Library Day in the Life, Round 8: Friday

I start later than normal today, as I am staying past the usual Friday finish time of 4.30pm and have some flexitime to use up too. I arrive at about 9.30, armed with my homemade veggie rocky road to share with my colleagues in celebration of National Libraries Day tomorrow! I also put out some sweets for the students on our NLD display.

I check my emails and respond to one from a friend who is kindly coming to present at one of our staff development hours as an outside speaker, answering some of her questions about what is required and also provisionally arranging for her graduate trainee to come and visit us at the same time. I respond to few more emails and go through the UKSG e-news, looking for anything of interest to me as a campus library journals librarian.

After a quick coffee (and a sample of the rocky road which has gone down very well with colleagues -  I am proud!), I finish off the evaluation of previous teaching sessions which I started earlier in the week. Then it’s 12pm and time for an hour on the enquiry desk. I get a few enquiries, about fines and printing. In between these queries, I try to sort out my overflowing email inbox, having received several warning emails about it getting too full, sorting messages into folders and deleting anything I don’t need. I also try to work out whether I’ve migrated everything of my accounts that I need to, in preparation for a forthcoming change in e-resource authentication, and have the odd peek at the Guardian HE Live Chat which is taking place at the moment,  on the topic of the role of the academic librarian in today’s HE institution.

I take lunch from 1 until 2, and then catch up with my book classifying. We receive most of our books shelf-ready, but we have a few rules (such as if there are more than six numbers after the point, or fewer than 4 items at that classmark already) which mean that books are passed to subject librarians to check and re-classify if necessary. Occasionally we purchase books from elsewhere which require classification from scratch -  I love doing this as it’s like detective work, and so satisfying when you finally settle on a classmark! All of the books waiting on my shelf are shelf-ready ones to be checked. I decide that some can go through as they are, but that I need to shorten or change the classmark for others. Media and cultural studies covers such a wide range of topics that I can be asked to purchase books on pretty much anything, and it’s fascinating to look through them. The books I’m checking now cover topics from social media to gaming to pornography in China!

Next, I sort out the AV reports for last month. At the end of every month I receive a report generated from the LMS which shows the catalogue records for all of the new DVD titles added to our stock that month. I check this report carefully for any misspellings or errors. This is really important as something as simple as a typo in the title of a DVD can render it difficult or almost impossible for a user to find, and if I don’t catch it at this stage it will get lost. Every month the LMS also generates a report of all AV held in our library, which I export to Excel and tidy up into a useable list to be saved in the AV folder on our shared drive, for our records. From this spreadsheet I use filters to create a spreadsheet of DVDs currently known to be missing, and titles which have no BBFC classification; again, I save these to the shared drive every month, as being able to access this information quickly and easily is helpful.  

After another cup of coffee (and another piece of rocky road) I’m back on the enquiry desk from 4 until 5. I only have one enquiry, which is about printing. For the rest of the time I try to work out with a colleague what the story is behind a mysterious box of DVDs that has been found in the office, create a spreadsheet of “suspect” missing DVDs – DVDs which went missing without apparently ever being borrowed, so we want to keep an eye on their replacements – respond to some more email actions, and look through a couple of book alerts to see if there is anything we don’t have which, based on my knowledge of modules and teaching areas, my department might want. I also look at what I’ve got on next week and make sure I’ve prepared everything that I need to.

At 5pm I’m finished for this week. Apart from the day off on Monday, this has been a fairly typical week – a lot of different tasks to manage, and one evening shift. About once every six weeks I work the Saturday shift. I don’t teach every week; usually only during October/November and January/February  - but this is a typical week when we do have teaching.

Library Day in the Life, Round 8: Thursday

I’m on the evening desk shift today so it’s a late start for me. I arrive at about 9.50am, make a cup of coffee then sit down for my Chat service shift from 10am until 12pm. We are part of an international co-op to offer 24/7 Chat to our students; in the middle of the night their enquiries are picked up by librarians in the US, and during the day we pick up enquiries from students at US universities, as well as our own. I love doing Chat; you never know what you’re going to get asked and it’s a great feeling to be able to help students on the other side of the world! The chats start flying in and I’m fairly busy; I help students in California with finding statistics and a student in Maryland who can’t access a section of their library website. It’s definitely challenging; you need to quickly read the policy page for the student’s institution to work out how you can help them, and you can’t always access the same databases that they can. They are very grateful though – it’s the early hours of the morning where they are and they’re still able to get some help – and one tells me I am awesome which is lovely! I also help one of our students with referencing. Students are invited to fill in a feedback survey when their Chat ends, and today I receive my first feedback survey from this student, who found the service really useful; so it’s a very successful Chat session for me today!

When I’m Chatting I can’t leave my desk or get involved in anything else, so in between enquiries I do little jobs like catching up with emails, selecting programmes from the Radio Times to select on Box of Broadcasts, and looking through the session plan for a repeat of the teaching I did on Monday.

My Chat session overruns a little, as often happens, but I still have time for a lunch break before teaching at 1pm. I get positive feedback on the session again, and feel like I go through the databases a bit more slowly this time, which is good. 

After teaching I return to my desk to read the feedback forms and work through some more email actions, before an enquiry desk shift at 3pm. It’s fairly quiet – the only enquiry I get is about booking a study room  - so I finish selecting programmes on Box of Broadcasts and catch up on some more emails. At 4pm I’m off the desk and I take a short coffee and cake break before finishing off my programme selection and doing some more teaching feedback evaluation (see yesterday’s blog post).

At 5pm I’m back on the enquiry desk. I have quite a busy shift this time: I help students to find books and print their work and ask some noisy students to be a bit quieter, as well as getting up fairly frequently to let in students who don’t have their student cards – the doors lock after 5pm and they are supposed to swipe in with their card! In between all of this I do some more teaching feedback evaluation and send some emails. At 6.30pm it’s time for me to close the desk and go home. A security guard keeps the library open self-service only until 9pm.

Later on that evening, I make some veggie rocky road to take into work for my colleagues tomorrow in early celebration of National Libraries Day…hope it turns out well!

Library Day in the Life, Round 8: Wednesday

I’m on the first enquiry desk shift again so it’s another 8.10am start to get the library set up for opening. While I’m doing this a colleague calls in sick, so, being the person who took the call, my first job of the day when I sit down at the desk at 8.30 is to arrange cover for their issue desk shifts. I and two colleagues are able to cover so that’s sorted quite quickly. Today it’s not long before I get my first enquiry; a student needing help with finding materials on British theatre in the 1980s. I search through some of the electronic databases with them and emphasise the need to think of different ways to describe the search terms. I only have one other enquiry before my shift ends; helping a student with the new online study-room booking system. I spend the rest of the time catching up with emails and making a start on checking a long list of books passed to me by an academic, to find out which we have already and which we need to purchase.

At 10am I’m off the desk, and after a short coffee break I go back to the book list. It takes me most of the rest of the morning to work out what we need to buy and how much it is likely to cost; I share a book budget with a colleague and as I know they have recently put a large order through, I want to check with them that this one is going to be OK in terms of funds! Once I’ve done this I look at an email that’s just dropped into my inbox about a new website which I think might be useful for my students. I am signed up for some Jiscmail lists for media and cultural studies academics, as well as LIS ones, in order to maintain a current awareness of new books, events, websites, blogs etc. in my subject area. My colleague and I have been adding links to useful websites for our subjects to Delicious stacks, and I wonder if this new site might also be worth adding. It turns out it’s not really appropriate. It’s now 12pm and I take my lunchbreak.

At 1pm I am back on the enquiry desk for an hour. This shift is a bit busier; I deal with enquiries about renewing an Inter Library Loan, extending a loan for teaching, booking rooms and accessing online journals. I go back to my office at 2pm and spend an hour working through the evaluation forms from some teaching that we did last week, analysing and summarising the results and comments into a useable document. After a short coffee break at 3pm, I send the big book order from this morning through to my colleagues who do the ordering, and then put up the National Libraries posters and signs that my colleague designed yesterday around the library. I’ll explain more about what we’re doing and maybe add some pictures in Friday’s blog post! I also email round the team to explain what we are doing for NLD, as it has all been a bit last-minute!

From 4 until 5pm I am covering the issue desk. It’s quiet – Wednesday afternoon usually is as it’s sports afternoon – I pass holds to a couple of students and answer a couple of queries about loan limits and fines. I don’t usually work on the issue desk so it’s nice to have a bit of a change of scenery and perspective! In between enquiries I start going through the Radio Times to look for anything I think we should record and add to library stock via the off-air recording service, and also for programmes to select on Box of Broadcasts, a fantastic TV and radio streaming database to which we subscribe. I do this every week and I select loads of stuff on BoB. Now that we have BoB I don’t request much to go on disc; mainly films for which the playback quality might be important. I don’t get all the way through so this will be one of my first tasks to complete tomorrow morning.

Library Day in the Life, Round 8: Monday/Tuesday

I’m an academic librarian working in a small campus library of a UK university. I’ve been working here for nearly 15 months now, and it is my first professional post since finishing my MA in 2010. Working in a small campus library, I have a number of responsibilities; I am a subject librarian for Media and Cultural Studies, I look after our journals and AV stock as well as some other acquisitions duties, I line-manage a member of staff, contribute to the management of the library, and work on the enquiry desk, amongst other things. If you want to know more about who I am, what I do and how I got here, feel free to look at my Library Routes post. I’m taking part in Library Day in the Life Round 8 mainly because I’m nosy and like to read about what others get up to! In seriousness, I hope that it might be useful for someone considering a career in LIS work, or LIS students who are trying to decide which path to take. As usual I am going to blog a week rather than a day, as this will be more representative of what I do.

I had the day off on Monday, to use up time accrued from working last Saturday and flexitime, so this time my week starts on Tuesday. I’m on the first enquiry desk shift of the day so I arrive at about 8.10am to make sure everything is switched on and that the library is ready to open when I take my seat at the desk at 8.30. It’s very quiet and I don’t get any enquires during this shift. While I’m on the desk I catch up with emails after having the day off yesterday. I then email round some of my colleagues to suggest that we do something for National Libraries Day which is on Saturday. After that, I do some final preparation for the teaching I am delivering later this morning.  It’s a session for undergraduate History students who are about to carry out group projects for which they need to use electronic resources only. The subject librarian for History has planned the session so I’m going through the various databases to practise the searches and make sure I know what I’m doing.

My desk shift finishes at 10am. After a short coffee break I go through various letters from journals publishers. They are all renewal notices so I check that we have renewed or cancelled through our subscription agent. I do some final preparation for teaching then deliver the session. It goes quite well though I possibly speed through it faster than I should! The feedback from the students and accompanying lecturer is positive though. Teaching finished, it’s time for another hour on the enquiry desk. I deal with a few enquiries on this one; helping students to book a study room using our new booking system, answering questions about inter library loans, and trying to trouble-shoot an IT problem with a disc not playing in a computer. In between enquiries I ask a colleague to help me create some posters for National Libraries Day, do some housekeeping and work through actions from the emails I went through earlier.

At 1pm I am off the desk and it’s lunchtime until 1.50pm, when I make sure that the teaching room is set up OK and that the guest speakers for our 2pm staff development hour have everything that they need. I am a member of the library-wide Staff Development Group and I help one of my colleagues to run the staff development hours at our campus; this is an hour-long informal training event which takes place fortnightly, to ensure that staff manage to take part in staff development on a regular basis. Today we’re hearing from colleagues from elsewhere in the university who work with the international students, supporting all aspects of their experience as a student here. It is really interesting to hear about the things that they offer, and they suggest ways in which library staff can help our international students to settle into university life.

At 3pm I have a quick coffee break then send out an online survey to those who attended the staff development hour, to gain feedback on what they enjoyed about the session and whether they found it useful. We do this after every session and it helps us to plan future sessions. I then spend the rest of the afternoon answering a query from a student who is trying to find material for their dissertation on a couple of television programmes, one of which there hasn’t been much written about. I send them details of databases to use, and explain that they will need to search more broadly. I don’t have much information about their actual research question so I encourage them to get back to me so that I can help further if needed. My colleague whom I asked for help with National Libraries Day stuff also appears to show me the fab posters he’s made – I’m looking forward to putting them up tomorrow!