Using my phone for work (not as a phone)

Recently I purchased a brand new HTC Desire phone. It's like an iPhone but doesn't allow me to access Apple's iStore. The software in the phone is called Android and has been designed by Google. It's quite swish. HTC (and Telstra) have both modded the phone though so it now has some fancy HTC usability features (woo!) and some useless Telstra marketing things I can't get rid of (less woo).

Apart from being able to look up restaurants and know the weather at a glance, the phone has some interesting apps which I was able to download to help me at work. One of these apps is a barcode scanner that uses the camera to 'scan' the barcode. I can then transfer my scanned barcodes to my PC.

Now this may not sound that exciting to most people. But anyone who has had to fork out hundreds of dollars for a wireless barcode scanner can probably see where I'm heading with this.

Picture me standing in a bunker. The bunker contains a compactus. The compactus contains books. Some of these books have a barcode. Now, instead of me having to write down the barcodes of these books onto a piece of paper, and then typing them into a computer (or taking a laptop down there and typing them direct), I just whipped out my Desire, pressed 'barcode scanner' and merrily went scanning things. I still have to write down the numbers on books without a barcode (although I should look at some kind of OCR thing that would scan the printed numbers) but I'm still doing things a lot faster and more accurate than if I had to write/type these numbers into the system.

I love my phone...except that I linked it to my work email and now it bings at me every time I get one...I should undo that. Otherwise all good!

Interesting theses

So I've spent the last few weeks faffing about in our archives doing a stocktake of our pre-1990 theses collection. In 1990, the Canberra College of Advanced Education (CCAE) became accredited as a university and tada, the University of Canberra was born. My task is to work out what CCAE materials we had and ensure we had a copy in our archive and one that was loanable to students. It turned out to be a lot bigger than I thought and I've spent ages fixing mistakes in the catalogue.

Anyways, in my travels, I have come across a number of interesting papers (well, interesting titles anyway). And due to the wonderful power of the interweb, I can share them with you.

1. Horsies
   We all love horsies. Some people love them so much that they write all kinds of things about them, from gambling to sexism, we have it all (well, not all, there's only a couple really). My favourite is Burr, Sandra : Women and horses : a study of Australia's recreational horsewomen . I love the picture of the horse ring.
   
2. Boring reading
   Don't you hate it when you're teaching a class to students and they all doze off because the textbook chosen is boring? Well someone studied that in 1982. Newton, P. V. : An examination of reading material used in year 11 with special attention to social science texts. Only the abstract is there but the full report talks about ways (that could be exploited by a computer) on making the textbooks more usable.
3. Enjoying your job
   I cannot find the text, but one work I was looking at was asking the question "How much do librarians like their jobs?". It examined government librarians and surveyed them to see if they were bitter. The results said no. Ooh, found it. Barnes, Helen : The work attitudes and job perceptions of Commonwealth Government Libraians : with descriptive data on Commonwealth Government librarianship as an occupation

That's enough for this time. Enjoy!

University of Canberra Libraryland

Wow, university libraries are so different. I've been here a few weeks now and am amazed by some of the differences.

1. People are quite happy to listen to instruction.
Me: Well I know you need to know about how feminist theory has destroyed micro-lending schemes in Cameroon, but did you know you can find this all out yourself?
Student: No, really? I'd like to learn that.
Me: Really? Where's the hidden camera?
Student: What hidden camera? I'm very excited about finding journals through your databases.

2. They write all over the toilets. Whole stories. With drawings. And people add comments. It's like a web 2.0, except in the toilets, so would that make it dunny 2.0? Social looworking :)

3. The crazy people are intelligent. They can actually prove that the aliens are reading their mind (although I must admit I've not really had crazy people here, everyone is quite nice).

4. Staff talk at a much higher level than what I'm used to. Who uses 'ennui' these days? And when talking to people? Pfft. I'm going to need to buy a dictionary to translate what some of the academics here say.

5. EMBATAPLH - even more bloody acronyms than a public library has. There are so many of them that they gave me a glossary of UC library acronyms when I started. I had to carry it around for 2 weeks to work out what was going on (add to that the point above and it's like I'm talking to someone in German... I can understand every 8th word, but most of that is the word 'the').

And some of the non-differences.
1. Still a bureaucracy. The IT department and most HR functions have been outsourced to India because it's cheaper. So if I have a problem with my pay or my computer, I ring Mumbai.

Actually, come to think of it, the bureaucracy thing covers all the non differences. Tasks are a tad less fluid than a public library and I'm always worried about overstepping my authority or stepping on someone's toes, but at least I usually know who to send things to.

All in all I'm enjoying things. All of the stuff that I was worried I wouldn't be able to do, I'm allowed to do. I've done training (a little anyway), reference stuff, research. I'm even in charge of two subject guides (software engineering and information systems). Oh, and I don't really even have to catalogue (much). It turns out I'm in charge of copy cataloguing...and I can copy well!

If I remember, I'll write my next blog post on some of the odd things that people write their theses about (being in charge of them is quite amazing).

New Library (details)

Interesting development in my new library job. I was going to start working at the University of Canberra as a Librarian/Information Officer. The position descriptions for the library are all left very vague so that you don't really know what you'll be doing, but from questions I asked, I knew I'd be working with the Academic Services Team. This would mean I'd be doing some reference work, some training (woo!) and a bunch of other stuff that I'm a bit hazy about. Unfortunately the Cataloguing, Theses and E-Document Coordinator got a promotion. Unfortunately because it means I now have to learn how to catalogue again.


That's right, due to generic position descriptions, my background as technical services team leader for a bunch of libraries and a merit-based job system, I was assigned the job. Honestly, I don't mind doing the job. I'm just a bit worried I'll end up typecast as a technical services librarian...you all know the type, hair in a bun, twinset and pearls, etc (although I must admit, if I had enough hair to put it into a bun, I bet it'd go fabulous with my twinset).


From a management point of view, having generic position descriptions is great...it means you can move staff around to places where they'll be more productive (or less productive if you're vindictive and want to get rid of them). But I haven't even started!!!


It's nice to be wanted...but I really really really wanted to do information literacy training.


Oh, and for you all (click for larger copies):

New Library (already)

Oooh, talk about slack! Since I've been at Yarra I've posted 5 blog posts. That should equate to nearly one a month, but seeing as the last one was July...it doesn't. Now, at prompting from Heather about being slack, here's a brand new post!

Big news from me; I'm leaving City of Yarra Libraries to go work for the University of Canberra. Woo me!

Hopefully (and I cannot guarantee anything) I will post more from Canberra. After all, I currently know 2 people up there and what else will I spend my time doing? Chances are I'll become addicted to TV shows about crime (CSI, CSI:NY, CSI:Miami, NCIS, NCIS:NY, Law & Order, Law & Order:SVU, Law & Order:The Other One, etc) and my only salvation will be writing on my blog about them. Ooh, maybe my blog can go from being a whingey librarian one to one complaining about episodes of CSI! I might have to start liking CSI though. I could even go as far as getting Foxtel so I could watch the Crime and Investigation network and have even more crime shows, except real life crime ones.

Somehow I don't think any of that will happen. I'll try and think of something interesting to post for the next installment of my life though.