Danny, Caroline & Tracy take us on a trip down into the IDS basement…
Continue readingAuthor: Sam Nesbit
The Hills Stamp Booklets
Leonard Cheshire intern Vicky Ward takes us through some of the stranger ‘health’ adverts in the Hills stamp collection currently being catalogued at the Keep…
Continue readingSelf-check: laying the foundations for wellbeing at work :-)
Looking after your mental health & wellbeing is something we all try to do, and there are services for students across campus, but…what about staff? We decided to try putting workplace wellbeing at the heart of the Library’s culture…
Continue readingUKeiG 2018: Libraries of the Future
UKeiG 2018: Libraries of the Future
by Nicholas Heavey
I recently went to CILIP HQ to attend UKeiG 2018 Members’ Day to find out what is going on in the world of Geographic Information Systems, Smart Campuses and Intelligent Libraries, CILIP’s Privacy Project and how libraries and Wikimedia can work together. As it was my first library conference, I was interested to see what was going on in the information world and who exactly was in it. In attendance were information professionals from the NHS and the Home Office through to publishers and local libraries. The day offered up a feast of new ideas and I left feeling enthused about potential future projects. Below you will find information about some of the topics and ideas discussed on the day, as well as some useful links for anyone interested in finding out more.
Turkish Delights (Rahat Lokum) Flavour Two: Information Literacy (Lemon)
By Philip Keates
Hello again, and welcome to part 2 of my library-famous blog series! This time, we’ll be looking at Information Literacy (or IL). IL was a hot topic amongst our speakers, receiving at least a mention in many, if not most, of the presentations.
I’m sure a lot of this will be familiar stuff to our IL professionals, particularly the core IL concepts, but I hope that even they might be able to sift a few useful golden idea nuggets from the… um… mineral-rich waters of the training week, using the… uh… the brain-sieve that is this blog post… no, this metaphor’s got away from me. You get the idea.
Book Sandwiches
by Clare Playforth
Classification is a big part of my job and certainly the part that I find most enjoyable and challenging. The other day I was looking in vain for a resource that would provide me with a table of ‘date letters’ that are sometimes used when classifying collected works. After a couple of discussions about this it became clear to me that there are many practices in cataloguing and classification that might seem like they are needlessly complicated and opaque. I want to explain that there is a reason for things to be done this way.
Every time we make a decision about how to classify something we are doing it with the collection and ultimately the user in mind. When someone has looked up a book on the catalogue we want them to be able to find it easily on the shelf, but when they get to that shelf we also want them to find a load of other books that are relevant on either side i.e. we want to enable browsing. We want them to arrive at the shelf and first find the general books about a topic and then to be able to walk down that stack seeing how the subject narrows and becomes more specific as the classifications are expanded. In an ideal world we would want each classmark to represent only one book – this is part of the reason for doing the reclassification projects which you can read about here.