For the second day of the working week, I was at our Tooting site, always a pleasure because of the fine Indian cafés for lunch (today I had a Sindhi biryani) and also because we have real users, as we deliver a service to the students on our summer school at the site.
I keep away from the users though, in case I frighten them. The management team pressed on with our tasks for the summer, and in a single day we:
- updated and revised the student induction presentations and scripts
- rewrote and redesigned the Learning Resource Centre leaflet, and cards giving opening hours and contact details
- prepared for interviews for the post of Electronic Resources Co-ordinator tomorrow. The interview packs had gone astray, so a very helpful member of Human Resources staff put together another one, and we devised some questions for the candidates
- on my own, I wrote a blog post for the CoFHE LASEC blog about the building projects debacle in British further education. Two parliamentary committees have now investigated it. These somewhat opaque initials need explanation: LASEC stands for London and South East Circle, of which I'm Chair, CoFHE for Colleges of Further and Higher Education, CILIP's special interest group for my sector.
All in all a good day's work. Less happily:
- I had a report back from our IT department saying that the reason external access to our catalogue had been disabled was because they'd put the catalogue server behind the firewall (I knew that). I composed some cogent arguments explaining why a library catalogue should not be hidden from the world. In the longer term, it seems to me to make little sense to host the catalogue ourselves. One of the puzzles of the further education sector is how little catalogue sharing and interoperability has been achieved
- I wasted a great deal of time trying to find a functioning printer.
- My attempts to use the interactive whiteboard foundered; the computer attached to it proclaimed itself out of virtual memory and collapsed on me every time I tried to use it