The unbearable lightness of cookies

Today the librarians bring home made food for a library workers’ buffet. We tell the assistants just to turn up and get fed and they seem to appreciate this. One colleague’s daughter has baked a sackload of raisin cookies, so we award her an honorary Higher to go with the rest of today’s exam results. Feel a bit sluggish all afternoon and wonder just what was in those cookies…

Meet with IT Training colleague to discuss what we are going to say in an hour’s teaching slot we’ve bagged on the PGCHET. Feeling singularly uninspired but then remember best remedy is plagiarism and ask another librarian whether I can beg borrow or steal an activity she did at a staff development event way back when.

Start to prepare sessions for the summer school that isn’t proper summer school – still don’t know whether I will have 5 or 25 students or which disciplines they will be covering. Programme is quite tight so despair over lack of time to fit much in. Even though apparently I talk fast.

Member of staff rings up with questions about Google Scholar. She has mysteriously found a PDF of an article to which we don’t subscribe… luck of the draw… good chance to tell her though that various current mysteries will be resolved soon and behold I bring all new subject guides to the portal.

Thinking I should really start looking at my next Presidential report for CDG tonight. Dashed off a quick book review for Scottish Division newsletter, Focus, this morning. Also making headway organising another Revalidation event – some folk are still registered for the process even though ultimately it is going to disappear and be replaced with a light touch CPD scheme.

Ah, constant change, what can you do?

Jiggery Pokery

Skived off blogging yesterday so missed the opportunity to say pinch, punch, first day of the month, *no return* – as we used to do in the playground. (I’m coming over all Iona Opie…)

Tried to cram a quart into a pint pot’s worth of time today. Felt a lot like packing for one of my holidays, kitchen-sink style.

Trying to regain the plot on information literacy. What kind of reports do we need to write this year, bearing in mind new currents that are afoot in the uni and the feedback from our IL review? How can we make reporting our friend and not duplicate effort needlessly?

New electronic resources are in the pipeline but it’s a full time job catching up with the details of the packages, prices and mechanics of them all. Oh, and letting people know what we’ve got. Need to go and make some hard decisions about print stock too, but couldn’t quite face it this afternoon. I need to write a report on scholarly electronic provision soon and have not a clue what to put in it – line manager made helpful suggestions and assured me there were number crunching experts on hand – but still feeling just that wee bit of panic.

Prepared a short presentation for SALCTG (Scottish Academic Libraries Consortium Training Group) – they’re having a Web 2.0 show and tell day on Wednesday in Edinburgh. I’m going to chat a bit about a wiki we used in some first year teaching and assessment.

Marked a few reassessments and sighed. Why resubmit and not include all the necessary components of the assessment? Why bother if you don’t improve your mark or in some cases actually fare worse than first time around?

Evening off tonight? Oh yes; I think so.