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Past Trainee Diaries
This page contains blog entries posted by trainees in the academic year 2010-11. To return to the blog entries for the current year click here.
November 24, November 29, December 2, December 3, December 13, December 14, January 4, January 12, January 20, January 21, January 28, February 2, February 8, February 17, February 24, February 25, February 28, March 15, March 21, March 23, April 13, April 15, April 21, April 26, May 6, May 12, May 23, May 26, June 2, June 10, June 14, June 27, July 8, July 13, July 21, July 28, August 3, August 15, August 17, September 12.
September 12
Faculty of Classics
As with the other trainees, I am nearing the end of my placement at the Classical Faculty Library, although I have another 2 weeks to go, as I am officially maternity cover for one of my colleagues. However, I'm enjoying passing on what I've learnt and trying to give him as a good a grounding in the workings of this library as possible before I swan off up North.
At least the library was as clean and tidy as it ever can be when he arrived, as we spent three days in August stockchecking - the annual bane of librarians' lives. Three days is actually quite a short amount of time, considering that we have 55,000 books on the open shelves whose presence requires confirmation, but the library is still so popular with graduates and senior members, even during the long vacation, that we can't shut for any longer without complaint (even after only two days, some of the grads were begging us to open up again!) Also, because we do things the old fashioned way (i.e. with paper lists and highlighters), the process of the checking itself can actually be quicker than with new technologies, as there isn't much that can go wrong with a clipboard (apart from dropping all the sheets on the floor and losing your order, perhaps...)
Lack of technological advances aside, we did manage to complete the vast majority of the stock within the three days, with the loss of very few books, so it can generally be considered a success, I think! I'm now continuing the tidy-up operation around my desk, so that the new trainee has half a chance of finding...well, anything.
As this is my last post on Catalog, I would like to thank the fantastic Cambridge Library Mafia for their help, support, and seemingly limitless enthusiasm throughout this year. Although I may not be staying on this side of the issue desk (I'm off to pursue ESRC-funded postgraduate study in Linguistics at York from October), the skills and experiences that I am taking away with me are all invaluable and will be of considerable benefit to me in the years to come, when I shall be the stressed-out student calling out to the librarians for help!
Becky Woods
^August 17
Murray Edwards College
The summer vacation period is when we would usually be doing the stock check in the library, but that hasn't been possible this year because the library is undergoing major refurbishment. New lighting, heating and plug sockets are being installed and the main entrance is being relocated from the basement to the ground floor. I'm obviously not working inside the library at the moment, as it is effectively a building site, but today I donned the obligatory high-vis vest and hard hat and went to have a quick look around. At the moment the library is full of scaffolding, right up to the ceiling, and any books that hadn't been removed are covered in layers of protective polythene. Tomorrow I shall be taking some work-in-progress photographs to put on display for the Alumni when they come to visit in September - by which time the project should be finished!
In the mean time, I am spending these last few weeks of my traineeship catching up on our cataloguing backlog and checking reading lists for next year. Unfortunately there will be no graduate trainee at Murray Edwards next year due to budget constraints, but I'm pleased to report that my colleague Agnieszka, who temped with us during Easter term, will be taking over from me as a part-time library assistant - I know that she's going to do an excellent job and I wish her all the best!
As for me, I'm off to UCL in September to start my MA in Library and Information Studies. I've really enjoyed my year at Murray Edwards and I'm sure that the knowledge and skills I have gained will stand me in good stead as I continue to build a career in libraries.
Jennifer Yellin
^August 15
Trinity College
It's mid-August and I'm coming to the end of my time here at Trinity. Soon I'll be submitting a report to the library about my experience, what I liked and didn't like so much, and evaluating how to keep Trinity's Graduate Traineeship a worthwhile scheme. I can't say too much about it here (not least because I'm still writing it), but it's nice to be able to recap and hopefully also to have my thoughts heard by the library authorities.
I've enjoyed this year very much. When I arrived I didn't really know what the job entailed (shoulda read CaTaLog!). I have enjoyed the wide range of tasks that I have been able to exerience, but I fear that with added expertise comes a certain specialization that would make the job much less varied. I have had some opportunity to utilise some of the skills I learned in my degree, though not as frequently as I might have liked: I miss Classics, and my 'next move' is doing further Classical study for a while in Germany and seeing where that leads. Certainly in the future, whether I work as a librarian or researcher, you'll be able to find me in close proximity to books, and lots of them.
Meanwhile my exhibition ('Horace at Trinity: Laude Recens') is still on display in the Wren and everyone is warmly invited along.
Tom Ford
^August 3
Newnham College
If you think the summer vacation is a quiet time for academic librarians, think again! The students may be gone, and exams may be a distant memory, but in their place we have numerous conferences, summer schools and study groups taking over the College. Many of the summer school students and conference goers make a beeline for the library, whether it's to read or simply to look around the lovely building.
Meanwhile we are starting to receive reading lists to check and order, and as usual there are donations to process, books to catalogue and journals to receive.
One task I'm aiming to complete before the end of my traineeship is to update all the posters and the library guides ready for the next academic year. I've also been going through the folders on my PC tidying them up for my successor so that she can actually find anything!
This is my last week updating CATALOG, and like Natalie I'm feeling a bit sad that it's coming towards the end of my trainee year. However I'm looking forward to starting my MA at UCL in September, and as I will be staying on at Newnham as a part-time Library Assistant, I can't really stay sad for long!
Annie Johnson
^July 28
Emmanuel College
It is stockcheck season at the library, as I and a student assistant have been working our way around the bookshelves, equipped with a red pen, black pen, and stacks of print-outs. Although this is perhaps not the most exciting of tasks, it is very important, especially as all the books have been moved twice since the last stockcheck and it is useful to know what has gone missing.
A garden party was recently held in honour of the people who donated or otherwise contributed towards the library extension and renovation. I could not attend, due to being on honeymoon, but I hear it was a success. I am starting to feel sad that I will soon be leaving the college. My graduate traineeship has been varied, insightful, and too quick!
Natalie Ford
^July 21
St John's College
This is my last week at John's and my last week updating this website. The year has gone very quickly and yet I have learned so much in the process. John's has been a wonderful place to work and the experience here has been invaluable.
This week I am finishing off projects and preparing things for the new trainee. I am writing up notes etc. so that she has a headstart on things that I had to work out for myself from scratch this time last year! The library is very quiet at the moment with the only visitors tending to be fellows or staff or indeed prospective students. There's not much else to report so all that is left is to wish the new trainees the best of luck in their traineeship and I hope that they have as much fun as I have had.
Erin Lee
^July 13
Christ's College
Although the library is much quieter in terms of student numbers we have a number of projects going on which are keeping us busy. This summer we are changing library management systems and moving from Heritage to Voyager. Needless to say there is a lot of data shifting to do and a lot of training that needs to be completed before this can happen. We hope to have it all up and running before the students return in October.
I myself am staying on at Christ's College after my traineeship. From September I will become the Library Assistant, which is a new post and I will also be taking a part time masters in Library and Information studies at UCL. I think that juggling a full time job and a part time masters, will be a challenge - but it is one that I am looking forward to!
Like the Classics Faculty, we have also recently recruited a new graduate trainee and I am looking forward to working with him in September. We will also be recruiting a new College Librarian over the summer so it is definitely an exciting and busy time at Christ's.
Charlotte Byrne
^July 8
Faculty of Classics
This week has been an interesting illustration in the ebb and flow of the librarian's year. Just a couple of weeks after having books piled high on the issue desk like the Acropolis over Athens, we're now seeing fewer than 30 books a day passing before us and the library population has dropped dramatically.
The area as a whole has been pretty busy however, as open days are in full swing with lots of prospective candidates popping in to check out their potential future study space, and we had the very difficult task last week of interviewing for and choosing our new graduate trainee. The standard was exceptionally high and all 5 candidates would have been excellent, but we could only choose one and I'm very much looking forward to working with her in September. I also feel privileged that I had the opportunity to participate in the recruitment process, particularly at such an early stage in my career, and I think I have learnt a lot, personally and professionally. For a bit more detail about the process and some (hopefully useful) stuff that I learnt along the way, see my personal blog post about it here. I was also very flattered to be invited to Pembroke College Library to speak to the their librarian about their brand new trainee post - though it's sad to be losing the Murray Edwards trainee, it's great that numbers will be kept stable with the introduction of Pembroke. The librarian there, Pat, is lovely and incredibly enthusiastic about the position, so whoever succeeds there is very lucky indeed, and will be working in a stunningly beautiful library which combines traditional reading rooms with modern stained glass windows impeccably. The library is also soon to develop its Art collection, and is expected to become one of the leading libraries for fine arts and history of art in the country.
Finally, I'm proud to announce that I've finally finished my cat/class marathon with the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, and it seems that they are already being consulted by more people than previously, so it's great to see the real fruits of my labours. However, I'm very much looking forward to a well-earned holiday; I'm off to Istanbul for 2 weeks, which I'm particularly interested in having recently raided our section on the Byzantine Empire for new reading material.
I hope you are all, and in particular our trainees-to-be, having a lovely summer so far.
Becky Woods
^June 27
Trinity College
Just a short post from me this week: the madness of exam term is over and there's some welcome peace as a result, but the Wren is busier out of term than in and so I've been kept occupied on that score, checking things back and so on. Meanwhile I'm preparing for an exhibition at the end of July on some books and manuscripts in our holdings featuring the Roman poet Horace.
Tom Ford
^June 14
Newnham College
As we're coming towards the end of term, the library is becoming quieter every day and we're starting to get invitations to all kinds of nice things such as garden parties and end of term socials! This coming Friday we are holding a launch event for the Cam23 2.0 programme that Erin mentioned in her last blog post. I'm looking forward to the beginning of the programme, but there is still quite a lot to do before Friday!
Last Wednesday I went to a Cambridge Library Group event, which was a talk by Sue Hughes, regional head of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, on "Libraries and the Big Society". I was interested to hear what Sue was going to say, as the MLA is being disbanded. She acknowledged the difficulties of the current situation, but pointed out the positives: libraries are currently very high in the public agenda, and campaigns against library cuts have had an unprecedented level of support. Challenging times can be a fertile ground for creative solutions. You can read more about Sue's talk here.
Meanwhile, I have been searching for a flat closer to London, which will be more convenient next year when I am studying at UCL. Time has certainly flown by, as I now have only 12 weeks left of my traineeship. Seems unbelievable!
Annie Johnson
^June 10
St John's College
The library has quietened down already as we near the end of term. Due to staffing shortages we all have to take it in turns to clear desks in the mornings before 9 and to shelve throughout the day. The students have been using the library heavily but not necessarily taking books out so the issue desk hasn't been too swamped though staples are still in high demand.
This week I had a brief introduction to rare books cataloguing by our rare books cataloguer and you can read about it on my blog. I have also been busy along with a couple of the other trainees in organising the online learning programme Cam23 2.0 which is aimed at introducing librarians in Cambridge to Web 2.0 technologies. Throughout the course the practical application and relevance of the tools to the Cambridge library setting will be explored.
I am also helping with a 23 Things programme for Professional Development which will begin on the 20th June and focuses on library advocacy, chartership and qualifications as well as the more traditional 'Things' such as social media and organisational tools. This is a must for any new professionals out there wanting to explore what is out there to help them with the first few steps of the ladder.
Personally, following the award of my scholarship, I have just about got everything in place for my move to Syracuse, NY for Library School in Fall. It is a rather exciting if frightening time!
Back in the office I am working on biographical enquiries and on updating the database with Questionnaires which Old Johnians have returned to the college with detailed biographical information. The King James Bible exhibition is being frequently visited and my Orange Prize for Fiction display regularly used.
Erin Lee
^June 2
Emmanuel College
It's exam season and the library is being very well used. While it is pleasing that so many students are choosing to study here, the downside is that the desks are rather messy (to put it lightly!), being strewn with papers, books, folders, and occasionally apples. This makes it difficult for me to tidy up first thing in the morning, as many of the desks are already occupied when I arrive. Therefore I have taken to sneaking around while most people are at lunch and am able to retrieve some books to reshelve. The library has a space reservation scheme for the most popular areas (the main reading room and the individual carrels), which enables a student to reserve their place for two hours by completing a slip, which they leave on their desk. If someone else wishes to use that space and the slip is out of date, they are then allowed to move any possessions from the desk to the 'belongings trolley'. This scheme seems to work fairly well, although it requires much photocopying and guillotining of yellow paper!
A special collections talk was held in the library last Friday afternoon by David Pearson, author of 'Books as History' among others. The theme was provenance; looking at books as primarily physical objects with fascinating evidence such as bindings, inscriptions, coats of arms, and binder's waste (the recycling of printed material, as plain paper was expensive). About twenty librarians were in attendance, and not only did they get to peruse some interesting examples from Emmanuel's collection of rare books; they also had a tour of the library, which they had not seen since the renovation and extension. This was followed by an afternoon tea break in the college museum, which I had not been in before, as it is only open for functions such as this. The museum is a small room containing a number of curios: the ones that caught my eye were a rug woven in the Emmanuel crest, a magazine advertisement for 'lawn-mowing horse-shoes', and a lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie's hair.
Natalie Rosen
^May 26
Faculty of Classics
The rains have come to Cambridge at last but more pertinently, so have exams. Most of the finalists only have about a week to go before their first papers and they are generally coping well with the stress...unless they're just putting brave faces on when they approach the issue desk!
The surge in numbers using the library during the day is clear - even regular users of the library have commented upon the full desks and three full books of trolleys to reshelve every morning are testament to the high turnover of material - never has our two-day loan policy for undergraduates seemed better justified. Unlike colleges, we don't really engage in the "tea and biscuits" pastoral side of things, partially because the colleges fulfil that role, partially because about a third of the people in here are not taking exams at all, so we can't really justify the disruption in terms of noise or staffing. We are however always ready with a friendly smile and 101 ways to help the student get the information they need.
Outside of issue desk duties, I am about halfway through a major reclassification and cataloguing project on a notoriously difficult series called the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. It's a series of catalogues of ancient vases and bits of pottery, broken up by country and by collection. Each country's fascicules vary slightly, but I think I've got a handle on it now, and the classification system will hopefully make things a lot easier to find. I particularly liked doing some research into classification systems, how other specialist Classics libraries deal with the CVA, and a small scale user survey of the pottery enthusiasts here in the Faculty. I hope they will be pleased with the outcome.
We're also dealing with applications for our Graduate Trainee position 2011/12 - if you're interested, you can find all the details here, and the deadline for posted applications only is next Friday, 3rd June.
And in other news, I was very flattered to be asked to take part in one of the faculty's Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminars last Friday. They are a weekly event where two people (usually MPhil or PhD students) present their research and ideas to their peers. It was the first time in nearly a year that I had presented an academic paper and the first time ever that I had presented one on Classics, so I was quite nervous, but I'm glad to say that everyone was very supportive and it seemed to go down quite well. For a more in-depth run-down about my talk on "Current psycholinguistic theories and how we can apply them to the study of Classical linguistics", see my personal blog here.
And finally - best of luck to all the Classics students taking exams, and to all Cambridge finalists - be you Mathmos, MMLers or Medics, you can do it!
Becky Woods
^May 23
Christ's College
Last week on Wednesday 18th May I had the official opening of my graduate trainee exhibition: 'Christ's at War: The College and its members during the First World War'. After months of research, sourcing material, writing up captions and putting out displays my exhibition was finally ready to go on show. I've really enjoyed putting together this exhibition and I definitely would like to work with special collections in this way in my future career. I've decided to put together an online exhibition blog so I can collate together all the information I have discovered and share what I've found with a wider audience.
Other exciting news at Christ's is that an advertisement for a graduate trainee to start in August 2011 has gone up. Please see the Christ's College website for more details.
Charlotte Byrne
^May 12
Newnham College
The library and library staff at Newnham have been well photographed lately! This year marks the College's 140th anniversary, and to commemorate this event a book is being produced, titled 'The Newnham Year', with photos, memories and description of a year at Newnham. The photographers visited the library and archives a couple of months ago to get shots for the book, and last week the whole College gathered out on the lawn for an aerial view photo of all the staff and students.
Also last week, a lovely photo of our archivist Anne appeared in the Cambridge Evening News alongside an article about our Literary Archive. Since the article ran, we've had another flurry of calls from people interested in viewing the archive, so we have decided to recreate the exhibition we did earlier in the year for the launch event. We were glad we'd taken a few photos at the time to remind us what it looked like!
Two of the Libraries@Cambridge team visited us recently to take photos of the library; these will be used on the University's library webpages, and we can use them in our library guides etc. (And one particularly lovely shot of our rare books room promptly became my desktop background!) If you're like me and love looking at pictures of gorgeous libraries, definitely take a look at the libatcam photostream on Flickr. The Newnham photos will be going up there shortly.
Annie Johnson
^May 6
Trinity College
If the Library was not busy enough over the Easter Vacation, it is now positively swarming with students. Our working library is fairly small as per college numbers, so we have laid out desks in the Wren as well, which now looks rather like an exam hall. So, a different learning environment for those who want it: (un)fortunately I am past the exam stage now. It is important to maintain an environment conducive to learning; food and drink are verboten, but certain places, such as the Law Reading Room, seem to be awash with Red Bull and Coke. (Not coke, I think, though you never know with lawyers). Prohibitive measures will be applied.
Besides the heavy shelving duties that this time of year brings, there have been other issues, not all book-based. For one, having made the mistake of coming back in after hours to do some work myself, I found the gents had started flooding and I had to mop up. Luckily no books were damaged in the process. Then last night, whilst I was indulging in a spot of photocopying, a fuse blew and half the lights in the Lower Library got taken out, most frustrating for the students. Luckily we have evening supervisors and they dealt with the phone-calls to various authorities with verve and aplomb.
There have been more academic pursuits as well: I was able to sit in on two classes on medieval manuscripts (whereupon I was called on to give a brief off-the-cuff speech about the Wren library, and thanked my lucky stars that I had read Gaskell, Robson and McKitterick), and had a root around in the Trinity papyri collection, shreds of Greek, Coptic and Arabic salvaged from the sands of Egypt by intrepid Victorian explorers.
So I guess it has been a fairly eventful couple of days.
Tom Ford
^April 26
Emmanuel College
The library has not been too quiet over the Easter vacation, as some students decided to stay here to study instead of going home. The vacation loans are due back this (three-day) week so there is plenty to do. At the beginning of March I finally finished checking the entire recommended reading list of the Philosophy faculty against our stock. I was pleased about this, as it is a very long list indeed, and I have been working at it, on and off, since September! Also in March, I attended a course about disabled access to libraries, which was informative and interesting. Topics included disability awareness, general and library-specific facilities, and the Equality Act.
I also classified and catalogued some books which were donated by an Old Member. The library uses a modified form of the Dewey decimal system which is quite easy to comprehend, and the software that staff use for cataloguing and circulation is called Adlib. Unlike many Cambridge University libraries, records are not uploaded to the Newton catalogue. However, Emmanuel's older stock can be found on Newton (and the new function LibrarySearch) as basic records with some obsolete classmarks, but students are told to use Emmanuel's own catalogue, which is up to date. I have been continuing my project of barcoding and updating the catalogue records of the library's reserve collection. These books were previously not on open access, but are now on the shelves because of the new space from the library's expansion. Many of the older books are very dusty with crumbly bindings and loose covers, but they still look impressive on the shelves!
Natalie Rosen
^April 21
Christ's College
This week I have mainly been working on my Graduate Trainee Exhibition for the Old Library. Christ's has a wonderful 19th century library which houses our rare books and also provides exhibition space. Every year the graduate trainee is given the opportunity to put on their own exhibition using items from the special collections.
Most exhibitions in the past have focused on displaying our collection of manuscripts and rare books but the basis for my exhibition is the personal papers of past alumni. I have already blogged before about my work on the Rouse papers, and it was his WW1 correspondence that inspired me to focus my exhibition on this period of history.
My exhibition entitled Christ's at War focuses on what happened to the College and its members during the First World War. I have done a lot of research for this exhibition and uncovered some fascinating things that had been forgotten about in the College. I hope to have my exhibition up in the next two weeks and will hold an opening night sometime in May.
Charlotte Byrne
^April 15
St John's College
The library is pretty quiet at the moment since there are only 150 students left in college over the vac. This, however, seems to mean that the fellows start crawling out the woodwork and searching for books which they know they consulted 20 years ago in the library but can't remember the title or wanting me to order them a book from Amazon with their credit card or indeed requesting the phone number of a fish and seafood restaurant in Covent Garden. I have ceased to be surprised by some of the requests that are made of me - these may be directly related to my putting up a postcard saying 'Questions answered here even the silly ones.'
The lack of students has meant that I have more time to focus on things away from the issue desk such as cataloguing and exhibitions. I am currently working on the King James Bible exhibition for the Upper Library as well as putting some extra finishing touches to the Johnian Prime Minister exhibition for the top-secret VIP visit in a few weeks' time. I have also come up with a new idea for the exhibition area in the foyer - Orange Prize for Fiction. I am looking forward to making a brightly coloured and welcoming display of fiction books (a good break from revision) for students returning from their vac.
Erin Lee
^April 13
Faculty of Classics
In my last blog post I was considering new technologies and how librarians can help promote them, but the overarching theme of my tasks so far today has been "old-skool". First of all, I receive a phone call (not an email!) from the main library at the University of St. Andrew's, into whose hands has fallen one of our books. Which is, inevitably, in German (what fun spelling out the title and the author's name over the phone). The librarian at Inter-library loans there had no idea how they had come by it, and there was no record of it ever being borrowed on our system. It transpired that one of our professors had borrowed it on a manual loan (yes, sometimes we do have to resort to pen and paper!) and had promptly left it up at St. Andrews sometime between now and September. The Royal Mail will be responsible for its safe return. This led to me having to tidy up the rest of the (mercifully few) manual loans, of which most could be accounted for and some I'm now in the process of chasing (Librarian = in loco parentis for unruly books and borrowers?)
Secondly, I am in the middle of a rather daunting project, trying to expand the 13,000 or so short records (that is records which only contain the bare minimum of information) which resulted from the move away from the card catalogue in 2002. Obviously I won't be able to complete this before the end of my contract, but I'm hoping to make a big dent in the 'B' section, which contains texts and commentaries of all the major (and some minor) works in ancient Greek. I have just embarked upon Aristotle (no mean feat), and have come across an interesting book in which the author is referred to solely as "a Cambridge graduate". The subsequent search for more information sent me riffling through the aforementioned card catalogue, which we still keep at the back of the library and which some scholars still use from time to time, on the understanding that it is only accurate up to 1995. It is an attractive piece of furniture, even if its function is closer to installation art than a working library tool nowadays. In conclusion, librarianship is not all about computers, because the human element of libraries continues to throw up the most weird and wonderful quandaries...and long may that continue.
Becky Woods
^March 23
St John's College
Over the past few weeks I have been working on my "Librarianship into the Future award" application. I have been lucky enough to be accepted into Syracuse University, NY, for a Masters in Library and Information Science for Fall 2011. I, however, need a lot of funding before I can even consider taking up the place. One of the funding options is this "Librarianship into the Future award" which involved filming a 5 minute video answering the question "why does the world need librarians?", serve as a platform for my personality and show how a library has reached out to patrons. So, after brainstorming with other trainees, tracking down a wonderful cameraman from Anglia Ruskin, writing the script, filming and many many editing e-mails, the video is complete and has been submitted. View the final masterpiece here:
I should hear any day now whether I have got the scholarship but I imagine that there is steep competition from my fellow classmates, all of whom are American and have very different information science backgrounds. It has been a really interesting learning curve working on this project since I have had to learn not only about the practicalities of filming but also about the best ways of getting across my point in a short timeframe and how to engage an audience (hopefully successfully!)
Erin Lee
March 21
Faculty of Classics
This week, a few interesting things have landed in my inbox or have popped up online which have got me thinking about the importance of information literacy training.
A recent project undertaken by librarians at the University of Northampton has indicated the effect that student-directed information skills training can have on students, particularly in their first year at university. I remember very little of my library induction at the beginning of my time at Sheffield; in fact, the majority of my information awareness came from information-savvy lecturers, who would embed information literacy seminars within their lecture timetable. This is all very well a) if the lecturers are up to speed with the latest available technologies and b) they can find the time to fit these sessions in without losing out on teaching time, but really this is a role that we as librarians should be taking on, as information skills are a vital part of our work and training. At Northampton, they offered short drop-in sessions at key points in the students' courses and tailored their teaching to individual assignments, providing the students with exactly the kind of information they needed, exactly when they needed it. This approach, rather than the traditional all-inclusive information overload at the start of the year was deemed successful by the students themselves, who reported increased self confidence and even higher grades than the previous year's cohort. Of course, this method involves dedicating a lot of time to identifying key moments in each course, and there could be hundreds of different courses across some of the larger universities. However, once the groundwork has been done, it seems to me that this is a great way not only to help students achieve, but also to alter their perceptions of who librarians are and what they do; putting a much more personal slant on our role as information providers. If you like to read more about the study, here are the bibliographical details: Lumsden, E., McBryde-Wilding, H. and Rose, H. (2010) Collaborative practice in enhancing the first year student experience in Higher Education. Enhancing the Learner Experience in Higher Education [online]. 2 (1), 12-24. Available online here.
Just after reading about this report, I then chanced upon a particularly interesting blog post by my trainee colleague Jen, here on her personal blog. To summarise, a stressed-out student came to her an hour before her essay deadline with no idea of how to build a proper bibliography. Now, Cambridge is a particularly unhelpful place for students in this regard as very few departments stipulate which referencing system they prefer (Classics certainly doesn't), which leaves the student with little guidance. Our final-year students tend to refer to past theses which won prizes in order to see how they went about layout and referencing; a far from reliable method which I personally find bizarre in its circuitousness. Furthermore, in Student-Staff Joint Committee meetings, the students, particularly the graduates, have explicitly expressed a need to improve their information literacy. So what can we do to help? At the beginning of February, I spent time learning how to use all the facets and tricks of three of our online databases - The New Pauly Online, the Oxford Classical Dictionary and Année Philologique - to be able to pass on what I had learnt to students who could really benefit from it. I also consulted our colleagues at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies who taught me how to use the referencing software Zotero, another invaluable and time-saving tool. I have had the opportunity to pass on some of this knowledge on the basis of individual enquiries, but as yet, our attempts to attract students to our drop-in sessions has failed.
Initially I thought this was down to advertising - I had made posters and put them round the faculty, but posters, especially on already busy noticeboards, are quite easily missed. But after the SSJC meeting, all graduates received emails about the sessions and still, no-one came. Why is this? It is possibly due to our room choice; we booked the faculty computer room so the session could be more interactive, but it is hidden away on the top floor corridor and isn't somewhere the students might walk past and drop in on a whim. Also, although there are no lectures on Monday at 1.30pm (our chosen time), some students may be unwilling to give up a portion of their lunch break if they're already busy with supervisions and lectures. And the solution to this? We're not yet sure. We may look to hold the sessions in the Library office, which is more accessible and obvious for students. Of course, the ideal would be that lecturers would advertise such sessions and would even perhaps direct their students along to us, though this may take a little more time to establish.
I will keep trying to spread the word and hopefully those who have benefited on a one-to-one, individual enquiry basis will let their friends know that the librarians are actually quite useful for help with online information retrieval and referencing software. I'll report back soon to let you know how we get on (we have not yet ruled out tea-based bribes...)
Becky Woods
^March 15
Classical Faculty and Murray Edwards College
The trainees from the Classical Faculty Library and Murray Edwards College Library recently took part in a work-shadowing exchange. We each spent half a day at each other's libraries in order to learn more about the differences in practice between College and Faculty libraries, and we have decided to write a joint blog post about our experiences.
Jen's morning at the Classical Faculty Library:
The morning of our work-shadowing day was spent at the Classical Faculty Library where I was given the chance to work on the issue desk alongside Becky, the Classics trainee. Working on an issue desk isn't new to me as I have previously worked in a public library, but it was an interesting change from the College library because at Murray Edwards we have a self-issue machine rather than an issue desk. I have found that this can sometimes limit the interaction between library staff and students, so it was really refreshing to have this chance to engage with the library users at Classics. Both Becky and I agreed that helping library patrons directly is often the most enjoyable aspect of our jobs.
The biggest difference between my College library and the Faculty library is the subject-specific focus of the latter's collection. While my library caters broadly for a range of undergraduate courses, the Classical Faculty library only carries stock which relates to the study of Classics. Despite this, their collection is far from narrow as it covers a wide range of different areas, including Greek and Roman history, art, archaeology, architecture, language and literature.
Borrowing at the Classics library is for a maximum of two days, and short loan books may only be borrowed for two hours at a time - very different from the termly borrowing which exists at my library! Many students had some fines to pay when they came to return their books at the desk, but they all paid these without complaint. It was useful for me to try my hand at using the Voyager circulation system as we currently use Heritage for circulation in my library and only use Voyager for cataloguing.
I also had the opportunity to do some shelving using the library's home-grown classification system, which was actually very logical and easy to follow. The shelves were arranged in alphabetical rows, which made books very easy to locate - the shelving arrangements at my College library are a little more complex, as Becky soon discovered when she came to work-shadow me in the afternoon!
Becky's afternoon at Murray Edwards College Library
Although I have a little bit of experience volunteering on small projects in a college library (St Catharine's), this was my first opportunity to see the day-to-day running of a college library from the point of view of the Graduate Trainee.
My first impression of Murray Edwards's library was how quiet it was compared to the Classics Faculty. This is not to say that the faculty experiences ear-splitting decibel levels - one member of staff from the English faculty library actually dubbed us "the most whispery library" she's ever been in - but there were a lot fewer people in the college library, which apparently experiences its busiest periods during the evening. The attire of the students was also quite different; slippers and even pyjama bottoms were de rigueur, and the Assistant Librarian's stories of things that have been left in the library were quite entertaining (a frying pan was the most memorable one, I think).
As Jen mentioned, there was a lot less interaction with students, not only because there were fewer of them, but also because the self-issue machine meant that my daily issue-desk stints did not feature on the Murray Edwards rota. The placement of some of the staff offices also made them less obvious and therefore less accessible to students, though this is an important feature of the proposed changes to the library's layout (on which more detail can be found here ). Visibility of staff is particularly important because, as Librarian Kirstie stressed, the college library staff can find themselves playing a pastoral as well as library-based role, particularly during the stressful Easter exam term, which starts at the end of April.
On an architectural note, something that really impressed me about Murray Edwards library was the overall space within the main body of the library - this is a 1960s building which really succeeded in combining a love for simplicity and concrete with the high ceilings and the grand arches which one expects of a Cambridge college library. There are lots of different working spaces, from squashy sofas in the Elizabeth Rawson reading area and a bookable room for group-work, to corner hideaways and balcony seats which allow the reader to survey the main floor of the library from above.
Within this space, the library must enclose a much wider range of topics and materials than in my faculty library, which it does using the Dewey Decimal system. This is mostly laid out in a logical fashion around the outside of each floor of the library, with the second floor as a notable exception, where art folios jostle for place with a bequest by a former fellow, who stipulated that her books be kept together, as well as the library's holdings in English, Modern Languages and general Art. This highlights how the use of space in modern libraries is so important and I think that, considering the restrictions placed upon them, the Murray Edwards librarians have done a good job, and they provide good signage to help the reader out. Besides, these are some of the brightest students in the country, so if they can't work out a classmark system, then I worry for their degree...
In terms of the jobs we did that afternoon, there were some elements, such as weeding and liaising with the college bursar about fines, which are just subtly different from the tasks I perform daily at Classics, but the overall aim is the same; to enable the students to find the information that they need in order to succeed in their studies.
The job-swap, though brief, was enlightening in a way which tours, though useful, simply cannot be. Thanks to Jen for a very good idea and to Kirstie and Jan for their help and time.
Becky Woods
Jennifer Yellin
^February 28
Newnham College
Disaster struck our blog this week! Somehow, a month's worth of posts had disappeared into the internet-ether, and as I began my turn as webmaster today I had the task of finding and recovering them. Thanks to some diligent backing up by Becky, this wasn't too difficult a job, even though it did give me a momentary heart attack when I saw my emails this morning!
Unbelievably, I'm now halfway through my graduate trainee year. This Friday we will be interviewing next year's candidates, it really doesn't seem like a whole year has passed already since I came for my interview and saw Newnham for the very first time! I am looking forward to talking to the candidates before their interviews.
This week we are also launching our library users' survey, an annual opportunity for our students to give us their feedback. I have spent the last week making adjustments to the questions used last year, testing the online survey and printing out paper copies. Once the survey is closed in three weeks it will be my job to analyse and present the results.
Annie Johnson
^February 25
Faculty of Classics
I've previously mentioned the kinds of different roles that I've performed during my traineeship, and I can now add another: marketing assistant. The Classical Faculty Library has had a Facebook page for some time, but as social media becomes increasingly important, we realised that one natty picture of the bookshelves (not a wildly exciting image) really wasn't the kind of image that we wanted to convey of a bustling and interesting research library. Consequently, I spent yesterday afternoon with Lyn the librarian and this morning with Becca the library assistant getting creative in order to freshen up the library's image. This involved a 'shoot' in the Museum of Classical Archaeology, where we probably overstepped the mark by actually balancing the books on the statues, but the pictures came out well and the statues still have all their digits! We also took quite a lot of pictures in the library itself, where nature gave us a hand by lighting up the desks along the length of the library walls. The fruits of our labours can be seen here. We've already had some positive responses from both librarians and library users, with one librarian even reposting one of the pictures on her own Facebook page. It's been a fun and slightly different way of spending our time, but it's just as important as classifying and cataloguing, because what's the point in beautifully classified books if no-one's coming in to read them? Hopefully our little stunt will lead to increased use of the library and confirmation that libraries are important, useful and lively places in the 21st century.
Becky Woods
^February 24
St John's College
I have begun a fair bit of new work for the biographical librarian over the past few weeks including some data entry and updating records using the college magazine and information sent from the Development Office. It is intricate and requires quite an eye for detail. I have also been liaising with the archivist concerning some rather delicate ancestral enquiries.
We have had a delivery of over 2,000 books (that's 75 boxes requiring 2 rather disgruntled delivery men), which are now in the stacks in the basement and all of the staff are beginning to catalogue these. It is no small task but made a lot more digestible by the fact that we have already downloaded the records from Voyager and so all we need to do is tidy up the records and add classifications and item information - it could be a lot worse.
I have started up my own blog under the name Wee Bookworm and will be adding to it as and when exciting library things happen. This will hopefully support a scholarship application I am making to the States for the Masters in Library and Information Science, to which I have been accepted at Syracuse, NY.
Erin Lee
^February 17
Emmanuel College
The library has the following new features, since my last post: a coffee room, computer room, OPACs on each floor, toilets, step-lifts, lockers, meeting room, and replacement staff chairs! Visitors who have not been to the library since its refurbishment are always impressed. My recent projects include updating the archival database of the college's Old Members with details from obituaries, reassigning enormous art history books to the oversize section, and making instructions for using the photocopier. The time seems to be going quickly; halfway through my traineeship, and the candidates for the next trainee are being interviewed next week.
Natalie Rosen
^February 8
Newnham College
On Friday and Saturday this week, Newnham is hosting a launch event for our Literary Archive. Newnham writers have been invited to contribute some of their creative work - we have had a great response, with manuscripts, books, photographs, letters and memoirs flooding in. At the weekend we will be displaying a selection of the donated material in the library, with authors Claire Tomalin, Sarah Dunant and Nicola Beauman giving talks and running discussions over the weekend.
As you can imagine this has meant that we've been very busy making decisions on what material should go out, designing displays, and liaising with staff from other college departments who are also involved in the event.
In and amongst Literary Archive preparations, I have been continuing to catalogue our library's music collection, meeting librarians from other colleges to organise a rerun of the very successful 23 Things programme in the summer, and on Wednesday I will be travelling to Sheffield for a postgraduate open day.
Annie Johnson
^February 2
Faculty of Classics
The World Health Organisation, this is a level 5 situation: with the temperature in Cambridge plummeting again, the lurgy has hit the library, which has served to highlight how important it is to have the right number of qualified professionals available in order to provide the best possible service for the students. We are a medium-sized faculty with around 300 undergraduates, 100-odd graduate students and a large faculty comprising post-doctoral researchers, research fellows, lecturers and many more! We are open 9-7 weekdays and 9-6 on Saturdays during term-time, with around 350 books passing through our hands in a day (and that's just books checked in and out). Needless to say, if you're on the issue desk, there's not a lot of time for the 101 myriad other things that need doing to keep a library afloat (See Annie and Jen's blogs below for more information about the daily inner workings of a library).
But germ-laden whinge aside, I find running the issue desk to be one of the more satisfying aspects of the job. I'm very much a people person, so daily interaction with a wide range of library users is a very pleasant way to spend my time. It also keeps you in touch with what is really happening in the library; for example, how can you know what books to buy if you don't know where the needs of the students lie? Computers and statistics can only tell you so much, but personal experience and chatting to the users can be much more informative (current UGrad essay topics = Latin syntax and Lucan, general mood = slightly stressed, though glad the first essays are out of the way).
There's also the enquiry aspect which I enjoy. An example would be finding the elusive obscure Italian volume that a post-doc has been searching for, and explaining how he can get it from Senate House (London) via the UL without paying exorbitant National Rail fares; he gets the book, I get told that I've made someone's Friday. Warm fuzzies all round in the library.
One of my other current projects in which I will also get to spend more time face-to-face with the students is our drive to educate the student body about the electronic resources which are available to them. Although graduate students get an intensive computer session at the start of the Michaelmas term, there's a whole host of databases and online bibliographies that would benefit them and the undergraduate students that they may not have come across before. I'm therefore learning how to use Année Philologique, Brill's New Pauly Online and the Oxford Classical Dictionary in order to teach them to the students on Monday lunchtimes. As I spent a very enjoyable year teaching English in a French high school, I'm looking forward getting up in front of a class again, though it is a little difficult to think of good clear examples when Classics is not really my forte...I'm getting there though. After having my wrist (metaphorically) slapped for classifying Suetonius in amongst the Greeks, I'm getting to grips with who's who and what's what in the Classical world...on a very basic level at least. In the mean time, I wish you all the best for Februarius - may your library of life have shelves crammed with interesting experiences, and your card be free of fines.
Becky Woods
^January 28
Murray Edwards College
For the whole of this week both myself and Annie Johnson at Newnham College have been taking part in the Library Day in the Life Project. The aim of the project is to encourage librarians and information professionals to blog or tweet about their working day in order to provide an insight into the many different kinds of roles that exist within the field of librarianship. The project is an excellent resource for anyone who is considering a career in library or information work.
For an insight into the working week of a graduate trainee in Cambridge, have a look at my blog here and at Annie's blog here.
Jennifer Yellin
^January 21
Newnham College
This week saw the start of Lent term, so has been a busy week for us in the library. I have been running induction tours for the new students who have joined us this term, as well as working hard to get all of the books back on the shelves that have come back after the vacation. (As we don't have a lift in the Yates Thompson library this means going up and down stairs many times a day!)
I have also been preparing for our Library Committee meeting which is next week, as I will be presenting ways in which the library can use social media tools such as Twitter as a notification system for our students. This will be my first Library Committee meeting, so I hope my proposal goes down well!
Annie Johnson
^January 20
Trinity College
It's one of our busier times in the life of the Library. I've been preparing the periodicals for what we term 'winter binding'. Unbound items are gathered together and sent off to the binders twice a year. With Trinity subscribing to over 200 journals, it's a big job and one made more difficult whenever we realise an item is missing, or never arrived in the first place - a sadly frequent occurrence. In this instance we send off a claim to Swets, our subscription agents, who then liaise with the publisher and we hope to get a replacement soon - though the journals in question will have to be left until summer as this often takes a while. Completely assembled parts are then entered in our binding book and sent off to J.S. Wilson & Sons.
Meanwhile I'm close to finalising my proposal for a project this summer, to be held in the Wren. The Library's fabulous 1250 MSS., though visually stunning, have been well documented and I'm more an Early-Modernist than Medievalist, so I think I'll focus on Emblem Books, a pan-European phenomenon of the 16th and 17th Centuries, with an artistic depiction (usually a woodcut) on each page, accompanied by a short poem offering moral guidance (and usually in Latin!). One issue is how far text and image are supposed to reflect each other. Another is that it is unclear quite how many of these we have in the Wren (enough for an exhibition, I hope!). So, plenty to work on over the next six months.
Tom Ford
^January 12
Christ's College
I have had quite a busy week so far, with in house training. Yesterday I had a session on how to use the online database Janus. Janus provides online access to more than 1800 catalogues of archives held throughout Cambridge. At Christ's we have a wide range of personal papers in our collection which are waiting to be catalogued or uploaded onto the site. I'm hoping that during the rest of my training year I can help catalogue the correspondence of W.H.D. Rouse. I was amazed at how comprehensive the Janus site is. It looks very simple but it is a great tool for researchers to use.
Today I had another training/brainstorming session about how we could encourage students to use online and e resources. I am going to an e-books training session at the UL tomorrow, so I hope I will learn some new skills and will be able to put them into practice when I come back to the library.
Charlotte Byrne
^January 4
St John's College
It is the first day back in the library after the Christmas break and everyone is catching up on e-mails and post. I am beginning to look into the Johnians, who were involved in the translation of the King James Bible, since it has its 400th anniversary this year and John's is displaying their copy in an exhibition in its honour. Hopefully I can discover hidden gems relating to the translators in our Old Library to make the exhibition even better.
The trainees are getting prepared for the Libraries@Cambridge conference on Thursday, at which we are presenting on the subject of working together within and across Cambridge libraries. We have split the workload into those writing and those speaking and this collaboration has worked well so far. We have one final rehearsal before presenting to the librarians of Cambridge. The conference promises to be enlightening with talks, workshops and posters from all areas of librarianship.
Erin Lee
^December 14
Christ's College
I've had a very festive day at Christ's today as we had our Staff Christmas lunch. All members of staff, from porters to gardeners trooped over to the neighbouring Sidney Sussex College for a 3 course Christmas meal. However I have been doing work today as well. This morning I was buying books for Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and this afternoon I was continuing with an ongoing project in the Old Library. For the past week I have been trying to organise a box of papers that was donated by one of our fellows at Christ's, W.H.D Rouse. Rouse was a Classicist who later became headmaster of the Perse school. Amongst the items he gave the college were 40 big brown envelopes of correspondence. These had previously been sat in their envelopes in a cardboard box. My task has been to remove the letters from each envelope and to place them in archival standard envelopes and then into archival boxes. One of the greatest challenges has been to put together the archival boxes! There are some really interesting letters in this collection, including ones written by Rouse's old pupils when they were fighting on the western front in the First World War. I am hoping that I will be given the opportunity to catalogue some of these treasures in the New Year.
Charlotte Byrne
^December 13
St John's College
Now that the waves of students have receded, the demands of the issue desk are somewhat fewer though there are still fellows and postgraduates to assist. I am currently working on an exhibition of Johnian Prime Ministers (Goderich, Aberdeen and Palmerston) and am putting the finishing touches to captions, scans and displays. Hopefully it will go up when the special collections librarian returns from sick leave and can add the archive material to mine. The cabinet containing scans from 1820s 'Punch' is my personal highlight of the exhibition and is the result of many a dusty afternoon spent in the chapel basement poring over cartoons!
I am also currently working on some biographical enquiries concerning Johnians from the nineteenth century. These are family tree enquiries and it is very rewarding to trace the relatives through our biographical archive and be able to report back to the family with information that they did not previously know.
On a more mundane note, since it is outside term time, we are having the second floor carpets replaced as part of the library's rolling improvements plan, which means that the doors to the building are being propped open while underlay is being ferried in and out. This is not helping the already chilly temperature at my desk. It is just as well that I am keeping warm by running back and forward to the Old Library with items for my exhibition!
Erin Lee
^December 3
Emmanuel College
It's the last day of an interesting and instructive term here at Emma Library. The staff moved from a temporary office to the newly renovated library building in October, and it has been all go since then! The new part of the library is impressive, being modern and functional, yet pleasing to the eye. I particularly like the windows of the stacks, which are in a rainbow spectrum of colours and printed with donors' names, and also the big window of the first floor, which is emblazoned with the Emmanuel lion! The renovation has been ongoing throughout term, presenting a challenging environment at times, but it does not appear to have put the students off visiting! It is anticipated that the work will be finished by the New Year, and I know the library will look wonderful.
At the beginning of September I assisted with the organisation of the Archives in its new home, and also got to witness the huge operation of moving the undergraduate collections into their present location. I feel that this was a valuable experience, from which I learnt much about the physical organisation of a library. The last in the series of book moves will take place in the two weeks before Christmas, when the mountains of boxes containing fragile books are moved out of the college's squash court and into the rare books room. Aside from all these exciting goings-on, I've been doing my usual duties of checking reading lists, processing books, and answering student enquiries. My ongoing project (and, I suspect, that of many graduate trainees to come!) will be to create or update electronic records for the books indexed in the card catalogue, which contains pre-1989 acquisitions. It will probably take a decade to do!
Natalie Rosen
^December 2
Murray Edwards College
It has been really busy in the library this week because Michaelmas term ends tomorrow and all the library books must be recalled before borrowing can begin for the vacation period. Essentially what this means is that at the end of each term we have a deluge of returned books which must all be reshelved within a few days - hard work! At the moment we also allow students to borrow their books for an entire term, which definitely increases the number of books which are returned at each Recall; however, we are planning to introduce three week borrowing in the near future and this will hopefully mean that the shelving is a little less mountainous at future Recalls!
In other news, I have recently taken on an exciting new project to create an accessible digital image repository for the many images which are held by the library. The images are mainly of the library at different points in time, and for example there is a particularly lovely one of the old wooden card catalogue cabinet before it was replaced by the OPAC.
The College also holds many other images on various servers and the eventual plan is for the digital image repository to store all of these in a central location where they can be accessed by all college staff. Due to the fact that the College holds so many images, my first step for creating this repository will be to design some cataloguing conventions to ensure that all the images are tagged in a consistent and accessible manner. I will also have to investigate matters of copyright in order to ascertain which images may be altered or reproduced by the College for things such as marketing materials or student newsletters. There will be quite a bit of research involved before I can actually begin tagging the images and I am looking forward to the challenge of laying some strong foundations for a project which I hope will continue after I have finished my placement, and which may even be picked up by the trainee who succeeds me. It is definitely exciting to be in a position to initiate a project like this and it is certain to be a really useful learning experience!
Jennifer Yellin
^November 29
Faculty of Classics
An interesting request came to bear today: I recently received an email from a Classical scholar in Sweden, who wished to consult one of our monographs during a visit to Cambridge. On retrieving said item, we found that it was in fact a notebook containing an unpublished type-script, complete with pasted-in photos and annotations. It was really quite exciting to find such a unique item nestled within the rest of our archaeology collection; suffice to say that it is no longer to be found on the open shelves! The situation most likely came about because our library was created from the merger of two libraries in 1982; the original Faculty of Classics and the collection from the Museum of Classical Archaeology. The classification system in Archaeology was (and partially remains) quite vague and the records brief, so occasionally interesting items can turn up in there which we weren't previously aware of.
Back to my Swedish scholar though, who did come to Cambridge and was very pleased to see an original notebook produced, as he is working with the papers collected by one of the authors. His visit did, however, throw up another interesting issue, that of copyright. As the work is completely unique, he wanted to take photos of or scan the manuscript to produce a .pdf to share with his academic colleagues. This then necessitated my first foray into the worlds of copyright law and biographical research. I was already aware of some facets of copyright law as students, just like everyone else, are subject to it (though the CILIP Handbook of Practical Copyright for information professionals notes that "students are notorious for bending copyright restrictions" (Norman 2004: 124)). However, the duration of copyright on unpublished manuscripts was a new one and, as it hinged on the date of death of the authors, meant that a bit of biographical digging was required.
Sadly, our notable archaeologists were not notable enough to be listed in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but good old Google Scholar (Google may be white bread for the mind, Professor Tara Brabazon, but I like my Warburton's Toastie) showed me that they had all been publishing in the Sixties, and therefore could not have been dead long enough for copyright to have lapsed. Therefore, our Scandinavian visitor (who turned out to be Norwegian) was entitled to copy 5% of the document or a chapter no longer than 30 pages. As the document was only 63 pages long, he did quite well out of this!
All of this made me think about what a librarian really is. During this episode alone, I was an adviser, a lawyer and a biographical researcher. I think that, by the end of my contract, I may turn out to have played many other roles as well...watch this space.
Becky Woods
^November 24
Trinity College
Just back from a combination of attending and invigilating a codicology class in College. This was held not in the Library, but near the Porter's Lodge, and so two of us librarians were despatched across court with those slightly forbidding, high-security suitcases. Human organs? Enriched uranium? Something far more readable: a treasury of twelfth-century manuscripts. The class was a good opportunity for me to learn more about rare books - and fortunately I didn't have to admonish anyone over mishandling the items. It's a week or two until the end of term and things are mostly under control. This is not to say that I have not lately been on the receiving end of some rather unexpected requests and phone calls at the Issue Desk. The other day a journalist at a major newspaper rung up, and today I was confronted with some Latin a visitor to the Chapel was interested in. My desk is relatively clear at present which is good - perhaps by some miracle this state of affairs will endure through to Monday!
Tom Ford
^