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.

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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!

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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.

I decided not to blog yesterday, as most of my day was taken up with family activities (Monday and Tuesday are non-library days for me anyway). I did do a couple of library profession related activities though: completed and submitted my application for a student place at a conference, and emailed my newly appointed dissertation supervisor (more on this in a future post, exciting!).

Today was a late night librarian shift for me (although it’s only until 7.45pm). I work late every other Wednesday, and don’t tend to start work on these days until 12-1pm. I had a bit of a lazy morning (always a treat!), and finished reading the Non-Designer’s Design Book (highly recommended, although not read the second book on type yet) before setting off for work at 10.45am.

Due to timings, I took the public bus route into work (I usually get the University shuttle but it only runs once an hour). I spent the journey in my usual way – listening to music, tweeting, and reading. Today I had some dissertation related reading (library marketing journal articles) with me so I read a couple of those during my three bus trip.

I got to work at about 12.45pm (following a brief visit to Tesco to grab some food for later) and spent the next half hour or so catching up with colleagues on anything I’ve missed. One of the drawbacks of working part-time is the amount of information you miss out on whilst you’re not in work, so a lot of my first day back each week is spent catching up on and responding to emails, and finding out about changes or developments I need to know about verbally (plus the obligatory what people got up to at the weekend although it seems a long time ago!). In fact, most of the day today was spent catching up and responding to emails – something I’ve noticed is people seem to have longer strings of email conversations at the beginning of the week, or maybe it’s just my colleagues!

I helped out with a few enquiries (face to face and phone), checked in new books that had arrived since Monday, and prepared for an induction I was taking at 3.30pm. My manager had also asked me to find out if any other Universities loan equipment through the library management system on behalf of academic schools, so I asked on the Twitter and got lots of replies really quickly which I forwarded on to him. It was yet again great to demonstrate how useful Twitter can be.

I went to my induction at 3.30, and found that there were only two students – was a good job though really as the room I’d booked was occupied. I took them on a whistle stop tour of the building, and then logged onto a PC to show them the basics of OPAC and our major health databases. Despite being new students on this course, both had studied with us before so they were clued up on most of the basics which was great. I updated them on some of our newer services, and made sure they knew how to get help if they need it later on in their course.

Then it was back to the office where I had a message to call back a colleague on another campus. It was about a cataloguing request I’d made last week about the Teaching Practice collection, and as always seems to be the case, it’s not quite so straight forward as I initially thought. However, between us, I think we managed to establish the ideal situation, and with a bit of give and take I think we’ll hopefully get somewhere near to what I’d like.

Then it was time for a quick snack before the late night desk shift. It’s the first week of the semester so I had thought it might be busier tonight but I only had three in person enquiries – two of which were from the same person. I booked study skills sessions for a couple of students, and spent the rest of my evening responding to emails, mainly about reference management (we support EndNote and EndNote Web).

I was following the Apple news too, and was periodically checking TechCrunch and Twitter to see what exactly Apple are releasing and if it has any implications for libraries. I’m looking forward to seeing the iPad, although like many I think the name will have to be a grower! I was pleasantly surprised to see the price (a lot less than I had expected), and can certainly see that it would be useful for roaming (something I mentioned in an earlier post). I can also imagine that it will be a pretty affordable option for students, and particularly useful if they can get a good network deal in the UK. I can certainly see it could be useful for those living in halls – keep the keyboard dock in their room for writing assignments, and carry the iPad around to make notes in lectures and communicate whilst out and about.

My boyfriend kindly collected me from work at the end of my shift and cooked me a lovely tea whilst I was writing this blog post, and now I’m off to watch a bit of TV and do some cross stitch before bed.

I’m hoping tomorrow I can get some real work done now the emails are down to a manageable level! I’ll try to take some photos too, was planning to today but completely forgot so might edit this tomorrow to add an appropriate picture.

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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.

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