I took a little break from professional activities: went on hols and never touched email, twitter etc. Very refreshing to switch off from time to time. I can highly recommend the Black Sea coast if you like sea swimming, ubiquitous 80s rock (mainly Bon Jovi) and g&t on a balcony overlooking the sea – I do! Oh, took Kindle along. Kindle is my new favourite thing – solving the eternal holiday problem of a fast reader with a luggage limit. You’ll be hearing much more about Kindle. Here’s a round-up of interesting things since I last posted (with exception of a piece about the recent riots and emergency planning which I’m still mulling over).
Professionalia
Following on from recent post about the RL-UK Special Collections survey, here’s an interesting article about the survey and advertisement for post of Project Manager (a 1/5 secondment – for which I’m applying!).
The Special Collections Handbook is likely to be published in November. I now need to decide how to keep the bibliography and web links up to date online – doing this will help keep book relevant and useful for longer. Thoughts welcome!
Social Media Whirl
I joined Googleplus. And promptly forgot all about it; I haven’t touched it since. It’s not that I don’t like it (Circles for example are a promising idea) but I don’t currently have the energy to engage with another network which I suspect will mostly consist of my existing twitter contacts anyway. I need to do some work on my rather scrappy Linked In presence, which does bring in different networks from the other social media spaces I use; I may have another look at G+ once that’s sorted.
Now using Hootsuite to manage my complex Twitter world: very useful, especially as I’m looking after the CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections account at the moment alongside my usual ones.
New and Cool
Alison Harvey of SCOLAR, Cardiff University, on issues in copyright for music and tracking down the copyright holder of an orphan piece – I love a happy ending!
and, having spent a lot of time recently making promotional videos, I particularly admire this long and informative one from the Folger Library, on handling rare books: