Technology…

I have not posted for quite a while, I have just not been inspired to. My work-life has been trundling along, I am not particularly challenged or enthused by it and I know it is time to move on should the right opportunity arise.

I very recently bought a smart-phone – a Samsung galaxy s II, which is a small computer really. I have not engaged with this form of technology so far, I had not felt there was a need, and was very proud of having a very basic phone that only cost 9.95 pounds. Recently I have been feeling that I am missing something not engaging in this technology trend so when the right deal came along I took the plunge. 

It has been interesting how quickly you can become “the person fiddling with the phone in the corner” progressing to becoming a phone bore quickly.  My favourite app is Google Skye Map which acts as a little annotated window on the cosmos. No matter what direction you hold your phone it shows the star constellations, planets and other significant celestial bodies all with little labels – I will no longer not know what constellation I am looking at.  

It has been a steep learning curve but I have got to grips with my phone quite quickly, considering I have been ignoring the technology for years. I am sure there will be plenty of apps I feel I must have and lots to experiment with. What will I do with my mp3 player and my camera now their capability is present in my new shiny little device?

End of year one

Earlier this month I passed the one year mark for the time spent in my current post as a cataloguer at the University of Strathclyde.  I have come to grips with the various aspects of the job which have become fairly routine now. Though just as I am becoming part of the furniture we will be moving to different offices next month. The new office will be open-plan, which will not suit everybody but it is a fact of modern office work – the trend to open-plan.

Information Visualisation – better than words…

I was classifying a book the other day on information visualisation and it was so interesting I found it was distracting me from my primary task. The book was Information is Beautiful by David McCandless. The book inspired me to look to see if the author had a website which indeed he has, at davidmccandless.com and there are lots of great information/data visualisations on that site and on informationisbeautiful.net. I have only had time for a quick browse but this material looks inspirational and very clever, I feel I have a very visual brain and great visualisations are much better than a huge screed of words.

Time Flies (when youre having fun)

I have been working in the library at the University of Strathclyde for six months now, which I find hard to believe – time does fly…

I am still based in the cataloguing and metadata section with shifts at the front desk as well. I have pretty much settled in and most tasks are fairly routine now, I just keep my head down and get on with it. There have been and will be changes in the library both physically to the building and stock and I suspect also to the workforce. It will be interesting and probably stressful to go through these changes but they are inevitable. Organisations that do not adapt will die (or become irrelevant) and this is true of universities and important units within them like libraries.

I had been following some of the discussions in the media and on library discussion lists about public libraries, but have become a bit disillusioned at the moment. I do hope that there is a major realisation for the need for a modern public library service and that it does not die a slow an painful death under the current UK government who are hell-bent on cutting public services into oblivion.  Time will tell.

Month five…

I have been working in the cataloguing and metadata section at the Andersonian library at the University of Strathclyde for nearly five months now.  It was a steep learning curve at first, but now mostly routine. I dare say I still have a lot to learn about the intricacies of Marc 21 and of classifying the very diverse range of books that come our way.  Lunchtime and evening cover at the front desk provides a complete change of pace, particularly the lunchtime cover as the front desk can be relentlessly busy.  There are big changes afoot in the library – changes to what will be on the floors, changes to services, merging in Jordanhill library to name some. I suspect this will keep everyone very busy, particularly as we are slightly undermanned.

I must admit to struggling to muster the enthusiasm to post on this blog at the moment. In fact I do not seem to be enthusiastic about anything at the moment – it may be the winter blues. With spring arriving I can only hope this will dissipate, spring is my favourite season after all…

Month One Day Thirty

Today will be the last day of my first month working in the library at the University of  Strathclyde. It has been interesting and there has been a lot to learn, the finer points of MARC 21 and classification (mainly DDC) are still a mystery to me but I am picking it up. You learn more from your mistakes, as you don’t want to repeat them, but nobody likes to make mistakes. My work has included some lunchtime and late cover on the front desk, serving the population of academic library users. Most requests are fairy straightforward, but sometimes you get asked for something different, for example, a SCONUL card.  Today will be interesting as I am on late till 9 pm on the front desk and we have Arctic weather – cold and with plenty of snow – thoughts of problems getting home are crossing my mind 🙂

Working in a Library

On November 1st I will be starting my first work in a Library – and academic library at the University of Strathclyde. Although my work over the last year and a half, doing applied research in IT related areas, has touched on libraries, this will be the first work in the “Libosphere”.  I will be “starting at the bottom” as they say but I do welcome the opportunity to get experience working in a modern academic library.

I hope to blog on my experience, I will be in the cataloging and metadata section in this post but who knows where it might lead.

The great quango massacre

Out of curiosity I read through the list of public bodies being reformed – abolished, merged etc. that is available from direct.gov.uk and realised there is quite a diversity of bodies in the list. I am still trying to figure out if it is a good thing or not. On one hand many public bodies are quangos and have huge budgets, make important decisions without consulting the public and are not accountable to the public either.  My gut feeling is that there are also too many of them with overlapping and possibly even conflicting interests and they are  long overdue a cull.

I do hope however that the functions previously done by some of these bodies will still be done. I don’t know whether this has been done as an efficiency drive or as part of an exercise in reducing the government’s footprint, the Tories have always been a party of “small” government and are ideologically inclined in this direction. Some Labour MPs have already complained that this may cost more than it saves, but I guess time will tell.

I have been hoping this government was going to crash and burn, having a lifelong loathing of the conservatives. Not that I think the main opposition, Labour, would do any better. I don’t know how optimistic I am about how the current government is handling the financial crisis. I still feel intensely annoyed that the banking sector was allowed to gamble it’s way into oblivion and that it was felt they needed bailing out.  They seem less that apologetic with some large banking companies are still setting aside billions for bonuses to the bloated pockets of their executives.

I keep thinking that there is no need for all these savings, and reforms aimed at saving government money because money is not real in the sense that all the transactions in the stock market are an abstraction and a great deal is not based on anything tangible and concrete.  i guess I am wrong as the recession will be feeling very real to a lot of people right now.