Next week is WOW week at Durham University. Which stands for ‘Welcome and Orientation Week’. Which actually means it should just be ‘WOW’ not ‘WOW week’ and that second week is redundant. Like saying ‘PIN number’ or ‘ISBN number’ (a particular annoyance for librarians) where the words number are in fact repeating the last letter of the acronym, effectively…but ‘WOW week’ sounds great so let’s just forget it and move on!
Continue reading “WOW week!”
On September 8th 2021, Kelly Hetherington and Ben Taylorson presented a lightning talk at the ALN Conference about this very blog.
ALN stands for Academic Libraries North, which, is pretty self-explanatory – if you work for an academic library and you are in ‘The North’ (Game of Thrones, anyone?), you are welcome here.
Continue reading “ALN Conference 2021: A blog post about a conference talk about the blog…”
Summer intern Iris Leussink looks back on two months spent working at Palace Green Library
For a lot of people in Durham, Palace Green Library is a bit of a mystery. Some of my friends, even those who have studied and lived in here for four years, have never set foot in the building. Before I started, I had only been here once to see a rare book for my History dissertation. So I’m writing this blog post to give you an idea of what an internship at an archive might look like in practice.
Continue reading “The Lambton Archive – a summer internship”
Hi, my name’s Judith Walton and I look after the day to day running of the library’s Inter-Library Loans team (previously known as the Document Delivery Service – we changed our name this summer just to keep everyone on their toes). One of the smaller ‘behind-the-scenes’ teams that you might not have come across, Inter-Library Loans is here to get hold of things not held our own library – books, articles, theses etc. It’s a lovely place to work, with a really positive feel to it. In daily contact with librarians all-round the UK (and the world), we’re always problem solving, tracking down hard to get items, which suits my inquisitive nature, and there’s always something new to learn. There’s a real sense of achievement when you track down something truly obscure and it’s lovely to see the smile on the researcher’s face when it finally arrives!
Continue reading “Inter-lending from the back of beyond”
Graduate intern Beth Hall updates us on what she’s been up to in the last month or so…
Hello, it’s Beth! Back again with another update from my Archives and Special Collections internship.
I promised an update on my time with conservation in my last post, and what a fascinating couple of weeks it has been.
We kicked off with a tour of the building, with a view to look at the conservation measures that we have in place to keep the collections safe. We have pest traps around the building (not necessarily to catch all the insects we might have here as you might think, but to monitor their levels and where they are likely to be found), which are mostly by the strong rooms where the collections are kept. We also have temperature and humidity monitors that make sure the environment for the collections are stable. These are regularly checked, and radiators come on if humidity levels get too high to make sure everything balances out!
Continue reading “Graduate intern update: Beth”
Hello! Please state your name, full job title, and a brief description of what that entails:
Hi! I’m Victoria Michelle Hedley, Customer Services Co-ordinator for Disability Support and Digitisation. The Digitisation Team processes all the digitisation requests for reading lists to make them available via online reading lists – this includes a lot of behind the scenes work on Talis and enormous, space-age scanners! The Library Disability Support Team provide personalised support for students and staff registered with disabilities, including book retrievals and creating alternative formats of reading materials. In addition to all of this, I help manage our virtual enquiry desk, Ask DULib!
Continue reading “#DULibIntroducing… Vicki Hedley”
Graduate intern Elisabeth Prestgard updates us on what she’s been up to in the last month or so…
Hello again everyone! Here is my update for the month. The Document Delivery Service team has recently changed its name to Interlibrary Loans team. I’m still part of both the ILL and Customer Service teams. I have been working more days onsite, which has been nice as it allows me to learn more about the different queries at the Help and Information Desk, and it gives me the opportunity to meet friendly and interesting people in person (especially since a lot of my time has been spent working from home.)
Continue reading “Graduate intern update: Elisabeth”
Welcome to the latest Five From the Hive blog post! Who are your favourite fictional librarians? We often have this conversation, so for this latest Five from the Hive we are looking at the 5 Most Popular Fictional Librarians (as voted for by staff at Durham University Library and Collections). Then we’ll look beyond the stereotypes of librarians to highlight the diverse work we really do!
Continue reading “Five from the Hive: Top 5 Fictional Librarians.”
Graduate intern Beth Hall updates us on what she’s been up to in the last month or so…
It’s been nearly three months since I started here at Palace Green Library in Durham, and time has definitely flown! My mornings are spent helping out in the search room to make sure our readers and collections are well looked after. It’s still quiet in Palace Green while restrictions are still in place and students are enjoying their summers, but there’s still been a steady stream of reprographics requests and enquiries to take care of to ensure researchers still have access to our collections remotely. I haven’t seen this building in its fully populated state, so I’m intrigued to see what it’ll be like in here once the students are in!
Continue reading “Graduate intern update: Beth”
A guest post by Liz Mytton, the first of our artist-facilitators in our #CreativeCosins summer workshop programme
“If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s the value of moving freely. To travel, to shake hands and embrace. In the early months of lockdown last year, I remember driving to my shift (I was a part-time NHS worker at the time) and on observing the empty streets during what would have normally been rush hour, I felt like a character in some apocalyptic thriller – everyone had disappeared.
Continue reading “Libraries are not just for reading”
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