calling all ilxor librarians!

best of luck!

I don't have AgeLine but I appear to have access to something called "Abstracts in Social Gerontology" though NB I never use these databases so I don't really have any idea what I'm looking at / doing - but if there's something specific I can search for in here let me know...

If you need AgeLine specifically, sorry, good luck!

I think I scraped together enough, but I may hit you up on that offer later. Thank you, very kind!

no problem, good luck with your research paper!

I'm going to bed now (sorry if this is bad timing) but will no doubt be around tomorrow morning uk time if there is something I can try to track down for you.

So these last few months my focus has been shifting from in-person access work to online, obviously -- but also to help our archivists here in some big projects. I'm currently engaged in others as well -- just finished up some work today with a big new one that should get a lot of attention when it is ready -- but here's a nice piece just published on our site about two of the other ones that have been completed:

https://www.library.ucsf.edu/news/new-ways-of-working-together/

Well, these next couple of days will be interesting:

https://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sils

And as a result of that, as of a few hours from now, Millennium will no longer be used by us. Which is a weird kinda farewell -- to quote myself from FB: Since my first formal day of work at the UCI Libraries on January 2, 1997, I have used, one way or another, this piece of software up to the present day through my UCSF Libraries work. It went through updates, iterations, changes, but Millennium just chugged along, and like the name implied it really comes from a place in the mid-to late 90s Windows universe in particular, something that did the job but was often slow, clunky and weird. What felt vaguely half-futuristic rapidly wasn't, and as other programming approaches took hold it REALLY showed its age. Later today use of Millennium will stop as the entire UC library system is about to switch over in a long-planned move to a unified top to bottom entity via the Primo/Alma web-based software from ExLibris, and I'm sure there will be growing pains and quirks and so forth. I am really interested to see how that works out, THAT feels like the future in a fascinating way. But this clunky, slow, sometimes painfully annoying software did the work all this time, and I have no more romance to offer than that, certainly no melancholy or sadness. It'll just be weird never to see the darn thing again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35pSI-HOirM

We switched to Alma/Primo back in 2015. We were using Voyager before

Ex Libris have a seriously dominant stake in Academic libraries now. It will be interesting to see how things develop with their latest ownership group

I'm at a weird special library where we STILL use Voyager. But our IT/Systems team is seriously understaffed and under-budgeted so a migration is probably not in the cards for a while. That'll be a real headache.

Voyager definitely shows its age (particularly its OPAC) but it still does the job decently well for us.

Different topic, but Anne Helen Petersen has some thoughts about the way the MLIS has evolved into basically a mandatory degree if you want a living wage in libraries: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-masters-trap-part-two-069

It’s not a question of being a lower-paid librarian or a higher-paid librarian; it’s a question of being a staff member who doesn’t make enough to live on or figuring out a way to fund your MLIS. And then, even if you do make it into a program, there are too many people with master’s degrees and too few jobs for them.

in the end i bought two book hods (not correct term) from gresswell as advised by NickB q17 yrs ago and I still use them a lot, they do the job they are designed for!

sometimws ilx is good!

ann helen petersen otm

the honest truth is that all graduate school and possibly all undergrad is a shakedown scam. if anyone asks me about graduate school (and no one does), i will tell them not to go, or to drop out if they're currently enrolled.

I can see her point there. I've been happily able to live without an MLIS in the field -- and arguably I feel better all around because of it -- but then again my pay increases over time are the reasons why, thanks to both hanging in there and whatever quality and skill I have that's been recognized (including a full reclass in 2008 -- just before the recession, thankfully). And I've been working in it for almost a quarter of a century. Current entry level? *shakes head*