Projects at work

There were a few things on my desk at work this Monday, but it wasn't anything urgent. During the summer we try to do some projects and one of the extra staff members had finished checking the entire open collection for missing books. She wasn't happy about the results. Of 300 missing books she had found four. This week I also instructed three students in the art of making the compact shelving system at a storage function the way you want it to. Not particularly successful, the technician had to come and fix the lights in the ceiling and then the shelves got stuck several times. But the students were persistent and managed to start on the project I had given them. They are moving journals from an open collection into storage, because these journals are now scanned and availabale online, so no one uses the physical volumes much.

I had desk duty twice this week and there were few visitors, but I got some paper work done while I sat there. There is an endless amount of documents they send you that you should read through, so I did some of that. We are re-organizing the library and there are lots of documents relating to that right now. We are turning the information-, circulation- and reception desks into one large desk in a few months.

One interesting thing at work happened today. I passed by the information desk looking for a misplaced book when I was asked by the attending librarian to help out with a question. First, the visitor asked for family information for a well known person who lived in the early 19th century. So we tried to find that, but then he said he was related to this person, but couldn't find out how. He based this on the fact that they had the same last name. (This is the moment when experienced researchers sigh and roll their eyes, but I tried to hide it). So we started with the visitor's family instead. It is rather easy for me to do it, since we have access to most records online. He was clueless, he had never done research before. So I was nice and found his ancestors several generations back until he understood that there could be no connection to the famous person.

Since I have the summer pass to ride the trains and buses, I have made some short excursions this week. Mainly to shopping centers. I'm looking for souvenirs to bring on my trip in August. Tomorrow I was thinking I would try to get to Ystad, if it doesn't rain. Sunday perhaps my mother (who also has a summer pass) will come to visit.