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.