Just a quick post in case you didn’t see the announcement on Jennie’s blog – the UK Library Blogs wiki is now open for any registered user to edit.

Time has flown by, but it’s been two whole years now since Jennie initially starting looking for UK library blogs. What initially began as an individual (Jennie!) searching out for other UK bloggers, was turned into a directory of both individual blogs written by librarians and library blogs written for users, and supplier or other information professional’s blogs. With a little bit of assistance from Phil Bradley, Christine Rooney-Browne, and myself, it has been kept up-to-date and developed further to incorporate additional entries to newly discovered blogs, relevant descriptions for each entry, dates last checked to ensure currency, and links to Twitter accounts where applicable.

The time has now come to open it up to enable anyone to register if they wish to add a new entry, edit their own entry, add new functionality, or just register to receive e-mail updates. We are also keen for anyone to use the data as they wish, such as Yahoo Pipes! to aggregate feeds, or the custom search engine I recently had a play with (although I’m sure there are plenty other more impressive things that can be done with the data!).

Many thanks again to Jennie for getting such a useful resource set up, and I hope it continues to develop

UK Library Blog wiki

For a while now, I’ve been helping Jennie (and Phil and Christine) administer the UK Library Blogs wiki with up-to-date details of blogs from the UK biblioblogosphere (i.e. library related blogs). It includes institutional blogs as well as personal blogs from all sectors in the information profession. The number of blogging (and microblogging) librarians in the UK seems to keep increasing, although there are some blogs that are now defunct, and a number that have chosen to change blogging platforms or converge multiple blogs into one. The wiki is a really useful resource (so please spread the word!), but there’s more that can be done now with the gathered blogs.

Yahoo Pipes to aggregate RSS

Last year Jennie copiously checked all the entries again, updated them, and produced a Yahoo Pipe for all the institutional blogs. This outputs as an RSS feed so that you can subscribe to which will pull in all the blog posts from institutional library blogs in the UK. Thanks to a conversation last week on Twitter, Gary Green volunteered to produce a pipe for the librarian blogs, although due to the large number of blogs this is currently running a little slowly.

Google Custom Search Engine

I still felt there was more which could be done with this list of blogs to utilise all the useful information within them. For example, wouldn’t it be great if you could see what UK librarians are saying about a certain topic (perhaps what they have written about CILIP, or what they think of the new iPad)? Or search across all the library blogs to see the sorts of things being discussed in library blogs for a specific subject or topic (e.g. to see what their vacation opening hours are like at a glance, or to see what libraries are doing with QR codes)?

After feeling inspired by a chapter in Nicole Engard’s Library Mashups book, I decided a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) might be a useful tool to use. There are a lot of blogs on the wiki so it took a day or so of playing, but I have now added all the blogs (both current and abandoned if they are still live) to create a UK Library/Librarian blogs Google CSE (accessed from this link or by searching below).

I’ve tagged the blogs with different categories (this is done by adding different categories in the Refinements section of the CSE control panel), so that you can refine the search to only include Librarian blogs (usually individual, although there are some group blogs), Library blogs (usually institutional), or Supplier/Industry blogs. As you can see in the screenshot below, it’s just a case of performing the search, and then using the refinements to narrow the search down further.

Google CSE - Refinements

I’d appreciate feedback at this stage, so please try it out and let me know what you think – is this something worth developing further? Would you find it useful? I’m not sure how Google manages the algorithms for the search, so I don’t know how reliable or useful the search results will be, but I’d appreciate it if people could test it out and letting me know if this sort of thing might be useful.

The future?

I’m happy to include the search box on Joeyanne Libraryanne blog, but am also considering using the Blogroll to Google CSE WordPress plugin which was developed for Libraries Interact to list australian library blogs and can be used as both a custom search engine and also to list and link to all the included blogs. This is relatively easy to administer, especially when compared to the Google CSE which seems a little flaky once a large number of sites are added. I might experiment with this plugin anyway, but would appreciate feedback in the comments, or by email on whether people think this would be useful?

By the way – if you are a UK library/librarian blogger and your blog is not included, please let me know and I’ll add it to both the wiki and the search engine.

This is one of a series of posts documenting my daily activities as a Resources Librarian at University of Wolverhampton, UK, as part of the Library Day in the Life project.

Today I’ll take the more traditional approach and record my activities, and the time I did them.

6.20 Second alarm went off, I finally decide it’s time to get up.

6.45 Leave home.

6.55 Get first bus.

7.25 Get University shuttle bus.

7.50 Arrive at work, such a quicker journey when I get the earlier buses.

8.00 Opened up (with help from colleague) – turned on OPACs, changed date to show Friday opening hours (we close earlier on Friday evenings), cancelled evening phone diversion, unlocked desk drawers etc.

8.10 Chat with colleague to update her on my recent discussions with the cataloguer about items in the Teaching Practice Collection. I’m hoping to change a sequence and have all fiction classified together in a similar fashion to a public/school library to make it easier to browse, and have a few cataloguing queries about classmarks for teaching materials – I’d like them to be classified by curriculum subject to improve browsing, but currently some are classified in the education section (in reality all materials in this collection are educational). Also discussed my ideas for hosting a coffee morning for academic staff to get them in to see the collection following a thorough weed and rearrangement of the room. I’d love to get more involvement from staff and see them really engage with the collection – recommending resources and setting assignments for students to use the resources.

8.20 Check emails, Twitter and RSS feeds.

8.35 Phone enquiry (we’re not really open until 8.45 but I answered it anyway seeing as I was about) – student thought she may have left her mobile phone on a group study room yesterday. Had a quick check in all the rooms and couldn’t find it, so gave her the number for lost property.

8.45 Set my mood for the day, today I chose focused. 10 tips on how to stay focused on the back (which I read to colleagues in office).

Focused - mood for the day

8.55 Manager arrives and briefly updates us on his visit to Coventry University library yesterday. He was very impressed with the way they manage their IT enquiries – using kiosks for students to log calls for support, and all IT staff have an iPod Touch to track enquiries whilst they’re out and about. He also seemed to really like the tracking devices that managers can use to check status of calls for each individual – how many they have, how quickly they are dealt with etc.

9.05 Checked our resources and Aberystwyth’s (where I am a distance learner) to see if I can get copies of some marketing articles for my dissertation, from a recommended list. Put in an inter library loan for one which I can’t get access to.

9.25 Checked mailing list emails (most are set up to go into a separate email folder). Followed up some links on upcoming events, and forwarded on an email on roving reference support which I think may be of interest to Katharine.

9.35 Took some more new books down to Teaching Practice, nice to see a keen student already working in there and using the resources.

10.00 Helped colleague with EndNote Web – preparing a presentation for a group of level one students in a few weeks, and our materials to support it need updating. Her PC doesn’t seem to want to work with Cite While You Write plugin in Word for EndNote Web, so I checked it out but couldn’t work out the problem. It’s something I’ve encountered before in the training sessions for EndNote Web, so I emailed a colleague to see if she knows what the problem might be.

10.15 Prepared for our staff meeting at 11, read the notes from the last meeting and checked the agenda.

10.25 Decided (as I’m so focused today!) to get back to a mini project of mine which I’ve been trying to get sorted since I had the idea at December’s Middlemash event. One of my bugbears as a subject librarian is finding out when new editions of books are published, generally I discover new editions when I re-check reading lists each semester (or as they are submitted, which is usually anytime after anyone needs the books). I’m hoping to create a Yahoo Pipe to help with this – to take details of the core books on reading lists for my subjects, run it through xISBN to get all related editions, organise by date descending and export as an RSS. That way I should be notified in my RSS reader whenever there is a new edition of any of my key texts, meaning I can order straight away (budget allowing!), and it ensures our stock is up-to-date. This may also help spread orders over the year rather than overloading orders assistants and processing staff in the run up to each semester. That’s the plan anyway! Unfortunately Yahoo Pipes wasn’t playing ball and keeps timing out so I gave up until later. If anyone has any advice on how to achieve this please let me know in the comments.

10.55 Sent an email to our helpful systems support and web admin (AKA Ben) to see if he can help with my new editions pipe.

11.00 Management meeting for Learning Centre (all librarians and supervisors from my centre). Included an interesting (and also a little bit silly!) discussion on how we should track who is in the building in case of fire – should we have multiple signing in sheets, or one ticksheet, or a laminated re-usable ticksheet, or velcro namebadges to add/remove, or in and out flip boards, or RFID tags?! I raised the issue about promoting that we are there to help on helpdesks (following yesterday’s discussion about students apologising for interrupting us), and we decided it would be a good idea to start promoting the helpdesks more and featuring staff in displays and electronic noticeboards so that people recognise who to ask for help. I’m hoping to work on a template using the new University brand guidelines for our electronic whiteboard, to feature staff and highlight what they can help with.

12.40 Quick lunch of gluten free crackers and Philadelphia – actually surprisingly yummy, despite everyone asking recently if I’m dieting! (I’m not, but have recently been diagnosed coeliac so am a little more limited in lunchtime choices). Office conversation recently has been about my lack of experimentation with food, so thanks to a kind colleague I had my first blueberry after lunch (only ever had them in muffins until now, shameful I know!).

13.00 Time to go on the enquiry desk until 3pm. Made sure to practice what I preach, and took my work out on the enquiry desk, nothing too involved so that people could see I was available to help. Also did some roaming and found people struggling to find books who I was able to help. Most of the enquiries were helping people use OPAC, finding books on the shelves or booking group study rooms. There was also a broken PC but a quick call to our IT team in the library soon fixed that (cable plugged in to wrong port!). Helped some lovely people and heard a fantastic quote: “I really like the library, I’d quite like to be a librarian.” Unfortunately I was eavesdropping at the time and wasn’t sure who said it so didn’t get chance to jump in and promote the profession. On days like today I love working on the enquiry desk; OK at times it can be a pain when you’re trying to work on office-based work (e.g. drowning in writing reports), but it’s such a rewarding part of the job. I replied to a couple of emails whilst I was on the enquiry desk, although hit my mailbox limit and lost one I’d written, downside of using Portable Firefox with Outlook Web Access is that it doesn’t save drafts.

15.00 Rewrote and sent email I’d lost, a reply to a mailing list request about using mobiles for roving, something I recently blogged about.

15.15 Photocopied some useful sections of Library Mashups book before passing it on to a colleague.

15.20 Added replacement items to one of the most popular items in Teaching Practice, the Owl Babies Storysack, which I’ve been waiting to be returned for a while.

15.30 Chatted to a colleague about Google Social Search, Yahoo Pipes and other technology related stuff, great to have someone else in the office to discuss these sort of things with. Google Social Search looks really interesting, looking forward to testing it out.

15.45 Called a journal publisher regarding a letter recently received with details of changes to our subscription. In common with many publishers, they’re moving more to online material now so I wanted to make sure we were fully utilising our subscription. Spoke to a very helpful advisor who explained the changes, helped me log into our account, and added me to their monthly email subscription so that I can forward the monthly updates to interested academic staff.

16.15 Needed to get some books off the shelves for reclassification. Found all but one and sent on to our cataloguers.

16.30 Cleaned up my inbox, briefly checked Twitter, and tried to clear my desk (don’t like leaving too much stuff on my desk at the end of the week if I can help it).

16.50 Last few little things for the week – sending book to a colleague, arranging a new label for the Storysack, gathering reports and articles to take home.

17.05 Shut down PC, grab coat, sign out, run to University bus stop and just make it! Weekend starts now, hoping to start work on my dissertation, off to see Stephen K. Amos (comedian) tomorrow, maybe a trip to home improvement stores, and hopefully some relaxation and cross stitching. Enjoy your weekend everyone.

This is one of a series of posts documenting my daily activities as a Resources Librarian at University of Wolverhampton, UK, as part of the Library Day in the Life project.

My desk at 11am - too much clutter and paperwork!

I was planning to get the earlier buses today which get me to work at 8ish so I could get some work done before we opened, but cuddles in bed with Cookie cat were too tempting to miss out on! I left home at 7.30 instead, and got the public bus and University shuttle. Bit of an eventful journey – I had a nose bleed on the University bus, but thankfully the kind student I was sat next to gave me loads of tissues.

I got to work just before 9am and checked emails, tweets and key RSS feeds. The project group for the CILIP big conversation was published this morning, and I was really pleased to learn that fellow new professional and blogger/microblogger Katie Fraser is on the group.

My first task of the day was to sort out a few outstanding issues from yesterday – cataloguing queries, new books, wrote a blog post etc. I also helped a colleague send a meeting request using Outlook Calendar – I’m a big user already but many colleagues prefer paper calendars. Outlook is good for sharing calendars though, and will be useful in future as staff are more geographically spread across campuses, so my colleague is keen to utilise it more.

At 10am I logged onto our virtual reference service; Thursday is our rota’d day to staff it. I had an early enquiry, but the user wanted to see someone in person ideally so I sent them a link to a relevant online help guide for their enquiry but also gave them information about where to get help in person. It always surprises me when students use our online service from within the building instead of going to the helpdesk, although I have to say my personal preference for getting help would probably be online.

A colleague is working through our reference collection and moving the majority into normal stock (reference collection is currently underused), and during the process she’s been looking at what we receive on standing order. I was really shocked to see the number of reference resources I didn’t know we had and particularly surprised to see the cost of them! Definitely something to look at more closely in future, particularly as so much information is now available online. I’d certainly be more likely to Google the name of a school to get contact details than look in the education yearbook.

Replied to some more emails, notified staff of new additions to the collection, and logged into my eportfolio as we had an email notifying us of new features. At this point I may have got slightly sidetracked with customising my eportfolio account! I’ve used it for the basics but would like to do more (or at least know how to!) on Pebblepad.

Then it was time for an early lunch, before my 1-3 slot on the enquiry desk. I had quite a few enquiries which was good as it’s been really quiet recently (many students didn’t return until this week). Lots of OPAC searches, directional enquiries, and helping people find books on the shelves. One thing I noticed on this slot were the number of students who apologising for asking for help, which worries me. Thankfully, I discovered after chatting to colleagues that it’s not exclusive to me, but we’re going to try to make sure the desk is more approachable and people don’t feel like they are interrupting – we are there to help after all!

Whilst I was on desk duty, I got materials together for an induction due at 4pm, but the lecturer called at 3.15ish and asked if we could move it forward. Thankfully the room was free so I took the group on a tour, and then gave them a brief introduction to our resources (PowerPoint and live demo). As always with these things, it didn’t go quite to plan – they seemed really impressed with e-books until I tried to get into one and hit an error page! Did get one working in the end though thankfully. They were a really enthusiastic group, and asked lots of questions which is always better than silence!

I finished the session at about 4ish, and spent the last hour tying up some loose ends with yet more emails, writing a blog post, and responding to a colleague about our RSS session. We run a session together for the Corporate Staff Development Programme, and it’s gathering more interest from teaching staff so we’re planning another scheduled session at the campus I’m based at, and more examples of RSS use in teaching included in the course. RSS is something we’re both quite passionate about, being advocates of new technologies and helping people manage information, and it’s great that we can help people utilise RSS feeds for teaching and research.

Last job for the day was taking some new books downstairs to the Teaching Practice Collection and checking a couple of classmarks, then it was time to log off virtual reference, shut down my machine, and go home. Thankfully no nose bleeds on the journey home!

This week is the fourth round of Library Day in the Life, a project started by Bobbi Newman in which librarians (and other library workers) document their work activities. This is usually via blog posts, although some prefer to use photos, and this time there are a large number tweeting, using the tag #libday4.

Library Scenester has written a great blog post explaining the project and how it could be used by different user groups to give an insight into what we actually do as librarians.

I participated in the last round last July (see my earlier posts for an idea of what I got up to that week last July), and am also participating this time. As I’m a part time worker I only wrote posts for Wed-Fri last time, but I thought this time I’d also include brief posts for Monday and Tuesday as I’m often involved in activities related to the profession.

If you’d like to join in with Library Day in the Life, add you details to the wiki and link to your posts/tweets/photos.

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Monday started with a lovely lie-in and cat cuddles (apologies to all who usually have to work on a Monday morning!). I then checked in with Twitter and caught up with my emails, mainly from in bed – I love my iPhone!

I decided at 10am it was probably time to get up, and did some household chores. I spent the rest of the morning on Twitter and responding to messages relating to CILIP West Midlands. Unfortunately, we’ve had to cancel the Libraries: Building for the Future event which was scheduled for 9th February, so I helped make sure we publicised the fact that it had been cancelled on all our communication channels. I was responsible for updating our CILIP West Midlands Twitter feed and Facebook Page.

After that, I edited an application I’m submitting for a sponsored student place at a conference, and then had some lunch.

This afternoon I’ve been researching different ways of integrating Twitter with WordPress, and looking at some really good WordPress plugins. I don’t currently use many on Joeyanne Libraryanne, but it’s always good to find out about new developments – a great feature of an open source community! I’m playing around with some new plugins to pull in Twitter responses to blog posts, and to publish my blog posts to Twitter (until now I’ve been using Twitterfeed but I have found it a little unreliable recently). The one I’m currently trying is Twitter Blog, which links to your bit.ly account (useful for tracking purposes), and pulls in Twitter replies into blog comments. It doesn’t do either perfectly (e.g. I’d like to be able to customise each Twitter post in case I want to add custom information), so I may well try others also, but I’ll see how this one does for now. We currently use WordPress.com blogs at our library, but I like to keep on top of WordPress developments as I’d love to use WordPress.org to host our own blogs in future to have greater control. We also use WordPress for some of our smaller websites at Cookies And Java (boyfriend’s business which I support on Mon/Tues), so it’s useful to know what plugins are out there to add extra functionality for clients.

It’s been a year full of ups and downs, mainly ups thankfully – although at times it’s been difficult to focus on the positives, I’ve learnt a lot this year about myself.

This time last year I had recently started my first professional librarian job, and one year in I’m really enjoying it – it was definitely worth all the hard work completing my Diploma. I’ve had the opportunity to work on projects such as improving the way we manage inductions, sharing information about our information literacy provision via an online shared calendar, communicating with our users via online technologies such as social media, and an evaluation of a collection leading to a lot of weeding and rearrangement of one of our rooms. It’s a part time position which has also given me the opportunity to also develop other areas.

I’ve learnt a lot more about marketing thanks to my work with my boyfriend at Cookies and Java, and this has given me inspiration for my MSc Dissertation. I had hoped I’d complete it this year to be honest, but life took over and my new target is the end of next year (this may also be too ambitious, we’ll see!).

I’ve also been able to spend time focusing my efforts on researching areas which really interest me, and I’ve done a heck of a lot of professional reading this year – books, journal articles, conference papers and blog posts. I’ve also attended conferences (highlights include the CoFHE Conference, New Professionals Conference, The Library Show and Middlemash – which I still need to write up!), training events, and participated in a number of other events online.

One major achievement for me this year is that I have spoken at two events, the New Professionals Conference and the CILIP Graduate Open Day. I was incredibly nervous but must have enjoyed it since I’ve volunteered myself for more! I’m really glad I decided to give it a go and am particularly thankful to my boss who encouraged me to go for it, and to role models such as Meredith Farkas for their inspiration and advice to push yourself that little bit further.

I’ve authored and co-authored more journal articles and it’s been really exciting to see my name in print. I’ve also continued to write posts for this blog, and really enjoy sharing my ideas and particularly getting comments back from readers. As I touched on last year, blogging has become integrated into my routine and is a really useful avenue for reflection or sharing ideas; it’s something I have also encouraged others to do this year.

My professional network has grown so much in 2009, particularly with other UK librarians and new professionals, and I think this is a massive highlight of 2009. The growth of popularity of Twitter has contributed enormously to this, and there are a number of new UK librarian bloggers too. I’ve also been able to meet a number of these people face to face this year which has been great (I was particularly starstruck when I met Phil Bradley at the Library Show), and I hope to meet more in 2010.

Being more connected with the librarian network in the UK has made me excited about what the future might bring for the profession, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to be a part of that change. The New Professionals Conference was a really positive event – there was so much enthusiasm and energy and it was great to meet other new professionals. Many of these, including myself, are now becoming more active in the future of the profession by becoming CILIP activists or even just making sure their voice is heard – the CILIP 2.0 event earlier in the year showed just how much people evidently have to say. CILIP’s Big Conversation in 2010 will hopefully bring some exciting ideas (although I share other’s worries that the initial invitation seems elitist).

I’m looking forward to the challenges of 2010 – for me personally that will include my MSc Dissertation, marketing responsibility for CILIP West Midlands, speaking at the CoFHE/UC&R conference, and possibly starting my Chartership. There will also be new challenges within my job role due to a restructure, and within the library profession as a whole with the changes in society, the economy and education. All I can say is bring it on, here’s to 2010! Happy New Year everyone

Just a brief post to highlight a new(ish) feature on WordPress.com blogs which you can use to link your blog posts to your Twitter account.

I talked about the importance of linking your online accounts at my talks at the New Professional’s Conference and the CILIP Open Graduate Day earlier this year, and at the time recommended using Twitterfeed to help you link your blog posts into Twitter. This is still a great service and works well with all RSS feeds, but if you just want to link your WordPress.com blog(s) to your Twitter account(s), you can now do it directly from your WordPress dashboard.

I was going to run through the process of doing this, but I found a great page on the WordPress support pages which includes screenshots for each stage, so rather than re-invent the wheel, here’s the link.

I’ve tested it out on one of my work blogs with our Twitter account and it works really well – you can edit the Twitter post from within the dashboard on your new post (in the Publish box on the right sidebar) and it posts almost immediately to your Twitter account after publishing the blog post. You can also use it with blogs with multiple authors and have just their authored posts going to their individual Twitter account which could be great for shared blogs.

Thought it was worth a blog post anyway, as it’s a somewhat hidden feature (well, I didn’t know how advanced it was anyway so thought others might not either!). At the moment this feature is just on WordPress.com blogs, but the developers have said they are working on a plugin to achieve the same thing on WordPress.org (self-hosted) blogs too.

I’ve recently co-authored an article with Christine Rooney-Browne for Refer, the journal of the Information Services group of CILIP, which has now been published in the Autumn 2009 issue. Refer offer some of the material from their journal online at REFERplus, and our article is available in pdf format, please feel free to read and let myself or Christine know what you think.

The article, “Blogging: an opportunity to communicate, participate and collaborate on a global scale”, is written primarily for reference librarians, although the majority of the material is general in nature. It was an interesting article to write; much of the material we already knew through our research interests and the fact that we both already blog ourselves, but it was interesting to research further into blogging and particularly some of the blogs written by, or for, reference librarians. We found blogs used internally for teams of reference librarians to assist each other in their work on the reference desk, reference blogs written about library services for the general public, and I also mentioned a personal favourite of mine, Swiss Army Librarian, which features a “Reference Question of the Week” – I always enjoy reading the enquiries he has had and how he answered them.

The process of co-writing the article was a new thing for me – we used e-mail and a wiki to communicate, and bought it all together towards the end in a Word document. I’ve also been trying out Google Wave recently though (feel free to get in touch if you’d like to add me as a contact), and I imagine something like Wave would make it even easier in the future to collaborate in such ways. It was good to bring our different knowledge and interests together in the article and I’m really quite pleased with the result. Many thanks to Christine, whom it was a pleasure to work with.

In my last post, I mentioned that I would be writing a post about how I got into librarianship, following a meme going round. Ned Potter has now set up a Library Routes wiki to record all these posts, in a similar way to the Day in the Life wiki. It’s really interesting reading everyone’s posts and I also think it could be very useful for anyone considering entering the profession to see how others got there. Here’s my story anyway…

I always wanted to be a primary school teacher – from as far back as I can remember that’s what I wanted to do. Throughout my time at school, the curriculum changed with more and more emphasis on performance in tests/exams and less importance on the child’s learning experience as a whole. The amount of planning and standards to adhere to also seem to restrict creativity in teaching and I just didn’t think it was for me.

I’m a qualified gymnastics coach (I used to compete in Sports Acrobatics until I left University) and had been coaching through my teenage years; I loved coaching but found it difficult to turn off afterwards, particularly when there were kids I was coaching who had problems at home. This confirmed teaching wasn’t right for me – I admire those who teach but for me I don’t think I’m mentally strong enough.

I finished my A-levels and because I wasn’t 100% sure about teaching I decided to do a regular degree and then I could always do a PGCE if teaching was the route I wanted to take. I really enjoyed the theory side of my PE A-level, so decided to apply for courses in Sports Science. I was also contemplating doing Maths (yes, I’m one of those weirdos who loves Maths), and I did consider a joint degree but in the end settled on doing Sports Science at University of Wales, Bangor. I loved my degree, and focused on Sports Psychology which fascinates me (I also did Psychology at A level and am really interested in studying people). I got a first in my degree (yay me!), then wondered what on earth to do next. I’d definitely ruled out teaching for the time being, and I didn’t fancy being a sports psychologist (although was tempted by an MSc/PhD route to lecturing).

However, we then moved to Wolverhampton (due to job prospects for my boyfriend), so I started looking for a job. I’d begun to try to look into librarianship (not really sure why, think it was suggested to me on an online test, and the idea of staying within education in some way appealed to me). I struggled to find any information in my careers library at Bangor or on the net (plenty of American information, not much in the UK), so I went to a jobcentre in Wolverhampton where I was told that they wouldn’t help me find a job because I lived with my boyfriend rather than my parents.

Feeling a bit deflated, I decided to get some voluntary library experience and a local friend came with me to the libraries she knew. I asked at the University and was told they don’t take people for voluntary experience, then tried the public library where I spent a day being told about the dodgy visitors to the library, scary experiences in the evening, and that there weren’t any jobs and I’d just have to wait until someone retired. It was all looking a bit bleak but a library assistant job came up in two of my local libraries, and my friend managed to get some work experience for me in the local high school too. I absolutely loved working in the school library, and the librarian there is fabulous – I still keep in touch when I can.

I was successful in one of the library assistant jobs, and was waiting for a CRB check to start working every Sunday for 3 hours – a whole £50/month! I spent a few weeks at the school in the meantime and then0 a graduate traineeship came up at the University library. The school librarian I was with used to work at the University too so she gave me an inytroduction to what it was like and I decided to go for it. I waited ages after I’d sent in my application and thought I hadn’t got an interview – but then on the last day I got a letter inviting me to interview. The interview was pretty intense – I had to do a presentation followed by a panel interview, and I have to admit I didn’t have a clue about some of it – I was asked about journal database providers and the librarian situation in Bangor (as an undergrad I don’t even know if we had a librarian and I did use Sports Discus but had no idea what platform it was on!). I didn’t think I stood much of a chance but got a call that evening to say that they hadn’t made a decision yet but that I was in the shortlist. The following morning I got the call to say I’d got the job and could I start the following week!

The job was a one year contract, and since then I’ve shifted campuses and worked different contracts, usually for a year each time, whilst I studied for my Information and Library Studies course via distance learning (Aberystwyth). I worked at the public library on Sundays for just over a year, but gave that up when I started my course. Last year I finished the Diploma section of my course, and shortly after I applied for a Resources Librarian post at yet another campus. I got the job, and am now almost a year into my first professional librarian post. I still need to complete my dissertation to get the MSc, but I am really loving librarianship – it’s the perfect career for someone like me who enjoys a variety (with the exception of Art and History I loved all school subjects), likes flexibility and different job tasks, and wants to help people. It really is the best combination for me – I still get to teach but I get to do so much more too!

If you’re working in the information profession, it would be great to hear your story – you can write a blog post if you have a blog and link to it from the Library Routes wiki, or if you don’t have a blog you can write a page on the wiki (there are instructions on the home page). Looking forward to hearing other’s stories!

There’ve been a couple of blog memes going round the UK biblioblogosphere ( library bloggers!), so I thought I’d join in.

The first is a post about how you got into librarianship, which I’ll write later this week, and today’s is Reading Habits (so far completed by WoodsieGirl, Jaffne, stupidgirl_no1, iOverlord and infobunny). I’m writing this one first as Infobunny asked us all to write it and I must obey Bunny – as should you, so please feel free to carry the meme on with your own reading habits.

Do you snack while you read? If so, favorite reading snack?

Not usually, no. If I’m reading on the sofa or outside during a nice relaxing day I may snack on sweets (Haribo Tangfastics are my sweet of choice), but I usually read in bed or on the bus – not really prime snacking locations.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read, or does the idea of writing in books horrify you?

I don’t think I’ve ever written in a book, but I do sometimes use those annoying sticky markers. If it’s a borrowed book I always remove them before returning though, good librarian that I am. Writing in books doesn’t horrify me, but I do think you should only write in a book you own.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog-ears? Laying the book flat open?

I usually use one of those boring clip bookmarks, I do have a couple of nice bookmarks that I use occasionally though. I can’t stand it when people leave a paperback book open, my books tend to look almost brand new after I’ve read them. In all fairness though I think this probably stems from when I used to sell my books on after reading them rather than because the books are sacred and it might hurt their feelings.

Fiction, Non-fiction, or both?

Bit of both, but usually fiction in my own time. Having said that, I read a lot on my commute which currently takes 60-90mins each way, and that reading is usually non-fiction – journal articles, textbooks, reading for work etc. I did a lot of my course reading for my distance learning MSc whilst on the bus.

Hard copy or audiobooks?

Hard copy, I downloaded an audiobook once to try but kept getting distracted when I was listening to it. I’m not very good at doing just one thing at a time as I get distracted (when listening to music it’s normally as background music), so I find it very difficult to concentrate on an audiobook.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?

I prefer to read to the end of a chapter (one reason I love short chapters like James Patterson!). The book I’m reading at the moment doesn’t have chapters and I’m finding it annoying having to leave it midway through a page.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?

No, I don’t think I’ve ever looked a word up unless it’s something I’m reading for a course. Usually though I can figure out what it means from the context.

What are you currently reading?

“This Charming Man” – bought as a holiday read but didn’t get chance to read it, struggling to read it now as I’m not enjoying it. Also Paco Underhill’s “How We Buy: The Science of Shopping” which I’ve only just started but is really fascinating.

What is the last book you bought?

Holidays reads from Amazon – A Spring Affair, Rumour Has It, and This Charming Man.

Are you the type of person that only reads one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time?

I usually have one fiction book at a time (which I tend to read each night in bed), and at least one non-fiction (usually relating to work or studies).

Do you have a favorite time of day and/or place to read?

I actually enjoy reading the work related stuff on my journey to and from work – I use that time as reflection and it’s quite good to have some theory to read about and relate it to work. As for fiction, I only really tend to read it in bed as I’m drifting off to sleep, but if it is a particularly good book I may read it at weekends/evenings and during the commute.

Do you prefer series books or stand alone books?

No real preference. I tend to read stand alone books, but I enjoy James Patterson’s Women’s Murder Club crime series, and also the Harry Potter and Twilight series (shameful I know but I loved the Twilight books!).

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over?

Not really. You may have noticed I don’t tend to read many serious books, in the same way my TV choices are mainly trashy; I like to not have to think much when I read fiction. Sophie Kinsella books fit the bill perfectly, and I have recommended the Shopaholic series to people in the past. I recently really enjoyed Mike Gayle’s To Do List (non-fiction) and recommended that to people – I also saw him at the Library Show just after I read it and was all starstruck!

How do you organize your books? (By genre, title, author’s last name, etc.?)

I don’t organise them apart from into piles of to-be-read and those I’ve already read. I don’t tend to keep many books – most go to the local charity shop, so there’s no real need to organise them. I did used to organise my CDs though, they were all alphabetical (in the loft now as they’re all on my PC!).