Thursday 2 February 2012

Library day in the life: round 8, day 4 (Thursday 2nd February 2012)

Day 4 was only a half day. I would usually have spent it in Special Collections (SCOLAR) working on the Cardiff rare books collection, which we are cataloguing to (we hope) high rare books standards, including the full range of notes on provenance, binding, former owners, &c. It's a prestigious acquisition for us, and has attracted a lot of attention already: we are working on the private press collection at the moment.

Be that as it may, I was also scheduled to take part in a two-hour test session on the new resource discovery platform, or next generation catalogue, with other colleagues, so that was how most of the morning was spent instead: exploring the potential of the new system and in particular trying to test whether certain functions work. Basically the new "catalogues" are not catalogues in the sense of lists of works, but databases. There are lots of interesting new possible ways of manipulating the information in them: there also seem to be some fairly major omissions. The session provided lots of food for thought. The scheme is not yet live and is still being developed, so I hope it is not too late to check on the reason for the omissions, and see whether this can be rectified.

Back downstairs to SCOLAR, but with only an hour left it was not really worth starting on the private press books, so I used the time to upgrade some records for some nineteenth century sermons which have thrown up some odd things on the catalogue, and to check some details for a blog post which I have prepared for the SCOLAR blog. With five of us contributing to this, we need to coordinate what we are doing, but my next contribution is (nearly) ready for whenever there is a convenient slot for it.

As I am part-time and don't work (in the library) on Fridays, that's the end of #libday8 for me. I still haven't got into the wiki: let's see if I can sign up before it finishes!

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