Tales from the CDG Tardis

So here I am at SALCTG’s Show and Tell Web 2.0 extravaganza. About 25 good library staff and true have gathered in a windowless PC lab at Napier Uni, forgoing bright warm sunshine outside, to find out just what the heck everyone else is actually doing in the web 2.0 arena. We’ve talked wikis and blogs, catalogue widgets and instant message enquiry services, and flown around the Sistine Chapel in Second Life. We’ve shared a few frustrations and misconceptions and many of us have felt outclassed by others’ presentations. There is so much more to be learned but it all needs time. I need to get under the bonnet more and gain confidence to enhance things, peek at the HTML a bit, not just go bargain basement with everything.

Stuff I’ll be looking up that I haven’t tried before… Meebo; Dapper; FeedBurner; Eurekster. Maybe. If I have time. Eat an Aero bar to sustain myself.

Have a good chat at lunchtime with a PhD student who is researching the psychology of learning technologies… plenty to analyse there I shouldn’t wonder! Actually find I have some business cards in my purse so encourage him to keep in touch.

The world is small and one of the delegates turns out to be a fellow musician who knows some muso friends of mine. And there are biscuits, hurrah! I need my strength if I’m to make it through Peebles tomorrow…

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.

Saturday - no work, no visitors, no job applications to write. In fact I get to have some free time! Go to the garden centre and buy compost and pots to pot up the patio roses my inlaws gave me. I am a real newbie to gardening - it’s the one thing I do where it really doesn’t matter if I totally screw it up, and that makes it therapeutic. I’m constantly amazed by stuff that manages to grow in spite of my mauling and drowning it.

Also hop on to good old LibraryThing, fabulous web 2.0 amateur cataloguing tool (I can hear you raising your hands in horror). Check out my complete library here. I add a new book to my personal special collection. This is a small but growing collection of first edition children’s books from the 1970s and 1980s. A little indulgence to remind me, in this age of e-everything, that a book is a Precious Thing. My new book is a copy of The golden key by Victorian writer George MacDonald, beautifully illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Sendak is so much more than just Where the wild things are - not that ‘wild things’ isn’t fantastic. I used to work with someone who is an expert on George MacDonald. Incredible how talented librarians are, and how generally interested in life and stuff.

Continue writing and mailing my reception invitations. It’s not really the upfront stuff that makes me nervous; it’s more the thought of keeping tabs on the many and varied activities of the group, scanning the political landscape and so on. Daunting. But it’s a team effort, right?

Warriors of the deep really IS a turkey. The Myrka is a hopeless lumbering thing that can’t seem to even break through polystyrene. The whole thing feels like a home video of kids in a school playground. Sigh. If CDG was a sci-fi monster, I hope it would be something infinitely more charming and effectual.