Welcome to Tessa's blog

Monday, March 23, 2015

Archive Center study visit

I was at home Mon-Wed last week due to illness. Thursday my computer was going to be exchanged, so I had to go to work for about half a day. I didn't have to retrieve any books, but did some emailing and other minor tasks. The workload the past few weeks has been moderate. We are happy about the new employee, she is keeping the volumes of returned books down and she is even asking for more work(!). Over the weekend our library system was upgraded and it went surprisingly well. It meant that we didn't have that many requests to deal with today, since it had been shut down.

This afternoon the social club arranged a study visit to the Archive Center, where our big storage is located. We had the university archivist give us an introduction and it was very interesting to see their material. Apart from university administration documents they have ledgers of the students and teachers from the 1660s and on, with their written essays and other papers, admission documents, manuscripts from lectures and much else. He gave us a tour of their stacks, which is in the same part as  we have our older stacks. Afterwards we all went over to our new facility in the same building, where we keep about 35 000 shelf meters of books. Everybody was impressed. It was a very nice visit, even though my nearest colleagues who go there every day to retrieve books, couldn't imagine that anyone else would like to see the place. But I had heard so many questions about our new storage so I thought there would be interest, and I was right.

There isn't much research to do right now, I have exhausted the possibilities. I think I will have to go to another archive later and then I have to wait for the material about Arndt's boss to be dug up this summer. It meant that I spent this weekend away from work. Saturday I went to a total of four second hand stores and two malls in the Malmö area. It resulted in a top and a summerdress. Sunday I vacuumed and brought the coats back to the attic. It's going towards spring weather here quite rapidly so I have stored the thick winter clothes. It never was much of a winter here in the south.

No comments: