Business librarians - talking in the library!

It's always interesting to compare notes with people doing similar jobs in different places. Which is what we got a chance to do today, as we hosted a meeting for business librarians from around the local area. As we discovered, 'business' can mean a variety of things, including or not including law, economics, social science, hospitality, advertising and more subject areas.

This was a first meeting of its kind, and so was a fairly general discussion of current issues in the business librarianship field. Subject areas that seem to be of general interest for possible future meetings were induction, ebooks and training (which is lucky as these are some of my particular interests - did I influence this too much I wonder?!)

Being part of the blogosphere has helped me to feel in touch with issues in the international librarian community, but it can sometimes be harder to keep up with what's happening locally! I hope we can make these meetings a regular thing.

British librarians blog

Here's something for the CV - I was one of the first 100 blogging librarians in Britain! There are now 100 members of the British Librarian Bloggers Group.

Budget update

A colleague tells me that details of today's Budget are available from here.

Including a link to DirectGov from where, "You will be able to view the speech live from this page in either Windows Media or Real Player formats, as well as download an audio 'podcast' version for use on your PC or MP3 player."

Just what I wanted!

This is not the only example of high tech government I've seen lately. It seems that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, which ran an experimental wiki for a while, now has a blog.

Whatever next?

Paperwork

I seem to be suffering a deluge of paperwork at the moment. Even as I write this someone has just added another inch of paper (a new course validation document) to the pile! I don't know quite why it is, but lately its landing on my desk faster than I can deal with it.

I'm looking forward to my enquiry desk duty later as a chance to get away from it for an hour.

It's a LibraryThing

It's fun being a librarian. And now, with the really rather wonderful LibraryThing - anyone can join in!

A reflective sort of post

It was an 'out of the comfort zone' sort of day today. I think it was good for me, but I wouldn't like it to happen too often. No one bit of it would have been a problem on it's own, but all on the same day was a bit of a challenge.

There was a re-validation of a course in one of my subject areas, which meant that in the morning I showed some of the visiting panel around the library and talked to them about the resources we have in the relevant subject areas. After this a colleague and I gave a presentation about the way we manage our library induction to a group of visitors. Part of the 'out of the comfort zone' of this was that we made a few last minute changes to the slides, (changing some quotes around and adding sound clips!) which is not something I would normally have the nerve to do just before a presentation. It definitely did improve it though, so was worth it. Then there was a short break for lunch and then we did another presentation, this one on Web 2.0/Library 2.0, and what it might mean for us, to some of our own library staff.

Standing up and presenting is a part of the job I enjoy much more than I used to (there was a time when I cringed at the thought of it and didn't enjoy it at all) but it's still not my favourite thing in the world. I would not like to be a lecturer. I generally get more satisfaction from working away quietly in the background to make sure everything is in place for people to come along and take the library resources for granted!

Which is what I hope to go back to doing, except for one small group training session, next week.