Since I started working in public libraries four years ago (almost to the day - June 14th 2004 was my first day), I've been doing pretty much the same thing: online stuff. I started with some vague responsibility for the People's Network, which became the management of bookmarks on the public (and staff) PCs, then metamorphosed into the creation ...

I don't know how your library's reading groups work, but ours are led by librarians. They meet every four weeks, and everyone turns up having read the same book. We also have reading circles, which have more of a free-for-all vibe. There's one school of thought that says staff should leave RGs to get on with it themselves. Our reasoning is that ...

We're having a let's-promote-our-online-resources day on Thursday. You know the drill: we pay for all of this stuff, but it doesn't get used particularly well, so maybe if we tell people about it we'll see usage go up... We used AviScreen Portable to grab five-minute videos of a few of our online subs: OED, DNB, Encyclopaedia Britannica and ...

The visits to Bulgarian libraries were great, and they helped give me a bit of context for the real reason we were there: to talk to Bulgarian library directors about how we do things. Seeing a couple of libraries - even if they were unrepresentative of the whole picture - meant that we had some common ground. There were 19 delegates from all ...

Old Communist Party building + shoehorned-in library = this: We met the Library Director, Georgi Belchev, in his office upstairs. He gave us the facts and figures - 1,000,000 items in stock, three (yes, three) branches - and described the 15 departments in the Municipal Library. We know already that there are 3,000-odd Chitalishte libraries in ...

This was my first visit to a former Communist country. Some people might argue that living in Sheffield for a year (which I did in 2003-4) counts, but Bulgaria has serious post-Communist issues. But then again, they've been coping with all sorts for centuries. Under Ottoman rule in the 1850s, there was a revival in Bulgarian culture. Wealthy ...

I'm supposed to be presenting to the library's Operational Management Team tomorrow afternoon, on the lessons I learned on my trip to Bulgaria. My photos are on Flickr, but I've been meaning to get my thoughts down on (virtual) paper. It was an interesting trip, not just for the reasons my Higher-Ups will be interested in. I'll write a few ...

I’ve been thinking about this post for a while (well it’s now just over a month since I heard my Chartership submission had been accepted), but I’ve been finding it difficult to work out what I want to say about it! After having spent so long doing (or supposedly doing) my Chartership it is a relief [...]

This is one for acronym fans everywhere: CILIP's Branch and Mobile Libraries Group is joining forces with the Public Libraries Group for a weekend conference this year. It's a varied and genuinely interesting programme, with the overall theme of ''Learning our futures today.'' If you ask me, the panel session on the final day - Looking to the ...

We almost won the quiz. We came second, which is perfectly respectable, yet avoids both glory and abject failure. We walked away with a tenner's worth of Waterstones vouchers each. I'm not sure of the wisdom of encouraging librarians to buy their own books, rather than borrow them, but what do I know? We should have won the competition for best ...