New database system

Last week we had a wake for our departed database called Lovisa. We had a small gathering at a pub, where the old ones (me and a few others) told tales of Lovisa's introduction almost 20 years ago.

One of the more memorable library visitors recently was the American man who asked for information about his grandfather. The grandfather was an American who had been involved in some committees relating to the Lutheran Church and had visited Sweden in the 1940s. I was able to find the minutes from the meetings he had taken part in and also two newspaper articles where his name and photo were included. We even found five letters he had written to Swedish religious leaders. The grandson was ecstatic about the finds and thanked me excessively.

Last week I held one more education session for some colleagues that still hadn't seen the new system. It was a very positive atmosphere and we all thought it will be better and easier to use for the staff.

Our new database system, called LUBcat, started today. I was invited to an improvised launch party in the technicians' office. There are of course problems already. For some reason we can't print anything from the website... At least not the things we want. Luckily, we didn't have that many patrons today. We have, however, about ten carts with books that need to be returned in this database but we can't do that right now because of the printing issues.

Over the weekend I visited the summerhouse again. The temperature is lower, around 20 degrees and the wind has changed so the ocean water is colder. Still, I jumped in once. We went to two fleamarket stores and surprisingly my mother actually donated much more than she bought this time. I got a book for my library. We are supposed to have all Swedish books but some we have never received because they are published abroad. This particular one had text in Swedish but was printed in Germany. Monday morning I travelled directly from the summerhouse to work. Once again the railway company had a bad day. The train crew apologized several times. The delay was about an hour in total.