Library Day in the Life: Round 6, Day 1

[The sixth round of Library Day in the Life is running from Monday 24 to Friday 28 January. You can find the other participants, and sign up yourself, on the project wiki, and watch the #libday6 hashtag on Twitter. This is the second time I've taken part. You can find my Round 5 posts tagged with libday5, including my introduction to what I do for a living.]

'Exclamation' by Ian Boyd on Flickr

Today has been quite exciting - I think the theme might be 'advertising' (Incidentally, there was a lovely exhibition of 19th and 20th advertisements in the University Library recently. Well done the Tower Project people who put it together.)

The major excitement was the launch of booking for the second Cambridge Librarian Teachment being held on 29 March 2011.This kept me busy throughout the day, doing such things as:

• Checking the drafts of the event page and blog post, updating all their links, and publishing them.
• Setting up POP access in Gmail to the camlibtm email address (info at camlibtm dot info if you want to get in touch).
• Emailing my designated email list to advertise the event and tweeting cheerfully about it.
• Watching the bookings roll in.  At the time of writing we're pretty much full, but we're working on getting the waiting list working properly, so do sign up to that.

I've also been working on the advertising for the grand finale of the Hoyle Project, which is happening on Saturday 19 March.

• Having been issued with the official Science Festival logo for this year I managed to track down the high-res versions of the College's quincentenary logo.
• With the logos in hand, I spent a very long time trying to incorporate them into the flyer design that I'd already drafted out.
• Once settled on a design I added a bleed area to the edge of the flyer, resized it down to A5 and printed it to pdf, ready to...
• ...place an order for professionally printed flyers.

I've also been writing draft notes on various aspects of the day, mainly advice notes for the volunteers who'll be running the 'Build Your Own Astrolabe' sessions, but for the exhibition and talk.  I'm going to be speaking about Hoyle's life, his collection of papers and artefacts, and my work in cataloguing them.  That's a bit of a tough ask to squeeze into 1 hour, so I've decided to structure it along the lines of 'A History of Fred Hoyle in 10 objects' (inspired by the obvious and also '100 Objects Bradford'.  Trying to choose only 10 objects to use as jumping-off points is really tricky because I need to choose a range that will cover most aspects of Hoyle's life, but I also want them to be visually interesting and not to have been exhibited much or published extensively (and that includes in my online exhibition) previously.

All sorts of other things happened throughout the day, too:

• A blown fuse in the Old Library. 
• A request for a short school visit on Thursday as part of a languages day organised by the people in College who work trying to widen access to the College and to university in general.  (I've written a bit before about access visits.)
• Lots and lots of email.

Now I'm heading off, to work on my Ignite talk and to start writing a bursary application to attend the LILAC conferece to talk about TeachMeet.