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.

Back from Blog Limbo...

Hello...? Anyone still there? Thought not! Well, it has been a while.
I thought about launching in with why I have decided to start adding to this again; but on further consideration I realised that explaining why I stopped is probably necessary, so here goes.
Ok, well, the week after the end of 23 Things was my third Study School in Aberystwyth. That was the first disaster. I went along, confident that I would get on as well as I had at the first two schools... only for that confidence to be shot down in a flaming mess when the reality assailed me. That reality (which I don't think was really made clear by the course team) was that not having a topic for one's dissertation was a bad idea. I expected to be able to get help choosing my topic, and as such was disappointed. I did not expect to leave Wales feeling as if I had done something wrong by concentrating on my taught course and getting 110 credits!
The second disaster was another case of expectations being wrong, in a way. My expectations that Saturday morning in May were that the ceiling would stay put (I even gave it a poke with my umbrella!!). It didn't; and I was fortunately not under it when it decided to give up. I did, however, have to decamp to the next-door room, have all my stuff covered in dust, and have to put off sending in my last assignment for my last module because I couldn't study due to being keen to get home most evenings to see how the repairs were going.
That was May taken care of, although the early arrival of my nephew Jack on the 30th was a highlight.
June was promising... right up until the morning when I woke up with chicken pox. No photographic evidence of that exists; I spoke to four people face to face during my 12 days of quarantine and only survived with my sanity intact thanks to patient friends and family who listened to me whine.
So, now we get to why I have decided to take this blog up again. Well, for a start there's been no major upsets in July! I am beginning to feel as if I can report on things library and not so library without having to mention anything sad or unpleasant.
Also, there are major changes afoot at the Bodleian, and I feel the need to give my slant on things. Before long the reading room where I work will close, and by the end of the year the staff will be moving out of the building in preparation for the redevelopment of the New Library. Already much is changing, and I think recording my thoughts on this will help me to feel as if it isn't passing me by. I will try to keep giving regular updates, keep it more-or-less library related and keep things amusing (I have some pix of bad hyacinths outside the National Library of Wales which I must use). For now, though, I think that's quite enough!

The Last Thing!

Wow... Thing 23... When I started the Programme April 9th seemed like a very long way off, but suddenly it's the day after tomorrow.
I should really start this entry with an apology. To all my fellow participants who worked so hard to get to this stage... I am sorry I didn't read your blogs! I tried, but eventually it got to be too much like hard work to keep up with everyone's thoughts as well as doing the Things themselves, and something had to give.
I don't regret following the Programme, however. It was definitely a positive experience for me in terms of learning exciting new things about Web 2.0 which I would not have discovered for ages without it. There were times when it all got a bit much; when having Things to do on top of work and studying and sleep (and suddenly finding myself with a boyfriend) seemed like TOO MUCH, but I think it was worth it.
Without 23 Things I would not have discovered Twitter, and the glorious Texts From Last Night, which is by far the funniest thing I have found on the Internet this year. I would also not have penguins on my iGoogle page, or an iGoogle page for that matter. I will take those away, along with my blog, which I am going to rename and continue with for the sake of the few people I have arm-twisted into reading it. I will leave behind Delicious, which I thought was pointless, and those Office 2.0 applications which seemed like a good idea at the time but which will only come into their own in a few years when speeds are better and it doesn't take twenty minutes to load. I daresay other things we have covered will seep into use over time; I am going to unsubscribe to things on Google Reader so I don't feel guilty about the 544 unread items and someday I might have time to have a play with podcasts and YouTube. Today I found a Library of Congress Subject Heading (Hikikomori) which cited Wikipedia as a source... I was very pleased!
If I were to offer suggestions to the team I might say that this programme ought to have been run at a time when people were less busy, such as the Long Vac, maybe, and that perhaps two Things a week were a bit tough, especially the ones which took a lot of time.

So... all in all a positive (if a bit hard work) experience.
Thanks Team, for all your hard work! I hope it proves beneficial to the whole of the Bodleian Libraries Group and beyond to have so many Web-savvy librarians on the staff!

P.S. Yes, that is my trolley, and yes, it is extremely lilac!

Gadgets again

Remember back in the distant past when I rebelled? I'm doing it again. I added the required gadget to my iGoogle page, found the settings irritating, tried to remember my login, couldn't because I don't see the point of sharing my bookmarks, and deleted it. Twice. There are more useful gadgets which one can add to iGoogle and I am always changing mine. I have a nice picture of clouds at the moment, and various other things which I move around depending on my mood. The penguins, however, remain constant. I get the point of this whole gadget business, but frankly the Wikipedia search box I have above my link to the BBC news on iGoogle at the moment is much more useful to me.
Sorry!