Safari week

It has been a very busy week. The libraries in the university network, a total of about 30, have been engaged in a library safari. The librarians have done excursions to the other libraries, to see how they are organized, decorated, how they place the books, or to chat with their colleagues. We work in the same town (most of us, there are libraries also in Malmö and Helsingborg belonging to the network), but we rarely have time or opportunity to visit each other. Now we made an event of it; the head office arranged a seminar, several libraries had quizzes with prizes, and some arranged lectures. At my library we had four lectures, and I gave one with a colleague. It was about an article service we have. The students can ask for journal articles and get them as pdf-files. People have asked how it is done in practice, so we showed them. First we had a presentation on the computer, then we did a tour of the stacks and finally we ended at the media office, where the articles are scanned. There were only four librarians interested, but it turned out that they had a lot of intelligent questions, so it was fun to get feedback.

The final event of the safari was a party at the head office Thursday evening. The social club had been asked to arrange it, and I must say that it was a great success! Even though it's a lot of work for us, we enjoyed it. I have been shopping for the decorations, and it wasn't easy to find things suitable for a safari party. I managed to find napkins with elephants and giraffes on, and then I also found some small toys in the shape of wild animals that I placed on a glass plate with green sand on (to illustrate the savanna). We had a Mexican style buffet that was great and the caterer surprised us by showing up 45 minutes early (we are certainly not used to that happening). Everything went well and people seemed to enjoy themselves, so I think we can conclude that the party was a smash hit!

Because of the safari, I am out of sync, so to speak. I didn't get any desk duty this week (at my own request), so that's why I write this on another day than normal. In addition to the regular work today, we (the chairman and I) also had to clean up the mess at the head office and bring back the chairs, tables and decorations to our library.

And I was right about the colleague who asked for help with his family history. He was very surprised to learn about his grandmother and other relatives living in about the same area, unaware of his family.