Star Wars display

We had been pushing for a Star Wars display at work, one of the ladies husbands is a huge fan and she populated 3 cases with items from the past movies. Unfortunately we do not seem to have many Star Wars fans at my work because the ladies that do social media were like, ‘oh I never thought of promoting that’. I was kind of shocked, firstly because we should be promoting absolutely everything we do. Secondly we are the only people in the region doing any kind of Star Wars display… the people need to know!

I think it is a great display. I kind of wish we could have done even more, but space is an issue 🙂

Here are some pics of our Star Wars display:

Have you guys seen any great Star Wars displays leading up to the release of “The Force Awakens”?

Christmas Book Critters

You might remember the Halloween Book Critters I created back in October. Well, due to popular demand I was asked to create some Christmas Book Critters for our Christmas display. Woohoo! I was so excited and got straight to it and I am very happy with the results (although I think my Elf needs a hat, I will have to find some time to work on that or take some stuff home and work on it lol).

Introducing our Christmas Book Critters.

Santa:

Elf:

I really do think this guy needs a hat. Will have to work on it 🙂

Rudolph:

And last, but certainly not least… Olaf 🙂 :

Unfortunately you cannot see his arms and hair too well in this photo, but I swear he has them 🙂

What has been seen…

So my friend and I decided we wanted to escape work at lunchtime and go boot shopping as well as grab some lunch. We tended to the boots first which was if I am honest only somewhat successful, because we have to go back when our sizes come in.

These are the boots I am looking at 🙂 Sooo warm!

After the boots were taken care of we bought some lunch and sat down to eat with a window seat and a nice view. I happened to look over at a couple a few seats away from us and froze as the male of the couple reached back and put his hand down the back of his pants, “yum, just what I want to see when eating” I said. Then he seemed to be fishing around and as we looked on in horror he pulled an umbrella out of his pants (it was one of those short umbrellas that would fit in a handbag/tote bag).

“What the fuck?” says I?

There are a couple of explanation for this event and I still haven’t decided whether;
a) we were delirious with hunger from boot shopping and therefore having hallucinations,
b) this really happened and that guys butt is apparently Mary Poppin’s bag,
c) we got pranked
d) all of the above

As completely bizarre as this whole experience was, it made me laugh so hard and still has me smiling hours later.

What do you think the answer is?

Spam broke my brain

Ahh spam… we all get it. Usually it is offers for a bigger penis or a longer lasting erection, both of which I obviously need because currently I have no penis so obviously more of one would be a good idea? The lack of penis obviously means I have never had an erection so I guess a longer lasting one would be a good thing?

I digress…

I received some spam on my blog yesterday in the form of some comments, usually they are pretty boring, things like, “Hey your post is awesome, for a bigger audience go to xxx” or for some reason I also seem to get a bunch where they have posted excerpts from books or something. The couple I found yesterday broke my brain. Seriously you guys, trying to read this had me going cross eyed hahaha.

Here it is: “Outset of whole I would same to articulate rattling blog! I had a prompt head inn which I’d care too inquire if you do non judgment. I was curious to have intercourse how you shopping centre yourself and straighten ouut your heed before writing. I accept had trouble clarification my thoughts in acquiring my thoughts stunned on that point. I in truth do takings joy in penning withal itt only seems corresponding the for the first time 10 to 15 minutes are skeletal  merelly fair nerve-racking to build knocked out how to set about. Any suggestions or hints? Thanks!”

Any suggestions or hints? Yup… DICTIONARY!!! Get one! “I was curious to have intercourse how you shopping centre yourself” – Uhh what?

I am not sure what is involved with shopping centre-ing oneself, but it sounds like it could be painful to either my person or my wallet. Neither of which is interested in pain right now.

The other one I received read as follows: “Its same you pick up my listen! You appear to empathize a caboodle almost this, so much as you wrote the guide on in it or something. I palpate that you just coulkd do with some percent to cause thhe subject matter household a bit, but former than that, ths is magnificent blog. A capital learn. I leave by all odds be endorse.”

What the hell is a ‘caboodle’? I Googled it (because that’s what I do) and it was decidedly unhelpful. Sigh, there is simply no Rosetta stone for deciphering my spam.

So apparently something is being endorsed, I am hoping it is me, but as I sign off from my post I remain completely confused by what I have read. Can you make any sense of it?

Consent: Not actually that complicated

This is the best (and funniest) analogy for consent EVER WRITTEN!!!!

“omg fuck yes, I would fucking LOVE a cup of tea! Thank you!” – This is totally how I react when offered tea.
“If they say “No thank you” then don’t make them tea. At all. Don’t make them tea, don’t make them drink tea, don’t get annoyed at them for not wanting tea. They just don’t want tea, ok?”… “If they are unconscious, don’t make them tea. Unconscious people don’t want tea and can’t answer the question “do you want tea” because they are unconscious.” – Everything after this sentence is magical tea gold. 🙂

rockstar dinosaur pirate princess

http://kaffysmaffy.tumblr.com/post/780535517

A short one today as my life is currently very complicated and conspiring against my preference to spend all of my days working out what to blog. But do you know what isn’t complicated?

Consent.

It’s been much discussed recently; what with college campuses bringing in Affirmative Consent rules, and with the film of the book that managed to make lack of consent look sexy raking it in at the box office. You may not know this, but in the UK we more or less have something similar to ‘affirmative consent’ already. It’s how Ched Evans was convicted while his co-defendant was not – and is along the lines of whether the defendant had a reasonable belief that the alleged victim consented. From the court documents it appears that while the jury felt that it was reasonable to believe that the victim had consented to intercourse with the co-defendant, it…

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Escape to Your Happy Place: De-Stressing on the Job

I had to share this post, as a Librarian everything in this post is familiar to me 🙂
Whilst constructing a comment for this post I rather nicely put together what I feel a Librarian’s role is really like.
“Here is what working in a Library is like: it is like being an early, primary, secondary, tertiary and ESL teacher all rolled into one except you never know what they are going to need to learn that day so you have to try and prepare for anything and you still get stymied. Oh, I forgot you are also supposed to be Police, I had a student the other day tell me that she had left her phone in the Library’s care (AKA put it on the recharge station then went to class) and therefore it was the Library’s responsibility that the phone was stolen… umm… okay… no.
I love that you have a list here, my personal escape is listening to music (Madilyn Bailey’s version of Titanium is a personal favourite). I found that I always came home from work happier on days I listened to music. But you know what this proves? Not only do Librarian’s have to be overly prepared for everyone else, we even have to plan and prepare our own stress relief hahaha.”
I should add that I mentioned nothing about technology here and that was a huge error on my part, we are also expected to be technology support for any technology ever invented. People have literally brought their new tablet from the shop, come into the Library and handed me the box and asked me to set it up for them. I have also had a child ask me why their tamagotchi died. I have had people call me and ask why their email is not working or to help them download and set up Skype over the phone. The Librarian – the true jack of all trades 🙂
Do you ever sit there and repeat, “I love my job, I love my job”?

Sir Nicholas Winton – the true Saint Nick!

Part of the reason I started this blog was to share; share things I knew, things I tried, things I have learned and things I think and feel. Nice and broad isn’t it, pretty much gives me a license to write whatever… oooh the glee.

When I was in High School we learnt about the Holocaust… a LOT, please don’t get me wrong I think that the Holocaust was one of the most disgusting and depraved things humans have ever done to other humans and I do believe it is important that youth are taught about it. If they do not learn of our horrific failures in our past, how can they learn from our mistakes to hopefully prevent this ever happening again? What I didn’t value about the curriculum was the fact that we learnt about it for over a semester for 3 years running and for the most part we were shown horrific videos and images that are scarred into me until this day. I am not ashamed to say that I cried during some of these videos, they were that awful. I think it is important that we were shown these images so that we have no doubt of the terror of that time, but we didn’t need to see it multiple times. I would have liked to learn a lot more about some of the people that did whatever they could to help in a time where so many people needed it.

One of these people is Sir Nicholas Winton, if you have never heard of him it is time you did. Nicholas was 29 when he organised the rescue of 669 Czech children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia during the 9 months before war broke out in 1939. Those children have grown up and had children of their own and now have grandchildren and great grandchildren, approximately 6000 people in the world today owe their lives to this man, giving the gift of so many lives perhaps he is the real Saint Nick.

 

Nicholas was living in Britain at the time and when a friend told him of the problems there he travelled to Prague for a two week holiday. He set up a small office there to meet with people that wanted to get their children to safety. Nicholas wrote for help to many countries, but only Great Britain responded offering assistance, even with their promise of aid the action was painstakingly slow and Winton and his colleagues were running out of time. To save the children they forged documents such as visas, this increased the risk they were taking, but at that point they felt there was no other choice.

8 trains full of children successfully made it to Great Britain where families were waiting to care for them. A ninth train with 250 children on it did not make it out of Prague, the children were on the train, but war was declared and transportation was suspended.

Winton is very humble and thus for many years not many people knew what this amazing man had accomplished against all odds. One day Winton’s wife found a scrapbook in their attic, it had the name of every child he had rescued, who their parents are and the families they had been placed with. 80 of these children were found to still be living in Britain, they were brought together in 1988 during an episode of the BBC program That’s Life. Winton had no idea that the audience was full of the people he had saved and describes it as one of the most emotional experiences of his life.

Sir Nicholas Winton has recently celebrated his 105^th birthday! Congratulations Saint Nick, I hope you have many years of joy ahead of you.

His daughter Barbara Winton has written Nicholas’ story in a book called “If it’s Not Impossible… The life of Sir Nicholas Winton”, I personally cannot wait to get my hands on it and I urge you all to check it out too.

Library Advocacy & Lobbying: National Simultaneous Storytime (Australia)

This is the first year in many that I have not been involved with National Simultaneous Storytime – this is due to the fact that I am now at a University Library and so there isn’t really a need for it. I have to say that I certainly missed it this morning 🙂

Failing to prepare is preparation for failure

I love this piece! To me a technology plan is a vital part of the strategic plan not a separate document/project that we hope to find some spare funds for at some point (because seriously where are there ever spare funds in a Library!). In general I have to say that the organisations I have worked in that have a technology plan and treat it as an organisational goal seem to have a higher profile and are generally perceived as more successful – I am judging success by the provision of quality relevant services to clients, the quantity of use of the Library in general and the way it is perceived by clients.
This piece was really well written and hit the nail on the head!

Musings of an MILS student

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” ~Benjamin Franklin

WebJunction’s Technology Planning site recommends that all libraries create a technology plan as part of the strategic planning process to ensure the library’s ability to effectively meet technology needs of both patrons and staff alike.  Some libraries are required to keep a technology plan to meet requirements for E-rate program, a service that provides discounted broadband Internet connections in low income communities, whereas some libraries keep a technology plan for their benefit alone, while others have no technology plan at all.  Personally, I feel that it is wise to play it safe rather than to be sorry later; keeping a technology plan can help to identify troubled areas, provide justification of services by highlighting strong technology aspects and help plan for overall future growth and development.

In 2002, Robert Dugan wrote that technology plans should be given the importance of other plans produced by libraries, such as collection development…

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Brand New Year

2013 was a crazy whirl-wind for me. I honestly kept trying to get to writing Libraries of the future – Part 2, but every time I sat down to do the research for it I got distracted or called away (let’s be honest, sometimes I was doing the research and kept finding interesting things and got carried away in my surfing endeavors) either way it will be forthcoming… eventually (kind of like George R. R. Martin’s next book haha).

I have been finished my Professional Library cadetship for a year now so have been in the job market and I am recently officially graduated – hooray! I have to say after spending a year in the ‘I am awesome please hire me chair’ I have learnt so much about applications and interviews. I’ll be honest (and blunt) my first couple of applications were BAD, I knew I was right for these roles, but I wasn’t even getting to interview. I was completely frustrated and quite a bit desperate because who can afford to be out of work these days! Then one night as I was plugging away at yet another set of selection criteria I had a thought… what if I approached this like a Uni assignment. I looked at my previous applications and evaluated them, I found them to be at pass, maybe credit level – P’s might get degrees, but they don’t get you in the interview chair. Then I looked at the assessments I received HD’s for – BIG difference in language, layout, pretty much everything. So I wrote my next application as though I was writing an assessment and my goal was to fit as much vital information in there as possible in a small word count without waffle – I got to interview. The fit for the role wasn’t right for me or them and it wasn’t a Librarian role so it didn’t go ahead, but I was onto a winner. I contacted an agency that specialises in placing Information Professionals and I applied for one of the contract roles they had and was working a week and a half later 15 minutes from home!!! Dream come true! The contract which was initially 2 months was extended to 9 and I have had the time of my life here – even meeting a life-size working R2-D2!

R2-D2 and me!

With my contract ending at the end of January I had to get back on the application trail, the problem being as many of you would know that most people don’t do a lot of hiring at Christmas. So I set up all my alerts and RSS feeds for a variety of online job advertisers and one morning the tell tale *ping* of an email arriving held a surprise. The University quite close to my home (yes it is a good one) had a really good 12 month position available (long service leave fill – the role is retiring and will become available after this time). I wasted no time in applying using my new method, a week and a half later I was in interview, 3 hours after the interview they were calling my referees so I knew I had done well and 3 days later I have been offered the role of Liaison Librarian in a great University Library. A little side-note to this tale is that it was one of the Libraries on my ‘I want to work there’ wish list Woo-Hoo!

Now in my case with this role I got a fairytale ending, but it could have easily gone very wrong. Here is where the learning experience came in. Please make sure you know your referees extremely well, you need to know that no matter what is happening with them you can rely on them to give you a good reference. In my case I hadn’t spoken to one of my referees as they called so quickly after the interview and something was going on with them at the time (I have no clue what so I cannot comment on this, but their response was very out of character and I have never seen or heard of this person acting this way they have always been completely lovely!) and their response to the call was that they didn’t know what they were talking about and didn’t have time to talk. Queue the panel member calling me and asking what is happening, luckily I was able to contact another of my ex bosses and get her okay to provide her details within half an hour (she is a complete doll and totally saved my hide!). If they hadn’t have wanted me enough to call and advise me of what had happened with my referee (which most places WOULD NOT DO! I need to stress that fact!) I would not have got this job – because of my referee. When I called the person I apologised for not speaking to them before they were called, but they would not accept my apology and simply said, “I guess you have learned a harsh lesson today” – OUCH! Obviously they felt that after that I wouldn’t get the role either, while I understood that this person felt blind sided by the call I was also hurt that they were willing to cost me the possibility of a job (therefore an income) to teach me a lesson. This was someone I always looked up to as a boss – mental note: I never want to end up like that!

So here are my tips to ensure this never happens to you:
1. Contact the person you want to use and ask them if they would be willing to do it for you – most places require you to enter your references at the time of application now so you need their okay early.
2. If you get an interview, let the people you put down as referees know and send them the position description for the role you have applied for. This means that they will know the role you have applied for and will be able to talk to your strengths in this area.
3. After your interview, just give them a heads up. A quick email or message is fine, something along the lines of, “Just finished my interview, I think I went pretty well. Thank you for being my reference, I hope they contact you. Fingers crossed”.

Hopefully they will in turn let you know if they were called and how they felt it went. If anyone else has any tips in this area or applying for roles or wants to share their story please feel free!

This post didn’t really end up the way I had planned, but I think I like where it ended up. So in the spirit of ‘where the wind may take me’ I am not even going to go back over and edit this post before I publish it – this kind of makes me want to chew on my nails, but here…we…go…