Continued from previous post… recounting my trip to Kingston uni libraries to see a pal and my mentor. After my time at the Knights Park and Penrhyn Road LRC’s I then took the free uni bus up to the Kingston Hill campus where I was to visit the Nightingale Centre where Anna works.
Anna met me at the bus stop and we headed to the LRC cafe in the Nightingale Centre for a bit to eat. I enjoyed a delicious sticky bit of home made brownie from there and had my packed lunch. Anna and I participated in the same series of CPD25 Chartership workshops in 2007-08, so I was hoping to pick her brains a bit about how she did her portfolio, and it was also really nice just to catch up and see her again. A couple summers ago she came to Brighton Uni when the IS staff at Kingston came to visit our IS department.
We left my bag in her office are and begun a tour of the library. I was fascinated by the automatic book sorter machine that sorts books out however you programme it, so students deposit their books using the self-returns place and they all get cleverly sorted!
We then took a walk all arounf the LRC, the computer areas were pretty big so I asked about how noisy they get, answer is they do get noisy when it’s busy.
I liked the nice quiet study areas on one of the upper floors, I think this was where music students come as there were lots of CDs and records available to use, plus super snazzy Macs with piano type keyboards for compsing and recording music.
There was also a nice electric keyboard that students can use – have to get the power pack and headphones from the helpdesk. Nearby was one of the best things I saw – the electronic rolling stacks!! I’d never seen/used these before, you just press the direcitonal button and the shelves neatly roll along… need to remember to check no-one’s down the aisle before you start pressing the buttons! It wouldn’t crush anyone though if there was due to sensors obviously….
I did enjoy playing with that, but like all automatic things, may be a bit tricky if it breaks or a part goes kaput.
One other thing I really liked was that all the study skills books were kept together seperate from the rest of the stock. I thought that was a good idea as currently that kind of stock is shelved in a couple of places at our library and it may be more convenient to have it all together near to our
enquiry desk perhaps… I’ll have a think and maybe see what others think about that! 
Kingston have self issue points and the Nightingale Centre is open 24 hours so these are essential. They recently adopted a new method of processing reserved items so that students can still collect them even ‘after hours’, as previously staff would have to fetch reserved items from out the back. Now, the books are made available to collect by the people who reserved them, but they are semi-disguised so that they’re not swiped off the sheld by others!
This seemed a very good idea, they’ve only just started it so will be interesting if it works OK.
After seeing the whole LRC we sat down for a bit and talked Chartership, I felt greatly encouraged and enjoyed feeling more inspired to crack on with it as I’ve been neglecting it somewhat over the last year or so.
It was a very useful day, and I really enjoyed seeing around another Uni’s Information Services facilities, especially as Kingston is quite similar to us in that it’s a ‘new’ university, has multiple sites and a converged IT and Library service. So thank you very much to Rachel and Anna for showing me round, I really appreciated it and got a lot out of it.
Librarian Sarah






