Apart from when I was rather young and had a fascination with the catalogue cards in my small, local public library, I have never really made much use of them. Given the recent KPMG report, I began to consider why public libraries have not attracted my custom in a way one would expect of a librarian.
First and foremost, I am scatty and forgetful! How many times have I taken out a book only to return it 6 months later (unread, of course) and incurred horrendous library fines?! Several times, I'm afraid, so it really isn't safe for me to borrow things!
Secondly, I now realise I am a hoarder! Why borrow something that I have to give back, when what I actually want to do is buy a book and keep it forever!
Finally, I am a slow reader, but impatient to get my hands on the latest piece of chick-lit by my favourite auhtors (favourite because their work is easily and quickly read!). So, long waiting lists for new novels doesn't appeal to me, nor either is the loan period generally long enough, and as I said above I'll forget to take it back!
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Cats, whiskers and fiendish plots!
I've been thinking about figures a lot lately and I've been putting a lot of figures into a spreadsheet and fiddling with them! I was never very good at maths at school, and it has only just occurred to me, since my daughter has been doing her GCSE statistics coursework, that what I have actually been doing over the years, in a very amateurish way, is generating statistics - on an allbeit basic level!
Cataloguing is one area of information work that is fairly easy to quantify, and if you collect, collate and analyse the right kind of data, you could be helping to provide anything from an efficient acquisition process, to justifying the employment of your staff.
I err on the side of collecting anything and everything because, while you may not have a use for all of it now, someone may ask you a question one day that can be easily answered if you have collected the raw data. Besides, how long does it take to record a few five-bar gates?
As I have only just cottoned on to the fact that I am dealing with statistics, I have been using Microsoft Excel to record data and produce very basic graphs, as well as doing a lot of calculations by hand because I'm not that familiar with Excel and haven't really got time to learn! However, now that I know that there is a name for what I am doing, I may well look into statistics in a bit more detail, maybe dip into a book or two (Statistics for dummies, perhaps?). Who knows, I might find it useful to find out about SPSS, or do a formal qualification!
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Routes to librarianship
My Route to Librarianship
Ok, let’s be honest about this; I always wanted to be a musician and librarianship was a second choice career! There! I’ve said it now; it’s out in the open, so now I can move on!
In retrospect, however, I can’t understand why I was side-tracked by the idea of a career in music, as the signs pointing me in the direction of library work were all there from the time I was about 6, unless every child used to create Browne issue cards for their friends and issue slips for their books, and then lend out their books to their friends!
Then, when I was about 7 my mother took me to what was then the college of Education Library in Cambrian House. What a treasure-trove that was, but maybe I was side-tracked by the excitement of finding the piano music for Tommy Steele’s Little White Bull on the shelves! Next came an introduction to the local public library. We lived in a small Welsh town so the library was only open a few days each week, and shared a space with the local secondary school. What a treat that was, pretending to be grown-up, going through the school gates and then rushing off to the library.
My mother introduced me to the librarian who showed me how to use the catalogue cards. This must have been a fairly forward-looking, or a newish library, as the catalogue drawers were the modern, light pine coloured ones, the smell of which still haunts me today. The joy I experienced when looking through the cards and then being able to find the books listed on the cards on the actual library shelves was immense, and my skill at using them led me to read the most unsuitable literature I could find, while by-passing the traditional children’s stories!
Moving from Wales to England at the age of 16 was, to say the least, a bit of a culture shock, and I only felt comfortable behind the issue desk of the school library, or when shelving the books that other kids had returned. It was during this time that I realised that becoming a musician was a dream rather than a career, and so it was that I decided to go for librarianship. The careers advisor strongly advocated that if I knew I wanted to be a librarian then I should go the quickest route and study librarianship. This may be the one decision of my life that I sometimes wonder about; would there have been more open doors if I had done a different degree first and then done a Masters in librarianship? Well, who knows! I’ve certainly been lucky and happy in my career to date, so I probably took the best option anyway. But music was never far away; I studied music as a subsidiary subject, and persuaded the university to let me carry on with this instead of a librarianship options in the final year, and I also studied music librarianship as one of my other options! Despite this, I didn’t go down the music librarian route as I chose to limit myself to a specific geographical location.
After a couple of work placements in libraries (first a public library and then a college of education library) my first proper job was as a Retrospective Cataloguing Supervisor for a public library, converting their records from a card catalogue to machine-readable form, using BLCMP batch forms, and re-classifying to whatever was the current edition of Dewey. Hah, hah, this should have told me something too!
This first job lasted nearly 2 and a-half years and taught me so much. Then I moved to a pharmaceutical library, where I learnt a different set of skills, ranging from helping users, developing guidance leaflets for users, to ordering books and helping to develop an in-house automated library management system. Although I enjoyed this varied work and the journey to work was ten minutes on a bicycle, this was at a time when the Animal Liberation Front were very active, and I became worried for my own and my family’s safety, and so I looked for a job elsewhere and was lucky enough to end up where I am today, 24 years later! Having spent some time as the Lending Services Manager, I am now the Bibliographic Services Team Manager – looking after, amongst other things, cataloguers who are currently embarking on a re-classification project!
I wonder what the future holds for me?
Ok, let’s be honest about this; I always wanted to be a musician and librarianship was a second choice career! There! I’ve said it now; it’s out in the open, so now I can move on!
In retrospect, however, I can’t understand why I was side-tracked by the idea of a career in music, as the signs pointing me in the direction of library work were all there from the time I was about 6, unless every child used to create Browne issue cards for their friends and issue slips for their books, and then lend out their books to their friends!
Then, when I was about 7 my mother took me to what was then the college of Education Library in Cambrian House. What a treasure-trove that was, but maybe I was side-tracked by the excitement of finding the piano music for Tommy Steele’s Little White Bull on the shelves! Next came an introduction to the local public library. We lived in a small Welsh town so the library was only open a few days each week, and shared a space with the local secondary school. What a treat that was, pretending to be grown-up, going through the school gates and then rushing off to the library.
My mother introduced me to the librarian who showed me how to use the catalogue cards. This must have been a fairly forward-looking, or a newish library, as the catalogue drawers were the modern, light pine coloured ones, the smell of which still haunts me today. The joy I experienced when looking through the cards and then being able to find the books listed on the cards on the actual library shelves was immense, and my skill at using them led me to read the most unsuitable literature I could find, while by-passing the traditional children’s stories!
Moving from Wales to England at the age of 16 was, to say the least, a bit of a culture shock, and I only felt comfortable behind the issue desk of the school library, or when shelving the books that other kids had returned. It was during this time that I realised that becoming a musician was a dream rather than a career, and so it was that I decided to go for librarianship. The careers advisor strongly advocated that if I knew I wanted to be a librarian then I should go the quickest route and study librarianship. This may be the one decision of my life that I sometimes wonder about; would there have been more open doors if I had done a different degree first and then done a Masters in librarianship? Well, who knows! I’ve certainly been lucky and happy in my career to date, so I probably took the best option anyway. But music was never far away; I studied music as a subsidiary subject, and persuaded the university to let me carry on with this instead of a librarianship options in the final year, and I also studied music librarianship as one of my other options! Despite this, I didn’t go down the music librarian route as I chose to limit myself to a specific geographical location.
After a couple of work placements in libraries (first a public library and then a college of education library) my first proper job was as a Retrospective Cataloguing Supervisor for a public library, converting their records from a card catalogue to machine-readable form, using BLCMP batch forms, and re-classifying to whatever was the current edition of Dewey. Hah, hah, this should have told me something too!
This first job lasted nearly 2 and a-half years and taught me so much. Then I moved to a pharmaceutical library, where I learnt a different set of skills, ranging from helping users, developing guidance leaflets for users, to ordering books and helping to develop an in-house automated library management system. Although I enjoyed this varied work and the journey to work was ten minutes on a bicycle, this was at a time when the Animal Liberation Front were very active, and I became worried for my own and my family’s safety, and so I looked for a job elsewhere and was lucky enough to end up where I am today, 24 years later! Having spent some time as the Lending Services Manager, I am now the Bibliographic Services Team Manager – looking after, amongst other things, cataloguers who are currently embarking on a re-classification project!
I wonder what the future holds for me?
Monday, 8 February 2010
RDA?
RDA. Now there's a standard! The year I entered university to study librarianship, was a big one! Not because I was studying to become a librarian, but because 1978 saw the release of AACR (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules). So, there was a new standard, and we were new, enthusiastic students, eager to learn, and so absorbed AACR as though it were water and we were sponges.
Actually, truth to tell, I probably didn't know it was new and revloutionary until about 1984 when I was cataloguing books for a special library who had no idea about cataloguing standards, so were keen to use my knowledge of AACR.
Since that time, of course, I've spent many a happy year using AACR and its updates, and am intimately familiar with most of it! Now, though, I find that after 32 years of AACR there is going to be a new standard released, and I am going to have to change the habits of a lifetime!
So this is what the last three or four years have been about. I've been playing with blogs and wikis, with Yammer and Twitter, recently joined Facebook and linkedin, getting used to changing the way I do things, so that when RDA is finally released it will just be one more new thing for me to learn, not the major obstacle that it could be.
At least, that's what I'm currently thinking ...
Actually, truth to tell, I probably didn't know it was new and revloutionary until about 1984 when I was cataloguing books for a special library who had no idea about cataloguing standards, so were keen to use my knowledge of AACR.
Since that time, of course, I've spent many a happy year using AACR and its updates, and am intimately familiar with most of it! Now, though, I find that after 32 years of AACR there is going to be a new standard released, and I am going to have to change the habits of a lifetime!
So this is what the last three or four years have been about. I've been playing with blogs and wikis, with Yammer and Twitter, recently joined Facebook and linkedin, getting used to changing the way I do things, so that when RDA is finally released it will just be one more new thing for me to learn, not the major obstacle that it could be.
At least, that's what I'm currently thinking ...
Thursday, 7 January 2010
New year: New plans
I find it is only when I have a break from work that I realise how stressed I've been! Three weeks of festive fun, food and friends has been quite restorative; only one problem - what was I doing at the end of 2009?
What to pick up on this year? The future of cataloguers? The new generation OPACs? CILIP re-validation? Library Routes Project? The latest technical innovation? Or should I just be looking for a career change, given the uncertainty in universities at the moment? All hot topics in 2009, and somehow I think they will continue to be, well into 2010.
Monday, 30 November 2009
Hello again!
Well, here I am, back again, only a week later!
Some folks from here have gone across to middlemash today. I've been trying to follow it all on twitter, but there is so much going on. Not sure how those people there can keep up with all the talks and ideas and tweet at the same time; I know I couldn't do it. Lots of good stuff out there relating to this specific session, like mapping the library, and there are also some slides on the session.
Bye for now.
Well, here I am, back again, only a week later!
Some folks from here have gone across to middlemash today. I've been trying to follow it all on twitter, but there is so much going on. Not sure how those people there can keep up with all the talks and ideas and tweet at the same time; I know I couldn't do it. Lots of good stuff out there relating to this specific session, like mapping the library, and there are also some slides on the session.
Bye for now.
Monday, 23 November 2009
Sorry, did I really say I'd post weekly?! What an ambitious desire!
As I said in my first post, things in the cataloguing arena are changing so rapidly, I've hardly had time to sit still, never mind put pen to paper!
Anyway, been reading around rather a lot lately: from the future of cataloguing and the future of cataloguers, to new-generation OPACs and all they have to offer; from arcane library standards like MARC and Z39.50 to SRW/U; from top technology tips for librarians, to making best use of RSS feeds; from what makes a good website to microformat applications; from Ruby to Python; from sql to cql - and some!
Feeling totally bewildered and inadequate! According to Roy Tennant, librarians love perfection - and boy is that hard work! The rewards for that, of course, are the opposite of rubbish in, rubbish out, but it is time consuming and hard work to keep up those kind of standards. Roy Tennant also said that librarians love to search while everyone else loves to find!
I might eventually have something to comment upon once I've digested my recent reading, although hopefully it won't take 7 months to make another post! In the meantime, I've already asked the boss if I can go to the CIG conference next September. Looks thought there might be some interesting stuff going on there.
See you later.
As I said in my first post, things in the cataloguing arena are changing so rapidly, I've hardly had time to sit still, never mind put pen to paper!
Anyway, been reading around rather a lot lately: from the future of cataloguing and the future of cataloguers, to new-generation OPACs and all they have to offer; from arcane library standards like MARC and Z39.50 to SRW/U; from top technology tips for librarians, to making best use of RSS feeds; from what makes a good website to microformat applications; from Ruby to Python; from sql to cql - and some!
Feeling totally bewildered and inadequate! According to Roy Tennant, librarians love perfection - and boy is that hard work! The rewards for that, of course, are the opposite of rubbish in, rubbish out, but it is time consuming and hard work to keep up those kind of standards. Roy Tennant also said that librarians love to search while everyone else loves to find!
I might eventually have something to comment upon once I've digested my recent reading, although hopefully it won't take 7 months to make another post! In the meantime, I've already asked the boss if I can go to the CIG conference next September. Looks thought there might be some interesting stuff going on there.
See you later.
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