Freshers' Fayre yesterday and today.

Our contribution is somewhat scaled down compared with previous years but we're promoting our zones with traffic light colored candy and a giant floor plan of the Library for students to stick in a pin into closest to where they think the only book in the Library with the words 'traffic light' in the title might be shelved.

But all that's by-the-bye compared to my rather interesting 'first' that happened today. One final thing I brought up with the Dean last week was the possibility of the Faculty having a spare janitor's closet that they weren't using that I might use as a base of operations when I'm down at that end of the campus.

I thought it unlikely given there's so much pressure on space and I thought it unlikely because it might have political implications. But as it happens a room too small to give to an academic as an office has just become available. I was given the keys this morning and have already 'tried it on for size' between various bits of teaching today.

Turns out it's the former room of a (former) chaplain I know quite well who'd been using it for personal development planning tutorials and who has now moved onto other things. As they're not replacing the post, I happen to be in luck. Although it feels somewhat like treading on ghosts, it also feels extra blessed!

One of my biggest audiences of the year - 300 seat lecture theater packed to the rafters with new mechanical engineering students. I've only got half an hour to enthuse about the Library and its resources/facilities to them, but it's a great space to 'perform' in.

(The lecture hall where the delightful Ms Elena Bodnar dragged me up to demonstrate her bra that turns into a pair of facemasks in an emergency when the Ig Nobel gang came to visit.)

OK, two journals are going. I'm not even going to wait for the usual liaison with academics - there isn't time. I'm cancelling now.

I've just had some usage statistics that show that between their (huge) cost and their (low) use, it's around $200 / downloaded article. Or more. (I'm looking at nearly three years worth of data and it varies).

??!?! For that money they could have almost as many inter-library loans as they cared to before it became rationale to subscribe again. They're history. [1]


[1] Well strictly speaking they're mathematical (one in French/English and one in German).

Possibly one of the hardest days of my professional career today as I had to meet with the Dean of my faculty this morning and explain basically that we've got no book budget and that we cannot renew the database we've had for the last year which many academics in the faculty really love.

Well of course - I think it's great too - it's full text and that's why when we had some money last year that we'd lose if we didn't spend, we bought into for a year knowing that it almost certainly was going to be a year and then we'd cancel it. In fact we were given 18 months access due to when we subscribed and that ends in a couple of months.

The snag is that two senior people who agreed to the 'one year' have moved on and those in their positions now are seeing it as a 'cut' rather than as a bonus for the last 18 months. Sigh.

Meanwhile, journal price increases have finally eroded the information resource provision portions of the budgets sufficiently that with no increase to the budget due to the economic situation, once we've cancelled the database and replaced the subscriptions to print journals that we cancelled to help pay for it, our book budget for the coming year will be zero. That'll be a first for my fifteen years doing this job.

Possibilities include accepting a book buying moratorium for a year. If we can start again next year, it shouldn't be a huge problem.
We could possibly NOT replace the cancelled journals to give us a small book fund for the year.
Or, and this is what I'm rather desperately hoping from the meeting, the Faculty itself might have some pennies lying around that they could contribute.

The meeting went as well as I might expect and I went armed with paperwork about decisions taken at past meetings (before he was Dean), allocation formulae, spreadsheets of costs and prices and anything else I could think of. He's a nice guy and I warm to him - and he sounds very pro-library which is good.

But my sleeplessness over this - which I knew would be a time all summer and had not been looking forward to it - isn't quite over yet as he's going to look at the papers and then get together with myself, the Head of Library and the acquisitions librarian at a later date. He's very keen to keep the database even at the expense of a book budget but at least sees how impossible it is with the library finances as they are at present.

I've spent the rest of the day trying to wrangle journal subscriptions and work out what we might cancel as we've been given a reprieve on a deadline for cancellations that I'd been told was past.

Quite exhausted now.

Been feeling oddly vulnerable the last month or so.

You may not recall this post from a couple of summers ago:
http://doosouth.blogspot.com/2008/08/yesterday-art-librarian-h-bemoaned.html

But I've been on display again. This time my bright idea was to use the four shelves to display artifacts and memorabilia from four different times and places in my life: the two and bit years I lived in Virginia, the five years I spent at boarding school, the year I spent in Nigeria, the two years I spent in South East Asia...

Give it a posh title 'Remembrance of things and times past...' or something and get the arty types to select and 'display' everything and hey presto, one miniature exhibition. Thanks to H for liking the idea enough to host it and thanks to V and D who've done a marvelous job of setting out everything.

Of course my somewhat cynical wife has titled it 'junk from the attic' and won't deign to come and see it, but my Mom and Dad came over today with my nephew and niece they were looking after for the day. They were quite taken with it as of course lots of the objects brought back memories for them!

It has been odd how 'vulnerable' I guess is the best word, that it's made me feel. I wasn't expecting that. Having things on display such as an exercise book in which I 'catalogged' 438 of my books [1], or a notebook with short stories written as a teenager, or even just cub scout badges - makes me feel oddly naked in front of work colleagues.

But it's certainly fascinating to see my life laid out as a musuem piece!

[1] Of course that same catalogue is now an Access database and recently added its 4300th item.

Had fun the last couple of afternoons attempting to knock out an article.

Month or so ago S from TheOldPlace had a request from a journal to write something - the editor had dug up her contact details from an article we co-authored a while back. S, however, didn't feel she could contribute so passed it to me.

I floated three possible ideas past the editor and she like the sound of one. My favorite as it happened as two thoughts would have been a new version of things I've written about before.

This one was to be on a subject I've been thinking about for a while and thought might make an article. Creativity, synergy, consilience - yes, lots of buzz words - and getting even junior staff involved in projects to let them use their creativity and foster professional development.

This seemed the perfect opportunity except that between my vacation and her deadline there was very little time. She needed 1200 words by today and I only had Tuesday and Wednesday at work before two days off now. My bright (and obvious) idea to actually include a junior (non-professional) member of staff in the writing of the article however, meant that she might be able to get just enough done in the way of background reading and interviewing yet another colleague which we needed to do, that two afternoons of solid writing might just get it done.

Better yet, the head of the library and R's immediate bosses okayed her time (one subject of the article!) and she was prepared to do some of the reading at home in her own time.

Having experimented with GoogleDocs before for collaborative writing, we both sat in the same room working on the same document. This wasn't quite the success as when I wrote a sketch with the map librarian. Possibly because then we were both adding to the bottom of the document all the time. This time we were both writing paragraphs all over the place - as they came to mind, as we found a quote we wanted to use, as we helped each other out. GoogleDocs did seem to slow down a little bit under these conditions and I even managed to crash it twice. (Nothing lost though, so no great problem). Just occasionally it seemed a little easier to bash out a complex paragraph in Word and then cut and paste it in so that we could 'share' again. On the whole though, it worked quite well.

And by dint of two really dense afternoons Tuesday and yesterday in which we barely paused for breath - and a bit of proofreading last night - we got it done. With one rather major snag. We'd produced 2400 words and nearly 400 hundred more of references. Oh dear. It said what we wanted to say but could I cut it in half today - supposed to be a day off if required? (One uncharitable colleague said it wouldn't be a problem as I never used one word when three would do.)

But before doing anything rash I had a suspicion it might just be worth submitting. After all the editor could reject it out of hand, in which case I had a plan B for submitting it elsewhere; or she could ask for it to be trimmed; or just maybe she'd have been let down by someone else and be happy to take the whole thing.

As it happened, the final possibility turned out to be what happened. This morning we got an email accepting it as it stood. R now very pleased so have had her first professional publication accepted and given we were told it was 'high quality' I'm now wondering if I should have sent it somewhere peer-reviewed. But the editor did ask for it, so she gets it.

My only other 'worry' is that possibly I've made the whole process look a little bit easy to R who was surprised we did so much in so little time. Partly it's my whole 'motivated by a deadline' personality; partly it's practice; partly it's that a lot of it has been buzzing around in my head for a while and some of it was turning up in the presentations I've been doing at conferences this summer. But I hope I've not given a false impression of the work needed!