Where did summer go?

Wow, doesn’t time fly? It doesn’t seem that long ago since my last blog post but that was way back in July! So what’s happened since then….?

Copyright : I suppose the biggest thing to happen is that due to the new Copyright Law, we now no longer pay any attention to restrictions in our licences for supplying  ejournals (yay!) This saves us so much time and effort when trying to fill requests for other libraries. I think it’s such a big change that some libraries still aren’t sure about it and I have to admit, as much as I wanted to rip up the pages in the manual that stated that we must check the licences as soon as I got back from the FIL conference, I had to wait until our Deputy Director had ‘rubber stamped’ it. Hopefully everyone will come on board soon and our stats for unfilled ILLs (due to other libraries only having ejournal holdings) should go down by quite a bit!

Independence referendum: Well, I have to admit, I did have some major concerns about how our ILL service would function if Scotland had chosen to be an independent country! Whilst most people were thinking about how much tax we would have to pay/what currency we would use I was thinking –

“oh no! we’ve just sorted out the copyright law, now we’ll have to start all over again!”

“Will BL charge us international rates?”

“Will we have to stock up on IFLA vouchers to borrow from libraries in England?”

You know, the really important stuff!

However, things didn’t go that way and we’re carrying on like it never happened, but it could have been very different……

Library Refurbishment : since way back before the summer, work had been going on upstairs on refurbishing level 3 of the library. Cue lots of drilling, walls being demolished, fear of workmen falling through ceilings onto our desks etc. Only a week behind schedule, the floor was officially opened last week. There are a number of booth style study spaces, lots of individual desks and the main attraction – a huge glass box in the middle of the room which houses our vastly reduced short loan collection– now rebranded High Demand Collection! It will certainly be interesting to see how things go as the staff are still based on level 2…..

Charging for uncollected ILLs : well, so far so good. We decided that we would charge our readers £5 for each book they ordered but did not collect/consult.  Since 1^st August, we’ve sent out 56 reminder notices that books had arrived and not been collected/consulted after 8 days, and to date, only added the £5 charge 6 times! Previously, we were dealing with approx 30 uncollected/unconsulted books per month!  I think people are starting to realise that ILLs aren’t actually ‘free’…..

I’m looking forward to my first FIL meeting next week. Slightly scared about taking on the role of Secretary but I’m sure I’ll settle into it! See you all soon!

Joanne