Now recalled by popular demand for a fifth session, Library Day in the Life is this week. The aim of the project is to give those outside the profession some idea of how we spend our days by blogging or tweeting. Predictably, the Twitter feed is more used than blogs, at least so far. Let me squeeze the first three days of the week all into one post.
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I'm Head of Learning Resources at a London further education college. It's an interesting week. A departmental restructuring shudders to a halt on Thursday with interviews for 'my' job; I and a colleague are competing. It's unclear what happens to the loser. And it's the last week we're known as Learning Resources. Next week we absorb print services and reprographics and become known, as we should be, as Libraries and Learning Resources; we already manage audio-visual services for the college.
Most of the staff are term-time only, but there's quite a lot of us still around. Apart from regular summer jobs such as stock-moves and end of financial year stuff, we stay open to serve an English language summer school, and have recruited two dedicated, in every sense of the word, temporary staff, Ros and Michelle. And this summer we change library management systems, going from Olib to Heritage, and move our VLE from Moodle to Blackboard. Apart from that, not much is happening.
Monday: the day should start, as always in the vacation, with morning prayers, a quick meeting where everyone who's in gets together and we go round the table, bringing each other up to date with whatever we're up to. We have to delay the meeting because of transport difficulties; this is after all London in 2010, so one of the world's biggest capital cities can't be expected to get its workforce to work without fuss or delay. I spend a lot of the day throwing away bits of paper, a regular summer job, and some of it buying more e-resources for the 800 HE business students who descend on us in September in an arrangement with the University of Cumbria (not our nearest neighbours, I know, but it make a sort of sense). I also have a tricky HR issue to deal with which I can't describe, only to say that I don't think it has been resolved.
Tuesday: morning prayers again, and today we have Julia from the Merton campus with us. More paper-shuffling and a last line management meeting with my manager, who's leaving. I've been here just over two years and he's the fifth manager I've had. Do I break them?
Wednesday is enlivened by a a fire alarm and evacuation. Our assembly point, appropriately enough, is the cemetery at the side of the college. Then I have a meeting with the new Head of IT to discuss how our computer access control system will or won't work with our new catalogue. Another issue surfaces; will Shibboleth work for all our sites, with the fragmented staff and student directories? Then I have a line management meeting with one of my direct reports, Ewa, the E-Resources Co-ordinator. We try to sort out her access to the JISC Collections website and the day ends with me trying, and failing, to log into our new e-procurement system.
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