A day in the life of a librarian - round 5

(The collected Days make for some interesting reading)

I'm a solo librarian in an academic library. All my students are on their summer holiday at the moment, and the library is closed, but that doesn't mean that it's going to be a quiet day!

Check email on the 3 accounts I monitor. Forward a handful of messages to colleagues, reply to the most urgent of mine, and batch together the rest by project to tackle later, or - as it turns out - tomorrow.

Clarify quotes with potential shelving and furniture suppliers, and pass them on to the rest of the people working on plans to maybe move our library within our building.

Measure up existing library furniture, and start making scale plans for some of the possible layouts that have been discussed.

Phone calls with boss, updates on the library move plans.

Pop out to pick up lunch, and caffeine supplies for the next few days. Collect armful of incoming book orders from my mailbox on the way back in.

One of our faculty members pops in for a chat about how resourcing is coming together for a new course - show him the relevant new arrivals, make some suggestions for titles that would fill the need he describes, and then order the two most likely looking ones. (Frustratingly, there's a brand new book that might be relevant but might be too technical - we can't tell from contents page, and none of our partner libraries have a copy yet. I'll call around local bookshops tomorrow to see if anyone has a copy he or I can go and page through before we order it, as it's a fairly expensive HB)

Check in on progress of another faculty member's course reader - she's finished up her part, so the ball's back in my court to double check the permissions, and send it out for a proof copy.

Call our main book supplier to try and find out why I've got an invoice, but no books - miss our rep both times I call, so - onto tomorrow's to do list with that.

More email and phone calls with suppliers and colleagues about the library move plans - forwarding quotes and requesting clarifications, and trying to make sure everyone involved has the information I've collected, ahead of our meeting later in the week.

Data cleanup - we're in the middle of transitioning to a new LMS, and the test transfer of our data threw up a number of anomalies that need me to investigate and make judgement calls. Today's area for focus was duplicate patron barcodes, and miss-matched bib and item sets. Picky and detailed, but satisfying. Really looking forward to going live on the new system.

Add 9 new dvds to the catalogue - the one thing I'm not looking forward to on the new system is media cataloguing, so I pulled these to the top of my 'to enter' pile to make sure they'll be included in the record transfer!

Stop - at half past leaving time - to look around, see what needs doing and to think about priorities. Make a few notes, and put together tomorrow's to-do list, so I can get off to a clean start tomorrow morning.

Go though reception on the way out of the building to discover a late delivery has arrived, containing those missing books, so I took a quick detour on my route home to drop into the book shop and leave a message for our rep to let her know that all is well after all.

* Photo by robjwells, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

London Lives

London Lives looks like such a new fantastic resource! We don't have any history courses running at the moment that focus on this particular period in the UK, but the assembled biographies tagged with 'transportation' provide some fascinating individual sketches for the British Empire history class, and I hope the site comes in useful for historical context in some of the other classes, too.

* Photo by wirewiping, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

More museums and galleries

I am, admittedly, quite a fan of wandering around museums and galleries, but even for me, four different London locations in eight days is more than I can usually manage unless I'm on holiday. They were a very inspiring eight days, though, London Architecture, the National Gallery, the Summer Exhibition at the RA on Saturday, and the Science Museum's late on Wednesday, where they launched their new 'Who am I' galleries with a fine, if somewhat warm, evening event.

I am a fan of museums in general, but especially a fan of the various Lates - I don't think I've been disappointed by one yet, and I think they're well worth scheduling around. There's a different feel to them, and any time a museum has a queue round the block to get in, you know they're doing something right. Especially if they have staff roaming the queue distributing maps, event guides, and lollies!