This past week I ventured into the city to complete my study visit. For a Shire girl this was a big deal.
It was great to finally meet Roy and also Michelle and Mary Anne. They helped to ensure that everything ran smoothly and the very important thing of marking our names off at each venue to say that we had in fact attended.
We attended some really good libraries and some not so good ones.
A brief summary of my week follows:
Tuesday
State Library of NSW- We all met here for our first visit. I think that there were about 60 of us. We were given a lecture about the library and then we were taken on a behind the scenes tour of the library. Wow, what an underrated resource this place is. I am going to use this place a lot more and encourage my students to use its on line services.
Things I learned.
We attended some really good libraries and some not so good ones.
A brief summary of my week follows:
Tuesday
State Library of NSW- We all met here for our first visit. I think that there were about 60 of us. We were given a lecture about the library and then we were taken on a behind the scenes tour of the library. Wow, what an underrated resource this place is. I am going to use this place a lot more and encourage my students to use its on line services.
Things I learned.
- They don't ever weed their material
- It is open to anyone to use
- It is a legal deposit library
- It is a research and reference library
- There are more than 5 million items in its collection valued at over 2 billion dollars
- Contains iconic material such as Captain Bligh's log book
- There are on line research guides that are continually being improved
- There is a Shakespeare room that has been modeled on a room at Hampton Court England. It has lots of William Shakespeare books in here.
- There is free wireless and free internet access
After being inspired by this library I then went to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music library.
All I can say is what a huge waste of time this place was.
They also had a really dumb borrowing system where you borrowed books for 8 weeks, but if someone else wanted to borrow it within that time the library would recall it and you would have to return it before the 8 weeks was up. They claim it works really well, but I am not convinced. The other thing was that students have to pay to use the internet here. how bizarre!
I was really disappointed with the presentation here. We were just shown through the library website for 1.5hours and then given a really boring tour.
This place was really boring, nothing special and not at all innovative.
The other choice for the afternoon had been the Art Gallery Library. Apparently it was quite good. Sure wish I had chosen that.
Wednesday
This morning I chose the NSW Parliamentary Library. I am so glad I did. It opened up another world to me. I really loved this one.
Things I learned.
In the afternoon I went to Allens Arthur Robinson Sydney Law Library which was in Deutsche Bank Place. What an amazing library this was. After seeing this place I thought that I would love to work in a corporate library but then realized I really love school hours and all of the school holidays so quickly scratched that off my list of potential jobs.
This library was in a very modern building with glass all down the side walls so that people going up in the glass lifts can see inside the library as they go past. It was also placed beside the cafe in a deliberate attempt to make them quite visual as people are forced to walk through the library if they want a coffee at the cafe. I though it made the area a bit busy and quite disruptive with the steady flow of traffic walking through all day.
An interesting thing about this library was that it is open 24 hours a day even though it is only staffed from 8.30 -5.30. I know how many of my books walk out of the library because teachers are too busy to write them down, so I imagine the same thing would happen in this library used by lawyers, especially when there is no-one manning it at midnight on a Saturday night. One of the conditions of borrowing from this library is that all books must stay in the building.
Considering that this is a law firm that charges lots of money for their services I found it interesting that the librarians don't charge for their time.
This is a commercial Law firm so most of the books etc are for this purpose.
All legal staff are expected to know how to access the library.
The lady who showed us around here had a really beautiful dress on. Apparently she got it from Leona Edmiston. It was beautiful but totally out of my price range!
I have to go and bring some washing in so I will have to do the rest of the week later.
All I can say is what a huge waste of time this place was.
They also had a really dumb borrowing system where you borrowed books for 8 weeks, but if someone else wanted to borrow it within that time the library would recall it and you would have to return it before the 8 weeks was up. They claim it works really well, but I am not convinced. The other thing was that students have to pay to use the internet here. how bizarre!
I was really disappointed with the presentation here. We were just shown through the library website for 1.5hours and then given a really boring tour.
This place was really boring, nothing special and not at all innovative.
The other choice for the afternoon had been the Art Gallery Library. Apparently it was quite good. Sure wish I had chosen that.
Wednesday
This morning I chose the NSW Parliamentary Library. I am so glad I did. It opened up another world to me. I really loved this one.
Things I learned.
- This library is only open to people that work at Parliament House. This included accredited Press who work at Parliament.
- The catalog is not available externally.
- Confidentiality is required by the library as they are often requested to research material for different political parties and can't tell the other party what they are researching.
- They offer a news clipping service, although now it is Eclips compiled by an outside company.
- Copyright doesn't apply here so they can copy anything they want.
- This is a legal deposit library so they get everything that is published in NSW. Most of the things they get is kept, what they don't want they send to the State Library and they discard it for them. (It was good to get this explained because I had didn't know what that meant when I heard the term at the State Library)
- There is no collection management policy they just get whatever they are asked for.
- They have an eclectic range of material ranging from magazines and journals to fiction novels to non fiction materials used for research.
- They took us down to the Stacks and we saw all of the old books etc down there. We even got to see and touch a Sydney Morning Herald fro the 1800's.
In the afternoon I went to Allens Arthur Robinson Sydney Law Library which was in Deutsche Bank Place. What an amazing library this was. After seeing this place I thought that I would love to work in a corporate library but then realized I really love school hours and all of the school holidays so quickly scratched that off my list of potential jobs.
This library was in a very modern building with glass all down the side walls so that people going up in the glass lifts can see inside the library as they go past. It was also placed beside the cafe in a deliberate attempt to make them quite visual as people are forced to walk through the library if they want a coffee at the cafe. I though it made the area a bit busy and quite disruptive with the steady flow of traffic walking through all day.
An interesting thing about this library was that it is open 24 hours a day even though it is only staffed from 8.30 -5.30. I know how many of my books walk out of the library because teachers are too busy to write them down, so I imagine the same thing would happen in this library used by lawyers, especially when there is no-one manning it at midnight on a Saturday night. One of the conditions of borrowing from this library is that all books must stay in the building.
Considering that this is a law firm that charges lots of money for their services I found it interesting that the librarians don't charge for their time.
This is a commercial Law firm so most of the books etc are for this purpose.
All legal staff are expected to know how to access the library.
The lady who showed us around here had a really beautiful dress on. Apparently she got it from Leona Edmiston. It was beautiful but totally out of my price range!
I have to go and bring some washing in so I will have to do the rest of the week later.
Enjoyed reading about your experiences. I t reminded me of when I did this subject. The "conservation" section of the State Library intrigued me. I also enjoyed the Parliamentary Library and would have loved to work there.
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