Bad librarian: no biscuit

I see I have been playing hooky for a whole week. Mea maxima culpa. I am a bit of a tease in the Web 2.0 world – a Facebook chat here, a few Flickr photos there – more commitment issues than the Doctor. Incidentally, I have been shamed into posting again by a Nameless CDG Member who reads it entirely for the DW content. Nice to know I have a role in life…

So, what have I been up to in the last week?

• Working. I do have to do some occasionally. It’s all heads down as we panic and rush to achieve silly numbers of tasks within unrealistic deadlines. Wrestling with HTML on the new library web pages.
• Attending the CILIP Equal Opportunities Panel. Lots of talk about the forthcoming positive action scheme. Shame the pilot will be in London – could be years before it filters up to Scotland. And round here I pretty much count as an ethnic minority.
• Reading: Diana Wynne Jones – Deep Secret (great fantasy convention setting); RED magazine (for the train journey); Charlotte Mendelson – When We Were Bad (for Book Group).
• Getting rejected from a job interview I went for. Boo. They kept me hanging on for a full week. I was special but not special enough, it would appear, despite my attempts to connect with them on a higher plane by discussing Murakami.
• Horseriding with colleagues – this was the IS Ride-out #4. I was assigned to the affable Max, who put up with my blatant incompetence charmingly and stopped for only a few snack breaks.
• Watching Prince Caspian. Georgie Henley couldn’t be more perfect as Lucy. Susan’s lips are alarming. Eddie Izzard as Reepicheep stole all our hearts.
• Watching the Doctor Who finale. What could be better than David Tennant? MORE David Tennant. NAKED David Tennant.  Alternate reality Doctor with no commitment issues. I am a cheesy whatsit and I loved the team round the Tardis console (only they should have let Jackie drive). Davros fantastic and looking evilly hot in his leather doo-dab. Red Dalek rocked. Altogether satisfying end to a surprisingly strong season.
• Watching Doctor Who #4 in The Invasion of Time. Worst ever Sontaran with bucket for a helmet and holes for his un-made-up eyes to see through. Not enough Leela (action wise not flesh wise!) and totally implausible romantic end.
• Watching the tennis. Federer vs Nadal. Nice. Add them to the two David Tennants and it’s fantasy soup. Oh dear, better be careful I don’t get filtered for bringing the world of blogging into disrepute.
• Trying to catch my breath after the first trimester of Presidency, quick scan to see what’s coming up and what I should be doing.

This afternoon I get to set objectives with my line manager. Rather hoping they bear some actual relation to my job and are not just baubles plucked from the Principal’s Christmas tree. They have to be SMART. Which as far as I’m concerned is just one step away from SWOT and PEST and a mere hop, skip and jump from a hey nonny no. Where’s Blackadder when you need him?

Toes in the water

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…

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.

All rosy in the garden

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.