Dumpling in a Hanky

Late last month, I got a bit of an unpleasant surprise when I came home to find the front of my house covered in scaffolding. My first thought was that was that something was seriously and suddenly structurally wrong with my house, and the council had put it up as an emergency measure. Having checked the frontage, it was clear there were no big chunks falling off, so it wasn't the council. Maybe it was my neighbours - we'd agreed a few months before to have some work done on our adjoining building fronts, so perhaps it was them, and they'd either forgotten to mention it to me, or they had had a unexpected chance to get scaffolding and do the work at short notice (they run a construction company). But I checked...it wasn't them. Which left the option of the scaffolders being idiots, and confusing my house (on X Road) with the same house (on X Loan), or....someone putting scaffold on for an unknown reason! Luckily, after I went round to see the owners of the house on X Lo...

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...

As 2014 changes into 2015, my employment will be changing too, as I'll shortly be starting another role in a new workplace. Unfortunately, in October last year my previous employer went into administration, and although it was quickly bought out of administration by another law firm, there weren't any roles available for the library staff at the new firm. So it was time to launch into the job hunt again! I have the dubious honour of being the only person to have worked for the only two law firms in Scotland to go into administration, and at one point it was suggested to me that I could make a career out of approaching all the remaining firms and asking them to pay me not to work for them... ;) I did think that once again, I would have to leave the legal sector to find employment, but some fortunate timings mean that I will be staying in the sector, although I will be moving away from working directly with solicitors. My new role is also a permanent one, and as stable as any j...

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...

Right on their doorstep, they could invest in an unusual bit of property, and buy their own Tardis  in the form of an old Edinburgh police call box. They only need to find £15,000-£20,000, and they could be running their own coffee booth in no time! Form an orderly queue with your suggestions for legal/coffee based pun names....

This is a follow up to my post on Open Access in May. A few times recently in work, I've been asked if there's a publicly accessible version of an academic article available. This wasn't because we wanted to get a hold of a copy of the articles: we already had them through our subscription services, and the solicitors had read them. What the solicitors were wanting was a free, public version of the article, which they could direct clients and other contacts to, saying "read this, it's important/relevant/well written". They wanted to highlight that the content of the article was useful, and that the author was a reliable and authoritative source. Sadly, I wasn't able to get a hold of a copy of any of these articles, because the authors hadn't deposited a copy of their work into their institutional repositories. That meant that the solicitors couldn't direct their clients and contacts to read the useful materials written by those authors, and th...

I think it's almost standard now that most types of professionals these days have a LinkedIn profile. It effectively works as an online CV, allowing contacts to easily review your skills and experience, and lets you gather many disparate facts about you into one place, such as your non-work skills and experience. One element of the LinkedIn offering is that colleagues and contacts can "endorse" your skills, allowing you to build up a list of your abilities that have been verified by others. On the face of it, this is a handy option - people who know you and your skills are able to vouch for you, and allow others to get an unbiased view of what you can actually do. Skills would be selected from a pre-approved range of options. It all sounds sensible, and useful. However, the reality was a little different in practice. It turned out, those pre-defined options were actually quite wide ranging. And in some cases, somewhat odd. I've attached a screenshot of the current...