Anne Johnston’s Library Blog

On Monday this week I hosted a meeting at DGS to consider how school librarians in East Lothian can encourage our students to become more independent learners than they are at present. John Crawford and Christine Irvine from Glasgow Caledonian Uniiversity came to meet me and my colleagues from Knox, Preston Lodge and Ross to follow up discussions we had at the open meeting on The Scottish National Information Literacy Framework in Glasgow recently. We now have a clear plan of action to follow which fits the points of focus listed by Don Ledingham in his recent letter “A Curriculum for Excellence - it’s not about doing different things, it’s about doing things differently”.

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.

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 »