Author: Kerry Smith

Memories of our childhood libraries

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To kick off the new year on the blog we continue our mini series on libraries from childhood, this time with Sam Nesbit.

Sam Nesbit

Blindfold me, spin me dizzy, and send me staggering down the Uxbridge Road: I could still find my way to the shelf which held the Dorling Kindersley Encyclopaedia of Sharks in Shepherds Bush Public Library. Such was my fascination with all things Carcharodon carcharias that I must’ve borrowed that book over 50 times (no automatic renewals in the 80s!), and it helped embed a lifelong fear of swimming in water more than knee-high. (My dad letting me watch ‘Jaws’ at a ridiculously young age didn’t help, but I’m not pointing fingers…)

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The Wiley warehouse

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by Clare Playforth

I’ve recently had an exciting visit to the Wiley European Distribution Centre with the Society of Indexers and because I am kind and you are lucky I’m going to share the experience here.

The Wiley warehouse is spread over a couple of units on an industrial estate in Bognor Regis and after arriving at this glamourous location we were treated to pastries and coffee and a chat about the history of the company: quite interesting. Then we donned our high vis and went on a 2.5 hour tour of the warehouse: very interesting.

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My office jungle

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For Environment Week the Library Green Group has taken over the Library’s social media, and invited Jules Bristow to blog about her office plants.

A selection of plants in small pots on a sunny windowsill.

I have a confession to make. The admin office was expensively renovated last summer to give us more space and a more logical way of integrating the team, but my favourite part of it remains my long sunny windowsill.

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Mindful tech for Higher Education: digital solutions to our digital problems

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As it’s Stress Awareness Month, we thought we’d re-post this great piece from our own Antony Groves on Mindful Tech in HE.

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by Antony Groves

Freshers’ Week is on the horizon, signalling the Autumn term will soon begin, and that some of us will shortly enter the busiest time of our working year. While we are planning how best to support our new and returning students, we should also consider our own wellbeing. One way of grounding ourselves during this busy period is mindfulness. If our days are a chain of events, mindfulness encourages us to focus on one link at a time.

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We Were Hardcore: The Only Way is Reference Only

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by Rachel Bramley

Last month I realised that we’d approached an important anniversary.  No, not the Beast from the East (thank you Google), but Reference Only books.  In the spirit of good project practice, and customer service excellence, I thought it would be fun* to have a review of the outcomes, one year on.  But first, some background.

* I don’t get out as much as I used to.

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Karl Marx and The Jewish Question through the eyes of Julius Carlebach

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by Morwenna Silver

Morwenna Silver volunteered at The Keep last year, helping to catalogue the donation of Julius Carlebach’s papers to the German-Jewish Archive. Here she writes about Carlebach’s reading of Marx, what constitutes antisemitism, and the power of language in a politically unstable culture.

More info on the Carlebach collection can be found on The Keep’s website:

http://www.thekeep.info/collections/getrecord/GB181_SxMs92

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Julius Carlebach had the most extraordinary life. Born in Hamburg in 1922, he and his sister escaped the Nazis via the Kindertransport. He was a sailor in the Royal Navy, and went on to manage a Jewish orphanage in Norwood in South London and then served as a rabbi in Kenya. Also an accomplished academic, he was a research student at the University of Cambridge, and taught at the University of Bristol before he eventually became Associate Professor of Sociology and Israel studies at the University of Sussex.  A vast collection of Carlebach’s correspondence, academic papers and research notes has recently been donated to the German-Jewish Archive at The Keep by Carlebach’s family. Continue reading →

These theses trees

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by Clare Playforth

Those of you who enjoyed my last post on sandwiches but felt like you wanted it to be longer and even more niche (lol) then read on, this one is for you! It’s an article originally titled Subject Indexing in an Institutional Repository that I had accepted for publication by Catalogue and Index – periodical of the Cataloguing and Indexing Group, a Special Interest Group of CILIP.

I’ve been a cataloguer for some years but have only just started training to become an indexer with the Society of Indexers. I can now see that there are many parallels between cataloguing and indexing and I am often expanding my knowledge of one activity through the other. The clearest example of a task in which the two areas are intertwined is when I classify theses in our institutional repository. Our current repository platform is EPrints using the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set. This allows us to assign subjects to research outputs so that they are indexed and available to users through access points in our discovery layer (Primo). I’m going to avoid discussion about the systems involved here and their interaction with each other and am going to focus on the details of this task and try to understand some of the benefits and flaws of the current workflow.

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San Francisco adventures and visiting Gleeson Library

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by Gemma Price

I visited San Francisco in August 2015. This post is about that trip and exploring the city. I’ll also talk about a visit to University of San Francisco’s Gleeson Library.

There were many highlights to my time in San Francisco.
The locals had lots of friendly open conversations with us.
It was good to walk around the neighbourhoods, wandering and exploring. It led to finding interesting buildings and independent cafes and shops.
The city felt modern but with many nods to the past, such as the traditional architecture. There were also plenty of tourist areas and modern shops.
A vivid memory of the trip was the intense heat- often most intense whilst walking up the steep streets. Luckily Brighton is steep in most directions so it wasn’t too much of a shock! Being there felt (despite the heat) like a breath of fresh air.

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