Library Day in the Life Round 7 - Wednesday and Thursday

So much for doing a post per day - I don't know where the days have gone!

Wednesday got off to a fairly quiet start with a shift on one of service points. Working in the new library is certainly keeping us fit as we're taking clients to the collection and the services they're looking for, rather than just pointing them in the general direction.

After this shift I had a meeting with a PhD student who was wanting some help with their research. They're looking at using bibliometrics to measure the level of interdisciplinarity within the environmental science field. We had a look at the citation map feature on the new Web of Knowledge platform, and thought about ways of collecting and analysing the references from the articles published in a particular journal.

After lunch I had a meeting with an academic staff member to finalise the training arrangements for their unit. The training rooms in the new library are being finished off at the moment, so they might not be available. We came up with a couple of alternative venues that would allow the students to have some hands-on expeience of searching the library resources.

Thursday began with another service point shift at 9am, which was pretty quiet. Straight after this I had a shift in our Virtual Service Centre (VSC), and that was very quiet too. The VSC handles all the non face-to-face enquiries from patrons i.e. phone, email and chat.

 

With the new library came new Multi Function Devices (MFDs) for client printing and photocopying, as well as new software that patrons use to pay for this service. I got some training on these new MFDs this morning, which covered the various types of machines, where they are located, and how to use them. This is going to be one of the main source of questions from the students when they return to campus next week. The books are still arranged the same way, the computers still work the same, but the new printing and copying equipment and software is something they'll have to get used to.

 

I went to more training after lunch. This time it was a refresher in using the Circulation module of our library management system. I've worked in Circulation previously and have filled in at the Borrowing Counter when staff have been in meetings, so it wasn't completely new to me. On the service points there are a mixture of reference and circulation staff, so we'll now be dealing with circulation-related queries too. It's going to be a steep learning curve over the next few weeks.

 

Well, there's only one day to go in this round of Library Day in the Life. Next week the ALIA New Graduates Group is beginning a Twitter blitz as part of their #tweetAugust project. I've never been much of a tweeter, but I think I might give it a go next month.