Connecting Librarian

Today, Monday 26th July, 2010 was Round 5 in the Library Day in the Life, where librarians around the globe write about what they did. Its a snapshot in the working life of librarians and builds an amazing picture of the wider ranging work that librarian’s do.

So anyway, here’s my contribution to the big picture.

Speaking of which, let me set the scene first. I am currently Acting Branch Manager at a large public library, which is part of a regional service in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. On a Monday, I have about 12 staff working at our branch and we have a weekend’s backlog to recover from.  So here goes….

8.45am – Arrived at work and noticed one of our emergency exit lights was annoyingly on the blink. As I needed to log a maintenance call to get it fixed, I did a quick review and noted other lights that needed fixing/replacing, before placing said call.

9.00am – Touched base with staff arriving for work and with some managers who were meeting with another staff before meeting with me.

9.05am – Made sure that all people who worked the weekend turned up and were paid appropriately. Very happy that this process is all computerised now and very straightforward. Last time I did this (many moons ago), it was all paper based.

9.25am – Adjusted our daily roster to accommodate changes arriving from the absence of one staff member and the addition of extra hours for another.

9.35am – Meet with our Customer Services Manager and our Adult Collections Manager to do a quick wander around our adult collections, to discuss needs, over stocking and collection maintenance. Our users will be happy to know that one of the immediate impacts will be that we will be getting more romances.

10.30am – More rostering and report completion.

10.40am – Assessing donations, dealing with duplicates discovered on our collection review.

11.15am – Started work on next week’s rosters as I realised I was going to be away on training the next two days. This involved compiling the weekend roster for two weekends ahead and beginning the desk roster for next week.  Got the first draft done, to be completed when I get back to the branch on Thursday.

12 noon – Lunch.

1.00pm – Short staffed over lunch, so spent the next hour trying to make an impact on the 33 boxes that arrived from our headquarters and other branches in our region. Along with one of our branch staff, we managed to get through about half of those boxes. Left the work in the capable hands of other library staff.

2.00pm – Dealt with stock rotation items that had appeared on the courier run. Assessed, made decisions on which titles I wanted for our branch, added them to our collection and sent the others on.

2.15pm – Did some website updating and created one of our e-newsletters – this one on suggested reading on the topic of Mind and Body Fitness.

2.50pm – Answered the email enquiries that had come in over the weekend. Queries ranged from “I returned that item” to “Can I do this…..”

3.00pm – Posted a staff created book review on our adult reading blog.

3.10pm – Briefed one of our librarians on what’s happened whilst she has been on holidays and what might be happening during the two days that I am away.

3.20pm – Added a range of CD’s from another branch to our collection and spent time accommodating them on our shelves.

4.15pm – Dealt with a couple of user issues – including payment for a damaged DVD and a disputed return of an item.

4.30pm – Spent the last of my day on desk which was uber-busy and involved a circulation desk overflowing with returned stock. Our process has been significantly slowed by the RFID tagging process, so an extra hand was very much required.

5.15pm – Finally headed home once I realised two things – one, that the staff could handle it and two, that if I didn’t leave, I could be there all night.

So that’s been my day. Not entirely typical, but not atypical either.

Hope your day was interesting, I look forward to reading of all you have been up to as well.

Within a couple of days, I had two people at our library, ask me to recommend a good read.  Not a rare thing in a public library, but on reflection and as I was reading Redefining Reader’s Advisory: Kissing Cousins in Library Journal (which by the way, is well worth a read), I realised that I had been receiving that question a lot more in recent times.

My usual process is to ask a few questions about the sort of things they like reading and if they have an author(s), they particularly enjoy. If they have the latter and its an author I haven’t read myself, I go to our reader’s advisor print bible “Who else writes like”, or refer our users to the wonderful Who Writes like, compiled by Eastern Regional Libraries or the UK What should I read next.

Reading Giovanni Battista Niccolini, uploaded by takomabibelot to Flickr, 29th November 2006, Attribution 2.0 Generic

But it has challenged me again to develop my reader’s advising skills a little more personally, by dipping my toe into other genres. I was intially a big fantasy reader, but of the last ten years I have been into mysteries. So now its time to try some other stuff, just to make myself aware of what is going on outside those genres.

Interestingly, the book that I have chosen and a conversation I was privy to yesterday have helped steer this pondering. We had Australian urban fantasy author Keri Arthur in as a guest speaker and after hearing her talk I was inspired to read one of her books as a starting point. What also came out of her talk was that there are still a lot of fans of print books around – both authors and library users alike. (but that’s a topic for another blog post)

So how do you help your recreational readers find a good read?  Any favourite tools or training that helps you to help them?

I posted a little while ago about how the National Library of Australia was going to be archiving Connecting Librarian as part of the Pandora Archive.

Well they don’t muck about!

Like many others out there, I have a vanity search on my name and my blog, using Google Alerts. This arrived in my email today:

Trove Results

So I click on the link, which takes me to the National Library’s Trove search on librarian (check it out). And there, down the bottom right of the screen, under Archived Websites 1996 – Now, is this blog!

This is so cool on so many levels.  Including:

• I am still thrilled that the National Library is archiving my blog
• I am extra thrilled that not only my blog, but all other websites that NLA is archiving can be accessed (along with a whole pile of other great stuff) through Trove

And most importantly:

• It is awesome that the NLA is opening up Trove to search engines like Google for indexing. As a result, how many more people will be accessing NLA collections through search engines, who would not have thought of visiting the library otherwise.

Like I said, awesome!

I am looking forward to hearing what the NLA reports back when they next update us on Trove. But in the meantime, it makes me think that somehow, this is the next inevitable step for libraries with digital collections.

How long before more library collections are opened to the broader Internet like this and what could this mean for our libraries?

Has your library done something like this and how is it working out?