Marseilles

I spent the weekend before Koha hackfest with Sophie from BibLibre and her family about 40 minutes out of Marseilles, near Aix en Provence.

You would think living in hotels and eating in restaurants every meal would be glamorous - and it is for a while - but there is nothing nicer than being embraced by a family and living normally. The best thing of all is that the home was full of beautiful contemporary art and they like gorgeous food as much as I do :)

We spent Saturday being tourists and Provence was everything that everyone has ever told me it would be.

Sophie and Eric were the perfect hosts / tour guides and the first stop was a total surprise: Paul Cezanne's studio! It was just as it had been left and has been in the family ever since. It is now set up as a lovely low key museum with his props and paint brushes and also letters and papers.

 We then spent a few hours wandering Aix including the church - with a baptismal font dating back to the first century (not a typo). There was also a fabulous front door that is only opened 20 minutes a day - and we got to see it.

The market was probably a typical French market with gorgeous looking tables loaded with spices, olives, cheeses, salami, veges, spices, mushrooms but I found it charming and wonderful and took loads of photos. I also tasted a lot and bought salami and nougat as a small contribution to the wonderful food that I knew we would eat later in the weekend.

We also went to an old Cistercian Abbey. This Abbey is completely austere, devoid of ornamentation and absolutely beautiful. That term a 'religious' sense of awe; well that is how I felt walking around. I am constantly amazed at the engineering and craftsmanship employed by the cathedral builders back in the day.

We visited a few galleries and drank wine and ate tarte tartin and bought linen and then headed time to ignore each other for a few hours before the most wonderful home cooked meal where we ate cheese and salami and bread and olives followed by a succulent veal casserole. Brunch on Sunday was the best meal I've had in weeks including the fluffiest lightest pancakes made by Sophie's daughter that one can imagine. It sounds like we ate all weekend and actually we pretty much did - in between wonderful sightseeing. As far as hospitality goes and all round experience I rate 'Sophie's' as a 5 star establishment!

Gothenburg, Sweden

Last Summer we were so lucky to host 2 exchange students from Switzerland and Sweden in Horowhenua . They had a few meals at our house; wandering home after a long day at the beach patrolling as life guards. Karin's family called in briefly at the end of her trip and it was a such a pleasure to stay with her and her Mum in Gothenburg for a flying visit before leaving Sweden.

More stunning scenery; we started the visit with a gorgeous lunch and then a boat trip out to see the small islands out of f the harbour.

Next day we went for a tour of the Volvo factory that Anna-Maria organised for us! Robots welding is a magnificent thing to see; no photos though - top secret.

Karin then took me into Gothenburg city for a look around. The Church is amazing: built in mid 1800s in a gothic style but it is painted so really different but really gorgeous too. Even the wooden pews were painted a lovely soft green which worked with the arches.



I talked Karin into taking me to the art gallery and Wow! Beautiful building and really lovely collection including many scandinavian artists that I had never seen before. The colour palate used the light is so different and so 'light-handed' - I really loved them.


Karin had never visited a gallery before or had any knowledge of art but she agreed to play a game with me that my sister Jackie and I first played in Melbourne. In each gallery/room you have 1 minute to pick your favourite and explain why to the other person. It is great way to experience art, figure out what you like and to view art through another person's eyes.

I think the best way to start looking at art is to see which ones resonate with you, evoke a reaction, and then think about why? It is a good way to figure out what it is that piqued your interest. Sometimes it is not even a picture you like or it is one that surprises you. Anyway it was fun and Karin found out she does quite like art actually after all!

A gallery in the Gothenburg Art Museum

Gorgeous views on the commuter ferry trip.

Sweden

View from Maivor's office at Hogskolan I Gavle

After Norway I flew to Stockholm and then caught a train to Gavle ready for a Swedish usergroup meeting the next day. I had a lovely evening meal with Per Falks and Maivor Hallen from Hogskolan I Gavle. I ate reindeer - yum!

Hogskolan has beautiful library; so light filled and elegant and with great spaces for students including 30 (yes - not a typo) bookable rooms for small group work. Maivor gave me a tour and it was clearly a very well used space for the university students onsite.

The usergroup was well attended - 40 people at a rough guess - and there were a number of presentations about Koha including Oslo public library showcasing their wonderful work which went live this week.

I was concerned to hear one library speak about how hard it was 'going it alone' who recently switched to Koha and felt they had no one to talk too or help.

They do not appear to have found the Koha community and the various help channels: irc online chat, discussion list, online tutorials etc. The koha-community.org website is a wonderful resource and the community is always happy to help.

There are many ways to switch to Koha from full-service, hosted through a vendor, onsite servers with either vendor support or do-it-yourself. There is at least one vendor in Scandinavia: Libriotech who has clients in Norway and Sweden.

Some of the 30 rooms available for 

Norway

I was so looking forward to the Norwegian leg of my journey; how many Kiwi's can say they have been north of the Arctic Circle? My trip was a bit like a mullet: business up front and party at the back!

Business

The first part of the visit was spent in Oslo. First up was a visit to the Oslo public library who were 2 weeks out from going live on Koha (of course). 

They are doing this themselves and have a great development team who are doing all sorts of cool stuff with the Koha API and the semantic web and recommendations.  My understanding is that it is basically a standard Koha install with all sorts of magic done using the API - and all their work on github so the community can share here which is awesome :) This will be an install to watch I think.

Design University, Oslo

They also have a new building in the wings - a spectacular building that will look right at home beside the new opera house down at the harbour front , but in the meantime they are doing great things renovating their existing 1930s building. It's a big old solid thing so really hard to knock walls about but it has great bones and features including huge windows and they are working wonders with colour. Convinced me again that all you need are clever librarians with great taste to transform a space into a perfectly acceptable public library. 

Fab youth space upstairs in the oldest purpose built
public library in Oslo

This was confirmed again when we visited the first purpose built public library in  Oslo. A WWI era building (I think) and while the downstairs is unashamedly a step back in time (as in 100% authentic) the upstairs youth area is stunning.

Magnus and a VIKING
ship - a real one!

We also spoke twice at a university in Oslo, once to library students, and visited a private university for arts and design that has recently opened in a refurbished warehouse. We had a tour of all floors and this building is not only truly beautiful but has a range of great student spaces to suit the collaborative way of working and flipped classroom trend.

Party

Ok - not quite party but certainly pure pleasure. Before Magnus took me to stay with his family for the night in Bodo we visited the Viking Museum and a collection of historic Norwegian buildings included an amazing traditional church. The weather was sooo cold in Bodo and so wet and simply perfect - given that we were north of the Arctic Circle (I'm going to try and say that at least 3 more times because I can!)

After a day sightseeing in Bodo (north of the Arctic Circle) including the remarkable narrow tidal strait and the new library we headed off to the ferry for the trip to Lofoten Islands (even further north in the Arctic Circle). It was dark when we arrived and then an hours drive to the house we were sleeping in. So, the next morning: WOW! What a stunningly beautiful place! 

We made an early start to the day because Magnus had an itinerary and we had so much we wanted to see; in fact that night when we were heading home on the ferry it was hard to believe how much we had seen in a day. If you ever get the chance to come to Norway or head to Lofoten: do it. I would rate Magnus 10/10 as a tour guide - would definitely book again! 

The landscape and the weather are so huge and the towns and buildings and people seem so very small. So, to honour that these last photos are huge!

Fish drying racks in front

A wee bit of naval gazing

As I have been travelling around I am seeing so many different libraries and meeting librarians and I am thinking all the time about my profession. This is because I have reached a crossroad in my life and have needed to decide where I want my next 15 years of working life to take me.

I have worked my guts out (for non-Kiwi readers that means 'really hard) over the last 3 years creating a new model of a public library in Horowhenua. This was 'public library on steroids' plus a whole added dimension of needing to raise significant amounts of our operating budget (like 30% of a $3m budget) and to run it as a 'business' AND as a 'charity' - not as a council department like my peers. It has been a brutal few years and I gave it my all.

Just when we had managed to hid our stride; when I was feeling confident that we had developed a great strategic framework, a sound business plan and a high functioning organisation both in terms of structure and of individuals and teams, the rug was pulled out from under our feet and within a week I was gone. Council would take over the running of libraries and I was out of work. I have to be very careful in what I can say about my exit but it was heartbreaking. The shock was almost physical. I kept extremely professional throughout because I wanted that to be the enduring memory of me but I took it really hard.

After 2 really horrible weeks I discovered, while trying to study for an exam, that my brain could not actually retain or recall information. I realised I needed a real break, a complete change of scenery and a way to get my mojo back. The idea of a Koha tour came to me and within a very short timeframe it was happening and I was on a plane.

I have spent the last 6 weeks reflecting on how I want to live my life going forward and have been an observer in all the libraries I have visited, and in my all conversations. I realise I am trying to pull together the essence of what libraries are about, the threads that are common across the Koha community. What was the last 30 years of my working life about? How did I get it so wrong that I could be dumped so unceremoniously from leading a very successful organisation that I had created?

Two Council employees have said that Council was not getting the credit for the success of Te Takere and the Horowhenua Trust. The public know that the Trust ran libraries and while we always made sure that the Mayor got to 'front' events there was still a feeling, it turns out, that they weren't getting enough of the kudos. I wonder if one or more of the elected representatives, or perhaps council officers, have been so hellbent on securing the credit that they were prepared to sacrifice the successful Trust and management to  pull it back inhouse. I am starting to realise, and some of the Trust board members got there weeks ago, that our biggest sin was be too successful.

Dublin: a Flying Visit

I caught an early morning bus down from Derry to Dublin and it was a great way to see the countryside.

Dublin is such a cool city. I was staying right in the middle of HQ Central for the Easter Uprising in 1916, virtually opposite the Central Post Office itself.

My visit to Dublin was a fleeting one. I arrived around noon and went straight to Trinity College and saw the long hall (amazing) and the Book of Kells (amazing too) and then I met Charles Quain from Interleaf for a gorgeous Japanese dinner before the usergroup meeting the next day.

It was so nice to meet the Interleaf guys; I'd been meeting their fans for weeks! A really good outcome was interest in forming a user group.

The question of Koha usergroups has come up many times over the last 6 weeks as I've been traveling round. While in Sydney Irma Birchall and I talked at length about important they are and how best Calyx as a vendor can support the user community. The trick is that while vendors can and should offer support, the usergroups should really be run by users not vendors. This question came up in Malaysia, Berlin and also again today in Stockholm.

Irma tells me that the North American Koha usergroup has done some great work formalising a structure and held a terrific usergroup meeting which her and Bob attended. Perhaps the North American model could be used by others as a starting point.

Derry: where Jo finds great grandparents

When planning my itinerary I built in a rest week that I would spend in Derry. The plan was that I might sleep a lot, drink a few guinness in an Irish pub and quietly potter around in the library or records office to see if I could track down family of my grandfather who left Derry in 1926.

Moneymore - not what I was expecting

Well best laid plans flew out the window really fast ...

My paternal grandfather left Derry as a 23 yr old in 1926. He came to NZ and married my grandmother in 1929. He never said a lot about Ireland, never wanted to go back, never talked about his family in Derry.

My Mum had been searching for years, had even hired a researcher in Derry to see what they could find, and no luck. All we had was Grandads birth certificate and the marriage licence of his parents, Patrick McBride and Eliabeth Wilson. We hoped there might be family somewhere, cousins for my father. Dad passed away a few years ago without us ever finding family but I have always wanted to trace those Irish roots. This was my chance.

On the first day I found a candidate for what could possibly be my great grandmother Elizabeth in the Derry City Cemetery. The electronic records were inconclusive so I sent an email to the records office to see if I could view the actual register. Of course; come on over! I was there in 20 minutes flat!

Font where my great grandfather was
baptised in 1864

The Records Office staff were wonderful and after flipping through a catalogue card drawer and hauling out original register books it was official I had found my great grandmother Elizabeth AND also her husband Patrick, my Great Grandfather plus 2 wee babies that were Patrick's but not Elizabeth's. There was a wealth of information on those registers - none of which was available on the electronic records. I also found the place of birth for Patrick and Elizabeth plus the names of both of their parents. I had so many leads now and things clicked into place very quickly as I spent a frantic couple of days using electronic databases tracking down leads to piece the family together.

I checked and cross checked and I am certain that I am correct. Long story short my grandfather's paternal line came from Donegal, his mother was a Callaghan and they were Roman Catholic (not presbyterians from Derry as we thought). Patrick changed his religion 4 times and married 3 times and lied about his age consistently throughout his life. No wonder he had been so hard to track down!

I visited all the places and addresses in Derry where I knew the family had been. On a whim, I took a hire car over to Donegal, and using my phone  and google maps found my way down one way mud tracks to Moneymore, where Patrick and his siblings had all been born. Just on dusk, then the credit ran out on my phone and data roaming stopped worked (Donegal is in another country to Derry) and than I found myself at a muddy paddock. Moneymore was a paddock!! Frantic reversing, an 8 point turn, desperately found my way back to the highway. Relief! I had visions of being stuck in the Donegal countryside overnight. I saw a road sign for Newtoncunningham - birthplace of Patrick - so I swung into the only pub in sight and collapsed with a glass of wine relieved but also disappointed.

Ballintoy Harbour - Greyjoy's turf in Game of Thrones

The waitress asked who I was and what I was doing. Oh she said, there are still loads of McBrides down Moneymore way, its a rural area with scattered houses and farms, and I'm a Callaghan! I'll ring my mammy. The luck of that happening was astounding. I went back the next day and photographed all the McBride and Callaghan headstones, then went back to the actual church Patrick and his siblings had all been baptised in.

I left exhausted but happy; I'd worked for hours at a computer, driven places, stomped around cemeteries and had only 1 day off sightseeing along the northern Ulster coastal scenic route (went to a number of Game of Thrones sites.

Websites
http://www.rootsireland.ie/
https://www.irishgenealogy.ie/en/
https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/proni