...because of the welcome meal last night.

Quite a select crowd. The six of us at the level H and I are at, plus our boss, plus K from inter-library loans. I hadn't quite gathered that the invitation hadn't gone to all library staff. When I'd mentioned the meal - every ready to stick my foot in it - to some of the folk from the issue desk, they'd looked at me rather blankly. Turns out there is a little more segregation between teams than might have at first glance appeared to be the case. H and I both agreed that had we had any say in the matter, we'd have no doubt done it differently!

H was the only one who'd worked out that there was no point in me going home at the end of the day only to have to set off immediately to get back in time. But with a couple of hours to kill on a non too promising evening weatherwise, she very kindly invited me to walk the huge commute she has which is all of 7 minutes to sit and read/watch the news while she prepared to go out.

Drinks before hand in a jam-packed pub after we'd rounded up B (who gave me my tour on interview day and also lives locally) and then onto a very pleasant curry house near the city's theatre. All very friendly, all very much as you might expect. If there had been any fears that it all might feel a bit uncomfortable, they were soon dispelled.

In the event it was a lovely evening out and taxi/train/taxi home worked out reasonably well as well. I even just managed to avoid the rain.

Teaching induction all day today.

Some of it compulsory. Some of it only compulsory if you've never taught before. I decided to stay for the whole day in any case as I can always benefit from learning new things or seeing things from a new angle. I was glad I did there was some really useful stuff.

Yet another folder in the Uni's ubiquitous color to start the day off (I've already got one as a staff pack and one as a personal development file from the library). This contained all the teaching material (and the stuff for the days of this that are to come).

What was best about the day was getting the full student experience:
lots of stuff thrown at us in a very short space of time
too much talk and too little interaction (though the afternoon improved things)
a room that was too hot and crowded
with some serious construction work going on outside so you couldn't open the windows and still hear anything
projector bulbs failing (though pretty impressed with the quick response of techy help)
sessions over-running so that lunch was cut rather short

it was a great demonstration of what the students will no doubt be feeling like as from next week. But despite all that, it was a good day. I particularly enjoyed the afternoon on learning styles (which I've looked at before but this was a different 'system' and I came out a little oddly); followed by a session on setting and writing learning outcomes which was useful.

Back to the office fairly exhausted - certainly with my brain far too full - but no chance to go home...

(will write about that tomorrow though)

Conference today for all new staff which was both fun and interesting.

I didn't do very well at the 'human bingo' as I'd end up talking to people rather than playing the game by just ticking boxes and moving on to get as many ticks as possible. The prizes were good too with a memory stick being 2nd prize. (I never did hear what was in the box being offered as first prize.) And why does no one ever have to get a tick against 'find someone who can steer a ship over 100 tons' or something!?

As for other content: we heard from the VC himself (who really ought to be an aging tv presenter but most confusingly manages - in both looks and mannerism - to be nearly indistinguisable from my old boss!) giving us an overview of the uni. Although it was interesting he ran over time and unsettled much of the rest of the day as regards time. The Finance Director told us about funding. And after a break we went on tours. Some on a tour of the city by coach, I'd opted for the walking tour of the city campus. Fortunately the rain stayed off while we were told more about architecture than about what the buildings contained - but it was interesting nevertheless.

All day there were lots of opportunities to meet other newbies and lunch was no different. But there was also a mini-exhibition in the foyer of various services that might be useful. Even the library was there with a stall and I picked up various freebies from mousemats to booklets and a uni stress reliever in the shape of an oldstyle computer terminal. Weirdest of all was stumbling across one of the chaplains who turned out to know my parents well and to have just joined the church I attend. I suppose I should expect the small world effect. Sister breezed through at that point having been relieved to have finished with a meeting at which some nasty allegations against her weren't substantiated. That was good.

After lunch there were parallel sessions for support staff and academics. I went to the latter as did H. Perhaps we should have divided and conquered to see what the other part was like. Our two sessions were a mixed bag - the first being fairly dry and presented unenthusiastically about getting money for research, the second being a more interesting look at various support services.

Journey to work options have just grown more complicated by finding someone who can drop me at the train station of a morning as he drops his daughter off. Saves being stressed by catching the bus and/or the close timing of getting on the train.

Snag is, it only works in the morning which means I still need a bus/ticket for the evening jaunt home.

I had finished my two week trial of the train journey yesterday after my two week trial of ferry, but I've extended the former because of the lift and for reasons I'll write about at the end of the week.

Databases. They're a funny lot of things really. For anyone who's not familiar with the academic abstracty types of the breed, their front ends depend on which provider you've bought the thing from.

Exploring some more and doing searches and working out what's where so I can pass all this onto to students in at least a semi-coherent fashion, I came across one I'm very familiar with but with a completely different front end. Not particularly better, not particularly worse - they're all much of a muchness these days but different enough to throw you and keep you on your toes if you were going to show them to anyone.

In the absence of an international standard I can only dream of it's just something to live with. But search engines all seemed to adopt Google's 'stream-lined' look. Can't database providers take a leaf out of someone's book, get together and make the student's life a lot easier? (Not to mention the librarian's life.) It's daunting enough for them to have to learn that they need to search more than just Google, but to have a learn a new front end everytime they switch is a nightmare too far - 'specially for those who are proud to admit in their third year that they've never even been to the library.

Of course, all this might be by-the-by if the federated searching we may be adopting soon, comes in. The idea here is that you can do one search that will go off and query all the databases that you've selected. Downsides including too many (possibly irrelevant) hits depending on what you're searching for and the fact that, like metasearch engines on the web, not all features are common across every database.

It's stuff like this though that reminds you we're still only in the early days of what's going to be possible in the future. Roll on tomorrow...

TheOldPlace start tours with new students this week. We seem to be a week 'behind' and wouldn't be starting that till next week. In any case, with the extension still unfinished tours are off the menu till the beginning of November.

Even when tours are available they're not the same. At TheOldPlace academics book their groups of students into slots (on the hour throughout the week) and up to 120 I think it is/was [there doesn't seem to be a grammar for this] might arrive in any one hour and would be taken on a five stop tour of the library by 10 guides working in five pairs. Of course, not every hour had that many students. It was a good team building exercise with acquisitions/loans/information team all joining in and newer staff able to learn by watching those who'd been around for longer. (And sometimes the other way round.)

Here, tours are much more ad hoc with students arriving and asking for them whenever they want (I think) and staff who've volunteered take them round. But not having seen it in action yet I'm not entirely certain.

What they do do here which didn't happen at TheOldPlace is get involved with the Freshers' Fair for new students. Handing out leaflets, enthusing about the library (?!) and answering any questions that may already be cropping up. However, since they had marketing guru and funster AB (mentioned back in early entries of this blog) this is all going to be themed around the idea of pirates and hidden treasure. It's one of those things that seems like a brilliant idea from the safety of a conference presentation but somehow is a bit more fearful from the vantage point of a week before it happens. I've already been collared to participate. I may get to dress up as a pirate, yet!

Hmmmm. Should I claim incipient old age and decide that now I'm an academic - stop laughing at the back - I should avoid this? Or should I just throw myself into it whole-heartedly and see if I can learn some jargon from International Talk Like a Pirate Day webpages (apparently I've just missed it)?

One thing that has most certainly improved in the change of jobs, is the email system. In fact from being better than TheOldPlace it improved in just my first week or so here to 'much better' when a new system was implemented across the University. Many of the old bugbears have gone with what might be described as a 'real' email system. LotusNotes may have been great at databases and portalness (not that it got used for that), but it wasn't that brilliant at email. GroupWise apparently has it's faults but I'm not spotting them at present.

Still available, there is the shared diary kind of feature that seems to be used a bit here (or is that just the effect of it being new and people giving it a go?). Tasks, emails and calendars seem to be a bit more integrated now but perhaps that's an artifact of being more windowslike.

But I'm really enjoying being able to do little things like sorting by subject line, export emails to text files tidily, and best of all, the long wanted, automatically sort into folders. This means you can subscribe to quite busy mailing lists but not have to individually read/delete/move each email as it comes in. Once a rule sorting it into the correct folder is created, you can just check the folder (handily marked with the number of unread emails) whenever the mood takes you. So rather than being continually interrupted, you can manage the things to fit in with workload/interest. In much the same way that Bloglines handles Blogs. So basic and yet so life changing (well, in the small world of email that is). I know just about everyone in the world has been able to do this in the likes of Outlook since the year dot, but it's a first for me and one I've long looked forward to knowing I'd like. I do.

Day off yesterday.

Irritating that the appointment I'd taken the day off for, was postponed for a couple of weeks. That's already very well but my diary's not too full at the moment and is getting busier and busier once the students are all properly back. Grrr.

The day was salvaged though by the weather being good enough to go sit in the sun on the beach with a book (or three). Great waves (tail end of a hurricane apparently) to get the adrenalin going. Much, much bigger than normal.

Shopping with sister at lunchtime today. That's something I couldn't do before!

Didn't find what we were looking for but did come to appreciate the expertise hidden there in my sibling as she was able to discard stores that would have been a waste of time and head to the best places in the mall.

I'm not entirely sure an overcoat a la some of the _West Wing_ characters is what I'm looking for - after all I don't have to stand around for hours in the cold of Inauguration Day, but at least we narrowed the options that were available. Apparently, I'm a bit early for such things to have hit the racks in any case.

Still haven't quite solved the problem of 'lunch' on such days. Previously I'd have filled the hour with external activities and been able to eat lunch at my desk afterwards. Unable to do that now, I either need to plan to take a longer lunchbreak to fit in some food or go hungry. Not quite as handy.

To an internal conference today.

Kept me out of the office and in another building. But when I thought, half way through the morning, that I'd like to send an email at lunchtime did discover there was a nice computer suite upstairs where I could just logon and get on with it for five minutes.

Despite being advertised for 'heads' and 'course leaders' I'd signed up anyway and was very glad I did. Very similar to the kind of thing that might have happened occasionally at TheOldPlace it was an opportunity for academics to get together and present some of the things they'd been working on and discuss some of the implications for the university.

I found it useful both for the content (e.g. my boss demonstrating a referencing tool and things on training I ought to know about), but also in seeing the university in action as it were. It was also a good opportunity to see and meet academics and generally start something of the process of making sure I'm not invisible or unknown - as was the problem at a certain infamous institution where they fired all those at my level. Not that I'm particularly planning on replicating acquaintances at the directorate level.

While the venue was very similar to one of the newest lecture theatres across the park at TheOldPlace, it was probably a bit larger and curiously had two large screens at the front. (As well as four big LCD or plasma screens suspended from the ceiling halfway back). Two (and then four repeaters) seemed a bit excessive especially as they both showed the same PowerPoint for much of the day, but I suddenly saw the point when we some little remotecontrol like objects were handed out and we were asked to participate by answering certain questions and pressing the relevant button on the handset. Then, while one screen continued to show the PowerPoint, the other showed the voting as it happened and produced bar charts of the results. Very impressive - and great fun. (Yes, I know, little things please little minds). I've heard of this and played with 'tests' but never really seen it in action before.

One speaker was particularly enthusiastic and jolly and funny. Coming from the subcontinent it was difficult to follow him at times, but if you didn't want to podcast before he started you did by the end. He was certainly a breath of fresh air. He was keen to remind us that education should be entertaining which you could sense that not everyone agreed with. He definitely educated via entertainment though! Unfortunately, the head of library not only had to follow him for a short 10 minute slot, but had to follow him with a really dull session on new copyright regulations. At least he had the humor to admit that however entertaining education might be or might become, the next 10 minutes certainly weren't going to be. In actual fact his briefing was fine, but I fear that it may reinforced those library stereotypes we're so keen to avoid.

One delight of the day was it finishing late enough in the afternoon to feel there wasn't much point in going to the office to start over - especially with a mind full of new things to reflect on, think about and get inspired by - but early enough to feel just a smidgen guilty at going home and enjoying the last few minutes of some glorious sunshine. As well as mowing the lawn. I needed time to dig up some documents for a conference in January in any case, so that worked out well.

Been here a month now. My doesn't how time fly! It can't really have been that already.

Seems as good a time as any to reflect on life for a moment. If I recall correctly I read a quote on the day I started here about the life not reflected on being wasted. I'll have to dig it out.

Looking back through some of my posts there seems to be just the possibility that they might be interpreted as a general dissatisfaction with having moved jobs. I don't think that was intended although perhaps I thought there'd be a bit more balance between the "oh, it's better here" or "oh, it was better there". Perhaps I've focussed too much on the TheOldPlace's positive aspects because I'm more familiar with them and they're being thrown into sharp relief here. There are positives here but they'll take longer to become so obvious or embedded in life.

On balance, I think all my reasons for wanting to move were correct and that as I settle in here more and more, I'm just getting 'used' to the place if not actively thinking work is a thrill a minute! (Does anyone really love their workplace - as opposed to certain aspects of their work or environment?)

A couple of things, of course, remain to happen here to really get a sense of the place. First the students returning; and second a full training diary. It is vaguely worrying that as I check our shared diary I only have a couple of sessions booked so far, but a colleague seems to have them coming out of his ears!

The one thing I think I really had underestimated was the extent to which TheOldPlace filled certain social parts of my life. Tied up with having some good friends there who I miss terribly - email just isn't the same. It leaves with me a kind of melancholy which has hit before for a few hours but is a bit more disturbing after days/weeks even. That and the new environment leaves me feeling much more 'aware' of my surroundings and experiences, perhaps much more introspective or reflective of life at present. Possibly no bad thing. But not something I'm used to.

First session today with students. Some masters and doctorate computing students. Not a large group but friendly enough. The masters lot flying off to Saudi Arabia tomorrow so mostly interested in electronic access.

All seemed to go reasonably well and the two academics (Joe Onion and a dutch lady) who stayed throughout were very positive about the session afterwards and said the feedback from the students/researchers had been good. Apparently they have four lots of this intake a year so plenty of opportunities to hone what I say to them and work out whether inter-library loans and the like work internationally (I don' t think so).

H was doing the third of her 'first' sessions half an hour after I finished and had kindly said I could drop in and see how it went. Unfortunately, not only was the building at the opposite end of a complex city campus but the map I was following left a little to be desired. I didn't get completely lost (and I did ask for directions) but by ten past the hour knew I wasn't going to make it. When I eventually did loop round and actually find the building at 25 past, I discovered I'd actually passed it just in time to get there but with no labelling whatsoever on three sides of a large block I'd managed to miss it. Ah well, after doing my John Cleese in _Clockwise_ impression in a rather dodgy part of town, my ankles are now very painful. These aren't the shoes (or suit come to think of it) for running!

As for the web page itself, it's a bit better than the old one but still has a lot of idiosyncrasies that are either confusing or just plain weird. Breadcrumb trails that aren't (they're merely another set of tabs, but it's not clear that's the case); links that are repeated in different places (odd as space is at such a premium on such pages); the odd promotion of some links that would more naturally be a level or two down (I think although I'm not at all sure that politics may be behind some of them); and a design which, again, reminds me of something from half a decade or more ago.

I understand from rumors that there the university style sheets or some such are about to revised in any case so things will change again. And I've been invited by my opposite number for the science subject areas who takes a hand in the group that looks at such things, to compile a list of comments. So there may be hope yet.

I hardly loved the 'forced on us' and (possibly overly?) studenty design of TheOldPlace's recentish redesign, but were we really so spoilt there?

Training in my diary for today but after lunch. H, my other newbie colleague, kicked off her first session at 10 this morning.

So it was a bit disappointing to find that the library's homepage had changed fairly radically on us with no warning at all.

Well, to be fair in our very first week an email had come round requesting comment on the proposed new page. So we knew it was on the cards. But I'd had no reply to the suggestions and comments I had made and heard nothing more about the forthcoming change.

I guess I should expect that kind of thing at this time of year, but it would still have been nice to have had an email, say, the day before saying that it would be different in the morning and that any screenshots or training you'd based on the old design would now be out of date or irrelevant! Once again, I'm reminded of some of the IT attitude we faced at TheOldPlace a few years back and which I think had been consigned to the past.

My induction program included meetings with two of the seven liaison officers - academics who've volunteered to be the link person with the library and filter such things as books orders and the like. But I thought I ought to meet the other five if possible. Friday last I emailed them all and have had three replies. Hence today and yesterday has seen meetings with four of them and another tomorrow.

An interesting variety of people. One from England, one from Uganda, one from France, one from Japan... It was hard not to warm to people who'd say "I'm passionate about books" or wished they'd got your job! Clearly this extra duty on top of their normal academic work wasn't quite the short straw I'd been led to believe it was.

They were all very welcoming and interested to hear about differences between here and TheOldPlace. I didn't quite dare point them to this blog but I could summarize briefly.

The most obvious difference was that I was talking to them. TheOldPlace didn't have such liaison and I was expected to do my best to get to know and make links with every academic in the subject areas I was responsible for. Where staff were reasonably library friendly, this worked well, but it was difficult to maintain a connection with everyone. This does seem a sensible solution.

Another thing we discussed was the much more 'hands on' approach of the academics in ordering (and weeding etc). They all seemed very amenable to discussion but I invariably got the distinct impression that there were things that they all might put their foot down about. One had a predilection for print books over anything electronic (even admitting to liking their smell) [1]. Another wasn't keen to see a huge, unwieldy, ringbound, looseleaf, 14 volume monstrosity that takes a fair bit of staff time to update disappearing. It costs nearly $800 and is also available free on the web. Continually up-to-date. Available from the desktop instead of coming to the library. (He feared the (government) website disappearing.) A third wasn't too enthusiastic about my observation that if there are space shortages, perhaps the printed abstracts and indexes might have had their day now that they are available electronically...

Hmmm, I might go off this whole 'hands on' faculty deal after all!




[1] which particularly amused me - though I didn't say so - as I've often drawn odd looks from those who've caught me sniffing particularly aromatic books. The ones that remind me of 3rd grade for some reason are particularly worth a smell!

OK, that was weird. But then I guess it is a small world.

Sitting in the staff room at break time a colleague mentioned that he'd just bumped into one of 'my' lecturers who had some students from Saudi Arabia that he was showing round. Couldn't think of his name off the top of his head and I went back to my book.

Then he remembered: Joe Onion.

And as my brain clicked into gear I asked him if he was sure? The name rang lots of bells from childhood - it kind of stuck in my mind for obvious reasons. Could there really be two such people? Short and even more rotund than me? suggested my colleague. That was probably him. From the little I could recall as a lad, short and round would be about right.

A little later sitting in the office, the ILL lady from just round the corner popped her head round to say that Joe was here with his students. She'd obviously overhead the earlier conversation and thought I ought to link up with this 'long lost friend'.

Actually, I probably wouldn't have known him if we'd passed in the street. As he reminded me, once the students were safely let loose to roam the library, he knew my parents well and often stayed at our house. But I was pretty sure we were going back three decades or more. He was delighted by the chance meeting because he's not actually a lecturer at the university having retired (two years ago did he say?), but as he did part-time stints with such students as the ones he was showing round who happened to be studying computing, they fell to me to induct. I now have my second induction booked but as it's on Wednesday, it will actually be my first here.

And Joe? He was so keen to catch up with my parents who are off to Brazil for six months from the beginning of October, he's coming round next weekend to meet up with them. The small world shrinks again.

New XP machine arrived today. Hurrah!

Nothing quite like that to put a bit of zest in your activities. Doesn't take 10 minutes to login now and I'm hoping it won't take 5 to log out (while I wait to press the button to actually turn off the machine when it's 'safe'). Given that I'm an information professional expected to spend a fair bit of my day using the PC and accessing electronic resources via it, not to mention training students and showing them 'what's what' etc, it did seem a little, urh, odd would be the polite word that it's only now this is happening. Still, at least it's happened now and not in a year or something.

Very small, very black Dell box. Screen still 17" but more of a margin round the edges. USB in the front which should be handy and still has a floppy drive which I thought I'd seen the last of. Be fascinated to know if I ever put anything in it. The DVD drive appears to be a RW as well which may be useful.

Softwarewise, Microsoft Office 2003 has arrived and Project and Publisher been added which I'll find useful. Acrobat has gone from v5 to 7 which is an improvement and our mindmapping software has advanced a bit too.

I can even print to the printer that's under my right elbow which is nicer than trawling off to a large shared machine elsewhere.

Nice young lady came and did the physical installation - not what you tend to expect from IT type services - but a refreshing change as she came with something of a customer service attitude and a 'can do' approach to some of the problems she faced.

Remains to be seen how much I can add to it in the way of scanner or Palm syncing, but we'll see. I've thanked the boss already; seemed only fair before starting next week with a list of all the things I now want to add/do!

Scanner
Doublesided printer (don't start!)
Palm sync cradle
headphones (no chance of speakers in the fishbowl)
access to C: drive?

Tried the bus and then train instead of the bus then ferry. Almost wish I hadn't.

(The plan had been to give one route a couple of weeks, then try the other for a fortnight before settling on one. Can't really experiment with the motorcycle option!)

Not off to a great start when checking the timetables I find there's only one bus that connects sensibly with a train. The timing on it is a bit better so that I'd arrive at work around 8.30. With the two choices if I have if go via ferry one gets me there a bit early and one a bit too close to 9 for comfort.

The first snag was getting to the station to discover I couldn't buy a weekly ticket without a photo. Well, I can remedy that but with a strike bracketing the weekend there wasn't much point even if I could have purchased one. Perhaps I'll give it another try next week.

In the meantime I bought a day return which cost half the price of the weekly via the ferry. (The bus ticket of course is the same either way and I'm still using the annual I purchased to get to TheOldPlace.) What's more the weekly ticket costs just about twice as much as the weekly ferry. Buying annually would reduce that to half as much again.

Upsides of going by train though: slightly less of a walk at the library end and much more comfortable journey.
Downsides are the much higher incidences of strikes or delays, the longer (about 10 minutes) overall journey time (it might be comfortable but it has to go further!), and the more limited options timewise thanks to the poor bus service between home and train.

Of course, what would be ideal would be an integrated ticket that would include ferry, bus and train and let me choose which way I wanted to go on the day itself. And wouldn't cost an arm and a leg as separate tickets would. But that would be far too sensible.

Met my first academic today. Well, first academic in subject areas I'm responsible for. Seemed a nice lady from the computing department. Writes a blog on tech in education.

She'd contacted me to arrange some post-grad induction in October and I thought I'd go visit to locate things and confirm what she wanted covered. Content will be pretty much what I might have done at TheOldPlace - but of course pointing to new catalogues and resources and the like. Then she took me to visit the room I'd be in. Pretty much an identical tech set up to TheOldPlace (even the same little panel to switch between pc, tv or whatever) - although there was no DVD player with the video player. Not to worry, all my clips are in video format any way; I'm still working on getting them all nice and neatly on one single DVD.

Anyway, it all seemed very 'normal' and pleasant - though the hinted at in email invitation to lunch in a nearby community hall with other colleagues as "they usually did" seemed to vanish when it actually came to it. What did I say?!