Bit of a shock to spend nearly four hours with technical services yesterday. Not so much the four hours - well, actually yes, the four hours as well. It had been timetabled as three but even that would have been a lot to take in. H and I visited the head of the section, the chief of cataloging, and the serials librarian.

All pretty much as you'd expect as we went through budgets and their names and some of the intricacy of how they're apportioned, how books actually travel through the department and how they might be found whilst there, how to mark books as urgent ("red star" items), stuff about cataloging, serials... no I'm not going over it all here.

Some of the 'differences' I spotted:
* recordings of tv shows done in house, I got the impression it was a much smaller set up than what I've been used to (two DVD recorders though)
* research money figures in the budgets
* books appearing on the catalogue immediately they're ordered but the shelfmark appears as "on order", when the book actually arrives the shelfmark goes blank (which means it's in technical services obviously(!))
* curious way of marking books BY an author in the literature (or art) section, say, and those ABOUT an author: 810.6 TWA for books by Twain. But 810.6 TWA/SMI for books by Smith for example about Twain.
* barcodes for books are semi-decipherable - a new party piece to learn after ISBNs
* ongoing journal donations should have names attached because the donor is chased!

nothing terribly major but it began to dawn on me some way through the morning that we weren't in Kansas any more...

...I've written previously about not having to 'order' books but just fill in a card to pass to cataloging. It's even stranger than that. Aware that the Faculties have much more say in library stock (for example nothing's weeded before it's vetted), I asked just what percentage of books were bought by Faculty rather than myself. Oh, about 95% came the answer. Just about, I'd have guessed, the complete reverse of the last decade or so. On the other hand, all the faculty requests do come past me for an ok.

In many respects that's a good thing as it shows involvement, interest and the specialist knowledge required to meet student needs. Though questions about 'background' reading and a well rounded stock begin to form in my mind.

That will take some getting used to and is much more like the Uni up the road where I didn't get the job. No wonder I can manage here without an assistant (though one may be on the cards next year if the University agrees to posts 2 & 3 - the first floor have had theirs agreed and it's been advertised). (Though to be fair the floor teams act in much of that capacity after a fashion.) So, no spending lots of money on books any more. Ah well, it was nice while it lasted.