I’ve spent the last two weeks in Orlando, Florida and thoroughly enjoyed it. I have been across to the States before but it was a few years ago now and I visited Washington DC, Boston, and New York City. Visiting Orlando was very different, everywhere was very flat and things were definitely a lot more tourist oriented.

As this was purely a personal holiday, you may think its unlikely that I can relate my experiences at Disney to my work in an academic library. However, something which really stood out to both myself and my partner was the excellent service we received in most places, but particularly in Disney. All staff (or “cast” as they’re referred to at Disney) were attentive and they were all working to the same objective - to ensure everyone enjoys their experience.

We also visited the Kennedy Space Centre. Apparently, if you ask any member of NASA staff there what their job is they will respond with “My job is to put a man on the moon”. I don’t know how true that is but I really like the concept. Whether a member of staff is a director or a cleaner, they ultimately help ork towards the same and I think that’s great. It’s something which I think we can all learn from - in libraries, our main role is to satisfy our customers and help ensure they receive the information they need to. That’s a shared goal for all staff, wouldn’t it be great if we were all working towards that goal as a big picture rather than focussing on tiny details of our job roles which can sometimes take over our focus?

At Disney it’s all about the customers and I think that’s something that I will take back to work with me, to try to ensure that our users needs are considered and try to make their experience of the library, whether it is physical or virtual, the best it can be.

Something else which I love in America is how staff say “You’re welcome” after you thank them, I’m going to bear that in mind next time a student thanks me for helping them. It’s such a minor thing but as long as it is genuinely meant, it’s a nice thing to hear.

All in all, I was very impressed with America, and I think my partner would emigrate in a second if he could take all our family and friends with us!

If anyone is interested, there are loads of photos of Florida in my Flickr account.

It really doesn’t seem very long at all since we were all stressing about the Millennium bug! Thought I’d write a quick post to wish everyone a Happy New Year and think forward to 2008. I’m not really one for specific resolutions but I do like to try to think about my main aims in life and how I’m going to get there.

By then end of 2008 I hope to have completed my Diploma in Information and Library Studies and become that all important “qualified information professional” - better get back to the studying really as I’ve done none over the Christmas period! I’ll hopefully be working on my dissertation this time next year if all goes well.

I’m also quite excited about the next year at work, I’m getting involved in more project based work and really hope to help improve our service by using some more up-to-date tools. We’ll hopefully be improving our OPAC, and I’ll be working on our presence in FaceBook. I think our department in particularly needs to really up the marketing this year, we have some great services that our users (both students and staff) just aren’t aware of which is a shame.

I’m sure I’ll continue blogging throughout 2008, so we’ll have to see where I’m at this time next year and whether or not I’ve achieved what I wanted to!

Writing about: pdf24 and their tools for Pageflakes and iGoogle.

As my home PC, work laptop and work PC all have different versions of Office on, I seem to be forever converting documents and adjusting them to suit wherever I need to print.

For example, I recently used our home PC (which has Office 2007) to make a nice fancy report, but some of the items weren’t compatible with Office 2000 or 2003 and when I took it into work to finish it off and print it, it moved all my page numbers around and shifted things to different pages. All very frustrating and meant it took ages to actually get it printed. At the time I was thinking “if only I could convert it to pdf it would stop all this hassle…”

Recently I was playing with my home pages (I am still alternating between PageFlakes and iGoogle so my post about those is still sitting in my drafts!) and found an extra tool called “Document to pdf”. I added it and tried it out and it works perfectly. You simply put in an e-mail address, browse to find the file, and it converts the file to pdf and e-mails it to you! Superb and definitely something I will be making use of. The even better thing is because it is web based I can also use it at work as I don’t need to download anything, should be great when we’re producing leaflets and guides to add to web pages.

I haven’t posted for a while, I’ve been spending most of my free time preparing for an interview (and reading Harry Potter, I’d only read the first three!).

I have been working part time for the last year, which has been good as it has given me extra time to study, however it has been more of a struggle financially and I have tended to spend my free day each week catching up with housework, going to town, the bank, the doctors, etc etc! A full time job came up at my level so I decided to apply for it, and was successful. I’m hoping to be able to take on more project work and hopefully try to put some of the Web 2.0 stuff into practice if I can. Hopefully I will still be able to find time at the evenings and weekends to concentrate on my studying. I’ve been having a bit of a break recently and am looking forward to getting back into it soon.

Since early May I’ve been helping organise our department staff development day. It’s been a little hectic to say the least but the day was yesterday and it seemed successful (we’ll know more when feedback is analysed but verbal feedback was very positive).

Approx. 160 staff from Learning & Information Services attended; the theme was “Enhancing the student experience”. The Dean of Students gave a talk in the morning and that was followed by lunch (which went down very well!) and workshops in the afternoon. There were workshops on a variety of topics, some to do with the theme of the day, some generally work-related, and others not so work related. I organised for Alternative Display Company to do a workshop which was interesting - we learnt how to make proper bows from ribbons, could be useful one day! We also had exhibitions from the local theatre and police service as well as a display from a colleague showing progress on our Federated Search project.

Despite the stresses, I really enjoyed organising the day, benefited from networking within the department as well as externally and learnt a lot about project management as well as event management.

Highlight of the event for me was this little gem from YouTube:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k8BKX2eQ0Q[/youtube]

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research into new developments in Web 2.0 recently, partly due to my career (I think you may have guessed that from the blog title!) and partly through my own interest. I thought it was about time I got myself a blog and used it properly. I’m intending to use it to store and share useful titbits of information I find as well as recording things within life (e.g. my progress in my studies!).

I initially decided to use Blogger as I have a personalised Google account anyway, however Blogger didn’t seem to want to work with the hosting I have (courtesy of my boyfriend Chris, thank you), so WordPress it is. I’m having a bit of a play with the themes and suchlike, I’d like to think of it as a learning experience and learn a bit more code whilst I’m at it so I’m trying to choose a theme close to what I want but add my own touches too.

Anyway, enough blabbering - welcome to Joeyanne Libraryanne!