Last trip for a while

Wednesday 21st March saw me once again on the platform of Fareham station heading out for the Berkshire College of Agriculture (BCA) @ Maidenhead. The purpose of this trip was to attend the LRC forum hosted by Andy Kirk of the JISC RSC SE, and featured presentations on evalued tool kit for electronic information services, the new build experience at BCA and other developments. One presenter was not able to attend due to technical difficulties with their search engine so sent furry goats (their logo) as an apology. Another useful feature is the round robin of learning centre updates from attending Colleges and I ended up giving a 10-15 minute presentation about my new role, and demonstration of the Virtual Library being created in Moodle. I managed to slip in a quick comment about putting into practice some of the training from the previous week's meeting of JISC RSC SE Heritage user group meeting by showing reading lists from the online catalogue placed in academic courses on the VLE.

Ho hum, staff updates finished for a while, now it's time to write reports, claim for expenses and see where I can get to next.

Day trip to London, part the two

The CILIP web training took up the morning, and was really really useful. From Ridgemount Street I then had to move out to Twickenham for a meeting of the South East, Eastern, and London Heritage Users Group, hosted by JISC RSC SE & London. This was again a wonderful afternoon with many contributions from myself during discussions on the Heritage library software. I learnt of several useful contacts for use in Heritage developments and how to publish reading lists in Moodle. Again I met a colleague from the Oxford training on the 6th March, such is the small world of library systems. Two hours of updates and discussion on Heritage, a tour of the College library (one has to be nosey), and then it was back to Waterloo and home to Fareham, reached after 1900 hours; a long day, but one of the most productive I have had for a long long while.

Day trip to Oxford

Tuesday 6th March saw me in Oxford all day at the home of Heritage Library Management software, receiving specialist training on the many areas of the management menu. My new job since January has been a systems librarian in all but name, but makes my last few years of managing and developing our library software officially part of my duties. I am currently blessed with a tame server engineer in IT who is glad of the support I give, and allows generous access to the two servers so I can tweak and play, sorry, develop our system. Very good lunch provided at the pub down the road, beats in house catering and makes things simpler for the company to manage. Training would have been better over two days as there is so much in the management module to cover, the few hours would not have suited the novice user; fortunately I have eight years experience to compensate, and I still learnt some new things, but mostly had confirmation what I had been doing was good. It was also good to meet some people I have been corresponding with on the Heritage mail service, Marvin.