It being Friday ...

Well, despite my great resolve that Friday would be blogging day, I have managed to miss at least three Fridays in succession but I feel I had good reasons for each of those times. Last Friday was half term and because the other half teaches, I decided to have a "holiday" as well. In actual fact, on Friday he had to do the marking he hadn't got round to, so I consoled myself with moving the books around in my personal Library. I have a study where we keep most of out book collections and a couple of years ago I decided to "Dewey" it. not intensely or accurately, but separate the fiction and non fiction and put things into rough Dewey groups. Because of the configuration of the book cases, the Dewey was not in the correct order and more than one set of shelves had fiction and non fiction. I bought and constructed another set of shelves, and have sorted it all out into order. Well, not to the exact 000.00, but in the right groups of the classification, The 300 are social science, the 600's technology, etc. I wonder whether that can count towards an exercise for Chartership?

The previous Friday, I was having fun in Cambridge with the Grandchild, doing autumnal things, sticking leaves on paper, doing a magic wand making trail in the Botanical Gardens, playing on the swings IN THE DARK!, carving a pumpkin and making pumpkin cake. We put raisins in the cake which was good:

Grandchild to my picky eater daughter: "We made a cake, mummy"
Daughter: "Ohh that looks nice, what sort of a cake is it?"
Grandchild: "Raisin cake"

The Friday before that, however, was a much more solemn occasion, I attended a memorial service at Loughborough University for Dr Ann O'Brien, who was one of the lectures there in the previously named Department of Information Science. The department got swallowed up by the School of Business and Economics, which is where Ann continued teaching. However, her death was particularly sudden and traumatic for the school because she experienced a fatal heart attack while working late in her office one evening.

I had come across Ann right at the start of my PhD work, I wanted teaching experience and she needed an assistant to help with tutorials, so I worked with her to teach small groups of students about meta-data and mark their resulting essays. The lessons were meticulously planned, and she was always happy to share her study with me on teaching days. She passionately felt that students needed pastoral care, and to learn effectively you really needed a system of small tutorials where not only you could talk to students, but they could feel more comfortable talking to you. I still can hear her voice telling me "Oh Marianne, you're doing a grand job". She was so grounded and homely.

She told me that she had been an academic librarian in Ireland and as part of her work, taught students. Her evident skills at teaching and relating to graduates were spotted and she was asked to work as a lecturer. I did not know that she had also spent time in America as part of an exchange programme, had conducted and published a ton of research, taught Ted Nelson about meta data and with another Loughborough lecturer had sorted out the joint library management systems for the Oxford colleges. I have a book she "lent" me, I will always treasure it to remember her.

Doom day

Well, I started this blog to be a story of my research about children's mobile libraries in the UK, and in recent months I have only been adding links about interesting children's mobiles I have found in other parts of the world. That is because all the research has been culminating to today. It is the day of my Viva Voce, my "Oral examination" when I will find out if the research and thesis will be accepted to be good enough for a doctorate. I have been looking forward to this and being scared by this. I have just done a check on websites of the various children's mobile libraries that I visited, and I am a bit sad because at least another two have disappeared, which leaves only half of the ones where I did observations. My moral dilemma is should I have published my work sooner? or have the CMLs just got too expensive to run because of the rising cost of fuel?

It really is time to have another search through local authority websites to check how many CMLs there are in total, but I won't manage to achieve that by 2pm today (that's the time of the viva). So, don't think that this blog is coming to an end, just because I have finished one journey doesn't mean that I won't start another, and more importantly, now after the work has been marked I can say more about what happened on the journey. I am planning to write case studies of each vehicle where I conducted observations, those will have to be anonymous, of course. I can tell you general stuff about all the CML's that I could find, even the ones that have gone, let this blog be an archive of their work. I will also put up my findings and diagrams I drew to understand the information that I found.

I am also writing a paper about storytelling on CMLs and I will report on that and subsequent papers. I really did gather enough information to keep me going for years. (But I do need a job now, so if anyone has a spare one out there, I would be grateful!) Anyway, to keep my list of CMLs up to date, it would be good if anyone out there could tell me if they know of a CML that is still operating in their area, or if any new ones are planned. If the reverse is happening, and if anyone knows of a CML closing down, then I will be more than happy to offer my services as an expert witness to the value of using a CML.

Oh, in case you are in doubt, I did prove that CMLs do spread literacy and a love of books.

Speaking at Loughborough Research Matters conference, 2012

The main thing that seems to happening in Loughborough this year is the Olympic Games. Loughborough is certainly the foremost sports university in this country, and we are hosting the Japanese national team as well as team GB. It seems very wierd, then that I am a Loughborough Student (for the second time round) and I am one of the least sporty people you can imagine. It is rather fortunate that Loughborough also specialises in other subjects, such as Library and Information studies. (It's a bit good at engineering and design as well). It is also rather proud of the research (unsport related) that happens in the Univeristy and I was one of only four PhD researchers who were invited to speak at the research staff conference last Tuesday.

It may have only been an "in house" conference, and not national, or international, or big and flashy, but I felt appreciated and really quite special to speak in the room where I had previously heard a lecture from Robert Winston, and part of a programme that featured senior academics from Oxford as well as Loughborough, and various levels of research staff. It was also the first time that I attracted a number of people to come up to me after the presentation to ask various questions about my work. It really cheered me up and made me feel a success.  Here is photo of me being presented with a certificate, by Professor John Feather, who is Dean of the Graduate School and a leading light of our department.