Blowing away the cobwebs

I know this kind of post is such a cliche at this time of year, but a combination of the New Year and the Libraries@Cambridge conference have reminded me that I've neglected my blog for far too long!

My last post was over a year ago, and so much has happened since then. Rory and I bought a house earlier in the year and we got married in October (see photographic evidence below). We also now have guinea pigs! Basically we did All The Things in one year and now will relax for the next 5 years :D

Work has also been pretty exciting. Over the summer I was involved in hiring a new member of staff, including being part of the interview panel. The Children's Literature Collection that I manage is growing very quickly, as we've acquired a donation of 150+ versions of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and a very large donation of 7,000ish children's annuals (which promptly went into storage and will stay there until we work out where they are going to go!) Liz and I are going to be presenting two academic skills sessions in February, so I'm putting that together now. I'll hopefully blog about some of these things at some point, especially about being on an interview panel, as that was a fascinating experience.

I was lucky enough last year to get a bursary from CILIP East which enabled me to get to my first Umbrella conference, and I also went to two regional library camps. At the Libraries@Cambridge conference yesterday I live-blogged Paul-Jervis Heath's session 'Quality for Who?' on the Libraries@Cambridge blog, but I've got a bunch of other notes and I'm going to blog some of my thoughts on the rest of the conference later this week.

What I've been reading in June

Save Libraries

CILIP, Women's Institute to Campaign for libraries (hooray!)

Lauren Smith, Libraries and the WI


Conferences

Various people, CILIP New Professionals Information Day blogs (a bit.ly bundle put together by Richard Hawkins)

Ned Potter, Presenting opportunities at library events, and how to get them 

Annie Pho and Lauren Dodd, Hack ALA: Get Your Network On!

Ned Potter, Librarians are horizontal; libraries are vertical (thoughts on the opening keynote of SLA 2011)

Laura Steel, New Professionals Conference 2011 

Jo Norwood, NPC 2011 Part One and Part Two (Tired of reading conference write ups? Here's the New Professionals Conference in comic form!)


Social Media and Technology

Josh Halliday, British Library creates a "national memory" with digital newspaper archive

Soren Gordhamer, 3 Pressing Questions Facing the Future of Social Media 

Audrey Watters, How the Library of Congress is building the Twitter archive

Hamilton Chan, HOW TO: Make Your QR Codes Beautiful


eBooks and Digitisation

ML Burgess, E-book campaign: advocating e-books in a visually pleasing way

BBC News, British Library makes Google search deal

Olivia Solen, JK Rowling reignites DRM debate 

Bobbi Newman, eBook FAQs. 36 Most Common Questions Answered by the OITP eBook Task Force 


Copyright

Jennifer Howard, What you don't know about copyright, but should 


Job Applications

Katy Wrathall, Gizza Job - From Both Sides of the Desk 

Becky Woods, Application, application, application


Misc.


Andy Woodworth, It's Pretty Dark Inside a Closed Mind 

Sarah Kessler, Startup Publisher Gives Readers Control Over What Books Get Printed 

New Professionals Conference audience (photo by sarahjison)

There and back again: our Oxford trip

Yesterday I visited the beautiful city of Oxford for the first time. We hitched a ride with the Cambridge College Libraries Forum who were going for a conference, and Erin had organised a day of library visits for the trainees. We had a tour around the old Bodleian by Verity, who is a reading room supervisor and a former trainee herself. Then we visited St John's College library where we gave ourself a tour based on their librarian's helpful emailed notes! (He was off to the conference.)

After a yummy lunch at G&D's (bagels and icecream), we met up with the Bodleian trainee, Becci. Next stop was Corpus Christi, where Erin showed us around the library, this being her college when she was at Oxford. We met the archivist, Julian, who showed us some really interesting items from their collection of manuscripts, including a letter from Henry VIII to the Vatican, enquiring after his divorce proceedings! Julian also is the archivist at Merton College, so he took us over to Merton to see their archives as well. The setting for Merton's archives couldn't be more different from our archives at Newnham, ours being built a few years ago, and the materials being stored in rolling stacks, Merton's archive building dating from 1264 and with carved wooden cupboards housing the records.


My usual tendency would be to write a mile long post about a day like this, unfortunately (or fortunately more likely) a lot of good stuff is going on this week and next week, so I don't have time! I hear your sighs of relief.

Edit: While I was writing this, Erin posted her account of the day, which is very much better than mine and will tell you all the ins and outs of what we were doing!

Rather bad picture of the Radcliffe Camera, which is AMAZING inside

View from outside the Bodleian

St John's College

Corpus Christi College

Chapel in Merton College

Garden in Merton College