On Monday I had the opportunity to attend two development sessions in one day.

The first being a morning-only session on using the new version of our library software package Access-It V8. It was very intense and the room filled with people with a range of roles all charged with the digital cataloguing of their school’s resources. Accessioning a library collection is an thankless task that those not charged with actually doing it seem to think happens by magic! I used to do the job on a Sunday afternoon at school but now have 1½ hours a week of non-pupil contact time for the job- not enough but more than before!

Raewyn has been released on the odd afternoon to learn the ropes. It irks me though as I take ten minutes to show her how to do something how I never had any one to learn from. What she can pick up in ten minutes from me took me hours of struggle by trial and error to figure out- all done in my own time in the weekend. Yes you can say RTFM but the manual is in pdf format and the index itself is about 20 pages long. How much less painful it would have been to be able to learn alongside someone else. We have to learn off each other – collaboration is the name of the game!