And this is just the beginning

Image from pamil-visions.net

So the first week of uni is complete. It wasn't as bad I thought it was going to be, although I was imagining hell itself. Things were pretty easy going with discussions about learning skills and studying skills, the history of libraries and key issues. 

The most interesting lecture, for me, was Working with Information (WWI),and yet it was also the most daunting as I was confronted with binary codes, HTML, document formats, digitisation and so on. All quite foreign to someone who studied English. 

For two of the modules (which are not WWI) we have already been set our assessments and it is the WWI module that has given me inspiration ... for one of the assessments, at least. Something along the lines of how once upon a time (not sure when exactly that is) information was quite sparse and hard to get hold of. Now, we have an abundance of information, so much so we're not entirely sure how to go about accessing it and what to do with it, which affects librarians as information changes format, ie. print to e-resources. As an example, I have been creating hyperlinks in Word for the DPhil reading list at work. A number of the items are only available as an e-journal but for the entire of today the server was down so I couldn't create these hyperlinks. Neither could any of the PGCE students access their set reading. Print copies seem the favourable option in this scenario but, as another example, three copies of one book that had their status as 'available' were all missing and have not yet been found either. In this case, an online version is best. It seems that either method of making resources more widely available has its faults, which may be a fault of our own in that, perhaps, we have become too used to having things, whatever they may be, readily available and information won't ever be constantly accessible to everyone, no matter how hard we try.