Spring cleaning in the home…

We’ve made a conscious decision this year to focus our efforts (and finances!) into improving our home. We’ve lived here almost 5 years now, owned the house for over 3 years, and yet still there are things we’re not happy with. Over the last few weeks we’ve been gradually getting things sorted – we’ve finally replaced the bath with one that doesn’t soak our floor every time we shower, added a shower screen, got some new kitchen lights, done some more work in the garden, and re-painted the kitchen ceiling. There’s still a lot of little jobs to do but it’s been very therapeutic to get some of these things sorted. Last weekend I decided I’d sort out our paperwork and finally organised all my statements and bills going right back to when I started University in 2002. We use online banking and keep track of our spending on an Excel spreadsheet, but I had kept hold of all our paper bills and statements too, so it was well overdue a sort out!

…spring cleaning elsewhere

The organising process has also rubbed off to other areas of my life too – my desk/dressing table is now clear of clutter, my dissertation paperwork is all neatly organised, and my desk at work is nice and tidy too. I’ve also been organising my online accounts, getting rid of unused accounts and tidying up accounts I do use. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve been up to online to clean up my accounts:

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There are many things I enjoy about being a librarian. As I’ve mentioned before, I find it particularly rewarding helping people utilise our resources to find the information they need. But a lot of the work we do as librarians isn’t really seen. Much of a librarian’s time is spent in an office sat in front of a computer screen – producing training material, managing web pages, communicating online with users, liaising with staff, reading list checking, finding out about new publications, researching and writing reports for projects, keeping up-to-date with developments in the profession.. etc. etc. So sometimes it’s nice to get out there in the shelves and do something that you can immediately see the effect of.

Weeding often seems to be a job that is put to one side, but it’s an important part of collection development. As well as keeping the collection current and relevant, it can also make life easier for users (and also keep costs down by reducing overheads required to heat/light extra shelving).

At my workplace, we have been doing a fair bit of weeding recently, and I have been doing a lot in one of my main areas of responsibility, the Teaching Practice Collection (materials for trainee teachers to use in lesson planning and whilst out on teaching practice). The collection contained some out-of-date teaching material, and this was my main reason for weeding. However, I soon realised that by weeding the collection it also made the relevant material much easier to find (not so cramped and easier to spot what you were looking for). Following a heavy weed, I was also able to remove some shelving and rearrange the area to create a room more conducive to study – room to prepare materials, work in groups, and spread resources out on tables. It’s a much better environment to work in now (not just a dark dingy room crammed full of books), and it seems that both the room and the collection is being used more as a result. I’m currently doing some research to see if usage has increased (and if so, by how much?), but I’m pretty sure it has and anecdotal evidence has shown that it’s easier to find things now – I certainly find it easier to use when I’m helping students find materials to use in their teaching.

From a personal point of view, it’s been a very worthwhile task, and although at times it has been a grotty job (some of the older material was way past its best and there was lots of sneezing!), it’s very rewarding to see such a physical difference to the shelves – I can certainly see the appeal of a physical job where you can see the fruits of your labour more easily!

How about you? Do you enjoy weeding or am I just odd?!

Are you sometimes afraid to open your RSS reader as you know you will be met by a shockingly large amount of unread items? Up until recently, I was – I particularly noticed it when I didn’t check my RSS feeds as frequently as usual back in October when I waspreparing for my interview, finishing my Diploma, and then went to Florida for 2 weeks . When I opened it up again after the break, I had thousands of unread items and found myself flicking through most of them with little interest.

I started to look at Google Reader’s Trends to help me analyse which feeds I was actually reading and which were just clogging up my inbox. I also looked at the frequency of postings and the percentage of items in the feed I read. I had realised that a lot of my feeds were giving very similar news – I had subscribed to quite a few techy news blogs, many of which were telling me about exactly the same things. I decided to do some strict weeding and deleted any feeds which I either didn’t read regularly enough, or which gave the same (or similar) news to other feeds. To give you an idea of the sort of data you can get from Google Trends, here’s a screenshot of my trends page (before I weeded!):

The exercise was very useful and made me realise how many blogs I actually truly value reading. I enjoy reading many librarian blogs, particularly those with practical posts based on their own experiences. But I just wasn’t reading many of my “general” blogs. I have kept most of my librarian blogs (although I have deleted some which seem to have bitten the dust), but have only kept a few general techy blogs as many of the techy stuff I am interested in or need to know about is either mentioned on the key blogs I still subscribe to (such as Lifehacker) or are mentioned in my librarian blog RSS feeds.

I found Google Trends very useful for helping me weed my feeds, it’s quite interesting seeing which feeds you do actually read regularly and which you don’t, and might actually surprise you. It’s also useful to find out what time and day you tend to read your feeds, as well as trends for posting times (although I guess this is skewed due to different time zones, many of the blogs I read are American). It’s also given me an insight into the sort of blogs I do genuinely enjoy reading and made me evaluate feeds before adding them to my reader just because they have one interesting post.

For those who have a New Year’s resolution to streamline their processes, one way you might want to try doing this is to weed your RSS feeds to make sure you’re getting the most out of them, it’s certainly helped me.