All entries for Friday 16 December 2005

busy week

This week has been a whirlwind! I guess it started with the trip to Dorney lake at Eton college on Sunday. Up at 6am, drive to the lake, screw together an iced up boat, hang around in the freezing fog for a few hours, then command and steer a boat of 8 men for 2×4km training pieces: its quite tiring, believe me! The last thing we needed was bad traffic, but with the M1 closed and a couple of accidents on the M40 and the road leading up to it, we were scuppered on our journey back to the boat club to put the boat away, before we could go home: we got back at about 8pm.

Tuesday night was the Institute of Mechanical Engineers Midlands branch Christmas dinner. It’s my husband who’s a member, not me, but I was tempted by the prospect of a night off from cooking, and the speaker was a lady rally driver, which I found intriguing. Lorna Smith is the British ladies rally champion, I believe, and she had some gripping video footage to show.

Wednesday saw a conference in London. Luckily it was just for the afternoon, so I didn’t miss the Library Marketing group meeting in the morning. I caught the pendolino train that got me to London in just about an hour. Those tilting trains make me travel sick! I’m never normally sick on a train, and I can read in cars, but I also do get sea sick. In any case, I skipped lunch because I learnt the hard way on my last trip to London…

The conference was very good and I learnt a lot from Jane Secker’s presentation about the CLA Scanning licence and the trial audit which the CLA carried out there recently. I have a lot of questions to put to Jane, that there wasn’t time for on Wednesday. Basically it’s a very complicated licence and even though I’ve read it through and through, there were still one or two things that Jane had spotted and I hadn’t. Still, the LSE have been clearing copyright for scanned items for a while now, and Jane was involved in the negotiation of the licence, so she ought to know more than me really! I am glad I went.

Last night was the Staff Christmas quiz. The library, the RIU and the Modern Records Centre all put in a team. The MRC team won the quiz overall, so well done to them. The library team came in about 12th, apparently, and I have no idea where the RIU team finished because I left before the end to get my beauty sleep! I don’t think we were last…

Time for a quiet weekend, you’d think, but I still have all my Christmas shopping to do… oh and a ball to go to tomorrow night in Birmingham.

I love this time of year!

Jenny Delasalle : 16 Dec 2005 15:05 |  Tags: Conference Personal |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem