Digitalist life in the library

Library Day in the Life – Tuesday

The following post is written as part of round 5 of the Library Day in the Life project.

Morning soundtrack: Filmspotting

I started the day looking at the existing tutorials and guides for business resources. They need a massive overhaul both in terms of content and format. Currently there is an extensive web tutorial on finding information for assignments which is largely text based and three PowerPoint presentations on Business Source Premier and using library databases for dissertation research. These have all got to go. Today I did some initial planning for what I am going to replace them with. I intend to create a suite of short video tutorials with supporting PDF guides to cover a range of information skills and specific resources.

With a little time before lunch I put the finishing touches to an article I have been writing for Sconul Focus on Oxford's 23 Things programme. I've run it past the other members of the team and now I'm ready to submit.

Finally, I worked my way through the EndNote workbook that my colleagues have put together. It is a perfect step by step introduction to the software. I now feel confident that I can include EndNote in my dissertation workshops later this year.

My enquiry list today included:

• identifying the best resource for market statistics on the UK DIY and home improvement industry
• helping a student to access Harvard Business Review and the Financial Times archive

Evening soundtrack: Kings of Leon and The Airborne Toxic Event

Library Day in the Life – Monday

The following post is written as part of round 5 of the Library Day in the Life project.

I am currently Academic Support Librarian for Business, Management and Economics at the University of Warwick. I have been in post for almost exactly 2 months. Everyday I drive a 100 mile round trip to work and back. My iPod is my friend and about the only thing that keeps me going. For the next week, along with my daily work activities I am going to share with you my commuters soundtrack. It follows a familiar pattern everyday, in the morning I listen to a podcast and on the way home some tunes.

Morning soundtrack: The Archers Omnibus - you may well laugh but I have a valid reason for this choice; I listen to this out of nostalgia. Listening to the Archers reminds me of Sunday mornings when I was a kid.

I have decided that for this round of Library Day in the Life I'm going to base my posts around my daily to do lists. Over time I have experimented with a range of electronic to do lists but none of them have quite suited my needs. A good old fashioned scribble on a piece of paper does me just fine. So here is today's to do list:

As you can see today was a pretty successful day with everything on my to do list ticked off. It makes up for Friday when I managed to cross absolutely nothing off. First up this morning I had to do a few sums for my subject budget for next year. Nothing too taxing as I'd done all of the hard work already. Now I'm just waiting for a few suppliers to get back to me and then I can send it off.

Next up a colleague gave me a whistle stop tour of the citation management software EndNote Web. I've never used it before so I've got some learning to do before I teach some dissertation workshops later in the year. This afternoon I had a play with both EndNote and Zotero trying to work out the merits of each. Registering for both was fairly straightforward as was downloading the add-ins for Microsoft Word and Firefox. When it came to adding citations however I had a nightmare with EndNote. I tried to add a couple of articles from both ABI/Inform and Business Source Premier to both accounts. With Zotero the process was as simple as selecting a radio button and clicking save. EndNote however was not playing ball and failed twice for no apparent reason. I shall try again tomorrow but so far it's Zotero 2, EndNote 0.

A constant of my job are the enquiries - these never make it onto the to do list unless they are particularly complicated. Today I answered three; one about EIU data, one about access to case studies and one ongoing enquiry for a student needing help with Datastream.

One thing I set up early on in my new job was the Business & Economics Information Solutions blog. I try to post at least once a week. Today I added a quick post about Gapminder.

The last thing on my to do list to get crossed off was the mock-ups for my new business information pages on the library website. I have inherited a set of pages which are incredibly text heavy and require multiple clicks to access information. My aim is to redesign them before the start of the new academic year to make them more accessible and useful. The first step is drawing up a range of options - which I did today. Next I will present them to the rest of my team so that others can input their ideas and hopefully we can redesign all of the subject pages to a standard pattern.

Evening soundtrack: an impromptu playlist including Melissa Etheridge, KT Tunstall and The Indigo Girls.

Library Day in the Life – Round 5

It's the time of year again when I devote a week's worth of blog posts to my daily librarianly activities. Yes, it's Library Day in the Life time again. So far I have taken part in rounds 2, 3 and 4. I find the process of writing about my week at work a useful reflective tool. I don't write a diary, I just don't have the will power to keep going day after day but I love the idea of creating these snapshots of my life every now and again.

In my post introducing round 4 I wrote a list explaining the reasons why I was taking part again. Looking back at it now those reasons remain pretty much exactly the same:

• Yet again I am in a new job. Looking back on the previous rounds I've taken part in I have been in a different job for 3 out of the 4. Reading back through the posts from my old jobs provides an interesting picture of my evolution in my early years in the profession.
• Now even more so I see library day in the life as a way of busting out of the echo chamber. Following my post about what I do where I asked my non-librarian friends and family to comment on what they thought I did on an average day I have been contemplating ways of expanding the research. One idea involves creating profiles of librarians in different sectors and asking the public to guess what their roles and responsibilities are. I wasn't entirely sure how to go about writing these profiles but I wonder whether this run through of library day in the life might be a good source.