day in the life

as with the 23 things, i've managed to avoid hearing about the library day in a life project until it's very nearly finished. as a result, this is a kind of retrospective look at what i've been doing at work this week. luckily, as i'm only a lowly cataloguing assistant, there isn't that much variation in my job and i should be able to remember what i did on each of the days. also, i only work three days a week so that gives me two less days to try and remember!

a bit of background

as i've mentioned previously, i work at the rnib's national library service which is just outside stockport. it's the largest library in the uk for readers with sight loss and has thousands of titles available in braille, giant print and audio formats. best of all, it's free! (well, you have to pay a very small yearly subscription to the talking book service but this can sometimes be subsidised by local authorities). braille and giant print titles are sent by post to library users and it's pretty fantastic really. you can read more about it byclicking on THIS LINK HERE.

anyway, i really enjoy working for a charity. it makes me feel good knowing that what i am doing is, in a very small way, helping people whose needs are often overlooked by traditional library services. i'm sure i'll probably do a post about this issue another time, so you can, uh, look forward to that. i'm here until the end of next month but there has been talk of a contract extension. it's a bitup in the air at the moment, but whatever happens i've enjoyed my time here and i'm sure it'll look very good on my cv. i'd continue to volunteer until i could find some other kind of library based employment somewhere.

back to the actual point of this post now, i think. as i said, i only work three days a week at the library (wednesdays, thursdays and fridays) so this will be a fairly brief summary of what i did on these days. i'm aware that i've written quite a lot already and still haven't started talking about a day in the life yet. let's go, shall we?

wednesday

i get on the 8:04 train from manchester piccadilly to rose hill marple and get off at brinnington. it takes about 15 minutes on the train and then there's a short walk through a housing estate, over the m60 motorway and into an industrial estate

to get to the library itself. i get there about 8:30am and get cracking straight away.

wednesday was mostly spent amending holdings data using a combination of different software. the library service are switching to a new lms in 2012, and the data that's held on the current lms needs cleansing (i suppose that would be the best way to describe it) before that happens. the library has been using a couple of different systems for different things, from what i can tell, so some information that is on one system isn't necessarily on the other system. the data from one of the systems is being used to populate the new system when it comes in, so gaps need to be filled in. i'm confusing myself now, but maybe it'll become clearer as i go on. someone from the libary is probably going to read this and say 'no, that isn't what is happening at all'.

so i spent most of the day entering data (mainly prices and order numbers). i do data entry as a part time job somewhere else, so while this might be mind numbingly boring for many people, i actually quite enjoy it. i have to use another system to occasionally check for records that can't easily be found, which is a bit of a challenge but it's quite rewarding when i manage to get to the bottom of the mystery. example: the wrestler mick foley's autobiography 'have a nice day!', after much searching, was found under the title 'mankind: have a nice day!'. thankfully i have a passing interest in wrestling which came in handy here.

thursday

i did the same thing as wednesday, really. i had to help with shelving in the afternoon as there are a couple of people on holiday. this gave me a chance to stretch my legs and test my knowledge of the alphabet. it always surprises me how much you (by which i mean i) have to think about where letters come in the alphabet. it's quite embarrassing.

friday

friday was a little bit different! i had to remove erroneous marc fields from the catalogue using a very archaic piece of software. it was character based, which i quite liked, so i felt like i was one of them computer hackers that you might have seen in them thriller films you have. maybe 80s ones anyway. this made me feel like i was an actual librarian, in that i was doing something that looked vaguely technical and an outsider might have thought that i needed some kind of expertise to be able to do it. the librarian that i share an office with leaves early on a friday so i listened to a bit of music, which was nice.

so that's your lot! sorry this hasn't been especially informative. i think i've managed to describe the job that i find very interesting in the most dull way possible. hopefully you saw past that.

bye!