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Decided to merge my last three days of Day in the Life together, as I did too much miscellaneous stuff, and not enough sitting down and writing. Consider this edited highlights!

Wednesday morning I spent looking for some new DVDs providing training in team building, meetings, and other workplace communication skills. Unfortunately the only materials I could source which seemed good enough to keep student attention were the ones we already owned (but on DVD rather than video). Too expensive to justify buying twice, so I'm still looking, if anyone has any ideas!

After that, an induction session. It was arranged as part of an induction programme for a small course, but only the library session was on Wednesday. Isolate library sessions never seem to encourage students to attend. Terrible turnout: a few arrived on time and a few late, making eight out of an expected twenty. I wasn't presenting, but did lead the tour, and felt a bit better about making the effort to organise the session when the students who did come were interested and asked lots of questions.

Most of the rest of the day week involved wrapping up activities, as this was my penultimate full-time week in the post. Wednesday concluded with my late night in which I created (by request from the head of my section) a list of keywords for induction demonstrations (such as databases) for the different departments I cover. There's some general subject-specific keywords, some comparative ones to show the difference keyword choices make, and a classic article to use in citation searches for each of the four departments. Sourcing and trialling these took me most of my late night shift, bar ten minutes which I spent editing margins so the crib sheet fitted onto a single handy sheet of paper!

Thursday and Friday morning (I work only the morning on Fridays to compensate for the late night) involved summary activities which more or less ran into each other. There were a couple of highlights. On Thursday afternoon we had an interesting session on the government's new Customer Service Excellence standard, which we're working towards, identifying measures we could use to demonstrate our excellence.

The best part of the week for me, though, was the announcement that I've made the Project Board for the Big Conversation: a discussion that CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in the UK) is running to determine its future. I'm really pleased and got lots of nice comments on Twitter from people who were happy to have a New Professional on the board. I've got project experience from my PhD and other academic activities, plus a billion opinions on research methods, so I'm hoping to be valuable in choosing a strategy for the project. The first meeting kicks off in February. Definitely a memorable week for me!

Picture: Sign at the new Nottingham Contemporary art gallery. I caught the end of the David Hockney exhibition on my week off this month.

Labels: academic libraries, CILIP, librarydayinthelife, professional development