Spring party

Last week quite a few things happened at work. Like usual, I attended a few meetings, but I also did a user study. I stood near the reference collection and watched how the students use those books. The results were very disappointing. They hardly ask for them. During one hour a total of two students looked for reference books. There is no crowd. There is one major reason for this - the internet. Many encyclopedias and dictionaries are online these days. We have 1650 shelf meters in our reference collection and we have to downsize it. As far as I know the collection has never been weeded, so we are some librarians who will look into that matter. It's a long term project.

There was a new exhibit opened Friday, with a large selection of ephemera print. It's calendars, postcards, catalogues, instruction manuals, timetables, posters, phone books, flyers, local community prints and much, much else. They want to make the ephemera collection more widely known, so they have spread this material out all over the library's open spaces. It was interesting to see, the focus was Sweden in the 20th century.

Thursday the library closed early (very unusual) because we were going to have a spring party! It was some sort of a party to celebrate the fact that some of us got new offices. Any reason to have a party at the employer's expense is embraced. We had a quiz about university buildings and I didn't get many of those answers right (even though I pass by some of the buildings regularly). The food was very tasty: Italian style meal with chicken and lots more. There were leftovers and many of us got lunch the next day.

Last week I got a parcel in the mail. It was a consolation prize in a consumer competition. I'm guessing my mother had entered my name in it. I won a DVD set with a TV-series. Too bad it wasn't the first prize - it was a trip to London.

Today I cracked a very difficult case at work. It was a question about a person's correct name. I had a misinterpreted last name and first initial to start with, along with the street name (no number) where this person had lived in 1986. It was challenging, but I found it by going through all the people living in this street according to the 1990 Swedish census.