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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

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.

Labels: academic libraries, librarydayinthelife, professional development

I am participating for the first time in the Library Day in the Life project in which library workers all around the world blog or otherwise record their working days for a week. Check out the Library Day in the Life wiki for further details. For those new to the blog I am currently working as an academic librarian, supporting Business and Accounting, in the UK.

I've been away from the library for six working days with my MA Librarianship graduation and a week's annual leave. I'm approaching the end of my contract as academic liaison librarian for business at De Montfort University so was using up the annual leave I had left. I came back from holiday to have a familiar panic that I was supposed to be on the help desk first thing (I always have Friday afternoons off, and often miss the rota coming round) but didn't have any shifts today. I seem to be getting better at avoiding a last minute dash!

On the train in the morning I was occupied with reading my notes for the presentation I was giving at lunchtime. This was on my MA dissertation project, and consisted of talks I'd given to a visiting group from UCR Wales in the Information Commons at the University of Sheffield (on which my dissertation focused) and at the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) Annual Conference. I'd presented both parts (the findings and theory) separately before, so once at work I just produced my handouts and then started wading through my accrued email from the previous week.

I'd reduced my emails to one page by the time I had to head to the Academic and Professional Development Unit, where I was presenting. The two talks seemed to gel together quite well, and I was pleased to get some practice presenting. I'm going to be giving regular lectures in my new job starting in February (as part-time academic liaison librarian for science at Leicester University). The questions after the talk were really interesting, and we had a great discussion about how students can be encouraged to use learning spaces in new ways. Plus, free sandwiches.

After a quick break for a walk I went to see Nathan (the normal business librarian, who is seconded into another post) deliver a lecture I'd written for him on library resources as part of a module on Professional Skills for Accountants. The talk seemed to go well - I liked the way he fleshed out my slides with lots of live searches as examples - but some students at the back talked all the way through, which was a shame. Last week I went to a staff-student committee in which students complained about other students talking in lectures (I heard some students shh-ing in this lecture too), and it's making me consider whether to address this kind of behaviour more actively: it's nerve-wracking, but I can see the benefits.

In the afternoon I caught up with a few more tasks. There are some which never seem to end, and two of my old faithful eternal projects (setting up a complex database, and a book I'm ordering through non-standard channels) came back to haunt me. I'm pleased to say that I made a bit of progress with both before hometime... maybe they'll be finished before my contract ends!

Picture taken in Lincoln in October 2009, on the way to a comedy festival. Moving into librarianship seems to have given me an uncontrollable desire to photograph things with the word 'library' on them.

Labels: academic libraries, dissertation, librarydayinthelife, professional development