A Barbarian in the Reading room

After a pleasant summer break in France where somehow we managed to avoid the monsoons in both England and further south from Normandy it was back to work fairly pronto for the Barbarian.

Before the end of August I was invited to return to Box Hill School to run a couple of induction sessions on information skills for the Summer School international students. We had good fun with game based learning including building Lego houses and the feedback was good.

Access-It training continued apace with the start of term in September and several clients new to the system as well as guiding existing users on the rather wonderful new OPAC. This allows you to create your own dashboard and save searches and resources that are your favourites. It also refines the One Search facility allowing cross searching against the catalogue and specified other databases or search engines eg EBSCO or Google Scholar etc. Then students can also create bibliographical records and citations from the resources they have chosen at the touch of a button and all this for free with the start-up package.

I returned to Roedean to meet their Headmaster and to discuss further the plans for developing the Library with him and the librarian. I am looking forward to seeing the outcome next year!

The main excitement of September though was enrolling on and beginning my AET Level 3 course at NESCOT. There are 12 of us all together with an interesting range of backgrounds from hairdressing and personal trainers to teachers from NESCOT. I managed to get the first of the three assignments in on time ….but will I sustain this ???