Ikea lunch

The RFID tagging in the open collection was finished earlier than expected. They were done this past Friday. They have the reference collection to do next. I have also taught the extra workers how to change call numbers in our database, so that they can help out weeding the books that should be moved to the closed stacks.

Saturday a week ago it was the biannual Amnesty book fleamarket so I went there to get books for the library. The selection was not as good as previous years but I managed to find seven books. I was there with a colleague, she bought books for herself.

The research for the university boss continues. I have had long hours at work because of this tagging project so I have done most of the research on weekends. I have too much overtime and needed to take leave for a few days so the other days I had to work even more. This past week I took Tuesday and Wednesday off because there were some work to be done in my apartment. I don't like to hand over the key to someone else so I was at home when they adjusted the radiators the first day and made changes to the internet connection the next day. The first guy came early in the morning so I drove to Ikea in Helsingborg afterwards. I had a marvellous lunch there - the Christmas buffet. The herring is really tasty. Småland style ostkaka for dessert, with strawberry jam and whipped cream. Incredible.

This past week I got one more research request. I have done research for him before, he is a brother of a former colleague. He treated me for lunch and handed over his research. He had done a very good job with it, there were source references to everything and it was clearly written. There were some gaps in it that he asked me to investigate.

RFID

Monday last week we started tagging the books in the open collection with RFID. It means Radio Frequency Identification. It's a sticker you apply to the inside of the book volume and then connect it to the catalog entry. This is called tagging. There are some 50 000 books in the open collection. We have engaged both temporary and regular staff in this work. Today we ran out of stickers. More have been ordered but might not get here until tomorrow. The tagging will be endless because we have to do all the books that circulate from stacks also. We resisted this project for many years because of the enormous amount of books here.

Last week I attended a workshop on collection building. It was surprisingly interesting. Two librarians from the Royal Library and Uppsala University were invited to speak. We all have huge collections that take up too much space. There are thoughts on cooperating more, so that for instance one journal title exists in one library and not in seven places. The owning library has to have a copying service in that case. The discussions have just started, it will be a long way getting there.

Saturday was Archive Day. I attended two different lectures at the Archive Center. One was about other sources for genealogy than church records. Nothing was really new to me but it was still nice to get an overview. The other lecture was rather sad. It was a doctor who told the heartbreaking story of a psychiatric patient in the 20th century. The lecturer included general history of psychiatric care and illustrated with clippings from medical records.

I got a research request from the university vice chancellor (the university boss). No pressure... He has some interesting ancestors. There was one emigrant and I have great difficulties finding out what happened to her. I spent Sunday at work to do this research but it will require more digging.

Book searching

The past two weeks have been very hectic at work. Because of other people's illness or absence I have driven the storage round several times and have had a lot of desk duty. There were several other challenges recently. One student asked for the history of our old card catalog. I suggested one book containing the general history of the library but felt this was not enough. I asked my colleagues and got some old work material like call number lists and old instructions for her. Another patron asked for two specific 17th century dissertations which the staff couldn't find. I heard about this just as I passed them in the corridor and offered to help. I was given the year, author and subject, and managed to locate both dissertations. It was very difficult. One other time both the patron and the staff had failed to find a book in the open collection. I got this message when they had given up. Of course I found the book. Another case regarded a book printed 1848 not in the old catalog. The question was could we have it anyway. Yes, we did. The problem was to figure out where but I managed because the Royal Library had it in their catalog with a shelf location code similar to ours. I am only telling about the successes here...

We have also been busy moving more high circulation books from storage to the main building, attended a workshop an entire day about the future plans for our department and made preparations for what is going to start on Monday. More details in the next blog entry.