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Thursday, September 20, 2012

Heather

I have thrown out my summer flowers and put heather in the box on the balcony instead. The fall weather is quite nice and sunny, but it's getting colder now. And dark, especially in the mornings. My mother has moved back to BorĂ¥s for the winter.

The situation at work is still pretty tough. My colleagues do the hardest work, since I'm busy with the move. Not that it's an easy job, but it's more planning, cleaning and re-arranging, not five or six carts of books to be retrieved at the same time. We all complain about the heavy lifting. The treatment I got by the chiropractor this Tuesday was again necessary.

We have an intern in the stacks who is from Germany. We host a visit every year. We have a number system in the stacks, so he doesn't have to understand Swedish in order to retrieve books. He helps out every day. He speaks very good English. Some of my colleagues have practiced their knowledge of German during his visit also.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Kick-off

The beginning of the semester is a tough time for everyone at the library. The past two weeks we have been working very hard. We still have to drive the storage round with two cars. I have had to go to an endless number of meetings also the past couple of weeks. We have started a process that will end up into an organizational change later. It's nice that we are invited to have an opinion, but the timing could have been better. I am also involved in the planning for yet another storage. It's not for my department, but I have done this before and want to prevent mistakes. They will also take some of our old bookshelves, so we have a few matters to discuss.

I was told the library boss wanted to see me, and expected questions about the book move. We talked about everything else, I think. She is very nice and is eager to have everyone onboard, so to speak. We did talk mostly about work-related things, but also about family history. She is Danish and it turns out that her grandfather's sister emigrated and the family members lost touch several decades ago. It didn't take me long to locate the living relatives, I even found an e-mail address. They were able to re-connect again. What would we do without the internet!?!?

This Monday I was invited with two colleagues to a kick-off at the archive center where our new storage is. When all the archive material is moved (sometime next year), there will be about 150 people working there, taking care of 440 000 shelfmeters of material. It's a huge place. At the kick-off, the staff was given an introduction to the facilities. We admired the art work installations, had a treasure hunt in the archive, watched old films from Lund, participated in silly games like throwing of small archive box and paperclip stacking, and then there was a big buffet dinner in the evening. Very nice event.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Museum visit

Thursday afternoon was the annual bus excursion with the colleagues. The social club booked a visit to a museum and park area near Helsingborg. We got a guided tour of the printing museum, where they had old printing presses and typesetting machines in working order. There were also displays of book printing techniques and fonts, and Gutenberg was mentioned a few times. Very interesting for librarians to see. We also got a guided tour of the park and botanical gardens. After returning to Lund we had dinner at a restaurant. The barbecue buffet was outstanding with several kinds of meat, salmon, 14 different salads, homebaked bread and a huge dessert table. We were about 60 people and we emptied most of the dessert trays faster than they could fill them. It was yet another great event arranged by the social club.

Friday we noticed a sharp increase of the number of book requests. The semester started this week and we have been extremely busy. Hordes of students wanted library cards and asked for textbooks. Many scholars also seem to have started on their projects, because we have had many requests from them. One of them stands out in this context, he ordered so many items from the old online catalogue that the system broke down. About 100 in total and all of them were the New Testament, printed various years. We have been forced to drive the storage round with two cars at the same time this week due to the massive interest in our books placed outside the main building.

The movers are not that happy about the working environment at the storage they load books from at the moment. It's dark, dusty and the loading dock is too high for their vehicle. It's also a complicated move, because they have to drive to another storage quite often to pick up books that will be integrated with the others. This morning it was especially difficult, since some book carts were in a third storage.