Bliss

The New Zealand Library Association (NZLA) loomed large in library circles - a combination of CLG and the old LA in the UK. I was asked to join the committee in Christchurch (part of the on-going apprenticeship scheme) and enjoyed helping with meetings, driving elderly members to and from meetings....and was headhunted! So I joined the staff of the Teachers' College library. This was a busy place, with students and academics all rushing in and out, asking real questions, or in the case of the academics, wondering where the spotty books were...a bit of delving and they proved to be a series of teacher manuals on mathematics, with spotty covers. The library was arranged according to the Bliss classification, which I really enjoyed using - ideally suited for an education library.
In the meantime, over three years, the training course for the Certificate of the NZLA continued. This involved one month every year full time at the Library School in Wellington, where we were pushed through such things as cataloguing, classification (Dewey was deemed enough for us), indexing, how to work with an architect to design a library, reference skills, the history of the book, world literature, bibliography, book repair and book binding, and I cannot remember any more. During the years in between we had exercises to carry out - compiling annotated bibiographies, practice classification and cataloguing, and under the mentorship of a local trainer, doing various tasks in our library. In many ways it was like an OU course, with the dreaded TMA.
However, I finished it, shortly before going to England on the great traditional Colonial return to the Homeland.