Same Stuff, Different Year

Ahh, the Great British New Year...
A time when the media bombards us with the doom and gloom of "most depressing day of the year" etc., when people go on diets they can't stick to, take up exercise they don't want to do and generally feel bad about themselves because they aren't changing.
This only happens because we all feed into it, making resolutions which are unrealistic and then berating ourselves when we don't stick to them. Personally, last year I resolved to get up earlier, and I still get up at 0630. This year-- she says, going on record-- I resolve to try to save more each month, because now that I am no longer paying for my Masters I can afford to.
In all honesty, I am thoroughly glad to see the back of 2010. For me, it was a generally not-so-good year; illness, drama, stress and general bother left me exhausted enough in December to finish the year with only half my face working as a result of Bell's Palsy, although I am pleased to report that I have both sides of my smile back now.
For others, though, 2010 was a positive one.
The Bodleian Libraries had an excellent year, with more donations towards the various projects, a successful implementation of the ingest of books into the new facility at Swindon and generally positive movement in the direction of the plans for 2014. I find myself feeling positive about all this in my own small way; it is a very exciting time for us as an organisation.
The move to our new offices at Osney Mead has been a step in that direction too, for all the teething problems which we have had (not least the heating conking out at Christmas which left us freezing). I will post further on this at a later date (honest!), but for now let it be said that, despite all the doom and gloom, 2011 cannot *possibly* be as hectic as 2010 was. :)

Itch...? part 2: greetings from Limbo

I bumped into a colleague the other day who asked me "How's life in limbo?" Spookily enough, I had been thinking about my life in just those terms for the last few weeks, and thinking back it's a similar situation to that in which I found myself seven years ago too.
Once I knew I had my job, I had to wait to start it. Two weeks can seem like a lifetime when something as big as a new job, a new start in life, looms on the horizon, and what I mostly remember about that time was the frustration of not being able to just get on with it. Of course once I did start I had what felt like all the information in the world crammed into my head in such a short time that I am sure by the end of the first week I was just wandering the corridors like a zombie...
Limbo seven years later is somewhat different.
Once we get the move (which is what is currently looming ever closer) out of the way work will carry on much as it has before. I anticipate a change of some workflows, hopefully for the better as I think there is more I could do in some cases than I currently do, but the big change this time around is one of location.
It is not lost on me that as the arrangements stand now I will work in the New Bodleian for exactly seven years. The day after my "library birthday" as a fellow student called it happens I will be out, and by the beginning of next month will hopefully be able to find my desk. Until then, the boxes and the dust and the likelihood of putting away something I will need consume me... For the sake of posterity, I therefore present a view of my workspace, replete with theses, as it looked on Tuesday November 16th, before the boxes arrived.

Itch...? Part 1

...Can it really be almost seven years?
I don't remember what day of the week it was, but I do remember that it all began on a day when my hair would not behave. Having had two failed interviews within the previous few days, I was spent. With the hair situation obviously meaning that I would not look my best, I decided that giving up trying to make a good impression and just taking everything as it came was the only way forward.
I arrived on time, just as the previous candidate was being shown out. The gentleman who showed me around introduced himself, went away to show the (utterly terrified-looking) candidate out, and then introduced himself to me again (which I found amusing), before taking me into the bookstack, right up to the top, and then admitting to me that he didn't really know his way around...
Pressing on, he showed me other floors of the stack, and the Reading Room, before taking me round to the office. I know now (having been pressed into service myself) that his purpose was to tell the panel what his impression of me had been; I must have made a favourable one.
The interview panel were pleasant enough. I answered the questions, the most useful thing I was able to bring being my knowledge of people having sold beer across the road for almost a year, and when I got the call later that day to offer me the job I accepted with enthusiasm.
I later concluded that being slightly un-groomed was hardly a hardship given the mess which some people walk around in, and that knowing most of the porters from the pub probably didn't hurt either.
Still seems unreal that this all happened in 2003!

Postmortems and other procedures...

...Part 2
Wow, I am actually managing to do this the following day as promised! Must be a sign...
Anyway, as I said in my previous post, this one is concerning the new stuff which I have been doing since the end of NBRR as we know it.
The procedures mentioned mostly involve circulation, which does sound rather medical, but which is just the euphemism for (gasp!) letting the readers remove books from the building.
Since the closure of NBRR I, along with a few of my Oriental colleagues have been redeployed at the Bodleian Oriental Institute Library on a rota basis which means for me that I am on the desk three afternoons a week.
Now, back in the mists of time when I began at the Bod, the OIL was regarded as something of a mystery by my naturally misanthropic and suspicious colleague, but I must say that the welcome I have had has been warm and that I am enjoying working in such a different environment from those with which I have previously been familiar.
Being a Faculty Library, OIL is closer to the sharp end of the teaching side of things, so it's actually far more dynamic than the Bod, which is rather ivory-towery. The atmosphere is more informal, and although there are all sorts of new things to learn I am finding it a rewarding experience being somewhere different.
When one is in a rut, it's hard to realise. The walls become familiar and the path easy to follow. My rut came to a natural end thanks to the refurbishment, and as a result I find myself with new horizons (albeit ones blocked by the silly round library next door!). The next big thing will be the office moves in November, but before that there will be the actual start of Term, which promises to make things even more interesting!

Oh, and in case anyone wondered, it was Merton in the photo, taken on a very foggy morning from Christchurch Meadow.

Postmortems, and other invasive procedures...

...Part 1.
I have been meaning to do this for ages.
Thing is, though, I kept being busy.
After my last post on the end of the NBRR I thought I would leave it a bit, see how I got on with my new regime, new library and such, and I find myself now almost a month on feeling deeply positive, which is always a good thing!
I will concentrate on the new place in my next post (part 2, all things being equal), but for now I must bask in the total freedom which I now discover (*basks*).
If I look back, the gradual release from the dreaded Reserve Desk is obvious to see. From the tyranny of the ORR, when I was in the reading room all day every day and only occasionally got to go somewhere else, to the NBRR, where I was on the desk about 14 hours a week to now, when I am at the Oriental Institute Library (OIL for short; it's technically the Bodleian Oriental Institute Library, but BOIL is rather an unfortunate acronym...) for three afternoons a week.
The rest of my time is my own, to do with as I need, and I am finding new reserves (oops!) of efficiency as-yet untapped as I work in an organic, sensible way, fitting in the bits and pieces of my various jobs in the bits and pieces of time as it arises. Finally my time is mostly my own, and I am enjoying myself immensely.
Don't get me wrong; the NBRR was a fun place to work, with interesting people and many challenges, but that rota was Hellish. I had to do two-hour slots at odd times of day, Wednesday lunchtimes being one that was particularly hard as I'd end up with a 7-hour afternoon if I was on evening duty. I didn't mind the duties per se, it was just the lack of freedom... I never was one for being told what to do!
So yes, much as I do miss spending time with my Map and Music chums (although not those weird Map and Music questions!), I do not miss that rota :)
Part 2 soon. In the meantime, major points for anyone who can spot the college in the photo...

The end of a Reading Room

It felt like a bit of an anticlimax, in the end.
On Friday last I worked my last couple of hours in the New Bodleian Reading Room, which ceased to be open to readers when the library closed on Saturday. I had expected it to be somehow more of an emotional moment, but the truth is that I am actually looking forward far more than I am looking back.
Ahead are the rest of the changes which will have to take place before the refurbishments are complete: the staff are moving out of the building, starting in the next month, and after we are all gone the crane will move in... I'm quite excited about the crane. I will watch with interest the dismantling of the infrastructure of the New Library as much as I tend to watch building sites with interest (it all comes from spending my 20s in holes in the ground...), all the time getting on with my new duties elsewhere.
Behind... well, seven years (nearly) of working in a building which has undergone many alterations since I began. I have learned a lot, I have worked with some very enjoyable people and some less so, both in terms of readers and colleagues, I have become the proto-librarian I now am through the years that I have been here, but where I work is not as important as the people, and we will all still be around, albeit in different places.
It had felt to me as if the NBRR was being slowly starved as the books were removed, but there is life after. The barcoders are using the space, and periodicals from the Camera and DH are occupying the empty shelves left by the Oriental books. One thing that never stays for long in a library is a flat surface!
So yes, on the whole the future is where I am looking. Not too far, or in too much detail, but forward.

Goodbye to the bookstack

They say the shortest route between two points is a straight line, but in the extraordinary little world where I work, the shortest route is often through the bookstack.
The New Bodleian Library, for those unfamiliar, is a big square stone building in Oxford on the corner of Broad Street and Parks Road. It is large and anonymous like so many of the other University buildings in our city, neither as columny as the nearby Clarendon Building nor as pretty and nobbly as the glorious Old Bodleian, with its 15th century bits and its gargoyles.
It is, however, deceptive. The New Bodleian is actually two buildings with a third perching on the top; the outer, stone structure is where the public bits get done, (although now the original six reading rooms are reduced to two) with offices and workspaces around the outside, then inside that is a nine-storey concrete and steel structure-- the first in Oxford to be entirely lit by electricity-- which is where the books live. The third building, the Indian Institute, was built on a flat roof overlooking the Sheldonian Theatre in the 1960s. It is connected to the rest of the building but has always been a separate entity from the Bodleian, having originally lived across the road in what is now the History Faculty Library.
My interest for this post, however, is the bookstack. Although I have never officially worked there, the stack has been an integral part of my job since I began in the Oriental Reading Room in 2003. We did all our own fetching and replacing, so my job included venturing into the shadowy recesses of H-Floor or up to the lofty heights of A-Floor (the floors are lettered A-L, but there is no floor I because of possible confusion). As I became more familiar with the stack I ventured further; the Oriental collections occupied some space on most stack floors, with many of our valuable manuscripts on the locked floor below ground and still others, rare Chinese printed books and even Egyptian papyri encased in glass on other floors towards the base of the structure.
By the time things began to change, when the reading rooms began to be amalgamated in preparation for the refurbishment of the New Bod (which is frankly long overdue in some respects), I was familiar with most of the floors, knew where the Oriental stuff was and more importantly, knew where other things were too. The stack was somewhere I could go and hide when things in the reading room got beyond clash-of-personality and headed towards me-saying-something-I-shouldn't. I got a great deal of satisfaction out of spending a meaningful half an hour pootling around, putting things away.
Lately, though, things are changing. The stack is not what it was. The special collections material has been moved out and the floors which used to be bursting with Victorian books classified using a system devised by a former Bodley's Librarian, E.W.B. Nicholson (which contained over 6000 divisions) have been rearranged and in some cases emptied. The muted chirruping of legions of people with yellow hi-vis vests on can be heard as they stick barcodes to every book in the stack before they are removed to a new facility in Swindon which will do what the stack has done for 60 years only with better climate control and less chance of leaks. The shelves of A-Floor are partially empty; their former inhabitants currently in boxes in a salt mine in Cheshire (yes, really!). D-Floor, where the Music material is kept, no longer has a special lock on its doors.
It is all progress, all change which is happening before even more change happens. Soon the New Bodleian will close, be refurbished, and reopen as the Weston Library, a flagship Special Collections Library for the 21st century.
I'm not saying any of it's wrong; I just wanted to go on the record to say I for one will miss the bookstack. I'll miss taking photos out of the window on A-Floor, watching the traffic on Broad Street while I wait for the lift, banging on the door of said lift when some idiot leaves the door open, traipsing up and down the stairs looking for the lift when some idiot leaves the door open and then walks away... I will miss the shadowy forms of the stack people, who do such an amazing job making sure the books get to the reading rooms but among whom I have never counted myself. I will miss the tunnel, which is about to close and which has been invaluable in allowing one to get to the Old Library without getting soaked on wet days, and the particular smell of the floors which house the old stuff... a proper library smell!
Still, everything changes, doesn't it? I am honestly looking forward to most of it, but I am also a little sad to see the end of such a unique and remarkable institution, which most people who use the library are blissfully unaware of.