Of books and baking

For the past couple of weeks, the main topic of conversation in the library has been our Literary Archive launch. Newnham writers have been invited to contribute some of their creative work to a Literary Archive, and we have had a great response, with manuscripts, books, photographs, letters and memoirs flooding in. To celebrate the creation of the Archive, this weekend we had a two day launch event, with displays of a selection of the donated material in the library, and with authors Claire Tomalin, Sarah Dunant and Nicola Beauman giving talks and running discussions over the weekend.

While my part in the launch event was fairly small, there was still a lot of work to be done - making displays, making the library look nice and presentable, and at the actual event doing a front-of-house type job. On Friday night we had a packed library, and on Saturday many of the same people came back a second time, as well as those just attending the Saturday events. Well known names including Eleanor Bron and Miriam Margolyes were there, as well as alumni of all ages, and all who I spoke to were really enjoying the event. I took a few photos before people started arriving:

 Meanwhile, I had my friend Rosie staying the weekend. As is fairly common when we get together, we spent the weekend eating at Nandos, baking, watching films and copious episodes of the West Wing! We decided to try a recipe I found on Annie's Eats for chocolate chip cookie dough cupcakes. The frosting was absolutely yummy and they had big chunks of chocolate chip in, but the actual cake part turned out a little...odd! They were a bit crispy, and kind of rubbery. I think when we were converting from cups and sticks to grams, and then halving the recipe something went wrong somewhere perhaps! (Just goes to show you should never decide to halve a recipe!)

Anyway, they looked pretty, and we had the assistance of Ernest the baking bear:

We made some of them bitesize using Rosie's mini silicone cupcake cases (which I've just gone and ordered a set of for myself!)

So it wasn't a total disaster (and we've had some total disasters when baking/cooking). I might give it another try when I've bought a set of measuring cups!

Library Day in the Life - End of the Week

This is my final blog post for the Library Day in the Life project. (My other posts: Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday)

I didn't have time to write a post yesterday as after work I went out for dinner with some librarian friends, and then we went to see two of the other trainees who were performing in a dance show at the ADC.

We had our weekly staff meeting this morning where we talk through the week ahead. The next two weeks for us will be largely taken up with planning and setting up for the Literary Archive Launch event which is happening in two weekends' time. We will be creating displays of books by Newnham authors, along with the manuscripts, letters, photographs and other materials donated by the authors, many of who will be attending the event. Quite exciting for me!

Apart from that, yesterday and today I've been doing a lot of book processing (the latest batch of journals has just come back from the binders, and need to be labelled up so that they can go out onto the shelves), and carrying on with my music cataloguing (I'm onto opera scores now!). This afternoon I gave another induction tour to a PhD student. This was a bit of a learning experience for me as well as for her because she had some questions about the college system in Cambridge as well as about the library. I was able to answer most of her questions - how many colleges are all-women colleges (3 - Newnham, Murray Edwards and Lucy Cavendish), are there any all-male colleges (not anymore) - but to her question "how many colleges are there altogether?", shamefully I was only able to say "erm...well it's thirty something..."! However after her tour I was able to look up the university's page on the collegiate system, and emailed her the link. (It's 31 colleges, but probably everybody else already knew that!)

This week has been pretty representative of what I do when I'm in the office (which is most of the time). Being a graduate trainee, I get to go off and visit other libraries, in Cambridge and farther afield. Yesterday we received more details on our upcoming trip to London. We'll be visiting the Guildhall Library in the morning, and then the library at the Institute of Chartered Accountants in the afternoon, and I'm sure I'll blog about that trip when the time comes!