Summers in the Library used to include two or three visits to other libraries or similar. This year we only have one.

So today saw 17 of us drive 80 odd miles to some national archives where the geanealogists amongst us had an absolute field day. After a tour and a lecture and some lunch even I was inspired to dig out the old census records that were freely accessible while we were on site and go back to find my great-great-great grandfather. Apparently I come from quite a line of either shipbuilders or preachers. No wonder I ended up on a Christian bookship for two years!

Tonight was the official opening of the new building the cosmologists inhabit. Having initially been overlooked I'd managed to wangle a ticket to the opening and the lecture.

Quite an event it was too with some very very notable people in attendance. The top astronomer in the country giving the lecture, famous TV astronomers, my office colleague's observatory Head and many many others.

What was particularly brilliant about the lecture looking at the next couple of decades in astronomy and cosmology was how it managed to appeal to the school kids in the front row and the senior researchers further back. The professional astronomers in attendance and the interested laypeople such as myself. Very clever. And some mindblowing stuff about alternate universes or dark energy and so on that sound like they're straight from science fiction.

"Library" trip (day off actually) to see Shakespeare at a replica theater. 'As you like it' which I didn't know until today. So another day of not getting any work done. Aaaaargh.

Still, it was a great trip, great play and great production so the five of us who went had a good time. My only frustration was not being able to make a side trip to a decent bookshop to buy a Czech/English dictionary.

Another day out today - no wonder I'm not getting anything done! - as the law librarian roped me into doing a presentation to a meeting of college librarians. We kind of did a 'dark side of the web / light side of the web' double act where I enthused about the positive aspects of Web 2.0 things and how we were using them in the Library and she warned about some of the downsides and negatives (e.g. privacy or the undeleteable nature of some content people blithely publish about themselves).

I even got in some stuff on creativity and how to encourage it in the Library and reference my former colleague S and some of the papers / work we've done together.

Seemed to go down well - although as ever I really should learn to self-edit better. I was fine - but could have been excellent perhaps if I contained some of my sidetracks and enthusiasm. On the other hand it's kind of why I'd been invited to present so it's a fine balance.

A new peer review system is being introduced to the university and poor H has been tasked with getting the faculty librarians up to speed on what we have to do.

No one is very 'engaged' with the process yet (and seeing that coming H actually volunteered to spearhead the project so it wasn't done by someone who didn't care), so there was a three line whip on us all to attend the 2.5 hour planning session.

H did a marvellous job of explaining it and getting us to work out what it would mean for us in reality and in fact it was much less 'scary' than everyone had anticipated. More a question of just getting going really like many supposedly awful jobs.

But woebetide my senior colleague who deliberately managed to avoid attending by 'scheduling' some teaching for the morning long after we knew what the deal was, if he either complains he doesn't know what he's supposed to do, or doesn't make his contribution to what we have to do as a team.

University grievance procedures have been revised and hectic though work is at the moment I had to spend two hours in a seminar on the new system this morning. The only saving grace of the experience was that was on the 9th floor of a building with great views over the city.

Weekend update: Stop Press!

Just had an email from the conference in the Czech Republic. They've accepted my paper!

Looks like I really will be going after all.

Three tours today of school children visiting the university.

The first lot I showed round were 16 years old, the next lot 15, the final lot 14.

It was both interesting and shocking to see how they behaved and how increasingly rambunctious they became the younger they were.

I quickly realized that most of my 'set text' just didn't work and I had to engage them at a completely different level.

My biggest mistake the first time was standing in the atrium saying we were going up to the 3rd floor - and just as I would for any tour group offered the elevator for those who needed it. Of course they all *needed* it. So as they piled into the elevator I realized I'd better go too. Just as I got in and the doors closed it dawned on me that a) my entire group were girls; b) this was our flakiest lift in the building and prone to breaking down at a moment's notice.

Fortunately we made it to the third floor in short order but it wasn't a mistake I repeated!

Today was the Library's summer event of training for any library staff who wanted to attend. Some 35-40 did.

Not quite as fun as last years extravaganza where teams had to research 6 holiday options and then we examined our information literacy in how we'd gone about the task.

This year was useful and interesting though:
- interactive quiz on e-learning
- exploration of various e-learning sites (in pairs or threes) with free rein to comment and criticize design and so on
- demo from our own e-learning folk of various things they were up to (including the project I'm involved with which I mentioned last Monday - rather quietly I discovered that they'd put everything 'back' how it was realizing that maybe we did have a point and an actual pedagogical reason for what we were doing!)
- then we visited various University e-learning sites and again commented and noted what worked and what didn't
- and then we had a session on how the Library might develop tools from wikis to Meebo for reference enquiries.

Now it's off to an evening meal to say farewell to our ground floor Manager of several years standing.

Away at a conference the last couple of days. City I've never been to before and expected to be a bit dingy and industrial. Turns out it's really lovely. Great city center, friendly people and possibly the highlight of the conference was the hour walk I took round on the first night after arrived.

For 'electronic information group' of our professional body it was a bit disappointing that there was no wireless access. (Just two computers in a lounge you could fight for time on!) So no live Twittering or anything for me. Although I did sit behind a well known blogger and enjoyed watching her blog live from a couple of sessions.

I'm trying to think of what I 'got' from the conference but I fear that it was one of those when I probably contributed more in workshops and the like talking about some of the work and projects I've been involved in the last couple of years.

Feeling a bit guilty I cut my stay short to make it back for our Head's leaving do in the Atrium of the Library. Quite a crowd there. Glad I came back though - mostly for the sense of closure for myself rather than any suspicion he'd have missed me had I not been there!

Have managed to revise my paper for the conference I'd like to go to.

As I don't think I've mentioned this before, bit of a catch-up: the project to create a website for students 'offered a place but not yet here' contains a Library section I've had a big hand in designing. I wrote up the rationale, method, design and so on as a journal article and then started looking for places to have it published. The Second Life gang I work with were also doing the same for Second Life things. I noticed a conference in eastern europe that might fit the bill for both subjects.

My paper came back from the reviewers with two comments: 'no scientific merit and no technical mead' (whatever that is) 'but a good description of the project'. Thank you. I'd quite agree. It's an IEEE sponsored technical conference and I was surprised they were even considering it but I was willing to see what I could do about it.

There wasn't *much* I could do to change it but I did change one of the diagrams into something that looked much more like a wiring diagram than a screen shot, the lady who actually does the Flash building (and who I've now added as co-author) gave me a couple of sentences on the technical behind the scenes stuff and I added a couple of references and tweaked another sentence. So, there's nothing more I can do. We'll see.

Book group met last night. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - absolutely brilliant and it's one of only two books that has been universally liked. Highly recommended.

We stayed for the quiz afterwards as well and managed to win - despite the lack of our staunch senior colleague who will no doubt be most miffed that we coped without him!

Somewhat shocked to go to a meeting today to check on the Library's contribution to a university wide project and find that they've changed around some of work so that it no longer makes 'sense'.

I tried to stay calm and consider objectively whether I was just being some kind of diva about our work or not liking change, but the more I think about it the more I realize that it makes what we've done seem a bit random and unhelpful. At the very least they could have asked or mentioned what they were doing.

I've asked for an appointment to see the senior manager on the project to see whether we (they) can't think again.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

I'll make my own fun most anywhere even if something is not that thrilling.
But I'd really been looking forward to a day of 'creativity' and using my Belbin 'plantyness' and so forth.

In fairness the workshop itself was great, but...

The workshop we (myself and two computing academics) had travelled to attend had some 30 others present. The aim was to generate some 'nifty tools' that could be built and used in Second Life. We were split into 6 tables of 5 or 6 so we were divided up as much as we could be in terms of skills, background and experience with Second Life.

My table consisted of a very young lady who seemed overly shy, a transexual (guy presenting as a female), an Asian lady who's English seemed fine, a very obese lady, and myself. (I'm not suggesting I was any less odd than anyone else!) There didn't seem to be any problems with anyone individually, but they just sucked the life out of me. I tried not to get volunteered to report back to the whole group after discussions, I tried not to talk a lot, but there was just nothing going on with anyone. In fact, a couple of times I actively experimented for several minutes of not saying anything and the group just ground to a halt. Although we functioned in a basic sort of way to do the assigned tasks there just seemed to be no ooomph or engagement. None of my efforts to draw people out or anything seemed to achieve anything.

I'm not one to give up easily but had I not been being driven back by one of my colleagues at another table I might well have called it a day around 3pm. It wasn't helped by lunch being in the same room and due to lack of room to manouver, we ended up eating in our 'groups'. I could bear it no longer and said I'd always wanted to see the library of the university we were visiting and made my excuses for half an hour. (Glad that I did - the library had just introduced a lab of digital tools and toys to explore with physical e-books, toys, comfy seating and all sorts to inspire. Well worth a look round).

I survived the day and was fascinated to hear my colleagues had had great experiences at their tables so they weren't so keen on my feedback of us being moved around periodically.
What surprised me was that this wasn't some random work group that didn't really want to engage in any brainstorming or something. It wasn't a group of pressed me. It was people who had seen the advertising, chosen to come, travelled some distance in some cases and presumably wanted to contribute.

Interesting. But odd.

My turn to lead one of our coffee mornings today.

On Twitter.

While I threatned that it would be the shortest training session ever - there's very little to say really - by the time I'd shown them Twitter generally, the Library's feed specifically and then responded to questions and debate about how we should use it, the 40 minutes or so passed rapidly.

It seemed to go down well with even the sceptics admitting there might be some point to it. I understand a couple of people have signed up to give it a go.

Off on the train in a moment with the prospect of a five hour journey as I'm at a workshop tomorrow which starts early.

Back now from 10 days leave which involved three days of camping which was 'fun'. Wet, cold, back breaking and possibly too much family. But there were highlights amongst some of the heritage sites / sights we took in.

And swam in the sea for the first time this year on the way home. Not that the weather warranted it. But it washed away the grim(e) of the vacation.

Then 5 days running the AV element of a conference which turned out to be exhaustingly demanding but a huge privilege with some top speakers and almost a free hand to annotate their talks. The main points I'd been putting up on screen the first day or two were apparently so useful to the large number of non-English speakers that by the end I was doing as near full-text as I could, in the manner of subtitles. Throwing in images as and when appropriate just added to the fun. Demanding but interesting.