A Day in the life of Rachel Dawson, Shelving Supervisor (http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com)

I work in the Main Library on Exeter University's beautiful campus.
Today, instead of working the morning I am swapping my hours to the afternoon. Only doing 4.5 hours a day 5 days a week is a bit of a juggle fitting everything in, but my life outside of work is pretty full too, and I'm not sure what, if anything, to give up, so will continue juggling for as long as possible.

As shelving supervisor I am responsible for the team of part time staff who shelve the library books. Today an hours swop between two team members was successfully resolved, and I also did the usual line manager stuff of authorising Annual Leave, and reviewing the workload for the team. (Happily it's not too bad because most of the students are on vacation). I also spent some more time trying to divide the library fairly into sections for each team member - a lot of counting shelves, and trying to assess usage of the sections.

On my desk is usually a pile of books. Today I had a small stack of books which had been reported as missing, but the shelving team had happily located. These needed logging and the books needed to be placed on the hold shelf. The sharp spotters in the team do a great job of finding the majority of missing books, but those that are not found need to be assessed to see if they need to be replaced or just deleted off the system. Later I had a meeting with an Academic Support Consultant (subject Librarian) and a member of the Library Resource Development (Acquisitions) team to clarify the process of deleting and replacing these un-found books. I have already developed a centralised spreadsheet, but will tweek it further, and it may one day grow up into an access database.

Other books left on my desk are for Ready Text. This is our 5 hour loan collection, and books go in here if they are heavily used or on a reading list. I am looking forward to making use of Tallis Aspire, but in the meantime have to rely on a more ad-hoc method of getting the right books into this collection. This includes searching for modules on the intranet and getting emails from academics. Currently I only have a trickle of these (2 books today), but come September there will undoubtedly be a flood of requests.

Most of the library books are tagged with 3M triggers, but the Ready Text collection is RFID tagged. When the building work is completed (the library is at the hub of Exeter University's Forum redevelopment, and should be finished in December - can't wait) the DVDs will also be added to this collection. I had a quick meeting with colleagues about the progress of putting the tags on the DVDs and writing the process for the next stage.

Of course no day is complete without checking emails, and as I'm also doing cpd23 I have been trying to read blogs and stay connected with LinkedIn and the like. There were several emails from staff working at the weekend, including a useful summary of emails sent during the previous week. I also subscribe to LIS-Link and try to keep up to date with what is going on in the wider library world.

A colleague kindly did the Parcel Force side of sending Thesis off to the British Library for digitising, but I have a couple more of those to look up - finding the authors to ask if they don't mind the digitisation of their work, and then locating the hard copies and sending them off. That should round off my day pretty well.

This focus on Networking has made me think a bit harder about my career and other professionals around the globe. I am certainly supportive of networking as a goal, but have not taken it up professionally until last week. I have now joined with groups on linked in, and the LIS Network, but am debating the value of joining Professional Organisations. Colleagues I know don't always have the time to read the literature that they have paid for. If anyone has any input about the dilemma between the cost and value of such memberships I would be keen to hear from you.

Reflective Practice

The blocks of time dedicated to reflective practice are one of the things that attracted me to doing these 23 things. This is the first of the reflective practice sessions - an opportunity to plan -> do -> review (very familiar to me in IiP land) or the preferred phraseology; What -> so what -> now what.

So far I have found RSS feeds to be invaluable, pushnote to be forgettable, and twitter I'm still ambivalent about. The advantage of Exeter University is that I can access my calendar from any PC, so have not been swayed by google calendar. Outlook scheduling assistant (something that people who use outlook don't seem to be clued into) is better than doodle, but I can see the advantages. It's been good to read about what others in this profession are up to, but I'm disappointed that this part of the country (South West) is not very well represented in the 700 or so participants of the 23 things. Perhaps I will find I'm wrong about that in thing 7, and this will naturally follow into advocacy and getting involved.

It has definitely been worth getting into this so far, hopefully all the other members are taking useful things away too.

CPD 23 Things Thing 4

Have just signed up with Twitter, and started following a few people and organisations. However chatty I may or may not be in real life, there must be some point when we simply run out of things to say. It's hard to keep up with Facebook, the blogs I'm now following and now twitter?! The next thing is how much to participate with all that's out there, how much to say, and what sort of stuff. Can almost feel the weight of all those unread screens sitting on my shoulders, and am really not sure if I want to add to that hullabaloo or not.

The pressure of completing my essay for the ILM qualification is also sitting pretty heavy, and the kids have broken up from school already so and trying to cultivate this relaxed chilled mum image with them, which is getting harder as the days progress!