Hot weather

I haven't had time to write here in a while. This time of year is very tough at the library with lots to do. It's the end of the semester and the students need books for their reports and then they also return large numbers of books to us. This year it has been worse than usual, I think. There are many other things going on also. Both our local catalogue and the national catalogue Libris will be down for upgrading in June. Many of us have been rushing to get things done before the closing. The catalogues will be drastically different when they go live again, so many fear that everything will take longer time then. We are still testing our local database to see if it will cope with such a workload as we expect with full capacity. It's still uncertain. The education sessions have ended. Now I'm involved in the project group that will produce guides and manuals for the staff.

This summer two students will work in the stacks and in preparing for that we needed five bookcases installed. The janitor is so busy we had to get a moving company to do it. There has also been an afternoon with lectures for the staff. The topics were equality and diversity. It was a lot more interesting than I thought it would be.

The weather is extreme in every way. The month of May has never been this warm since they started keeping records in the 19th century. The ventilation system at work is not functioning well. It's 28-30 degrees inside my office and the stacks. It's very difficult to do manual labor under these circumstances. The heat is affecting my brain and I have made several mistakes these past two weeks.