Victoria Park, which sits behind the University.
This is my second set of posts as part of the Library Day in the Life project, although it’s the fifth round of the project as a whole, which aims to record typical (and atypical) days of library workers around the world. You can find all of my posts within this project under the librarydayinthelife tag. For those new to this blog, I am an academic librarian, providing scientific subject support at a UK university.
I was only in the library on Monday and Tuesday this week. My current post is usually part-time, working Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Friday mornings, but this week I swapped Wednesday for Monday and ended up taking Friday morning off to give myself a short break. This crammed a lot of activities into two days!
My first activity on Monday was attending the Web 2.0 forum – a group of librarians, researchers, student support, educational technologists etc. who meet up to discuss web 2.0 and its use in the university. I’ve never been before as I’m rarely in work on Monday mornings, so it was an interesting experience, although attendance was low because of the summer break. There was lots of discussion of e-books – both in terms of e-book readers and support for e-books provided by the library – and also mobile web access to university resources. Lots to be thinking about!
When I got back to the office I finished checking my email and started addressing a query from a member of academic staff about obtaining some topographical maps of Iceland: they were out-of-print, but he’d heard they might be obtained from the British Library. A quick visit to our Document Supply department across the office established we weren’t quite sure of the details, so I ended up contacting British Library customer service, who told me it might be possible to obtain something through the imaging service rather than the document supply service, but that it was best to contact the Map Library directly for details.
A member of staff from our Student Development team contacted me via Twitter to ask if I’d be interested in joining the new dissertation wiki she’d set up. I’ve got a user account on at least five different wiki sites, so I spent a few minutes researching my own account details for the right one, and then sent a request to join.
This was followed by a meeting of the team redesigning the library website. Next academic year the library is in line to move its website onto the University’s new content management system: this project is looking at making some changes to the website for the upcoming academic year, and then will move on to the redesign as a whole in collaboration with the web team. I had to quickly finalise my choices of interesting library site designs to take to the meeting.
In the meeting we had a productive conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of the sites we’d brought, and ended up with a task to put together some suggested layouts for our new pages for next year. In addition, I need to learn a bit more about Google Analytics, which the library systems team have set up on the current webpages, to help interpret our usage statistics.
Tomorrow: the map query, part 2!
