Ah, 'Avocado', how I've missed you...
John Bowes Morrell is much changed since I last met him, twelve years ago. I suspect his unconventional partnership with Raymond Burton and Harry Fairhust has helped brighten him up. He's redecorated, and while I do miss the old wood finishes I have to confess that the modernist white paint-job looks rather smart. Harry's looking grand too, having kicked out the itinerant compscis and laid out some beanbags for his all-nighters.
I'm lodging with Harry now; have been for a fortnight. I share my digs with a lovely assortment of librarians, and am doing my best to blend in. Two of them, like me, only started recently, and also like me, are providing short-term cover for someone else (one of them even has a blog). The three of us, variously experienced in the dark arts of librarianship, have been enjoying an impressive spread of induction events (some of which go on right up to the end of my contracted term), and these have been invaluable in helping us to settle into our new home.
Interlaced with this training has been the steady drip drip of actual work. My first task was to transfer the old subject guides across to a new system, and tidy them up a bit. As someone who's been tinkering with HTML for over a decade, this was quite a pleasant introduction to my new role, and I'd soon wrestled the lists into some sort of shape. Tidying them up further is an ongoing task and there are some dead links still to weed, but the work of an academic liaison assistant is many and varied and one must prioritise accordingly: for another, more pressing aspect of my work arrived this week: teaching.
I am not entirely green when it comes to standing in front of a group of people and speaking. I've run exams as an invigilator, I've spoken between songs when playing in a band, I've done presentations as a student, and I've assisted in library teaching sessions before (I got to do a little spot of that sort of thing again this week, which was fun). In October, though, I'll be giving my own student induction sessions, and that's both exciting and just a little bit terrifying too. Things are complicated slightly by a number of factors, primarily the not insignificant detail that I myself am still being inducted. This is balanced to a small extent by the fact that the library is undergoing a number of little revamps here and there that are not yet implemented, making lesson-planning tricky for everyone, not just us pesky kids. That the more experienced members of staff are in boats similar (if not quite identical) to ours does perversely lend a tot of confidence.
Not bumped into my old nemesis yet. Only a matter of time.
During the course of this week I also popped two important library cherries: I bought some books and I discarded some others. The purchases were not my own selections, and the discarded books were donations rather than proper weeding, but it's a start! I'm beginning to feel just a little bit like a grown-up librarian...
