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 London, part the one

Staff development doesn't happen often to me, but when it does, it comes like buses, in groups. Wednesday 14th March saw me on Fareham station in time for the 0619 train to London for a meeting with the web team at CILIP, especially, Patricia McHugo, @ 0900hrs. After a quick breakfast in MacDonalds, I was ready to receive the wonderful training which lasted about 2½ hours. Patricia took me through the web editors forum on CILIP communities, demonstrated the blog space from the same service, and we went to town on the content management server used to power CILIP and the Sub Branch of HIOW. A big thank you to Patricia from myself and the Committee of HIOW for the time given; I hope we can do justice to the web facilities allowed to us. After the Committee meeting this evening, I now have a seven point action plan for my communications role, some of which relate to the website and ideas for additional pages as we expand our services under the possible banner of "HIOW - local CILIP in action" (my idea, I forgot to mention this in my report, well it was long enough). I also found out that CILIP advisors also check this blog as one saw it mentioned in the presentation from Karen Blakeman. Hampshire seems to have a reputation that proceeds them, one of action.

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.

Update

It's been a long time since we last met; been busy with the fact that I am currently covering two jobs at work with the usual competing pressures, etc. So while I am waiting to download my 300 plus junk mails and a handful of useful ones, plus 10MB of updates from Norton, and goodness knows what from Microsoft (hope it's not the whopping 230Mb .net update we've had fun with at work), I though I would bore you with my fast moving last few day in a few blog entries. Earlier this evening HIOW had another Committee meeting and our thoughts are with the two members from Hampshire County reapplying for their jobs in the restructure - good luck Jane and Helena and best wishes. At the meeting an article from The News, 12th March 2007, was tabled for discussion and response - more in another post shortly.

Where are the library bloggers?

This is where the library bloggers can be found - a new list on JISC mail, and with over 200 subscribers already since launch a short while ago. I am waiting to join and see what is happening; judging by the archive of mail the list is very busy comparing tips, tricks and favourite software for web 2.0 and other techno things.