adventures in far-off lands, introduce you to new friends and cultures, and let you discover poetry, classic literature, science fiction and much more. If only everybody loved to   read a...

So, after initially complaining that I felt a bit cast adrift , professionally, and then through discussions with other equally drifting mid career professionals, working out what we could do for ourselves in order to actually create the network we felt we needed, the beginnings of a plan are coming together. It's all thanks to lovely Moo ( @_Moo_ ), also known as Lynne Meehan , and her partner. They've got the technical skills and resources to take the experiment a bit further, and set up an forum to see how exactly we could make this work. If you'd like to be included as a Middler (loving that name, Lynne!), and take part in the experiment (AKA - poking about an online forum and axploring how to make things work as we go), either get in touch with Lynne directly (she's the Lady in Charge), or leave a comment below and I'll pass your details on to Lynne. Lets give it a try, shall we? After all, if we don't do it, who will?

Well, my last post triggered a lot of discussions: one big thing was that many people identified that they felt the same in regards to losing the momentum to push themselves, but that they didn't really mention it formally because they felt they couldn't give any input on how to fix the problem. But then that's not right - if you feel you can only speak up when you can fix a problem rather than be able to just identify that the problem exists, then that means there's a lot of silent people out there, quietly hoping for someone else to see and fix what's wrong. So, while talking about this feeling of a need for some sort of support, Bethan Ruddock ( @bethanar) and Celine Carty ( @cjclib ) and I started to try and work out what we felt we needed, and what was possible. Beth said that she was hoping to implement some sort of one-on-one mid-career support within SLA Europe, and Celine said she had been working on something for her group High Visibility Cataloguing ...