#libday8 Monday

The first in another week long series of Library Day in the Life blog posts for Round 8.

I had planned to spend the morning continuing with the database clean-up project work I had been working on last week but the emails and phone calls soon started coming in. Enquiry work of course takes priority so I decided to set aside my project work until a quieter moment.  It’s quite thought intensive work which requires a lot of problem solving skills and I’m only just getting started with the project so at the moment it’s not best juggled with other tasks.

Enquiry work and requests for the morning were quite straightforward, mainly orders for copies of programmes which we deal with on a daily basis.  For these we simply retrieve the tapes and take them to another department who do the rest of the work.  Requests are always varied and sometimes fairly urgent, especially from our newsrooms.  I received a call from a regional news team at another site for a programme which was needed urgently.  Normally tapes requested to other sites are delivered overnight by courier however this material was required same day so it was sent via a process that we call playout.  It’s a techie tv process that I don’t really understand but my layman explanation is that the content is broadcast by a linefeed to the other site.  I’ve only dealt with one other request for a playout so although I had a vague idea of what to do I still had to check with a colleague just to be sure I was doing it right.  We find the tape, cue it up to the right clip by viewing it, noting down the timecodes and ensuring the tape starts at the right point, then take it upstairs to another team who do the rest.  Quite simple when you know what to do.

The rest of my day was filled with fairly routine tasks.  Several boxes were waiting in the morning with my name on, containing tapes returned from loan as well as new tapes which are sent to us for archiving after transmission.  As I am responsible for the Yorkshire television part of the collection, this means Emmerdale.  Some of the boxes contained Emmerdale episodes from the last couple of weeks tv so these were sorted, registered as assets on our library asset management system if not already registered and shelved.  Returns shelving was also piling up to the point where the shelves were full so I did a couple of trolley loads of tape shelving in an attempt to clear the backlog.

As is often the case with library work, what you get done in a day is dictated by your customers needs and other projects must be slotted into the gaps.  On reflection everything I do at work can seem rather ad hoc and piecemeal but that is simply how the job works.  It often feels like I dip in and out of tasks, juggling different jobs which have a pressing need with ongoing project work that can be done whenever time allows.