My last daily report (for Friday 26 July, but written on the following Monday). See previous reports for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
I didn’t have time to do my daily blog report on Thursday night so I came in early and posted it on Friday morning. I always think that it’ll only take 20 minutes to type something up but it was more like an hour.
I did my daily policy/news scan. Highlights were something about London’s medical city, a post excruciatingly entitled Postdocalypse by Austin, a Dean Burnett piece about the term ‘boffins’ and something on Independent scientists.
On a Friday I also do a weekly round-up. I select between a dozen and 20 of the most interesting items from the previous week’s policy news. That gets squirted into the weekly internal newsletter (communicate) that comes out on Friday afternoon. Sometimes I think that I should write a weekly round-up and put it on this blog. But then reality kicks in (NO TIME!).
I received an amended version, plus image, of the website news item about the Science paper, so put that up as a draft. The title and standfirst are a bit long so I asked the author to shorten those. It’s not the end of the world, but it makes it harder to fit things in if we have very long titles for news items.
The paper on PolyQ has been published so I was able to make that news item live. I also made a link to it from our intranet home page and tweeted it.
I was delighted that one of yesterday’s attendees sent me a piece she had written about the Wikpedia edit-a-thon – it meant I didn’t have to write something. I edited it a little to go into the internal newsletter (hope I did not mangle anything). There was quite a bit more to-ing and fro-ing, mainly by email, connected with yesterday’s events and some photos too to be digested.
The Crick Institute has a new Transition Director, i.e. responsible for ensuring that the creation of the new Institute goes smoothly. We have been encouraged to talk with him, so I arranged a meeting. I don’t know that the Library will be top of his priorities, but perhaps I can persuade him that it shouldn’t be right at the bottom (or absent).
Today is our trainee librarian’s last day here. One of her more visible tasks is to prepare communicate, the internal newsletter, so I wrote a piece about her to go in this week’s issue. Then the Library team all went off for a special lunch to mark her departure.
After that I checked through communicate, made a few edits and then gave it the thumbs-up to go live. It was quite a bumper issue this week. During August I will have to create each issue on my own, so they will be rather thin (it’s usually a quiet time in any case due to holidays).
Late in the day I remembered about an email from one of our Lab Managers that I had not yet replied to. A publisher said they needed an OA payment within 5 days of receipt of the email announcing that a paper had been accepted. Failure to comply would mean an additional £50 payable to make the article OA (on top of the £1400+VAT). We struggle to make payments within 30 days, so 5 days is pretty much a non-starter. There was not much I could do to help, sadly. This is another reason why I am looking forward to the JISC APC service.
That was about it. Not a bad week, but I still have too many things to finish off:
- two sets of minutes
- two or three evaluation reports
- three or four news items for the website
- journal renewals
- transition funding bid
- promotion for the innovative journals publishing day in October
- Alumni newsletters
- Get the ebook authentication sorted and the service launched
Plus everything else on lower priority to-do lists. Maybe next week I can finally clear most of those things off my desk. Here’s hoping.
