Showing posts with label sense of humour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sense of humour. Show all posts

Thursday 1 May 2014

Twenty Years as a Law Librarian - Admin

Remember these?
This is the fourth in this series of Twenty Years in Law Librarianship. Given it has been generated by general high level themes of my Chartership Report, such as technology, communications, and professional bodies, I decided it was time for something more prosaic

The reality is that librarianship entails a lot of admin, and although it's boring and unglamorous it is vital to the smooth running of the library service. Whether you are just starting out or reaching the vigorous middle age of your career, admin is everywhere, so it seems appropriate to salute its ubiquity.

Saturday 19 April 2014

Effective Networking: From the recycling pile

Useful Connections
It's that time of year. The sunshine is finally strong enough to reach into the farthest recesses of the dusty bankers boxes on my office bookshelves. Looking at them blinking in the sun I realised I hadn't touched them in years. Despite a few office moves they have followed me around, so this morning I called their bluff and sorted them out ferociously. For the most part they contained old budget figures, meeting minutes, course notes, and various suppliers catalogues which I can now view online so my recycle bin is now bulging.

I thought I'd recycle some of the course notes in a different way, with one set from 2004 striking me as still very relevant and interesting. This piece uses 'Top 10 tips for effective networking' which was presented by Lesley Robinson (Oct 2004). Amazingly I still vaguely remember the seminar, partly because of the anticipative terror I experienced by the thought of having to actually talk with a large number strangers. As I recall we listened to her talk, then put her ideas into practice and it worked really well.

Saturday 18 May 2013

Generic Widgets: Musings on a library budget

It has been said that ‘information is the lifeblood of law and the legal profession’. And to this I would like to add, law firms continue to be the flesh and muscle of the body of knowledge which they make available to clients; good lawyers turn that information into business knowhow. Anatomical analogies are a personal favourite and perhaps to stretch this one, everyone is trying to extract a pound of flesh from the legal corpus as a whole. From clients expecting discounts, lawyers squeezing suppliers and suppliers driving hard bargains, everyone is at it.

Wednesday 6 February 2013

'Bang Bang You're Dead': Jay Gun at WW Gallery

After a normal day of Formula 1 photos, a university seminar on disturbing medical images and a podcast about Galileo and psychopaths, I returned home and wondered what to relax with on the iPlayer. A timely text from a friend recommended the Charlie Brooker Weekly Wipe - 'do it now - it's 30 minutes of life well spent'. This collection of acerbic observations from the news was amusing but the section on US gun culture needed no commentary from Brooker to be shocking; just to watch snippets of adverts, the Piers Morgan shouty interview with Alex Jones and the small child showing off her pink REAL guns was astounding. And worrying. Which is why when I saw Jay Gun: The Most Dangerous Man on the Planet, I didn't know whether to immediately laugh or cry.