Unfortunately I failed in my attempts to take a photo a day this week for the Library Day in the Life project. In fact, Thursday is the first day since New Year's Day that I haven't taken a photo.

Thursday was just one of those days. Although it is very nice to be out of the office for a day every now and again I find that it often makes the day before a running around like a headless chicken day. To make things doubly hard I spent the afternoon shift (13.00 - 17.00) on the busy library desk. It's the second week of term and there are a lot of people in the library every afternoon chasing down the books they need to write their assignments. By the end of the day I was relishing the opportunity to change gear and wind down to the weekend with a trip to Liverpool for a Business Librarians Association (BLA) committee meeting.

To get to Liverpool in time for a 12 o'clock meeting I had to get up a little earlier than usual to catch a train at 08.07. On the first leg of the journey (Oxford to Birmingham) I caught up on the latest issue of CILIP Update. At Birmingham I met two fellow committee members and we continued on together from there.

The main purpose of this meeting was to visit the hotel where our annual conference is going to take place in July. This is the newly opened Liverpool Hilton (image above). Although the hotel has been open since November their official launch party happened the night before our meeting. As you might expect some people were a little worse for wear having partied until 06.00.

Despite a packed agenda we finished the meeting a little earlier than expected so I had about an hour before my train to have a wander along the waterfront. The journey home seemed to take forever and the trains were packed. When I finally got home around 21.00 there were two thing on my mind - pizza and beer!

Next week we have a trainer coming in to run a workshop on Datastream; so this morning I spent 1.5 hours attempting to get the training room ready. This involved installing the Datastream software on all of the PCs, well in theory it did. Unfortunately through faults of the hardware, software and I am sure my own incompetence I only managed to get four done. Thankfully a colleague had done five yesterday so now we only have six to go. Can you tell I held my breathe writing that?!

The rest of my day I spent finishing some edits on our intranet site. Over the past week I've been working on a new set of pages on our key business resources. I have been telling anyone who will listen that these are the first pages I have created on SharePoint that I am actually proud of and that is after over 2 years working with the damn thing.

Today was a day of fire fighting. I did a million and one things and none of them were on my to-do list at the start of the day. Some days are just like that, you start out with a plan but it soon becomes clear that you're going to have to ditch it.

As part of the fire fighting I helped an executive education student based in the US to find articles for his assignment on organizational culture, showed a member of admin staff how to find out whether we had electronic access to a journal and spent 2 hours on the information desk troubleshooting printer problems.

Today's photo is of one of our new multi-function devices which can, when properly installed, act as a printer, photocopier and scanner. At the moment unfortunately they're only set up as copier/scanners and we are relying on the increasingly troublesome printers provided by the IT department. Hence 2 hours spent clearing jams, changing toner and fiddling with the duplexer.

To change things up for round 4 of the Library Day in the Life project I have decided to blog a photo and a quick summary each day this week.

Today I didn't set foot in the library. I started off at a Librarian as Consultant course and ended up working for the last hour or so of the day at home. The photo above is of my desk in my "home office". I say office but actually it's more like a play room. In reality my last hour was spent catching up with the days emails and setting out my to do list for tomorrow.

I am especially looking forward to this round of the project because next week is going to be far more varied than a typical week for me. For a start I will be out of the library more than I am in it. I have a training course spanning two days and a trip to Liverpool for a Business Librarians' Association committee meeting.

As well as posting my photos to the library day in the life Flickr group I will blog about my week here.