Recently I’m been faced with that age-old problem – not too little to blog about, but too little time to blog it. One of the major reasons for this problem is that I’ve moved departments again! I just returned to cataloguing last month, but at the last minute was shifted into the accessions department at the beginning of June. Briefly, from next year it has been decided that all the trainees here will move among three departments – cataloguing, interlibrary loans and accessions. In order to facilitate these changes it made sense to move me into accessions already, and so off I went!
Of course, this is a good opportunity for me. Getting to see three departments instead of two adds another feather to my cap (or line to my CV) and accessions is the only section of the library I didn’t think I was going to see. It’s interesting to see the books as they come into the library, to get a better hold on how the financial side of things works, and to perfect that age old librarian skill of stamping books with the library’s name. This is something that my book collector brother would probably consider particularly nasty vandalism; apparently library books are a complete disaster from a collector’s point of view, with all the stamps and stickers and labels and suchforth.
So far it’s been a good experience, and I’m beginning to settle in to the extent that I’m feeling useful: I can get a book ready for cataloguing and pay and send off invoices, which feels like a significant contribution to the department. The end of term’s approaching, so when we move to termtime hours and off our late-night circulation and enquiry desk rotas I’m going to be in acccessions for significant periods of time. But there are still library visits and the annual stocktake to provide plenty of variety, so it’s not going to be all accession posts from now on!
Ooh, final news, our posters from the public library are on their way! Lots more to do!
