Library meeting in Stockholm

I got out of bed early Sunday morning to take the train to Stockholm. I arrived at 3 in the afternoon. Walked around in town for a while first before getting to my relatives' apartment. There were other visitors there, so it was a full house. They left later, though. We had dinner and talked about recent trips (they had been to the island of Åland).

Monday all of us went shopping in different places. Or maybe not so different, we discovered afterwards. I had been walking down the same road as Inger about the same time, but we never saw each other. It was fun to see the stores and collections, but I didn't get much. It seems like quite a few of the second hand stores overprice their goods. It's in fashion now to buy vintage items, so they charge very much for it, sadly (for me). I only got an egg cup made of wood. In the evening we were invited to the daughter of the house, Åsa. She has a cute dog that required our attention. We had a nice time chatting and eating cookies also.

This was a short visit, so Tuesday morning I said goodbye and walked off to the subway. The university is only one station away, so it was a three minute ride or something like that. I knew where the library was from previous conferences, so it was easy to get there. We were seven people who got a viewing of the brand new (and extremely expensive) scanner. It was noisy and seemed to have problems flipping the pages of even the easiest book. Not so impressive, in other words. We also got to see the old and rare collection and I'm probably damaged by my job, because I didn't think much of it. In my trade the only thing that matters is that the patron gets the requested book. What the book looks like, how old it is, or what illuminated illustrations there are in it don't interest me particularly. Okey, the one with real gold illustrations was a magnificent example of incredible craftmanship from about 20 years after the printing press was invented, I can admit to that. After a very nice lunch (roast beef) we had the actual meeting. We managed to agree on several things so there was some progress. We have different types of collections that we want to digitize and we discussed what the priorities should be. After the meeting I had a little time to go sightseeing before the train departed at 5 in the afternoon. I came home at 10 PM. A really long day that got even longer when my mother called me at 10.30 PM and wouldn't stop talking until I told her (twice) that I actually had to go to bed.

Today was a rather bad day in the stacks. I was tired, first of all. There were some unsolved tasks from the past two days (this I counted on). The number of requests was quite high for being mid June. I also had a meeting with a shelving construction company, so my new colleague had to drive the storage round. She had bad luck with several requests, and it meant that I had to drive off after lunch to get some things done. Locate the entry card she had forgotten in a transportation box, for instance. The day ended nicely though, with a strawberry cake to celebrate a colleague who had turned 50.