Library Day In The Life - Day 3

What a day! On the way in to work I was thinking 'wow I've got a lot to do today' and by 9.15am it was quadrupled.

A teacher came in to see us first thing because two of her Level 1 students had a really awful experience on their work placement and she wondered if we could take them on for the next week and a half. Their placement was at a well known stationers/book vendors often found in train stations, I shalln't say the name. As I run the Student Volunteer programme I'm going to supervise them. So I spent until 10am drawing up a rota of tasks they can do up to the end of the week and printing ff the training notes and leaflets I give to the student volunteers. My entire morning was occupied with supervising them, inducting them, rotaing them etc. At about noon the teacher returned and mentioned that one of the students is dyspraxic - this obviously has a massive effect on what I can ask them to do (he also has a problem with one of his arms which minimises the amount of shelving I can ask him to do) and to be honest I feel quite annoyed that she didn't see fit to mention it at 9am.

In the midst of this we had a student setting up a powerpoint for Holocaust Memorial Day based on a trip to Auschwitz that he had made with another student. He phoned first thing suggesting I set it up for him or else he'll do it tomorrow! I was surprised by his attitude as he's one of our student assistants and usually works really hard. I advised him to come in and do it today or else it won't happen. So he came in and sorted it out.

Lunch was a working lunch at the bistro run by the catering students. It was cross-faculty meeting about maintaining connections with our link school in Ghana. My manager and I are the International Coordinators for the centre. In the course of the meeting the headmistress suggested I lead the team to push the Ghana link which I have agreed to do. Feel quite honoured that the headmistress asked me, but also aware that probably no one else wanted to do it! The food in the bistro was fantastic as ever, I had kedgeree from their special menu in honour of Burns Night.

After lunch I supervised the work experience students and made a little bit of headway on the keywords, but not very much at all disappointingly. I was grateful that I'd sorted out the lists of genre fiction yesterday as it's given them a labelling task to do. The library closes at 4pm on a Wednesday which has given me the chance to blog and catch up on yesterdays - I'll put it down as CPD!

Tonight I'm going to a talk at the Imperial War Museum with a friend.

Library Day in the Life - Day 2

Arrived at work at 9am. Spent most of the morning on the Circulation Desk. Started by doing my routine tasks - statistics and journals - then moved onto keywords tidy up task (inbetween serving students, dealing with enquiries and dealing with problems with the printer). I believed I'd completed the As yesterday but hadn't. Made a list of the keywords beginning with numbers then started amending the Bs. Sorting out the entire catalogue is going to take a lot longer than I originally thought! Off the counter at 11.30 so visited study centres to drop new journals off and tidy up a bit.

Lunch at 12.

Spent most of the afternoon on the Circ Desk. Decided to spend some time working on a task for our Student Assistants. We want to label fiction books with stickers indicating their genre (romance, crime, science fiction etc) to help users choose fiction books. So have spent the afternoon playing with the flagging and advanced search functions to print off lists of books of each genre and adding keywords to items (such as adding 'Romance' to books that already have the keyword 'Love' so that the all come up as one set).

In the evening watching the film Milk, it was really good. Had an early night as we've got a lot on tomorrow.

Library Day In The Life - Day 1

Ha! I've just realised that the last time I blogged was my unofficial day in the life! Still, here we are...





Arrived at 8am to open up the library for 8.30am: turning on PCs and printer, filling printer with paper, putting money in the till, restocking the stationery shop, checking for bookings in the diary and new notes in the Circ Desk Message Book.


Stayed on Circ Desk til 11.30am (apart from my tea break). As usual on a Monday morning we have an entire BTEC sports class in taking up about 13 of our 18 PCs. I collated last week's statistics and checked to see if anything had been added to the 6 Book Challenge website. I then worked on cleaning up our catalogue's keywords - the bane of my life and a situation worthy of its own post. Massive problems with the printer (again - it's absolutely constant) so spent a lot of my morning explaining that to students. Also the internet was off or patchy until 10 ish which didn't help.


At 12 had lunch in our office because I couldn't be bothered to go up to staff room. I ran into the facilities manager who reassured me that the second recycling bin that we have requested over a week ago is on its way.





Back on the desk from 1-2. Students are complaining that it is taking 20-30 mins to log onto computers. I assure them that IT are aware of the problem and that we are as frustrated as they are. Processed the day's journals.


At 2pm went into the office. I don't like working in the office, I like to be on the floor. However, our other staff PC has had it's mouse ball stolen rendering it useless and IT have taken over a week to replace it. I could log onto a student computer but with the log on problems it seems like a waste of time. Finished cleaning up the keywords beginning with A.


At 3pm I distributed the days journals to study centres and had a little tidy up. At 3.30pm I was back on the Circ desk where I worked on creating the list of keywords I will clean up tomorrow (the Bs).


Left work at 5pm. Spent the evening working on the presentation.