Library Day in the Life Day One – Monday

8am – Wake up! I get a lie in on Mondays as I don’t start until 10. I was very grateful this morning as I overdid it this weekend with socialising.  So then began the mad rush to shower, dry my hair and find something to take for lunch.

10am - Arrived at the library and pottered around my desk to set myself up for the week whilst starting up my computer.  Checked emails and feeds.  Had an email from a university tutor who had finally sent me a reference for my Sheffield application and funding forms so I uploaded that to my Sheffield application.

10.30am – Bodley box time.  Monday morning is one of my turns on the stack book processing rota.  Books come over from the central Bodleian/bookstacks for readers to use in our reading room.  It’s normally very straightforward; collect the returns list from the printer and then find the books on the shelves, scan in and return.   Sometimes books are on research desks or in carrels which takes some extra work.  Then if any new books have arrived, scan them and take them out to the reading room.  Our readers can collect the books from an open shelf at anytime to use within the library and can keep them for up to a month so normally there is a steady flow of books in and out.  This morning a book was missing its slip so I couldn’t scan it in.  Asked a colleague how to print another slip as I couldn’t remember but nor could she, so had to play around on the computer for about half an hour trying to find the reprint function.

11.20am – Went to make a cup of tea, brought it back to my desk as I don’t like taking a proper tea break when I start late.

12pm – Shelving.  Enough said on that really, shelving is pretty straightforward and dull.  Good stretch of the legs though!

1pm – Lunch.  I’m trying to not go shopping until payday as I’m poor so lunch was some ryvita with philly cheese and grapes.  Carried on reading First Amongst Sequels by Jasper Fforde.  Love his books and it is a nice easy lunchtime read.

2pm - Back to my desk, quick check of emails, Facebook, twitter etc before taking a look at this weeks 23things task.   As it is blogging and I’ve already set up my 23things blog I decided to leave getting stuck into it until later in the week.

2.20pm - Project time.  I’m working on some ‘podlets’ for the library.  Basically mini information video guides covering a range of library FAQ type questions.  At the moment I’m focusing on 3 questions ‘What computing facilities does the library have?’, ‘How to I order an item from the bookstack?’ and ‘What is the law reserve?’.  I’ve done most of the planning for these 3 and now I’m working on putting them together.   At the moment I’m focusing on the visual side of things, experimenting with screencasting and slideshow style animation.  Today I worked on the computer facilities topic, using Powerpoint to create the storyboard/slideshow which works quite nicely.  I’m very limited with the software I have available so not sure how I’m going to turn it into a video yet.  I can save the powerpoint as a series of jpg files and put them in Windows Movie Maker however it’s rubbish.  The images become distorted and the quality is terrible.   Our IT expert is now on the case of trying to sort out a solution.   Also didn’t have any image editing software so Picnik was my saviour. It’s a brilliant website, who needs Photoshop for basic manipulation when you have Picnik.

3.40pm – After much trial and error my computers slideshow was making slow progress, but progress nonetheless.  Went down the staff room for an apple and a Cadbury’s highlights hot chocolate.

4pm – Back to my desk to carry on with project work.   An email came in for a document delivery request, the items weren’t obvious law items.  Rather banking and operational risk sounding  journal articles, however nobody in the office could work out what journal it was from the abbreviation.   Normally document delivery requests are straightforward, this is just a bad example because the information sent was limited and we didn’t have it anyway.

5pm – Home time   Went to the gym first and now I can’t move my legs without pain. Think I overdid it a bit.

The rest of my evening has been spent doing not much at all. It’s a proper collapse on the sofa and watch tv night.  Hollyoaks, Doctor Who, Delia Through the Ages and Glee to be precise.  Will probably end up watching more Being Human before bed too.  Also discovered the Facebook photos on picnik feature and made funny pictures of me and my housemates involving comedy facial hair and funny hats.  Sophisticated.  Oh what a cultured life I lead!