Career reflections and staff retention

’ Do you remember when you started your first post-university professional job? When you were eager to sign up to your professional organisation and get going on the post-nominals? I had just moved to London and during the mid-1990s had an open mind as to whether a job was going to be for life or for 6 months but I really hoped my first job would be special, long lasting and I worked really hard to get it right.

Which I did; that firm never had a keener or more passionate library assistant and I loved it there. Building on my theoretical library school knowledge, I learnt so much about how to – and how not to – run a library, design a new one, set up a library catalogue, see how lawyers reacted to the thought of mere support staff having email and communicating directly with clients. I would have stayed there if it hadn’t been for a number of issues, which I shall come on to in a moment. Despite having written a career overview for the excellent UKlibchat group, this posting isn’t just a mere excursion into nostalgia but recently I overheard someone say ‘if someone is good [at their job], we don’t expect them to stay’. Both have made me consider staff retention and there were a few things I wanted to think through.

Bubbles

Bubbles of time carry us through

Temporary states, atoms in flux

Weightlessly lifted mutating forms

Fleeting and turning with wind

Like notes of the band drifting out

Down over the water, down to the sea

Bubbles in swell both beneath and above

Bubbles of air are carried aloft

Endlessly recreated, suddenly stop

Nothing but puddles, like our footsteps,

Remain to show silent whispers of soap

As music ebbs, time shouts out

Bells of the churches, chug of the boat

Bubbles in swell both beneath and above

The Monteverdi Ballets; Baroque-Hip Hop

Tonight's outing heralded a very busy couple of weeks therefore I have no doubt that this won't be the last review posting of the up and coming weird and wonderful. It also strikes me that I have never done a really negative write up of something I've seen.

I'm a polite reasonable member of an audience, willing the performers to do well and I would never let criticism get in the way of enjoying an evening out. However the Monteverdi Ballets, presented as part of the Spitalfields Summer Festival, made me think about what makes an event work. Or not. 

Get me a Retrospectascope...Stat!: John Hunter

Hunterian Museum

‘No theory can ever be proved true - we can only show that a theory is false’ - Karl Popper

I've been meaning to do something specific on John Hunter (13 February 1728 – 16 October 1793) for some time and though there have been a couple of posts that touch on him, I've not written anything explicit. Indeed my course in the spring used his collection of curios at the Royal College of Surgeons as a point of departure for many themes coming out of ‘exhibiting the body’. Therefore the excellent talk presented by Professor Stephen Challacombe at the RSM provided the material for this post.

The simple question that he wanted to explore focused on the relevancy of John Hunter’s approach to science and research. What was so special or different about his methods?