This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the sixth time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009, January 2010, July 2010, January 2011 and July 2011. I’m currently a full-time Researcher at Evidence Base, Birmingham City University, UK. Although my job title doesn’t include the word librarian and I don’t work in a library, I still consider myself very much a librarian – our research helps support the library and information communities.

Just a short post today as it’s Friday evening and I have a friend coming to visit. I’ll just give a brief overview of today’s tasks:

• Worked on the Emerging Leaders project (gave feedback on survey and added liaison details into our contacts spreadsheet)
• Updated the contact list of JUSP libraries in Surveymonkey (new libraries are joining all the time and I add them into the contact list monthly) and scheduled a feedback survey to go out to them next month 
• Had a catch up call with my manager (we don’t usually have these daily but have a lot of little bits we’re working together on at the moment and this is the easiest way to update progress)
• Had a Skype call for the m-libraries community support project with the programme manager at JISC – this was really useful and we discussed future activities such as a community event, the community website, and the m-libraries conference in September
• Produced a document outlining our ideas for the m-library community event 
• Updated the Twitter guidelines for JUSP based on feedback from the project team
• Wrote a blog post for the Evidence Base blog reporting on the LIS DREaM event I went to on Monday

Hope you have found this insight into my week interesting. My work varies every single day depending on the projects we’re working on. It’s a nice mix at the moment – two external projects and some internal research for the library. 

This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the sixth time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009, January 2010, July 2010, January 2011 and July 2011. I’m currently a full-time Researcher at Evidence Base, Birmingham City University, UK. Although my job title doesn’t include the word librarian and I don’t work in a library, I still consider myself very much a librarian – our research helps support the library and information communities.

Today I was working from home which usually means I can get a lot more done, but today my brain seemed to be on slow mode. I did get things done in the end but I worked into the evening to get everything done, which I’m really trying to get out of the habit of doing. My to-do list also seemed to grow rather than shrink today – I’d get one task done and need to add another two or three! So what did I actually do today?

My day began with some sorting and planning – prepping for a couple of calls, organising my tasks, and keeping project documentation up-to-date. Then I had a call with my manager where we discussed things we’re up to at the moment – project progress for the m-library community support project and JUSP, and some focus groups we’ve been asked to do on e-books for our library (based on the results of a library survey we ran at the end of last year). We started planning these and I suggested using Eventbrite to organise the booking. Last time we did focus groups the administration was a nightmare – we have two part-time support staff but this doesn’t cover the full week so I was also responding to some of the messages. It got very confusing with three of us trying to organise the participants and the sessions they could attend (and especially when we had to cancel one of the sessions), so I’m hoping Eventbrite might make things simpler. 

Lunch next, which I always enjoy at home because I can have something other than a jacket potato (today I had gluten free pasta with tomato and mozzarella sauce) and watch some TV (today I watched a very emotional episode of One Born Every Minute). 

This afternoon started well – one of the senior managers noticed my news in the recent library newsletter about being an ALA Emerging Leader and wants to feature it in the wider University newsletter. Could be useful for the Chartership portfolio!

We’re currently finalising some use cases for the JUSP project to demonstrate how libraries are using the service. We visited a number of libraries last year, and interviewed more over the phone/Skype. After writing up each library’s interview as a case study, we decided that they would best be presented as use cases. They are now written up and we’re getting approval for use of quotes from the libraries involved. I made some amendments based on one library’s feedback today. 

Then it was time to make the edits to the report write up of the m-library support project fact-finding survey. Some grammatical and formatting changes, and some additional quotes added in to demonstrate some of the examples of current m-library initiatives. 

I also tidied up my Chartership evidence submission form. I’m using a Google spreadsheet so that I can add things easily from anywhere with web access (I have a copy of the form starred in my inbox and can also access the form through my browser on iPhone or iPad). I had columns for what area of my PPDP and what marking criteria each piece of evidence supports, but this was a free entry text box. I’ve now added each option as a checkbox so I can just tick the box and easily check what information I have for specific areas. It’s working well for me so far (I’d be happy to share or give more details if anyone is interested). 

Tomorrow I have a couple more calls (are you noticing a theme here?!) and hopefully some work-related blog posts as I’m falling behind (it’s unfortunately something that always slips to the bottom of the to-do list as it’s not as essential as other tasks, but I still need to make time for it).

This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the sixth time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009, January 2010, July 2010, January 2011 and July 2011. I’m currently a full-time Researcher at Evidence Base, Birmingham City University, UK. Although my job title doesn’t include the word librarian and I don’t work in a library, I still consider myself very much a librarian – our research helps support the library and information communities.

Day in the office today – which ironically usually means I get much less done (too many interruptions and errands). It took me longer than expected to get in this morning (had forgotten what traffic was like during peak times!) but I travel by public transport and always have my iPad with me so I can work on the way in. I finished drafting comments for the report I’ve been reviewing during the journey, and caught up with news on Twitter.

When I arrived at work I found a lovely surprise parcel of goodies from Lisa Jeskins who is part of the LILAC Conference organising committee. I’d been telling lots of people how much I love the LILAC conference whilst I was at ALA Midwinter last week so had joked that I should be on commission. Lisa clearly thought I should be so sent me these:

I’d also had some new stationery delivered so I had quite an exciting start to the day (I know I’m sad but I love getting new stationery!). After a quick catch up with my colleagues, we decided to bring forward a discussion we were planning for next week (it’s rare that we are all together). We’re getting our communication in order and have devised a new system to help share news from our department with the rest of the library and with those external who are interested in our work (most of our work is external). Internally, we’re using the library newsletter whilst externally we have an Evidence Base blog (and may later set up a MailChimp mailing list once our new website is sorted). My colleagues aren’t very familiar with blogging so I agreed to help them get started and provide some informal training for them. Unfortunately we had many hurdles (it seemed to take ages to get their accounts sorted!) and then we got interrupted by an IT guy so we didn’t get as much done as I’d have liked.

I went out for lunch with Damyanti, but we went slightly later than expected and lost track of time whilst we were there so I returned back to work later than expected. Oops! Time for lots of grovelling to manager and quickly preparing for a project Skype call – I’d done my own preparation but hadn’t had chance to discuss with my manager. The call was for the JISC m-library community support project, and we’re at the point now where we know broadly want people want from an m-library community and we need to make decisions on how we can best deliver that. It was a productive call and I certainly feel a lot clearer about our activities for the short term at least. I’ve been interested in investigating how libraries can utilise mobile technologies for a long time, and I’m really enjoying working on a project I’m so interested in. There’s lots of really innovative work out there and we’re hoping to be able to share this with the wider community to prevent duplication and help drive developments further forward.

After the call (and after adding actions to my to-do list and tidying up project documents), I did a bit of work on the Twitter account for another project, the Journal Usage Statistics Project (JUSP). We’ve had a Twitter account (@JUSPSTATS) for a few months now but we haven’t been using it often, partly as it didn’t really have clear ownership or purpose. I’ve worked with some of my colleagues on the project to discuss our intended use and have developed some guidelines. Today I shared them with the rest of the project team, answered some questions about Twitter use to a colleague who is new to it, and set up some saved searches on Twitter to keep an eye on. The Twitter search interface is a lot better than it used to be and seems to work well – I didn’t know it was so easy to set limits such as language and geography in addition to keyword and phrase searches.

That took me to almost the end of the afternoon – there was just time for a few emails and actions to be added to my to-do list regarding the JUSP project, then I visited the library general office to return the travel insurance card (I took it to Dallas for ALA Midwinter) and headed home. Thursday and Friday I’ll be working at home so hopefully able to get some real work done!

This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the sixth time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009, January 2010, July 2010, January 2011 and July 2011. I’m currently a full-time Researcher at Evidence Base, Birmingham City University, UK. Although my job title doesn’t include the word librarian and I don’t work in a library, I still consider myself very much a librarian – our research helps support the library and information communities.

Today was another continuing professional development event for me, again in London. This time it was a joint event organised by CILIP in London and Library and Information Research Group (LIRG) on Writing for Publication (which I will share the notes from later). It was only a 3hr workshop but the style of learning really suited me – there was lots of discussion time and it was fairly informal with questions welcomed throughout. I didn’t necessarily learn anything ground breaking (although knowing the publication process from the journal editor perspective was useful), but it reinforced a lot of things I should know but seem to forget when I have a writing task and a barrier stopping me doing it.

The workshop finished at 1pm, so after lunch at my favourite place in London for gluten free food (Planet Organic), I got a train home. During the afternoon I worked on the train – mainly catching up on and organising emails, thinking about my writing homework (there is a follow up session in a couple of weeks), catching up with my boss, and reviewing the m-library report we need to get finalised soon.

I got home at about 5pm and worked a bit more during the evening. Because I’ve been travelling a lot over the last couple of weeks, I’m not as up-to-date as I like to be with responding to emails, reading RSS feeds (I’m way behind and might have to hit mark all as read even for my favourites folder) and managing my to do list. As a mobile worker, I do sometimes find it difficult to switch off from work. I can’t just leave my office/workplace and stop work for the evening, and I like to leave it in as tidy a state as I can before the next day (no half finished tasks). After yet more emails, I spent some time sorting out my mailing lists and filters so that my inbox doesn’t get overloaded (this is a particular pain at the moment as many I subscribe to are US based so they fill up in the evening due to the time difference).

I also did a bit of work on my ALA Emerging Leaders project – my team and I need to finalise the questions for our survey soon and start sending it out to people. We’re using ALA Connect to share documents and hold discussions (including our virtual meetings). This way our project mentor and our ALA staff contact can also see our progress and help us when we need it. This evening I added a couple of new documents onto the wiki style software so that we can all work together on finalising the survey.

Tomorrow I’m actually going into the office at the university. Looking forward to seeing some colleagues

This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the sixth time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009, January 2010, July 2010, January 2011 and July 2011. I’m currently a full-time Researcher at Evidence Base, Birmingham City University, UK. Although my job title doesn’t include the word librarian and I don’t work in a library, I still consider myself very much a librarian – our research helps support the library and information communities.

Just a brief post – today I attended the LIS DREaM (Developing Research Excellence and Methods) workshop 2, this time held in London. It was an early start (left home at around 6.40am – too dark!), but it still amazes me that I can be in London by 9.30am and at an event before 10am.

On the train journey I worked on a draft of one of our reports (for the m-libs support project), and sorted through work emails.

The event itself was 10.30am until 4.15pm at the British Library.

I have to be honest; it wasn’t my favourite research event as the topics weren’t very relevant to my interests or current research areas and I struggled to see how some of it could apply in practice in libraries/LIS research. I did find some of it useful – I enjoyed the session on webometrics and might do some further investigation into what can be done with sentiment analysis from online social media (e.g. using tweets), and I enjoyed hearing about other attendee’s research/ideas in the unconference half hour. I’ll write a full review of the workshop later this week.

Having coeliac disease means its always a bit of a gamble with conference food (I have to follow a gluten free diet), and the lunch was, as is often the case, pretty disappointing but in the afternoon I got my own special gluten free cake!

Once the event finished I checked into my hotel (staying over as I’m attending a writing for publication workshop on Tuesday), and after a quick catchup of work stuff via email I headed out to catch up with some lovely librarian friends from London and enjoyed a nice meal followed by some cocktails. Great end to the day!

This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the fifth time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009, January 2010, July 2010 and January 2011. I’m currently a full-time Researcher at Evidence Base, Birmingham City University, UK. Although my job title doesn’t include the word librarian and I don’t work in a library, I still consider myself very much a librarian – our research helps support the library and information communities.

I decided to do Library Day in the Life a little different this time round; partly because I’ve been busy, and partly as I’m not sure verbatim accounts are the most interesting thing to write or read. So instead I’ll be writing a summary of what I’ve been up to this week (using Nirvana, my to do list, to help me as I can check my logbook to see what tasks I’ve finished). My work life and professional interests often cross over so this list includes some pure work tasks, and other professional related tasks such as committee work and studying. Read the rest of this entry »

This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the fourth time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009, January 2010 and July 2010. I’m currently a full-time Researcher at Evidence Base, Birmingham City University, UK. This will be the first time I complete the project in this role and I hope it helps explain a little bit about the type of work I do.

Today I chose to work from home – I find it easier to focus at home and it saves me 3hrs travelling and £6.80. I’m glad I have the option of working from home on days when it makes more sense to do so. I wish I could tell you about my fabulous home office environment but unfortunately it’s just a desk in the corner of our bedroom (my partner works from home full time so he has the spare room next door). It seems to work well for me though, and it’s good to have company for the odd break from the screen (and always good to have cat cuddles at various points throughout the day!).

The day was focused on three main tasks, none of which are that interesting I’m afraid:

• Making changes to the deposit survey I’ve been working on following yesterday’s feedback – I thought this would be a really quick job but my brain just wasn’t in gear this morning so it took a lot longer than it should have
• Organising documents and gadgets (iPad and Kindle) ready for various meetings next week. I’m travelling down to London on Monday morning so I’ve got reading material for the journey, and then we have Monday and Tuesday full with meetings, then back to Birmingham on Wed for another meeting
• Applying for a funding bursary for conference attendance. I really want to attend ALA Annual this June so have been investigating various options to get the funds to attend. I thought I had a couple of weeks left, but yesterday realised January was almost over (I blame having a Christmas meal last night!) so I had to sort it. The closing date for one of the applications was today so I finalised the application and sent it off this afternoon, fingers crossed it was received in time!

So that’s pretty much my week – it’s been a pretty typical week for me – out and about at events/meetings, some working from home, some conference calls and Skype calls, and a day in the office. I don’t normally have as much going on in the evenings though, so I’m looking forward to an evening in front of the TV with some cross stitching tonight!

This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the fourth time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009, January 2010 and July 2010. I’m currently a full-time Researcher at Evidence Base, Birmingham City University, UK. This will be the first time I complete the project in this role and I hope it helps explain a little bit about the type of work I do.

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that today is not actually Thursday (I was tempted to change the publication date but I can’t bear lying to myself). But then this does tell you something about a day in the life of a librarian – it can be unpredictable and plans can change throughout the day so you have to be flexible. In my case it included a rather entertaining conference call (that’s a whole other blog post!) which took far too long and ate up most of my afternoon.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the fourth time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009, January 2010 and July 2010. I’m currently a full-time Researcher at Evidence Base, Birmingham City University, UK. This will be the first time I complete the project in this role and I hope it helps explain a little bit about the type of work I do.

Today was the second day of the event in Edinburgh, and the focus of the day was open source software (OSS) library infrastructure. Some of the mashups used yesterday are examples of open source library software, but today concentrated on the fundamentals of OSS, benefits and barriers of OSS, and discussed ways to progress in future.
Read the rest of this entry »

This week I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project which charts the day-to-day activities of library workers at different points of the year. This is the fourth time I’ve participated; you can see my earlier posts from July 2009, January 2010 and July 2010. I’m currently a full-time Researcher at Evidence Base, Birmingham City University, UK. This will be the first time I complete the project in this role and I hope it helps explain a little bit about the type of work I do.

Read the rest of this entry »