Warmups required

Teach summer school students today for 2 whole hours and realise I am definitely not match fit. Keep launching into long explanations and then having to stop and catch my breath. Completely bamboozle thewm about e-books, referencing and all kinds. A few little surprises too as I test drive the new library web pages and discover various Shibboleth nasties.

Not much else to report. Tum ti tum. Completed my papers for officers’ meeting over the weekend, so hoping for a quiet week or two on the CDG front.

The barefoot librarian

What is the weather about? Pouring rain this morning so out come the winter coat, boots and such like. Now it has gone all muggy and my feet are burning up. Dare I risk letting them out or is that just too unkind to colleagues?

Shibboleth day so lots of things changing. Need to update guides that I’ve only just written with great behemoth URLs that hopefully will take students where they want to go. (Shibboleth and behemoth in one paragraph… very biblical… just bring on the dugong and away we go).

Finally manage to email staff about information literacy classes. The main aim being to make my spreadsheet look nice and tidy. Much mapping of this to that and the other. Perhaps today I will even get to start writing up staff development events I attended 2 months ago.

CDG still in a bit of a summer lull but many missives from CILIP to read and digest and inwardly mark. Also signs of pre-officer meeting activity. I think we are all dusting off our to-do lists and reminding ourselves what it’s all about.

Had we but world enough and time

A day of both unexpected progress and unforeseen setbacks.

That scary paper I was wrestling with? I sent a long email with lots of answers to the academic’s questions, and he is happy. The paper itself doesn’t need any further redrafting before its public debut. Result

Manage to send a few more emails by way of information literacy liaison. Most of the computing staff are away anyhow so no great hurry except that I would like my tasklist to major in black rather than red tasks.

Go to a rather confusing-yet-enlightening meeting about the summer school that is not the proper summer school but involves all the subject areas and and doesn’t have a name. The session I will be running for it is uncannily similar to the one for ‘proper’ summer school. Needless to say everyone wants to camp out in nice library teaching room for the duration of the entire fortnight-long performance. Explain at least six times that I can only take 25 students at a time…

Our local public library no longer has a complete set of British Standards. This is a major blow since they are our backup and we are currently between e-resources! “Oh bother” said Pooh.

Update the freshly minted library portal pages with the new Shibboleth URLs. Great phone call from an engineering colleague: ‘Amanda, what’s this thing beginning with S that I can’t pronounce?’