Tuesday 7 December 2010

...and now I'm on vacation. No wait, that's the students.

I've now had my first taste of a Cambridge end of term! Last Wednesday was the fixed due date for all books that had been borrowed during the term, and it was also the day when the students could take out their vacation loans. So, a busy day! We came in early to kind of get ahead of the students who could start taking out books from 8.30am. I spent quite a lot of the day reshelving, and felt a bit like the wizard-sweets lady on the Hogwarts Express ("Anything off the trolley dears?") when I was taking medical textbooks upstairs and students were taking them from the book cart before I'd got chance to put them on the shelves :D It was a pretty fun day really, and nice to help lots of people get the books they needed for the vacation. We had a lot of requests for books just before the vacation so Debbie has made several trips to Heffers and we've been doing lots of speedy processing. I think we managed to please most people!

An aside: I don't like the word vacation! Probably because my head of sixth-form used to say "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Christmas period is not a holiday, it is a vacation. You are VACATING the building. You will still be working!" I guess that's what Cambridge are getting at too...

Another aside: I realise I keep announcing words I don't like. I should make some kind of dictionary of dislike.

Back on topic: As well as the frenzied borrowing, we were also running our booksale. The sale was very successful, we had several people who came back every day to see what new books we'd put out, and we had several people from Lucy Cavendish, and a book-dealer from the market drop by (The book-dealer bought £50 of books ^^). We raised £289 to add to the travel scholarship fund, woop!

I finished off the week by having nine librarians and librarian's-boyfriends round for dinner and film, which was good fun though I think we scared my house-mates into permanent hiding :P Then on Saturday Rory and I went to the Mill Road Winter Fair. Erin and Becky were there with Lindyhop, so I'll leave you with pictures of dancing librarians!


3 comments:

  1. The Master of College said the same thing about Vacations to us when we were brand new freshers. It's the only bit of his welcome-to-the-College speech that I remember. (I was pretty terrified at the time, and that didn't really help!)

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  2. Aw the joys of vacation loans...I used to go in at like 9 to get all the books I wanted, load about 40 books into the car on the way home (to the annoyance of my dad) and then bring them back five weeks later not having opened a single one.

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  3. Aah I know me too, but at least we had good intentions!

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