Monday, August 1, 2011

Library Day in the Life - Friday

Well, it's a bit late but this is my final post for Round 7 of the Library Day in the Life Project. It covers Friday and Saturday, as I worked a weekend shift for the forst time in a while. And it was in a brand new building!

As with the past couple of days, Friday started with a shift at a service point. The 9am-10am shift is the first of the day, and has been pretty quiet this week. It could be a bit different next week once semester starts.

Later in the day I had a meeting with two of my colleagues to discuss the access arrangements for one of our restricted access collections. It is a collection which received very little use in the old library, and we assume that will be the case in the new building. The collection is stored in the Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS), so items need to be requested for retrieval via the catalogue. The complicating factor with this particular collection is that there are restrictions on who can access the material in it. Currently, anyone can log in to the catalogue and request an item from the Automated Retrieval Collection (ARC), so we need to come up with a way of dealing with requests for material from this collection.

In the afternoon we held an afternoon tea to farewell one of our long-serving (23 years service) staff members who has retired. I was in Year 6 when she started work at the library (most people don't like it when I point out things like that).

Saturday was the first weekend day that the new library was open, so it was a memorable shift from that point of view. As expected, most of the questions from patrons were directional, because people are still finding their way around. There were a few teething issues to be worked out with the building, but on the whole the day went pretty well.

Well, that's it for my Library Day in the Life summary for this round. If there's a Round 8 I'll sign up again. For August I'm taking part in #tweetAugust (as @andrew2153), so hopefully I can post at least one tweet a day.