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.