I was earning my 'plant' thinking money this morning.

Our senior staff meeting (chaired today as part of a new scheme by boss rather than the head of library) had a bit of a puzzle.

Cutting a rather long and tedious story short our library system needs to be taken off line for half a day. Very frustrating that the work had not been fitted into the summer as planned but there you go. You can imagine that this time of year it's really difficult to take half a day out of a system that's so vital to all that we do.

Must be done between 9 and 5. Must be done on a weekday. (There's long and involved reasons as to why.)

Lots of discussion as to whether it was necessary (yes), could it be delayed say till Christmas (no), and all the other ins and outs of what it would mean.

One of the biggest issues over the exact timing is the colleague that has inordinate amounts of training she's doing with students on how to search the catalogue (if only my students cared!). One solution I thought of was to simply use screen shots, but I held my tongue as I guessed that she was doing 'hands on' sessions. Unsurprisingly, someone did suggest that and the idea was shot down because the sessions were 'hands on'.

After a little while of this, I finally had my bright idea: TheOldPlace had a library system bought in from a small European country and we were the only ones in the country to use it. (Despite it's widespread usage in Denmark). The aim had been to sell it wider.

However, that is not the case with the system used here in this library. So why not do the searches on another university catalogue that looks all but identical? Check beforehand the books you want exist there and simply explain to the students why you're doing it and that the shelfmarks might look a bit different. A nicly lateral solution.

Only, because I thought it was a bit off the wall and have been trying to tone down such ideas since learning that they wind other people up [1], I didn't dare produce it on my own but had to suggest it to the e-guru next to me and get him to put it forward when he didn't laugh out loud at the thought.

Perhaps I shouldn't self-censor so much.


[1] A couple of weekends ago my wife and I were trying to solve a basically intractable problem and I came up with at least three possible solutions all of which she dismissed as 'off-the-wall' and found really irritating. Trouble was I'd already discarded several of the solutions I'd had which really were a lot more strange. Wish I'd started with them now and wound back into the more sane ones...