Champs!

Earlier this summer, my employer held a staff party. Staff awards were distributed during the event and I am pleased to say the library won the ‘annual recognition award’.

We were presented with a shield and a bottle of champagne each. The decisions were made after senior management studied feedback from the annual staff survey and also the regular end-of-semester student surveys. I’m not sure what comments were made about the library but they must have been good!

It feels great knowing the library and the work we do is appreciated by both students and fellow staff. It’s nice to see people appreciating a library service, a provision which is traditionally often overlooked. In my previous employment, the library was often side-lined but here we have support from senior management and that feels good. It allows us to develop the service and for this I am very grateful. 

Heritage Cirqa Flagship Programme

In Sept 2015, IS Oxford – the developers of Heritage, our LMS – launched theHeritage Cirqa Flagship Programme. This was a series of 10 monthly assessments designed to utilise a variety of functions within the software. I registered as soon as I heard of the course and was really chuffed to be within the first wave of ‘graduates’ announced in June. The main aim of the programme was to encourage library staff to make use of functions they may not already utilise. Each month saw a different task – here is a basic list of each topic covered: 

Brighton, baby! ARLG 2014 conference

Earlier this year I was successful in applying for the 2014 AlisonNorthover Bursary, awarded by ARLG. I used the award to fund my attendance at the 2014 ARLG conference, entitled ‘The final frontier: to boldly go where youhave never gone before’. This was the second CILIP ARLG study conference and was held at the University of Sussex, near Brighton, between 23^rd-25^th June.

I have pondered long and hard how to best record and reflect upon my attendance at the conference, and even now – several months later – I’m still not sure of the best way to approach it. The conference offered a very full schedule of talks and workshops, and I came away with a wealth of knowledge. I met new people, learned new things about myself and had an amazing time. Attempting to put the entire experience into words is a tall order! It may not be the most innovative method, but I shall tackle it in the form of a daily diary, leading to a final post summarising my overall thoughts. I make no promises, but shall attempt to keep the entries relatively short, to prevent them from becoming overly descriptive, tedious reads.

And so, dear reader, settle down on the sofa with a warm drink as I take you back to the summer of 2014…

Alison Northover Bursary 2014

I'm all smiles!
Image by Ben Smith

This time next week, I will have arrived at the University of Sussex in Brighton, ready to attend my very first conference. Conferences are something I’ve always had an interest in attending, but due to the cost of tickets it is has never been plausible. Until now…

Towards the end of last year I decided to apply for bursaries with the hope of securing a sponsored place to a conference. Whenever a bursary was advertised I considered applying for it, and in the end I applied for three. All three were to attend CILIP’s Academic and Research Libraries Group (ARLG) conference, entitled ‘Academic libraries: the final frontier’. One of my applications was rejected as I fell outside the geographical boarder for applications, but my other two applications were both successful. Both bodies contacted me to say I’d been successful within a week of each other, and I accepted the bursary with the more substantial financial package. I was incredibly flattered and humbled to win both. I won’t name the bursary I turned down out of respect for the person it was then offered to, but I am both surprised and pleased to be the 2014 recipient of ARLG’s Alison Northover Bursary.

Leaving School

Some of you may already be aware that I have recently been made redundant from the school library. I haven’t blogged about it until now as I wanted to gain distance and perspective first – reading a wholly negative blog post is no fun and benefits nobody. 

I worked at the school for almost 6 years and in September 2010 it merged with a local school to form a ‘new’ dual site school. The original plan was for the school to remain dual site, with some subjects on North Site and others on South Site. However, with the coalition’s controversial removal of the ‘Building Schools for the Future’ (BSF) programme in Summer 2010, the school lost £32million. This was a massive political u-turn and, at grass roots levels, it meant the school could no longer afford to operate two sites. So, ultimately, redundancies were made from both support and teaching staff.