Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:03:02 +0000

I finally posted off my chartership portfolios yesterday to CILIP. Yipee!  It is the culmination of two years hard work and I am pleased it has all come together. I hope the outcome will be good news for me. However, my continuing professional development does not end here. This is an ongoing process and I [...]

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:54:32 +0000

Right-handed or left-handed? Have you worked for the university for 10 years or more, or less? Are you a morning or night person? This activity illustrates how we are all different and was part of a mandatory Equality and Diversity training course I attended at the university this last week. The half day’s training had varied [...]

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:49:21 +0000

I have got the CDG NE web pages up and running after we have moved over to the CMS (Content Management System to the uninitiated). The CDG web pages are small with 4 or 5 links and I learnt how to add newsletters to the Resource Manager and how to create links to newsletters. Adding [...]

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:25:52 +0000

This blog has been a bit quiet in recent months. I have been blogging on my team work blog, and time constraints have made it difficult to blog on both. I am now in the final lap of putting my portfolio together. I’ve discovered the practical challenges of bringing together disparate documents like Word, pdf, [...]

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:11:45 +0000

I am just picking up my blog again after being off work on holiday for several weeks during the summer, if you can call it that with all the endless rain we have had. Summertime is traditionally a quiet time for academic libraries with few students in the building, but this is when all the [...]

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 11:38:11 +0000

Revisiting the glory days of the British empire is not what you’d expect on a sunny day in July but a visit to the Palace Green library unearthed some real gems of British history. One of the gems was Ogilby’s Britannica, published in 1675, which was a series of road maps, depicting journeys from London [...]

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:27:46 +0000

On a cold, damp windswept day, a building site on Tyneside is not the place you’d expect to find 10 librarians and the Head of Newcastle City libraries! This is the heart of £40 million public library innovation for the 21st Century. We were here to see work in progress on a guided tour of [...]

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:35:38 +0000

In this case, the title didn’t say it all. It wasn’t about a librarian working in Hollywood. If you were expecting a life story of someone at Universal Studios looking after the scripts, you’d be wrong. The film, directed by Ann Seidl, was a concoction of film footage depicting libraries and librarians, interspersed with public [...]

Tue, 27 May 2008 20:46:11 +0000

The Career Development Group ended up in jail on Friday 23 May. But don’t worry: librarians on the rampage weren’t arrested. This was the Old Gaol in Hexham. We hadn’t been arrested; we were visitors. The gaol, purpose built between 1330 and 1333, covered 4 floors from the gaoler’s lodgings on the top floor to [...]

Fri, 23 May 2008 09:42:35 +0000

I went on an in-house training course on Turning Point on Thursday 22 May. Turning Point is a piece of software that measures audience response to a set of multiple choice questions. A bit like ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?’ except that you don’t get a chance to go 50:50 or phone a friend [...]