Spreading the word



Glazed tile image from Ishtar Gate of Babylon, Museum of the Ancient Orient, Istanbul.
Copyright Emma Woods 2011.

I am writing this post at work. However, I'm not in the library, I'm in the Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) school office. Last month, my colleague and I started visiting the school office for two hours every Thursday afternoon. We do an hour each, talking to academics, answering their queries and updating them with relevant library news. The school office is the perfect place for this to take place as it's where the hot drinks machine is, so as academics come in to get their coffee in between lectures we can take the opportunity to start a dialogue. This week it's very quiet due to UCU industrial action, which is why I'm writing this post instead.

Even though it's still early days, I feel our regular presence here has already increased interest in the library. I'm hoping that this will continue and will strengthen our relationship with the department, leading to more requests for information skills sessions and better promotion of library resources to students. Some computing reading lists are alarmingly short and this means students don't see the need to come into the library or use the online resources until very late on in their studies. I hope to start encouraging academic staff to explore what we have of relevance to their modules and to update and extend their recommended reading.

I'll write another post in a few months to further reflect on how our visiting librarian scheme is going. In the meantime, I'd be very interested to hear from other librarians engaged in similar activities. Please comment below.

Latest Thing: Technorati

Our latest 23 Things assignment is Technorati, an internet search engine for blogs. I'd looked at the site before but never really bothered exploring properly, so I'm happy that the 23 Things programme is allowing me the time to do this.

Inspired by all the World Book Night excitement over the weekend, the first thing I did was look at some of the top blogs for books. I was pleased to see that the top blog Novelr's most recent post was about my favourite author Margaret Atwood.

I then had a quick look at the Top 100 Link but couldn't see much that interested me so I quickly moved on to searching within the blogs. Continuing on last week's theme, I searched for Matt Damon. Yesterday afternoon, I went to see Inside Job, narrated by Matt, at the Ritzy in Brixton (my favourite London cinema). It's an excellent insight into the global financial crisis and shows that some of the people who caused the meltdown are still working for the US government. I commented to my friend that I thought Matt Damon was disappointed by Obama's performance so far and so it's quite appropriate that the first result in my Technorati search was Matt Damon Tells Piers Morgan He’s Disappointed By Barack Obama.

The next task was to sign up to Technorati and submit this blog. The signing up bit was simple enough but they needed me to include my claim code in a post before my blog could be verified. The original post included this but I've since removed it. 

I finally received the claim complete notice two weeks after submitting it. This means any new posts I write will appear on Technorati.