With rather a lot of annual leave to use up before the end of August I took yesterday off. Although I'm stressed by the work that's piling up, I was glad of a day off doing very little after a weekend with in-laws.

On the upside French rellies were visiting which made it fun and I managed to beat father-in-law at chess which is a once in 20 or 30 game occurrence. Or less. Very unusual.

The new campus cards have arrived. We had photos done a while back. Now they're here.

I must admit mine is much improved. I guess I was in shock when the first one was taken - it was my first few hours in a new job. Now I'm not so embarrassed to wear the thing. Though I can't say I like the vivid lime green of the card in place of the more subdued green of the old one. I'm sure I won't notice soon though.

I may have mentioned way way back that that's one difference between the library here and TheOldPlace. Here staff are much more inclined to keep campus cards on them at all times round their neck on chain or cord. It's been a while now (nearly two years!) but I don't recall many doing that at TheOldPlace. Maybe no one.

They haven't yet implemented the proximity detection that's supposed to be on its way - so these new ones are still swipe access. But mine seems to be letting me in, still, to the huge range of places I'm 'cleared' for. Some, apparently, have had the wrong numbers printed on them preventing borrowing from the Library. Great!

Great coffee morning this morning as a colleague who's just returned from leave presented pictures (and thoughts) from his travels in India. If only my staff development offerings were as well attended - we had to switch venue when numbers got up around the 30 mark.

One moving section of his talk was the images of kids from an orphanage dealing with those who've lost parents working with salt. More information here:
http://www.akaashganga.org/

My lunchtime workshop on Google today. Using it well (or not using it all or with caution). It's quite a fun session and it's run 'hands on' so attendees can follow along - or do their own thing.

Not sure attendance has been great at this series this year and mine was no exception - just 5 today. First time we've added to our advertising by using our Facebook page and blog, but I don't think that helped any. It's early days.

However, those who came seemed to appreciate it and engaged with the discussions and puzzles and so on. If nothing else they get a nice lot of color handouts!

Posting today from some training on Toolbook. I think my boss volunteered me for these two days when I wasn't at a meeting or something...

It's software http://www.plattecanyon.com/instructor.aspx which allows you to develop computer based training which can either run on the web 'as is' or be put into our Virtual Learning Environment. The Library's interest comes from wanting to build some information literacy nuggets and wondering if this would be a good tool to use.

I'm wondering if a hour's demo to a wider library audience wouldn't be more efficient than two days of me getting to grips with the software and then trying to report back on whether it would be useful or not.

Still, I'm here with 5 or 6 others (some of the more 'important' people come and go) and at least R, a colleague from the computing department, and I can sit at the back end of the room and check our email when things get slow. I've been told off by the (external) instructor a couple of times for doing my own thing when we were specifically told we could try our own examples and then what I have on my laptop screen doesn't match what he's trying to show us. Sigh.

All that wouldn't be so bad except for some of the brilliantly unintuitive bits of the software interface. I appreciate it's powerful and can do some clever things, but all the same...

I wonder how much Microsoft is to blame by getting us to expect software to behave in certain ways. Whatever you might feel about the company, they've certainly standardized a lot of our way of working with software and even if Microsoft products themselves can have unintuitive bits for complete newbies, for those that have been around for a while it's a least familiar.

OK, back to thinking up some multiple choice questions to get the software to grade and comment on.

Senior team meeting cancelled this morning! Time to catch up... yay!

Until of course all the enquiries hit me...

... ah well.

Coffee morning this morning on 21 moons of the solar system which was really interesting (I scored well on the quiz!) and delivered of course by my office colleague who is into such things.

Then onto a workshop for three hours about designing good student handouts from one of my favorite internal presenters. Excellent. Learned lots, was inspired, and was able to contribute in a tiny way.

But with all this and lots of student 'interruptions', I'm really not getting a lot done!

Hardly a moment in the office today what with enquiry desk work, tutor center time, tours, and a committee meeting in the afternoon. So of course work is still piling up round me as I don't get on with it...

To the 'installation' of our new chancellor today. A lovely actress (and writer and director). Very weird and not something I've done before. A 50 minute thing in a nearby theater followed by reception/party afterwards.

The formal part was about as close to a secular church service as you could get. Opening 'worship' from an excellent choral group, a 'reading' (i.e. 5 minute talk by the President) reminding us of past events, and a 'sermon' by the new chancellor. Not much liturgy I suppose excepting everyone on stage signing a formal warrant or something.

Amongst the 'welcomes' were half a dozen international students representing their cultures and faiths. One of whom I happened to know as I've spent some time with him on several occasions. So very gratifying when he mentioned the library as being a great help.

The reception afterwards was very jolly with live jazz band (and excellent drummer) though not quite the 'lunch' I thought we'd been invited to. Just an endless succession of canapes and drinks.

Funny kind of thing to go to and arguably a waste of three hours in some colleagues' view, but for me it was a great opportunity to see the university with it's formal (and not so formal) hat on, to see us as part of a larger community and to be encouraged that what we do is appreciated by students and worthwhile.

Back froma a week's vacation. Only about 400 emails to deal with. Fortunately 200 of them could be deleted as spam - I must have words with the IT guys.

Wish I feel I'd made a dent in them by the end of the day...

... ah well.

I appear to have survived being a Roman.

But I fear it was only by the skin of my teeth.

A fun quiz evening I think, but once again we were doing well all evening (2nd) only to be pipped into 3rd place at the end. By the other Library team (again). And once again, they took first place for costume and we took second. (We suspect it wasn't so much the excellence of their outfits - which were ok, but the popularity of their French resistance tv comedy).

But we definitely had the better food!

Speaking of which, this might clear up some misconceptions:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/021101.html

I'm away all next week - so come back in 10 days time or so.

Uni quiz night again tonight. For whatever reason I was volunteered to play the part of Frankie Howard "a distinctive English comedian and comic actor whose career spanned six decades." says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankie_Howard
as we all dress up as Romans.

It's a bit worrying really. It started as something of a joke but given a choice of two other guys in the Library it was decided I was 'campest'. Now admittedly I could be terribly butch and still come out as 'most camp' if the other two are even more so... but I don't think that's what they meant!

Then it degenerated and they (by this I mean staff room tittletattlers) decided there was no male in the Library more camp.

Oh dear. It's an achievement of sorts I suppose. And I can hardly complain given that I'm a librarian in the first place. Librarianship isn't noted for it's high ratio of male to female staff. But it would have been nice for my legacy to have been *something* else...

OK, off to don my toga.

I've set up monthly meeting with my assistant to make me look at the budget situation. Hopefully this will force me to grapple with the numbers - and more importantly what to do with them.

But somehow - although I'm reasonably numerate - as soon as you stick a currency symbol in front of any kind of figure I begin to feel I'm translating out of some very alien language.

TheOldPlace had a simpler system in many ways. If, by the end of the financial year, you hadn't spent the money you lost it. We all got through our book budgets for certain! Better yet we were sometimes given extra money from parts of the Uni which hadn't spent their allocation. The only way of getting through it in the time available was to hit a really huge bookstore a couple of hours away and literally pluck titles from the shelves. Great fun.

But we don't do that here. :-( We can carry money over which causes lots of problems down the line. But with a bit of hard labour for three hours or so, I've spent over $10,000 on books today.