Investing in my domestic future...

Or: why I am not renewing my CILIP membership...

There's a simple answer to this one: money. Going from the student rate to the top rate of subscription represents a jump that I just cannot make, and I *know* it's only £18 or something a month, but that might mean going without a week's groceries in a few weeks' time for me and I can't commit to that. Just because someone earns more than £17,500 a year does not mean they can afford to shell out nearly £200 for membership of this organisation, so I am making the decision before it becomes an issue rather than in a few months time.

It's all about priorities. At the moment I live somewhere which has become unbearable for various reasons and my only option has become to move away. The increased expense of rent (buying is out of the question; it would, I have calculated, take me about 15 years to save up for a deposit) plus bills and travel will reduce my disposable income to a much smaller amount than I currently have, but weighing this up against the improved quality of life I will also have is what has convinced me to make the leap. 

I currently live in a pleasant little middle-class ghetto in the leafy bit of Oxford, in a bedsit with a shared bathroom. In the seven years since I moved in I have gradually grown out of the space, to the point where it is now unliveable: I have no dining table because there's a computer on it; the kitchen sink is surrounded by stuff better housed in a bathroom, but since that has no mirror I tend to keep things in my room. If I open one of  the cupboard doors too widely the shower gel falls off the fridge. I can't even leave loo roll by the toilet without it vanishing. My room, which has French windows on to the garden, (and a lovely view of six wheelie bins) is below the kitchen of the flat upstairs, so I get awoken from Saturday afternoon naps by the spin-cycle on their washing machine, not to mention the late-night parties and the times the fire alarm goes off when one of them burns the toast.

I have never been one of those people who can have lots of balls in the air at once. When I was finishing my Masters that was all I could think about. At the moment moving has taken the place of that, and once I have moved I hope to throw myself into an extensive flatpacking regime until I have acquired more bookshelves and a bed. Much as membership of a professional body is probably beneficial, I cannot justify the expense of the subs, and until such a time as my home life has settled down I would not be able to concentrate on involvement in the profession anyway. I will probably come back, but for the time being I would rather be able to afford food.

STILL in the Library

During the four years that it took me to complete my Masters I did not use the Public Library.
I realise that this is a terrible thing to admit, and that I am a bad librarian. Believe me, I have hung my head in shame about this (but only when practical, otherwise I would have probably walked out under a bus as I wasn't looking where I was going), especially as so many amazing library people are campaigning strenuously to save this valuable but threatened service, but in all honesty it was a necessary sacrifice on my part in order to stop myself from being distracted. I did read for pleasure, but only things I had bought or already owned or borrowed from friends or family.

It's been almost a month now since I sent off my dissertation, and I made my second visit today to Oxford Central Library. It's a lovely light space, and I look forward to using it much more often in future. I like the idea of library books - from which I have got out of the habit - especially that I have them for 3 weeks. In this case, my choice was a challenge to myself: Ken Follett's Fall of Giants which runs to 850 pages: I will be curious to see if I manage to read it by 31st March, but if not I can always renew!

One of the things I liked about the studying part of the Masters (before the Horror of the writing up process) was spending time in the Library. Much of that time was spent in Duke Humfrey's Library in the Bodleian, which is the fancy old bit where they filmed Harry Potter, among other things (My sister was disappointed when I showed her round that the books don't float around).
Aside from the perceived glamour of working somewhere so historic, that part of the Bodleian has its downsides; the chairs are very hard and not *quite* high enough for the comfortable use of a laptop on the wooden desks, so eventually your spine goes numb; working on the South side puts you close to whichever social events are going on in Exeter College gardens and the North is next to the Sheldonian Theatre, so you get orchestral noise-pollution and the fairly constant flash of tourist photography; but it is also the original building which housed the Bodleian, and so steeped in 500+ years of history that you put up with that. I did also work in the Upper Reading Room for the times when I needed to use a pen (DH is pencils only), and enjoyed the change of scene if not the stifling heat when the sun came in and none of the other readers opened the windows.

I take away from this period of my life a liking for Sainsbury's cheese and onion sandwiches (my staple Saturday lunch), and fond memories of feeling like a proper student, and a perception of the Library from the readers' point of view which I would never have had otherwise. I think this is valuable if you are in the reader-focused side of library work. Knowing what they are going through always helps you to help them.

So... no longer a student, I have just changed allegiance to another library, where I genuinely *am* just a reader. I'd love to say that this is a way of increasing my professional development by gaining an insight into how the other sector works - having only ever worked in University libraries - but that would be overstating it. Anyone who saw the little happy dance I did when I went in and saw all those books that I can read - for free!! - would realise: I'm really just a bibliophile, and my visits to the Library are a highlight of my week.

Aspirational Library Furniture

It kinda started as a joke...

We were getting new book trolleys, and the leaflet from the company that my colleague and I had been given after going to a book-trolley demonstration (you can imagine how exciting that was, I suspect...) included one which was a beautiful shade of lilac.

My first trolley was blue. The picture shows it and my eventual trolley arriving off the lorry which brought them over to our new offices from the New Bodleian when we moved in November of 2010. I was happy with the blue one, it was well-behaved and stable for what I needed it for, which was mostly processing of Chinese materials in those days.

Then another colleague needed one, so someone decided to give him my blue one and get me another. I jokingly mentioned the pretty lilac one on the leaflet, and the sweet girl who was my line-manager's temporary assistant at the time ordered it for me. So now I have a lilac trolley, and am absolutely guaranteed to get comments about it, especially when I am wearing one of my (numerous) purple outfits.

When it came to starting a new blog, as part of my 2012 resolution to be more organised online and do something with my online presence, I had to think of something that defined me, and aside from the serious stuff, like my job title, the trolley sprang to mind. So, good people of the Interwebs, envy me, for this truly is my book trolley, in all its amazing lilac glory!

Adjusting to a different life

Two weeks since I posted off my dissertation, bringing to an end my personal participation in the Masters degree which I have been working on for almost four years, I am finally getting the hang of the change that this has wrought in my usual routine.

There was a period of a few weeks prior to posting it off when I was mostly angry, frustrated and pessimistic about the whole process. I composed various rants for this new blog on the theme of submission, and was generally very resentful of the time and effort which I was expending for something that had lost its meaning for me.

In the end, though, I have decided not to write those posts. There are two reasons for this: firstly, I don't actually feel as angry as I did; more relieved and pleased to have finally finished, and don't really want to go on record as being that pissed off; and secondly, I know a lot of people who are still doing the course I did and I really don't want to put any of them off by writing a load of negative stuff about what is actually a good thing to do.

So... here I am now.

For the first time since I knew I had a place on my course, which was in the summer of 2007, although I didn't start until April 2008, I no longer have anything which I should be doing. Weekends stretch ahead of me without the obligation to either be sitting at my computer or in the library. Evenings last about three months!

I hesitate as yet to call myself Librarian; it will be at least three months, probably closer to four, before I get the results. At the moment it is impossible for me to be objective enough about my dissertation to believe that it will actually pass, so for now I am choosing not to think about it. It is enough that it is finished, and that I can get back to whatever it was that I used to do in my free time once again, plus a few other things, like this blog, named after a certain piece of aspirational library equipment...