I am Senior Research Librarian for the London office of the US law firm Reed Smith.
For once, my Monday morning train was bang on time and I was in the office just after 9am. It’s my session on the enquiry desk this morning so once my tea was brewing I logged in at the desk. We have an actual separate desk in the library where people do come and ask questions. It’s about three metres from my allocated desk so generally people do just come to me when there’s no-one in the official hot seat.
Checked through the emails in our inbox and queries in the web-based request system too. Dealt first with an urgent query sent late on Friday evening asking for a definition around the status of the Channel Islands. I remembered a similar query from a while back so I searched for that as starter. It wasn’t quite the same, but finding the answer did 50% of the thinking for me. Once that was out of the way I cleared up a few easier requests for cases and journal articles.
On Friday I had helped with a last minute request for authorities for a bundle. One of the case citations seemed to have caused the trainee some consternation. This morning I drafted a brief email to him mentioning the online Cardiff Index; that we have Justcite and the library’s catalogue to help locate which series we have via online access. Since it took a fair amount of my time too on Friday I also needed to ask for a client/ matter number against which I can record my time .We record our time on the same system the lawyers use.
Following on from this I revisited the schedule we have for the new trainee lawyers who start next week; I arrange library inductions and training on our databases for them all. I do this in conjunction with our Learning & Development team to try to integrate the library sessions into the induction rather than being seen as an optional extra. Just as I had begun to think about wording for the calendar invitations the phone rang; and I was then involved for half an hour making sure a database add-in was working for one of the firm’s partners. That meant working with the IT team and luckily I spoke with someone who knew about the circumstances of the original installation.
More tea and a few more quick answers sent and I was into the final half hour of the morning. The phone stayed quiet and the emails dried up giving me a chance to update the time and enquiry records for the day so far. At 1.30 I handed over to my colleague and escaped.
I try to fit a short run in twice a week; I generally reckon that I can run for 20 minutes and still fit in changing, showering and eating lunch. Today I ran a mile at a fast pace (well, for me, anyway, a bit less than 9 minutes) and took a slow jog/ walk back to the office.
Back at my desk I ran through the daily checks I do for various people – updating vessel locations; assessing new alerts; searches of websites not elsewhere indexed. Then I had a fun meeting with our IT trainer who showed me how the interactive whiteboard in the training room works; most of the database sessions are going to be held there so I reckoned it was time I got to grips with it so we could use it if we wanted to.
Just as I once again returned to my desk a request for information from the business development team arrived. My manager and I split this between us and I ran a couple of litigation searches, saving the results in various formats so my colleague could see the available options to drill down through the data. Another quick update for my time entry and it was nearing 4pm. I briefly thought about database usage statistics but decided it iwas a bit far on the day to start number crunching, but a good time to try again with the preparation for the trainees’ session. I was a good way through this by 5.45pm when I stopped work on the day job and turned my attention to an imminent session with fellow CLIG members Neil Stewart and Olwen Walker. Both came over to the office here and Neil demonstrated some of the features of the website; principally allowing us to send out messages to our members. This took until 6.30 or so when I packed up and headed home via Liverpool Street.
Arrived home at about 8:15; had an unexpected trip to my parents to collect a spare key after I broke one of mine in the lock… no idea how… and did a few little jobs about the flat. A quick sit down to catch up with the Daily Show from Friday and that was about it for the day.
Filed under: Personal narrative, librarydayinthelife
