Library Day in the Life

I am off work for the rest of the week so this will be my only contribution to the Library Day in the Life project. I hope it is interesting and please feel free to ask questions:

Managed to check up on last night’s Twitter action and read my RSS feeds on the way to the gym. Not a great start to today as the gym have moved my locker to a more inconvenient place and seem to have lost all but one of my towels in the process. This meant that I had only one towel and couldn’t put one round my hair which was irritating.

Got into work about 8.45 (I actually start at 9.30) had a lovely summer fruits cereal bar for breakfast as well as six vitamin tablets – calcium/bone vitamins, echinacea, vitamin C and a multi-vitamin: I’m just paranoid about being fluey!- and got to work trying to cut down some of the 200 emails I had received and adding the relevant tasks on to my (already quite long) to do list.

Replied to a query from a member of the CILIP in London committee (which I belong to) about how LIKE (London Information and Knowledge Exchange) where I am a host organises events.

Quickly popped on to LinkedIn and LISNPN (the network for new professionals). I am New Professionals Support Officer for London and the South East so I try to get on LISNPN most days to see if there are any queries I can help with. I also added a couple of new blogs to my Google reader (I’ve just started using it and I’m not that impressed but trying to stick with it!) and pulled out the urls of a few linguistics blogs I think a colleague might be interested in.

The first job of day (and one which is ongoing) is to try to ensure that all of our intranet pages are up to date and any which are not sufficiently important have been deleted. The whole team is working on this but I’m aware that I haven’t given it too much time as yet thus having a quick blitz before I find something more urgent/important/fun to do.

A supplier of ours is due to visit the Glasgow office but hasn’t heard back from the contact there so I give him a call to chase up on what is currently planned. I then turned my attention to our sign up sheet. I have put a page up on the intranet where one ticks the boxes of the current awareness emails that can be received to be added to the mailing list. I needed to add someone’s details in manually.

The next thing I did was to go along to our team meeting. This is just a very quick catch up between the Research and Information teams to say what we all have planned for the week ahead.

After that I finalised a training session I had arranged with an external trainer coming in to speak to the attendees.

The next item on my list was to quickly browse the new books list from Wildy’s to see if there were any items I would like to purchase. I also skimmed through our daily DeHavilland round-up to see if there were any stories which it would be worth sending on to any of the sector groups.

The two projects I am currently working on are a business case for a GIS (geographic information system) and a guide on how to use some resources to which we have recently gained access. I spent from about 11.45 until 1pm finishing off the GIS report. I then quickly downloaded a few Treasury documents and nipped off to lunch.

I was meant to be having lunch with a friend but unfortunately she is ill so I instead spent lunch time at my desk with salad, vegetable pasta, grapes and diet coke from our staff canteen downstairs reading through Twitter and the last Legal Information Management (with the addition of tow copies of Update – just the long articles at the end which I never seem to get round to!). I also quickly noted down the important events and appointments I have planned in my personal diary and my desk calendar.

Lunch was over far too soon but armed with a coffee brought over by one of the Researchers (we do rounds) I got stuck in to a little bit of cataloguing. We use an in house classification scheme which was a bit complicated at first but now comes as second nature. I had a few books and some legislation to put onto the system but I didn’t get through the whole pile as I had to discuss with a member of the team who deals with subscriptions why we are missing an issue of the Journal of Planning and Environment Law. He is now on the case with our subscription agents. I really enjoy cataloguing as I find it very therapeutic but I hardly ever get to do it.

The next thing to do was to discuss the progress of some changes to the user interface of a product to which we subscribe with our account manager. Work is progressing well and the interface should be changed by the beginning of February.

Next on the list was to call a surveyor in the Manchester office about a Land Registry search we arranged for him last week. He just wanted clarification about the situation of unregistered land.

Next I dealt with an enquiry asking for a planning case. It was a bit of a tricky one as the case citation didn’t seem to exist at first but a bit of digging found the correct case. I then found an article for another planner.

The next portion of my day was spent fiddling about with spreadsheets. I then moved on to compiling a list of resources to show to our senior new starts that might be helpful to them.

Finally, I started to draft a search tips hand out – just basic Boolean operators. At 5.30pm I set my out of office, changed my voicemail and set off…

Today probably wasn’t a typical day – there were far fewer enquiries than usual and a lot more instances of me finishing tasks than is generally the case but I hope that it was at least interesting!