Posts Tagged: librarydayinthelife


2
Aug 10

Library Day in the Life – Days 5&6

This post covers day 5 & 6 of Round 5 of the Library Day in the Life Project.  I’m a cataloguer in an academic law library.

Friday was a less eventful day than planned as a meeting on our reclassification project was cancelled.  I spent some time gathering together items that have posed problems for our reclassifiers, so that we can make a decision on how to handle them.  One of the curses and  blessings of our collection is that it is so rich in historical material, and material which is not strictly legal in nature.  The Moys scheme is designed to accomodate academic and law firm collections, but inevitably we have had problems fitting some of our older, weirder material into the scheme.  For this reason, the people overseeing the project have to create some local exceptions to the scheme and pass this down to the reclassifiers.

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30
Jul 10

Library Day in the Life – Days 3 & 4

This post covers day 3 & 4 of Round 5 of the Library Day in the Life Project.  I’m a cataloguer in an academic law library.

Wednesday was a very routine day, broken up a bit by a shift on the enquiry desk from 1-3.  It was very quiet, as even the comparatively few people using the library during vacation have to eat lunch sometime, but I was able to help a few external readers find their way around the library, and resolve some problems with a printer.

Thursday, as I mentioned on Day 1, is when the delivery of legal deposit books arrives, all shiny and new.  The Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries underwent some changes in March 2009, moving from their premises in London to Edinburgh and implementing a new database and workflow for the receipt and dispersal of legal deposit material to the copyright libraries.  Unsurprisingly this led to many changes for us, most importantly the fact that, whereas we (or rather the Information Resources Graduate Trainee!) had to search for bibliographic records and create holdings for each book received, now these are loaded onto OLIS with each delivery, so that each book should arrive at the law library complete with a bibliographic record.  These vary in quality of course, but it means that in most cases our Graduate Trainee can get straight on with the physical processing (yes, stamping!) and quickly pass the books to me for cataloguing.

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27
Jul 10

Library Day in the Life – Day 2

This is day 2 of Round 5 of the Library Day in the Life Project.  I’m a cataloguer in an academic law library and this is my Tuesday.

On Tuesdays I work until 7pm, so I roll into work a couple of hours later than normal. I singularly fail to help my colleague resolve a baffling acquisitions problem, then go off to help with more recruitment stuff. By about midday I’m ready to start checking through my email.

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26
Jul 10

Library Day in the Life – Day 1

This week I will be participating in Round 5 of the Library Day in the Life Project.  I’m going to try to cover a whole week, because that’s the cycle my work is built around, and because I’m working this Saturday there will be an extra bonus day!

My actual job title is the desperately un-catchy Library Assistant (Cataloguing) but I usually say that I’m the English Language Cataloguer for my library.  My supervisor, the senior cataloguer, is responsible for material in languages other than English.  So, onto my day.

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