Quickly, quickly...

A quick and dirty news round-up of things I'm never going to get round to blogging in full.

Me, me, me

• Having finished the Hoyle Project last weekend, I've just started a new job as a 'Rare Books Specialist' at the University Library. It seems to be fun, and hard work, and I'm definitely going to learn a lot, which is very exciting.
• As part of the Hoyle festivities, I was interviewed for March's Naked Astronomy podcast (my bit starts about 16 minutes in).
• I've unveiled my LISNPN competition entry, and yes, it really is a knitting pattern.

Things that are happening

• This year's CILIP CDG New Professionals Conference will be on Monday 20th June in Manchester, and the call for papers is now open (deadline Friday 15 April).  The theme is 'Professionalism and Activism in a Time of Downturn'.
• Cataloguers are doing a lot of talking, via #catbkchat discussions of the book Conversations with cataloguers in the 21st century on Twitter (time and section info here) and the new CIG e-forum.
• The second Cambridge Librarians TeachMeet is happening on Tuesday, and there are lots of other library TeachMeets popping up all over the place.  If you want have a TeachMeet, Niamh's written a beginner's guide.

Things that have happened

• On Friday 4 February I went to the first Museums TeachMeet, held at the British Museum. It was really interesting to hear about some of the techie things that museum educators are using - it rather puts libraries in the shade. I particularly liked the speaker who had made a 5-minute screencast of things he wanted to talk about - a really good way of sticking to the time slot! I really wanted to write this up in full, but it's starting to look like that won't happen, so I'll just put up the list I made of things to investigate futher:
  
  • Learn how to make and edit videos
  • Animoto
  • Edusim 
  • Google Warehouse
  • QRator project at UCL
  • Qik
  • Streetmuseum
  • Today's front pages at Newseum
  • 50+ web 2.0 ways to tell a story
• The Personalised Library Symposium (#pls11) happened last Monday. I didn't manage to follow much of it on Twitter, but the idea that students like to 'womb' in libraries did come up. I think that's a rather unpleasant way of saying they like to make themselves nests

Cool stuff

Two delightful ways of increasing engagement with reading:

• Reading out loud groups (I heard about this in an interview with Frank Cottrell on 'The Verb' on Radio 3 back on Friday 12 November 2010): a way for people with low reading ability to take part in discussions about texts and to enjoy literature. They sound like good fun even for those who are confident solo readers.
• Dogs who visit a school so that the children can read to a non-judgemental audience.

And finally...

Long-standing readers may remember that last year I posted about how I don't like the format of Update Digital. Update Digital now has a new, slightly re-jigged format, and I don't honestly think it's much better, but I'm not going to write a full-blown post on that unless you rise up in the comments and demand it.