Anne Johnston’s Library Blog

13th June was the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, Scotland (CILIPS) Branch and Group Day. This day is part of our annual conference and it is attended by people from all different kinds of libraries and other organisations. The day consists of workshops and seminars arranged by the various special interest groups of CILIPS. The day began with the Presidential Address - no, not George Bush but Christopher Phillips, President of CILIPS. My first session after that was on Developing Catalogues for Customers not Cataloguers. It did what it said in the tin, wasn’t overly technical and explained how new international cataloguing standards will improve access to resources for everyone, that is readers, borrowers and customers and not just librarians.

My next seminar was Running Successful Book Groups. We have had a book group for a number of years at DGS but I was hoping for some fresh ideas, which I got. Thanks to CArol Moug from St Saviour’s High School, Dundee for an entertaining and informative presentation.

Last session of the day was Falkirk’s RED Book Award. Again I got lots of ideas form this even though it was dealing with running an award as a whole authority.

At the end of last week in ICT Librarian mode I showed edublogs to a colleague from East Lothian Library HQ. He is keen to have a blog and may well have contacted David Gilmour by now. I also encouraged him to look at one or two other blogs, including Euan’s. Same colleague was interested to see the structure of the GLOW portal. I’m sure there will be places to link public libraries in East Lothian to GLOW. Our students and staff already have access to several online services/portals via East Lothian Library Service.

Also last week I experienced one of these “it’s a small world moments”. I had a phone call from Fiona MacIntyre in the Unison office. She has been contacted via Friends Reunited by one of her best friends at uni who also turns out to be one of my former flatmates. You can run but you can’t hide!

My last unexpected bit of info from last week was when I discovered that one of the founders of Wikipedia has set up Citizendium - a competitor for Wikipedia. Cataloguer Librarian was particulary attracted to The Big Clean Up whilst Research Librarian liked the idea of quality assurance. More details here: Wikipedia ‘broken beyond repair’ says co-founder and Citizendium goes live in beta

Tomorrow is our CRAW lunchtime when our Creative Reading and Writing group meet and Storyteller Librarian gets a rare opportunity to appear.

I can’t believe we’re well into November already. The last couple of weeks have been hectic but in an enjoyable way (well mostly).

I have attended my second meeting of the 3-18 Learning and Teaching Strategic Group. I find the overview perspective this gives me fascinating. I have always kept up with developments and initiatives in DGS to make sure that the library provides relevant support to the school community. Now I have the opportunity to do so at authority level. As Field Officer for East Lothian Library Service I am able to feed back relevant information to my fellow school librarians and also to the SMT of the library service. There is a great deal of potential to be explored. The first example of this being the Extreme Learning project. The meeting at the Marine recently allowed us to begin considering in detail the relevance of our professional information management skills to the aims of Extreme Learning. 

In the same week as the 3-18 group and Extreme Learning, I also attended the briefing on single status and job evaluation, our McCrone if you like. Check Brian’s Blog for more details on support staff’s concerns.

Last Monday was another of those woman versus technology days - loser again! But the week improved. On Wednesday CRAW (our Creative Reading And Writing group) met as usual. We heard the third installment of our novel, courtesy of Ms Aiken. Chapters 1 and 2 had been written by students. Everyone in the group has to write a chapter and we will think of a title for it at the end. I can’t remember when my turn is. I hope it is several weeks away. The standard has been set high.

The new library space is proving  a suitable venue for all sorts of events. On Thursday we had an author visit by Keith Gray. Keith has visited DGS before. He gave a talk to all of S1 and S2 - an audience of over 200. This time we opted for a creative writing workshop which was attended by about 20 students. It worked well. I know this because we were supposed to finish at 12.30pm and most people were still there at 12.45 and having to be forcibly evicted! It was a mad gallop to Haddington to make sure Keith had time for lunch before he went on to give a talk at Knox Academy. Next month, thanks to EL Library Service and Scottish Book Trust, we will be visited by Beth Webb who will be talking about her new book.

Question of the week - from Thursday and fairly obvious. “Do you need a hand tidying up miss?” i.e. “Its 15 minutes to lunch. Do I have to go back to class?”

Apologies for the break in transmissions. I do intend to contribute to my blog more regularly than every 5 or 6 weeks. Not long after I posted the first entry my PC at home died quite suddenly after years of loyal service. At the same time we were experiencing network problems in school. Hence the gap of several weeks. I am about to try to set up wireless broadband tonight. I know the broadband works and since my PC can’t sit in the kitchen beside the main phone line socket wireless it is.

I attended a wheen of meetings during September -all of them important and producing benefits for our students and staff - but I am looking forward to spending a whole week in my own school. Continue Reading »

Monday saw the return of the students to DGS and the usual round of getting courses started. Only a few students came into the library at lunchtime – some of last year’s regulars and a few S1s.

On Tuesday the SMT and Guidance staff held a session in the Library for S6 students and cleared almost all course changes in one fell swoop. Whilst this was happening Andy Holmes, a Senior Librarian with East Lothian Library Service, visited me to demonstrate the upgraded backup system for the automated library system. We disconnected the issue desk PC to simulate loss of the connection and I learned all about Talis Assure. So far so good. Then we reconnected the PC so that I could see how the backup fed the information into the live system to discover that the live system had gone down during the time of the demo and stayed down for the rest of the afternoon. PCs 1, Librarian 0. Luckily no-one wanted to issue textbooks to their classes on Tuesday afternoon – the only time in the week this has happened. Biology, Chemistry, Physics, CDT, History and English all issue textbooks via the library system to keep track of their books. As you can imagine, the first week of a new school year is a particularly busy time for handing out books. Continue Reading »