Woke at 5.30am anxious about the week ahead. As always, left the house at 7.10 to get the train. Spent the first half of my train journey catching up on emails, Twitter and Facebook. The Curriculum Manager for Fashion joins the train half way to work and we always have a good chat. The college has a minibus that collects staff and students from the station which is fantastic.
Arrived at work at 8.40, to find the LRC Support Tutors locked out of their workroom which also contains the keys to classrooms that we issue to staff. I left the caretaker breaking into the workroom, and went to have a conversation that I had been dreading which went better than expected! Tweeted and got a nice reply from @SmilyLibrarian. As my workplace's only qualified librarian and the head of the service I often feel out on a limb and isolated, so such kindnesses from the LIS community Twitterati is much appreciated!
Came back to find that staff had access to the workroom, but that the lock would need repairing. At least we can get to the kettle now. Made some tea.
Spent the morning making amendments to the week's rota, replying to emails, chasing up a few odds and ends from last week (registers, Finance, HR, filling in staff development forms for upcoming events etc), checked through last month's finance report and caught up with one of my staff who works part time that I haven't seen since Wednesday. I was on desk and patrol duty from 10-11. We have to combine these two things as we are tight on staffing. It was a busy morning lots of students; in Independent Learning Sessions, in classes that have come in with teachers and drop in students. We've had lots more students sign up for the Six Book Challenge and staff are asking me to buy another set of diaries. It's the first time that the college has run it so I'm pleased that we've had such great buy in from ESOL and Functional Skills staff. Almost all the students that have signed up are usually not LRC users which is also great as reaching out to non-users was one of my challenges for the year.
I had lunch at noon. My new year resolution was to eat at lunchtime and I've been really good at sticking to it. I went up to the canteen (which I love!) and got ratatouille quiche, chips and beans.
At 1pm I went back on the counter, dealing with the unchtime rush: helping students find books, moving along students who aren't working, resetting passwords, triage on the laptops (we can reestablish the wifi connection to save taking them up to IT). One of the Faculty Directors called in and we had a chat about problems with the timetable which puts pressure on resources and rooms. The Networks Manager called over to fix something on my computer. Apologised for smell of chips and vinegar in my office but he said he likes it. At 2pm we had the combination of a large class of Public Services students and a large class of Motor Vehicle students - two of our livelier cohorts! - so spent some time on behaviour management. Our students aren't cheeky or malicious, they are just high spirited and can get noisy. Returned to my office at about half two and phoned the British Library about some Inter Library loans. Gave a new teacher an e-books tutorial over the telephone. Ordered the new Quick Reads that are coming out for World Book Day in March. Dealt with some emails: mainly laptop and room bookings.
At 5pm the LRC Support Tutors went home and I stayed on for evening duty. I put out the reservation notices in the bays for tomorrow, and prepared for the Additional Learning Support (ALS) department moving in to three rooms that have historically been part of the library. The front of the college is being remodelled so ALS are being relocated, possibly temporarily, possibly permanently. In order to make space for this we have closed down our AV and off air recording service and lost the breakout room that was created for us in the summer 2010 refurb. To make tomorrow's move (hopefully) smooth and safe I have shut off the back of the LRC so that they can bring things in through the fire doors. To do this we will lose 8 PCs for the day, and as Tuesdays are our busiest day I suspect that we'll spend half the day stopping the student going in the 'out of bounds' area. I'm anticipating a visit from an ESOL class at 7pm who are signing up for the 6 Book Challenge, and will be out of here at 7.30pm which will get me home just after 9. Mondays are long days!
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