All change, again

Well, this blog has been dormant long enough and it is ironic the last blog entry was my promotion, and now I am reflecting on the redundancy within two weeks at Highbury due to financial squeeze and questionable benchmarking evidence of how many librarians are needed at College. Sufficient to say COLRIC and COFHE data has been rejected in favour of something which can not be produced after waiting two weeks of asking. However, cannot say any more at the moment in case the traitor who reported an email to my College Principal hoping to get me in trouble, tracks this down for a second attempt. More information after the 21st June and I will start publishing my thoughts on the work of coming back to the labour market for the first time since August 1999.

All change @ Highbury College

Highbury College Library service is changing; with the Head of service departing in June, we were quickly merged with the IT Services Dept which has been a fantastic move. I have now been appointed to a new role of College Librarian and we have recently moved into our new library on the brilliant rebuilt premises @ Cosham. Earlier this year I received the College Star Award for e-learning in teaching and learning.

Apologies for the blog stopping for so long; the twins @ home, Samuel and Oliver, don't apologise for the delay that they caused in regular updates from me.

I am also on Twitter, just as an experiment, so if you are interested read my tweets (I believe that's the phrase) on http://twitter.com/hantslibrarian

More soon.

SE Branch AGM & HIOW AGM

South East Branch AGM 2008
The South East Branch AGM will be held as part of a joint meeting with the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Sub-Branch on Monday 19th May 2008 from 13.00-16.00.

Refreshments will be available from 13.00 and the business meetings will begin at 13.45. These will be followed by a talk by Nicola Franklin, Head of Recruitment at Sue Hill Recruitment, who will be speaking on "Marketing your Skills - Getting that Promotion".

The venue is the Barn, Church Cottage, St Michaels’ Church, Basingstoke.

The event is free, but those wishing to attend should register by emailing lisa.jeffery@port.ac.uk by 30 April 2008

HIOW forthcoming event

The Chief Executive of the Museums and Libraries Association, Chris Batt, is giving a talk on October 11th on whether we need libraries. If you are interested in going, please use the link above for further details and to post a booking request.

For a summary about his impact with the MLA, please click for the press release about Chris Batt.

CILIP evidence to Hampshire Libraries review

The title of this post contains a link to the CILIP evidence to the review of Hampshire public libraries.

Apologies for being too quiet; this is far from the case in Hampshire libraries. I have a small collection of local media articles over past weeks which stem from the Council leader saying criticism of their restructure is unjust, to a senior member of the Library management team question the intellect of their borrowers whilst signing the protest survey. Mr Ezra also seems to creating another storm by querying whether public libraries should stock fiction, this has been covered in the Bookseller.

So for the moment I shall sign off, but there will be more to come. It's never a dull moment in library land.