Library Day in the Life, round seven: Tuesday

It’s going to be a very short blog post today, as much of what I did was very similar to yesterday, and I don’t want to repeat myself. So here’s a couple of the other tasks that I carried out.

• Selecting off-air and BoB recordings. Every week I go through the Radio Times and select programmes and films that would be useful additions to stock. Once upon a time I would send them all through to our off-air recording service, who would record the programme and then send the disc to me, to classify along with our commercial DVDs. However, we now subscribe to Box of Broadcasts, which has really reduced the need to record things. It’s a streaming service which allows subscribers to select things from the week ahead to record, which are then added to the BoB archive for any subscriber to watch; so if someone from another subscribing institution has selected something to record, you don’t need to, as it will become available to all. Most of my selection is now done on BoB; this way, the programmes are available to a large number of students at any one time, and they can watch from wherever they have a computer and internet connection, neither of which is true of a DVD in the library stock. However, I do still send a few things through to be recorded onto DVD and added to stock; our Film students often analyse aesthetic aspects of films, so we want our film recordings to be of high quality, which, being a streaming service, BoB recordings sometimes are not.

• Classifying DVDs. I have been getting behind with classifying recently, as I’ve been focusing a lot on journals, so today I decided to spend some time on the growing selection of DVDs on my classifying shelf. We usually purchase DVDs from Amazon, and, as I’ve said, we get discs sent through from the off-air service, so classifying is done from scratch. I add a classmark (cinema films all go at the same classmark, with cutter letters from the start of their titles), subject headings, geographical headings, general notes such as the presence of bonus material, and parallel titles, if any. I enjoy classifying DVDs – they’re interesting, and I have found that my knowledge of film has really grown since I started my job (though I think my parents found it annoying when I was home for Easter, and I piped up with “I’ve classified that!” every time they suggested a film to watch!).

I also agreed a date for a Staff Development Hour that I am going to deliver up at the main campus during the next academic year, on the research that I did for my dissertation and consequent journal article. Staff development is viewed as really important by Library Services, and there are fortnightly Staff Development Hours at each campus during term-time. I have delivered/helped to deliver a few already, so I’m looking forward to this one, although I think it’ll be a while before I get chance to sit down and plan it.