Library Day in the Life: Round 5, day 1

Like a few other folk, this round of Library Day in the Life has somewhat taken me by surprise. Is it that time again already? ask a hundred busy information professionals.

Today was mostly an admin day for me, with no desk shift.  My first tasks were to finish off a couple of queries from Friday – a press search on a case report that was released on Friday afternoon, and to order an extract from an old edition of a book from the brilliant Law Society Lawdocs service (thank you!).

I spent some time on current awareness tasks including an audit of alerts we’re moving from one news database to another (curses to the Murdoch paywall). I put together the rota for the team for August… always a challenge to remember to not rota folk for a desk shift when they’re on holiday (apparently being on holiday means people aren’t available to answer the enquiry desk phone…) And since it is holiday season, it’s always a bit depressing how many times in a day my own name appears next to various tasks. Balancing what the fee-earners need NOW with long term project work is always an interesting challenge. I probably should have learned by now not to put things off ‘until the summer when it’s quieter’ because the effect of the quietening down of the flow of enquiries is mitigated by the reduction in the number of people in the office.

At lunchtime I emailed my PhD supervisors a summary of the supervision call we had last week, and I read the Guardian’s accounts of the Wikileaks war documents from Afghanistan.

In the afternoon I put together some usage statistics -I do like messing about with a spreadsheet and producing some interesting graphs. Whether anyone else understands the way I’ve approached things or not is almost a secondary consideration.  Once I’d done that I had a couple of days’ worth of enquiry stats and time recording to do, which necessitated several biscuits as motivational tools. I headed home on time, fell asleep on the train home and have spent the evening in admin:

• made contact with the library team in Qatar with whom I will be sharing a presentation slot at Internet Librarian International
• Sent my ILI summary to the organisers
• written this blog post.
• written up the City 5k from last week over on Running Life
• Sent a PhD summary to an SLA colleage in the Academic Divison
• Amended the LCF’s Google Group and sent the first message out to members

…and now I think it’s time to call it a day!

Filed under: Uncategorized

Energy Resources at SLA 2010

I’m still going through my notes from the sessions at SLA conference and I just found the handout from the session run by David A. Brackus and Stephanie Byrd from the Petroleum & Energy Resources Division division on finding free energy resources. I’ll admit to not having stayed for the whole session – there was just too much going on.  Our library is receiving more and more requests for this kind of information, though, and I picked up some good pointers. Their handout with useful links is available on the SLA website here.

This session encapsulates one of the major advantages of the SLA. Its breadth of membership means there are people working in so many sectors that someone, somewhere, is an expert in an area I may need only a passing reference to. That passing reference, though, will need to be reliable, accurate and trustworthy – something I am not necessarily able to judge myself. Our enquiries here can send us in all sorts of directions – that’s why I love this job – and knowing that there are knowledgable and helpful folk out there makes it even better.

Filed under: Event report, energy resources, SLA conference