After many delays, my MA proposal has at last been submitted. An online version can be found here. My supervisors are not entirely satisfied with it, but have decided to still let me submit it because time is ticking away.

It’s official: I start work this coming monday as a ‘continuing’ Library Assistant for the Macmillan Brown Library here at Canterbury University (part-time, of course)! What’s more, I get to keep my old job on the after-hours team as well! I’m very pleased about getting this position; I really enjoy being a librarian.

I am especially looking forward to getting a look behind the scenes in MB’s basement. I imagine it to be like Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University Library. I’ve tried to find some quotes describing it, but they don’t quite match what’s in my mind, still -

The layout of the Library of Unseen University was a topographical nightmare, the sheer presence of so much stored magic twisting dimensions and gravity into the kind of spaghetti that would make M.C.Escher go for a good lie down, or possibly sideways.

It’s generally very quiet in the Unseen University library. There’s perhaps the shuffling of feet as wizards wander between shelves, the occasional hacking cough to disturb the academic silence, and every once in a while a dying scream as an unwary student fails to treat an old magical book with the caution it deserves.

In most old libraries the books are chained to the shelves to prevent them being damaged by people. In the library of the Unseen University, of course, it’s more or less the other way about.

…Those descriptions all sound rather dangerous. Jill Durnie, the Macmillan Brown Library Assistant Manager, did mention jokingly that they occasionally lose librarians down in the basement.

I found an interesting flickr photogroup of librarians’ desks from all around the globe, by way of librarian.net. I’d love to contribute pictures of the main desks at our libraries to the collection. I will see if it’s okay for me to take pictures of the basement, too, to put up on this site.