A post for Library Day in the Life 7
I work as a Senior Information Officer at a commercial property firm in Bristol. Our small team (just me and the Information Centre Manager) provide an Information Service to around 1,500 employees - just call us Superwomen for what we can accomplish in a day!
We take it in turns to be on enquiry duty. Today was a non-enquiry day for me, a chance to catch up on all the other things I do. Here's what today looked like:
08.40 - logged on and checked emails.
09.00 - planning meeting with my manager. We've recently merged with another company which has doubled the number of employees in the UK to around 3,000. We've decided to make some of the things we do self-service, to free up time to enable us to deal with the increasing number of enquiries where are skills can be put to better use. At the moment we are still operating on two separate IT systems, however as different teams and offices merge we will undoubtedly get busier. Things need to change and fast.
09.30 - finished a couple of quick enquiries from Friday; a Land Registry search as well as finding some company information.
10.00 (ish) - downloaded documents for our Electronic Library. Reports are saved, catalogued and stored in a file structure that mirrors our in-house classification system. The latest report in a series is also uploaded onto the catalogue. There were lots of new titles today which needed to be catalogued from scratch.
14.30 - lunch. Sometime you just need to get out of the office for your sanity, today was one of those days.
15.30 - last bit of cataloguing for the day, hoorah!
16.00 - started work on FAQ's and training manual for one of the things we will be making self-service. The principle behind the service is simple enough; you work out what documents you need, then order them, however the idiosyncrasies of the system are making it very difficult to come up with a clear set of instructions. You try explaining that when the system says something is coming by post, it doesn't always mean by post - this is what I'm up against. I've already compiled a list of top users, who will be my guinea pigs. Good luck to them! Of course, I don’t really mean that, being a librarian I'll be there to provide on-going training and backup for the more complex enquiries, but they will have to get used to doing things for themselves.
17.30 - responded to a couple of emails before heading home.
So that's my Monday. Non-enquiry days for me vary greatly and I could have easily spent most of the day dealing with subscriptions, developing our new library catalogue or maintaining our intranet pages, but I'll leave that excitement for another day.
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