Mixed feelings!

I'm beginning to experience the sadness of saying goodbye! What a difficult thing to do...

I established special relationships and made wonderful friends and even though I'm looking forward to finally go home, I also don't want to say goodbye. To a large extend the situation here has become my ideal world. Just taking today as an example:

GIS - the specialist who is from Mexico, tells me how she enjoys working in America because it's so easy to obtain information from government: telephone messages get followed up and returned, government officials are willing and eager to share information and keen to deliver service.

EndNote - a specialist arrived at my office, promptly, and gave me a one hour quick instruction course on the use of EndNote (I'm familiar with RefWorks, wanted to compare) and answers all my questions knowledgeable and efficiently.

Diversity - I attended a lunch hour workshop on 'cultural filtering', and what fun it was, being able to laugh at ourselves and to share! Such a workshop takes place once a month.

Research Interviews - three researchers shared their research experiences with me in three different sessions today: i A tenure track researcher who applied for the position because he wanted to do research; ii a well established bibliographer, author and publisher of extensive bibliographic volumes of science fiction, covering science fiction over a one hundred+ year period; iii another well established author of several history books on terrorism and extremism, including several encyclopedias.

Yesterday I spoke to another researcher and author-librarian who commented: How do you prevent burnout in your Librarian-job? Write another book or publish another article, she says...

Positive attitude, I would say!

Purdue archive opens

I found this article today while reading my Bloglines feeds. Avenal is there at an exciting time.

We're starting week 10! The last week! I can't quite believe it. Simon and I will be giving our presentation to Duke University Library staff tomorrow at 1.30. Other than that, we still have a visit to North Carolina State - which is where Hilbre is being hosted - squeezed in to this week. I'm looking forward to that.

San Francisco was a great experience. We all felt re-charged by meeting up again. It's been wonderful to form such close bonds with colleagues here.

Most frequently asked question while in the USA:

"What is the most surprising thing you've noticed about our country?"

This question has been asked by almost every person I've met here in the US. And after 8 weeks, I still haven't really come up with an adequate answer.

Training Lan design

Do you have any new ideas about training lan designs in the US. Iam sure you must have seen quite a number of fancy designs with fast networks. If you have any new ideas that can work in our little space Avenal please send us with a picture if possible.

Service Ethics at A&M

I've met only the second librarian after Paula Cairns at Illinois who embraces the concept of the 'embedded librarian' - consciously expressing it! Others do it but are hesitant about using the term.

Service here at A&M Library is really excellent. To mention just a few points:

-Checkout and ILL merged to one service point to benefit the users - more mergers of service points are considered
-ILL takes requests and collect from shelves in the home-library, stacks and branches to hold ready for a user for up to 10 days, but turn-around time is really 48 hours
-Virtual Reference is overtaking Ref-desk stats by far, running 7 days a week, librarians doing duty on laptops from home Saturday- and Sunday nights! Can you belief it? At the end of each chat-session, the text of the chat session is e-mailed to the student for reference, training and future use.
-Double check-in is applied at the check-in desk. This eliminates user complaints about returned books still on their record.
-Reference books collected from tables are scanned in for stats in order to identify unused books... the latter will eventually be moved into storage, clearing space for the planned i-commons.
-At this time of the academic year, potential failures are given additional support. Plagiarism cases were booked into the library's Instructional Services and offered an additional class on citing, which I attended.

And so I can continue, I'm really impressed

Sleepless in Seattle

When one hears “Seattle”, the first thing that comes to mind is “Sleepless in Seattle” and I wish it would “Rain less” in Seattle. It has rained almost the entire week. Today, we have had absolutely beautiful weather. I walked around absorbing what I usually take for granted back home. People enjoying the sun, children playing in parks, joggers and cyclists enjoying their sport, students skate boarding and even a change in dress code. The “Cherry Trees” have just begun to blossom and they are absolutely gorgeous. I have been hearing about the “Cherry Blossoms” even before I came to Seattle, which seems to magically lift ones spirit. I have had an interesting and somewhat amazing week and just a sneak preview: the first of which, Janine will be trilled about is that, some of UW subject librarians are looking at the merit of using twitter to market and promote the libraries resources. The second, I attended the Medicine Morning Reports meeting and the Medicine Grand Round meeting. What is amazing is the relationship that the Subject Librarian has with the Medicine Department. This is certainly a model I would like to follow.

Just to let you know....

the Turn Right on Red rule freaks me out.