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The view of my desk at work

As I was only in for two days this week a major goal for today was clearing my inbox as far as possible! I tend to have folder for projects so this isn’t too alarming a task, but I had a few queries to follow up and things to get done before I went.

Firstly, I followed up on the map query from yesterday by establishing contact with the map library. They were very helpful. Unfortunately, copyright restrictions meant the maps couldn’t be copied without permission from the publisher, but they did fax me through the details of the series of maps I needed. Once I had the publisher’s name I was able to source quite a few alternative points of access: one local stockist of a CD with the maps on, and also online versions of the maps (which were useable with help from Google Translate!)

My original plan was to be in work on Monday and Wednesday this week, so I didn’t think I would be in today, and only belatedly remembered I’d said I was unable to help with some teaching on Tuesday morning. The teaching was unique to this time of year: helping tutors who were going to be supporting international students in researching essays for our summertime international induction courses. I was able to pop in to the session and help support one of our biological science librarians in demonstrating some general science resources which might be relevant for students to search.

I made my way through the majority of the emails I had – mostly small things – as the day progressed. This included providing some text for a distance learning handbook for Geography with details of library services. I was able to borrow a large part of the text from another of our librarians who has a much larger portfolio of distance learning students in the departments she supports. However, I needed to check a lot of the details of services provided, including where a graduate certificate fitted in our various borrowing and service categories!

Lastly, I was down to two messages in the inbox, and had to finish sending off the details of our subscriptions to individual academic journal titles to one of the departments I support. I’ve been trying to find time within a staff meeting to discuss these within departments, but as this department doesn’t have a staff meeting scheduled until after our deadline for decisions, we decided to email the list of current subscriptions round, like previous years. As I send the email, I’m thinking there must be a better method than inviting email comments, perhaps some kind of online questionnaire? I make a note to investigate this further with the other departments when I came back from my break, and then my library day in the life week for Summer 2010 is over!

Tuesday, and I started the morning by working on my module spreadsheet: my somewhat haphazard knowledge management project. I don’t have access to any centralised information about the modules I support, so every time I get a little bit of information – module details, leaders, student numbers etc. – I squirrel it away in my spreadsheet. I’d gathered from a departmental meeting that a lot of the module codes for Human Resource Management were changing this year, so I asked for a list of the changes from the HRM module admin to update my info. I’m hoping to compare this information to our reading list stock before I leave to get some idea of which need updating and which we can drop off the system.

After that, I started updating the library ‘How To’ sheets on Internet searching. It’s something I’ve been asked to look at before I go. At the moment my major dilemma is how much to expand them. It’s tempting to put in lots of information, but I actually think their current simplicity is a strength, so I’m mainly concentrating on updating them for currency.

As well as the work I plan to do, there’s always a little bit of work which travels over to my desk when I’m not there, in the form of notes or mysterious items. I went for a hot chocolate after being thoroughly chilled by some unnecessary air conditioning, and returned to discover a textbook and a copy of the Radio Times TV listing magazine on my desk. While I was deciding whether or not to withdraw and / or replace the first textbook (missing some index pages) by looking at usage and considering its currency, a second textbook arrived. Luckily the second book was hardly used, badly damaged and had a second copy, making at least one easy decision. Once the books were sentenced I read through the Radio Times, sadly finding no business-related TV for the week to record, and headed up to the Information Desk for my shift.

I was on the Information Desk for an hour. It’s always hard to tell when we’ll be busy, and so it’s not too unusual that the first 15 minutes were deserted, and the next 45 frantic. I pointed one student towards books on dissertation / research project writing and gave some literature searching hints and tips, including explaining peer review. I found a spelling mistake on a reading list which was stopping one student finding a book on the catalogue, and tried to help another find some photographs of insects as a reference for drawing. As so often happens, as soon as I got back to my desk I thought of better places to look, but hopefully I did enough, and at least I’ll remember next time! Then lunch.

After lunch I was ‘on call’ for the Research Training Programme for PhD students we hold in our lecture theatre. There’s a morning looking into the process of literature searching, current awareness etc. and then the students get a practical session on Endnote (the reference management software) in the afternoon. This wouldn’t always happen, but there’s a bit of library flu going round, and so we were short of staff with Endnote knowledge to support the session. However, if I’m around during this bit of the session I do pop down occasionally as I used Endnote to manage my references for my PhD, and so I’ve got lots of practical hints and tips on use. I went down to answer some general questions, including those of one repeat customer who’d picked up importing references to Endnote at the last session, and now wanted me to demonstrate a bit of Cite While You Write (using Endnote in conjunction with Microsoft Word).

I then went back up to the office (answering one more Endnote query remotely!) and did a little more office work. I finally crossed off one of the ‘to-do’ items I’ve had on my list for a while. Since I arrived we’ve been setting up a new database, and one with relatively unusual requirements and demands. I’d asked for some information from other librarians on a mailing list on how they ran the database, and needed to collate their responses to feed back to the list. I went through their mostly unstructured responses and categorised them, to make it clear which strategies other libraries had used and finished just in time to re-check my emails and go home.

Photo: Note the cunning tie-in via the use of the word ‘squirrel’ in the first paragraph. The bird seeds at home have been subject to attack by this furry critter.