This month I started another new volunteer position, this time at the charity The Ramblers. They have no full-time librarian and a very small library, which is a bit of a mess and is about to be reorganised. There is no up-to-date catalogue (the spreadsheet - no databases here! - hasn't been edited for about 5 years). There is an accurate record of the publications held in archive, which is something.

I will be working there one day a week, reorganising, condensing, cataloguing. I am really looking forward to sticking my teeth in - it's a great opportunity for me to put together a library in my own image, so to speak. I don't quite have carte blanche (maybe carte gris) but the amount of input I have in this library is fantastic for someone with as little experience as me.

Meanwhile, back at the National Portrait Gallery, I'm still doing the two jobs. The indexing has taken a bit of time to get to grips with - not the software side of things, just the endlessly complicated and confusing rules for entering the names of persons of nobility into the system: which bits of their titles go where, who outranks whom, whether they inherited their titles or married into them… There's a 30 page booklet on how to correctly enter names. But I'm getting there.

I also now have a university e-mail address - does that mean I am officially a student again now? Or do I have to wait for enrolment?