It's been a while

Obviously, I have no real commitment to keeping this blog up since I haven't posted in about a year. I kept telling myself that at one point I would either come back or delete it completely. I have decided to go with the former.

There are so many things I would like to talk about, but I never wanted to deviate from the "a blog should be about one subject" philosophy and I quickly got bored of solely posting about one subject. I've decided to widen my vision for this blog. I'm not too sure yet what direction I'll be going with, but I have some vague plans for future posts. 

Something I'll be focusing on in the immediate future is what I call my "social media challenge", which is just an excuse for me to try out all the social networking sites I've scoffed at in the past. I figure that before I complain about something or discredit it, I should probably test it out.

We'll see how long I keep this "challenge" up, I'm a very good procrastinator.

Old Law Books

Something I've wanted to blog about but have been putting aside since I've been back from vacation is some of the neat and interesting material I've found while working at the Law Library.

Law was never something I had much knowledge about, just that it was important and that there needed to be libraries dedicated to the subject. I still don't know nearly enough about the subject (but I am learning!) and I always find neat little things while working in the library.

I was browsing the shelves a few weeks ago and stumbled upon a few books that needed to be re-labeled into our KF modified numbering system. KF modified is part of the Library of Congress Classification System but modified, as the title suggests. What the library used to use was something called "moys" which I don't have enough knowledge about to explain, but basically the wrong classification numbers for law books.

All of these books had really interesting looks to them, not only being in quite good condition for their age but also with the quality of pages and lettering inside. One of the books even had an interesting illustration on the inside cover!

I have since found all four of these books in the British Library Catalogue and have copy catalogued them into our own system.

I also borrowed a legal research book so that I can get a little more insight into how to answer references questions for our public. It's called Legal Research and Writing by Ted Tjaden and is part of the Essentials of Canadian  Law series. 

It's written quite the same as a lot of reference textbooks I've previously seen but instead of being generally on reference it's entirely focused on law. I've only just started looking at it and taking notes but it seems like a good textbook to have around if you are planing of doing legal research.

Also shout out to one of my previous classmates who runs a blog about Zombies in books and everything Zombie related: here is a pretty awesome book I found about zombies while browsing chapters! Hope you continue blogging about zombies!

Coming up in my next post : some of my favourite series that I have read or am currently in the process of reading!

Book Club!

So I took a week off to travel to Saskatoon for two days and then to Calgary for five and during my stay in Saskatoon I not only got to go to a friends family wedding but also I got to join some of my old classmates for a book club meeting. Since I've moved back to Regina it's been pretty hard to stay in contact with most of my Saskatoon friends but occasions like these give me chances to re-connect with some of my dearest friends!

At book club we have taken up the tradition of all reading books we want to read, not forcing each other to read genres or authors we don't like. It's a pretty good way of doing it because we all have such vastly different reading habits that we would never agree on only one book to read.

Some of the books read included: This Dark Endeavor by Kenneth Oppel, Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake, Divergent by Veronica Roth, Beauty Queens by Libba Ray, and Sex on the Moon by Ben Mezrich which I now have!

For my book club selection I read an old favorite of mine, Pride and Prejudice. The thing that makes it different is that I read an electronic version on my new Kobo that I got for my graduation! I've read the book a few times before and it always keeps me entertained with the humour, good writing and wit. Although it is one of my favorite novels I always end up disappointed by the situations these fictional women are in. Make's me very glad to be born in my time!

So just a short post but as I am currently writing this from the Saskatoon airport it will have to be. Have a great day!

Weyburn and Yorkton Law Libraries

One picture of all the material we had to throw out in Yorkton

As promised, here is a post about my recent trips to two rural law libraries that are a part of the Law Society of Saskatchewan Libraries.

This summer one of the things I got to do at my new job was visit and clean up two rural libraries in Saskatchewan. The first was in Weyburn. The Weyburn courthouse had just been through a major renovation and the library had been moved to a new location within the courthouse. Because of all these renovations the new books for Weyburn (over 90 boxes!) had all been stacked on the floor of the new room. What wasn't known was that there was some sort of water problem in the basement and all these boxes had been absorbing water for a few weeks when we arrived!

Unfortunately, we had to throw out quite a few boxes which included numerous sets of old law material. With law, the primary sources are the most important, so it was quite a big loss to have to throw out all this valuable material. What we worked on for the next day and a half was throw out all damaged books and re-shelf all the material that was still useful.

The next library I went to was in Yorkton. The Yorkton library was going to need a clean up because the users wanted to turn it into a sort of lounge area with a fireplace (around books?) and big boardroom table. So they asked the LSSL staff to come and re-arrange the books around the perimeter of the room. For a day and a half we recycled most of the old textbook collection and kept the more recent textbooks and some of the old but "pretty" leather bound books. We also worked on relabeling the textbook collection as they were still in the old moys numbers.

Visiting these two libraries was a great experience and I'm glad I was able to participate, even though we had to throw all those books away!

The next few posts will be about some of the old material in the Law Society Library of Regina, my next book club meeting + my book review of my book club selection and maybe even a post about my vacation this week! 

Also me and my library co-workers have issued each other the challenge of keeping an updated blog and so hopefully you will all see an increase in posts here!

My new job

So I thought I would make a post about the job I got back in June and have been working at since.

I did a three week practicum (work study) at the Law Society Library of Regina in May to finish my SIAST programme, and it was the best of the three practicum's I've had. I finally got to work in a special library, which is a library with material that is specific to a field (law, medicine). I got to do all the neat things library technicians do (cataloguing, labeling, data entry, check-in/out) and some not so fun things (invoicing, filing) but all of it was useful to know for future job positions!

While I was there the person who I was shadowing was in the process of leaving her position, and so there was a job posting up. I applied and because I was basically being trained to do the job being advertised I was one of the preferred applicants.

I finished my practicum, went and graduated (yay!) and scheduled a meeting with the higher ups of the Law Society (parent company of the Law Society Library) for an interview. The interview went smoothly (although I was a little nervous) and about an hour later I got an email with a contract!

I had been worried about finding a job as the end of my programme got closer, because I kept hearing how bad the job market was out there. Some of my past classmates hadn't necessarily found their jobs right away and that made me a little worried about the future. I had only applied at two places, the Law Society and the library at my old high school.

The timing of getting this job was perfect and I am settling into the workforce quite easily. My coworkers are great, I always have work to do, and I get to learn about a subject I had never thought of being interested in!

Next post I'll talk about the two trips I made to two of our rural libraries.