L&LR staff blog

I’m going to be giving a presentation, along with my colleague Mr Leach, about our Jerome library ‘un-project’, at the next EMALINK (East Midlands Library Information Network) workshop in the Pilkington Library at Loughborough University, on Wednesday, 24 November 2010. EMALINK Workshop Joint Lincoln University Library/ Loughborough University Library event The next generation OPACs Lab [...]

I baked this chocolate cake to mark Open Access week 2010, and to celebrate (belatedly) our passing 2,000 items on the Lincoln Repository. It was enjoyed over coffee in the Enterprise@Lincoln café, by colleagues from C.E.R.D., the Library, and the University Research Office, all of whom have been instrumental in making a success of our [...]

I’m about to launch (along with Joss Winn and David Young) into a series of training sessions for University of Lincoln staff, entitled: Understanding Google Apps Straightforward online collaborative tools for researchers 90 mins (+ optional 30 min ‘surgery’) This training workshop will introduce you to some of Google’s collaborative applications that may be useful [...]

For more than a year, I’ve been meaning to resurrect my website of tips & tricks for reference management. I finally got around to doing so today, with a new video tutorial about sending references to a RefWorks account from the University of Lincoln Repository. You can see it at – http://refworks.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/ Last July, inspired [...]

I’ve suspended my Facebook account because I’ve been finding it increasingly (a) difficult to keep on top of its ever-changing privacy settings; (b) redundant: I get far better mileage from Twitter et al.; and (c) an irritating intrusion instead of a pleasure. These messages—which I saw when I tried to deactivate my account—only confirmed that [...]

Two trips to the British Library for this year have been arranged: Wednesday 24th November 2010 (slips must be in by 3pm on Monday 15th November) Thursday 17th February 2011 (slips must be in by 3pm on Tuesday 8th February) The trips will leave from outside the library at 8-15am.  They will return back to [...]

October is the month when n-hundred first-year students on journalism, media, and computing programmes seem all at once to discover Microsoft’s DreamSpark software offer. DreamSpark provides access to a range of professional Microsoft tools (including MS Visual Studio, MS SQL server, and XNA Game Studio), all free to students in the UK. Unfortunately it’s not [...]

I’ve thought of three more since my original post (in September 2009), which implies I’m capable of one decent new idea every four months or so. Better late than never. Don’t reject a minor improvement because you’re waiting for a hypothetical perfect solution to arrive. (I’ve since learned of the phrase “Don’t let the best [...]