Orientation, Pt. 2

A half day of orientation at the hotel, and then we were off to the ship.  Finally!  

And what a lovely treat, Karen King (voyage librarian for summer 2014) and her husband Mike just happened to be in town and came on board for a visit.  We poked around all of the areas of the ship that we were allowed to, marveled at the library, checked out my cabin, and then I’m afraid I had to get right to work.  Fortunately Lisa was there to handle the hostessing responsibilities while I got things cranked up.  My first task was to transfer all of the readings that Mary had been collecting for the previous month from my thumb drive (one of many; backups are a great necessity on the ship) onto the ship’s intranet.  (Background:  in the months prior to a voyage, Mary combs through the syllabi of all of the classes to make sure that we have the books and videos that are needed, as well as reserve readings.  Because of the limited bandwidth on the ship, we provide required readings as PDFs that will live on the ship’s intranet, but Mary collects them all ahead of time.  I brought them with me, then transferred them to the ship intranet.)   Next, rummaging around in drawers and cabinets to see what’s what.

Anne Houston, the voyage librarian for the enrichment voyage which just ended, did an excellent job of setting up the library for Lisa and me, which was a huge help.  But because we didn’t overlap at all (she got off the ship this morning) Lisa and I didn’t get a tour of where everything was.  But Anne left excellent notes, so finding our way around wasn’t too difficult.  After a farewell to Karen and Mike, it was back to work, then our first dinner on board, then back to work, all the while answering about a thousand questions from faculty. 

In the evening there was a reception for parents who’d come along to bid farewell to their daughters and sons.  It was quite a lovely affair, even though there weren’t that many parents on board.   That didn’t stop the faculty and staff from enjoying themselves.  The food was set up right outside the library and the computer lab, with the library serving a dining room and food staging area for a time.  I decided not to be a hard a** yet, that will come later. 

 Yes, it was an exhausting 16-hour day, but still and all, it was tons of fun.