Weekly inspiration ~ 3-7 June

Hope everyone had a safe and relaxing Queen's Birthday weekend- I heard there were no deaths on the road so that is awesome news. I headed up to Christchurch to catch up with my sister and had a great time. We went to Lyttleton, the mall ( if you know me, that's no surprise!) and the Botanical Gardens which was gorgeous. Here's a crazy photo I took in the really, really strong wind in Lyttleton- literally thought I was going to get blown away!

Here are the things that have been inspiring me this week:

LIS discoveries:That awesome moment when you realise that you can use the search box  in circulation history, instead of scrolling through tons of pages to find out if a patron has had a book! Brilliant.

New ways of searching: My current assignment focuses on the finer points of searching on catalogues and databases- truncation, wildcards, Boolean logic etc. While I'm very familiar with these I don't tend to use them. But, after working on this assignment I'm determined to try and incorporate them more into my searching skills. Do you have any tips and tricks for better searching?

Currently Reading: The last quarter of the moon. I'm loving this book by Chinese author Zijian Chi. It is beautifully written and her descriptions of the Chinese landscape are amazing. Full book review to come soon.

Three things libraries need to do to survive: I thought this blog post had some really great ideas, especially the one about libraries needing to get a new definition of who we are and what we do.

I'd love to hear what you've found interesting or motivating this week, just leave a comment here on the blog or send me a tweet @JuliadeRuiter