One word? When seven would do…

An interesting day today. I had a full day of training sessions. In the morning it was Bibliographic Services training – the department which purchases all books, music, films etc. for West Sussex Libraries, processes them, works with the budgets to decide what to buy, what to replace etc. and then recieves in all the books, gets them ready for borrowing and sends them out to libraries. They also have all donations (and we get a lot of donations of books etc. in, even in Lancing I am aware of tens of books being given to us each week) in from libraries around the county and get them ready for borrowing with date labels, barcodes, entering them onto the system, jacketing them and doing spine labels for non-fiction or genre labels for fiction. Finally they deal with requests from our libraries for books we don’t hold on our own catalogue and want to borrow from other libraries around the country or the British Library, copies of periodicals or articles (I processed an order for one from 1947 today) and incomming requests from other libraries around the country to borrow titles from our catalogue. They also deal with determining whether to spend money on getting titles from around the county (it costs to borrow from other counties libraries) or to invest in buying that book ourselves.

It was actually a really interesting training session, although I am staggered at several things every time I attend training. One is how contradictory the training programme is – on the one hand they invest a lot in training – every member of new staff attends 8 training sessions (full day courses) in libraries around the county, so that includes freeing them up from the business or paying them to work on their days off, covering expenses for travelling, taking the trainer out of the business for the day and we also have pre-training discussions with senior staff at our branch and then a debrief after the training. They have IIP (Investors In People) accreditation, which requires that sort of level of training and is very commendable, yet when it comes down to it the actual quality of the training is poor. Many of the staff within the library service are classic library service staff, without wishing to be critical the stereotypical library worker very much exists closeted away within high up positions in the West Sussex library service. They are shy, unassuming, unable to project or come across with passion, zest or enthusiasm. They are all excellent at their day to day job, but not much cop at training. The other thing, which I now have proper statistics for is the proportionately very small numbers of support staff in offices compared to the larger numbers of staff out in libraries, but more on that later.

So the training was interesting subject matter, rather tediously presented. We did get very nice chocolate biscuits at break time though :). Next we had a practical hands on session which was good, where we got to actually put new books and donated books onto the system. I ended up being shown how to do this by the only man working in the office who I had been prewarned about as having a very bad stammer. He was utterly charming, very chatty and took ages to get every sentence out. I was torn between finishing sentences for him, smiling encouragingly as he struggled to get words out and looking away pretending not to notice. I worked with someone with an even worse stammer once, who was very open about how he struggled with it and the coping mechanisms he used, some of which I recognised this guy putting into practice. We muddled through though and ended up managing a little chat at the end with him asking me questions and me giving long answers.

Then it was lunchtime. Ady and the children had brought me over to Chichester (where the training was) and were coming to collect me again at the end, so I had to walk from one end of the city centre to the other where the afternoon session was being held. I could have got a lift with one of the people who was driving but would have felt obliged to stay with her for lunch too then and I couldn’t afford the pub lunch she was planning. So instead I had a lovely leisurely walk through Chichester, got a drink and sandwich and sat on a low wall to eat it watching the world go by and then headed to the next office (above the registry office, so very prettily the doorstep was decorated with confetti) for the afternoon session.

This was equally interesting and equally poorly executed really, we were given loads of statistics, about the standards that libraries should be meeting, about how WSCC receives the lowest budget from central government, what our budget is and how it is spent, how we are performing generally and plans for the future. The guy running the session is the Business Performance Manager which is a line of work I’ve always thought would be very interesting, and indeed could see being a really good role to have. I like going to these training courses and meeting the sort of people who are doing the kind of job I might aspire to have in 10 years or so when I am in a position to work ‘properly’ again – funny to think in a different life I’d be starting to think about that now with Scarlett due to start full time school in September.

The afternoon finished earlier than scheduled so I walked back through the city centre to meet Ady and the children, we went to McDonalds for them to have their tea and then came home via the farm where the chicks parents live (where Ady got the eggs) so we could see what they might look like when fully grown. If you’ve been looking at their recent pictures on flickr it won’t surprise you the answer to that is ‘huge!’.

The children had watched Night at the Museum with Ady, played loads outside, made some sort of first aid centre (it’s their current passion, first aid) and generally had a good day at home with Daddy. I spoke to them both on the phone at lunchtime, but when Ady is looking after them I don’t give them a great deal of thought in terms of worrying about them through the day which always makes it easier to focus on work.

We got home and I cleaned the chicks brooder out and moved them into the garage for the night – their first night outside. Someone on my chicken forum floored me yesterday by suggesting they all looked like cockerels from the most recent pictures so I’m very disinclined to build anything else until I know whether I’ve got any hens or not. They seem pretty happily settled in the garage tonight anyway so the house doesn’t stink any more which is a definite plus.