Journal: Library Day in the Life

Library Day in the Life

Ned Potter (July 2011)

Context: I work in an academic library at the University of York. I’m an Academic Liaison Librarian – essentially this means I’m the first point of contact between my two academic departments (Music, and Film Theatre and TV Studies) and the library. I manage a departmental budget for resources, attend some of their key meetings, teach the students information skills, and so on.

I work in a shiny new building (it opened a fortnight before I arrived) called the Harry Fairhurst Building. It is adjacent to the main library, and contains no books; just offices and flexible study space. If you’re interested, some photos of the redevelopment and of how it looks now are available here.

This job is what I’ve always wanted to do, since knowing I was in librarianship for the long haul.

It is absolutely mint – I love it. 

Monday 25th: Being an academic librarian is an extraordinarily reactive job. By which I mean, more than any other job I’ve done I don’t know what’ll happen in a given week – I reckon about 40% of my time I know roughly what I’ll be doing (for example, collection development or preparing teaching materials – stuff which happens on an on-going basis), and the other 60% I’ll have no idea about till it happens. The demands of the job are driven by the demands of other people – students, academics, other staff across the library and the University.

So I get in, a little late, with some idea of what my day will hold, but in the knowledge that the contents of my inbox may dictate the rest.

The first thing that happens is picking up a conversation with some colleagues where we left off last week, about slides for a 20:20 presentation. There is a staff Away Day on Friday, and each department within the Directorate (York has a converged IT and Library service known as the Information Directorate) is giving a Pecha Kucha session about themselves.

I’m doing the one about Academic Liaison, and last week sat down with the leaders of each cluster in Academic Liaison (Arts & Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences) to brain-storm what we wanted to say. We’ve gone with a ‘six ideas in six minutes’ approach (20:20 presentations consist of 20 slides each lasting 20 seconds – hence the name – so that basically gives you around 6 minutes plus a little time to start and end it) rather than trying to get absolutely everything in. So I’ll be talking about who we are, where we fit in to the organisation, how we get involved with content in the library, how we infiltrate departments, and the external and internal projects we’re involved in.

One of the best things about this job is the chance to be involved in all sorts of inward-andoutward-facing projects which come around – Academic Liaison has its claws into everything...

I’m currently involved in the implementation of a new catalogue, for example – it’s a fascinating (if sometimes frustrating) process.

Anyhow, I’ve gone all out with the slides – including loads of animations (which I normally eschew) in order to get round the limitations of the format. Hope I don’t get in trouble for that...

There’s a couple of things I’ve got wrong in the external projects slides, so we talk about them and I correct the PowerPoint.

I later get an email about the new catalogue which is complicated I don’t even try to read it – I just mark it with a red-flag to attempt later, maybe after some coffee.

In the afternoon I attend a meeting about Prezi.

(See why I love my job?) Recently a new post has been created in the library – Head of Relationship Management. This is a pretty highup position, and the post-holder will have ultimate responsibility for Academic Liaison. All the candidates had to present, and unfortunately I couldn’t attend – the buzz from the team afterwards was that one candidate had been particularly excellent, and she had used Prezi.

(She ultimately got the job and I’ve heard so many good things about her since, I can’t wait to work with her!) So we were talking about Prezi and it emerged that some of my colleagues who have been playing around with it wanted to run a workshop to introduce it to the rest of the library.

My Prezi guides have been seen by more than 10,000 people and the company has just invited me into their Pioneer programme, so I decided this was not the moment to be shy! I volunteered to help out, and am now starting and finishing the workshop, which happens next week.

I’m so thrilled about this – it’s the meeting of my existing interests and the actual job that I’ve been increasingly pre-occupied with over the last 2 years, but unable to achieve in my old jobs. It keeps happening here – I get to do stuff I love in work time, rather than just outside it...

I’ve been meaning to create a Prezi all about how to use Prezi for absolutely ages. My two guides (one in written form, the other a set of slides) are out of date now, and they don’t cover how Prezi works, really – they jump straight into making a proper good one. So I seized the opportunity to create the ultimate How To Make a Prezi, Prezi – from how the interface works right up to using Hidden Frames to create interactive maps.

In the run up to this meeting some people from twitter very kindly tested my guide for me -

this turned out to be a really useful exercise as their feedback was used to add sections, clarify things, correct stuff etc. So thank you to the testers!

The meeting went well and we discussed the format – hand-outs, an introduction, some hands-on time for participants, examples from other presenters of Prezis they’d used in an academic context, and then stuff from me about how to avoid making the viewer sea-sick, how to use frames etc. I’ll be blogging the guide next week, but if you want a sneak #libday7 peak, you can find it here ...

Incidentally, I’m trying to train myself to work in small bursts. All my life I’ve preferred to be immersed in something and really be able to have at it for a good period of time – this is no longer realistically possible with a lot of stuff I do. So rather than spending a day or an afternoon on the Prezi guide, I did 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, 10 minutes the next time I got a chance. And actually it was fine. Perhaps there’s hope for me yet.

Other stuff did happen in the afternoon, but I’m aware this entry is REALLY long so I’ll leave it there for now.

Tuesday 26th: In the morning I’m tied to my desk – I’m on back-up duty for our enquires desk, known as Help & Information (or H&I). During the summer we don’t have to work actually on the H&I desk in person because it’s so quiet – we just have to stay by the phone and be ready to go down there if needed. Even though I’d often spend an morning at my desk, you do become very aware of being constrained when you know you have 4 hours in a row! But today I’m actually quite glad in a way – I organised my brother-in-law’s Stag Do at the weekend, and after all the lazer-paintballing and footballing I can barely walk anyway.

All sorts of issues with Outlook make the morning very frustrating, but I eventually manage to volunteer to be the library’s representative on a University project looking at ‘live classroom’ applications – essentially, stuff that allows you to have virtual conferences or more pertinently to us, virtual info-skills sessions. I’m really interested in this anyway, and as one of my subjects (TFTV) is on another campus a lot of my students could almost be considered distance-learners. With that in mind,

despite already having quite a lot on, I stick my name down as no one else has volunteered.

I make the mistake of closing Outlook to see if it works better when re-started – it then won’t even load up. While I wait for the systems team to help me out, I get into a nice debate in the comments section of my blog, about braverybased librarianship, and whether that’s an appropriate word to use for what I was talking about. It raised an interesting question, for me, about how non-librarians would view the stuff I put on my blog. I talk openly on there about what I perceive as failings in librarianship or stuff I think we could improve on, so that could certainly provide fodder for someone who was anti-library. But the blog is aimed at librarians and I use other platforms (such as Slideshare) to try and disseminate stuff externally – so perhaps that’s okay? I certainly don’t want to not have the debate at all. Something to ponder, anyway.

At lunch time I go to Stock Xchange (http://www.sxc.hu/) and find the photos that form the backdrop and cover for this journal.

I’m excited about using Issuu to publish this – I’ve always liked the platform but haven’t previously found a really good use for it. This

particular journal was made in PowerPoint, then saved to PDF and uploaded to ISSUU. I find PowerPoint a lot easier to work in than Word for creative projects. It’s actually a really flexible tool.

At any one time there are about 6 really urgent things to do with my book on marketing libraries which I need to do but have not done.

One of these is contacting the (awesome) person who has agreed to write a case study about their institution's use of Facebook. This is slightly different to the other case studies in the Marketing With Social Media chapter because I don’t actually use Facebook myself so don’t know that much about it. So this case study needs to be broader in scope to atone for my lack of context... I finally get the chance to think this through and correspond with the contributor via email to sort out what we’re going to do. It’s a weight off my mind, immediately replaced by many other bookrelated weights jostling for position on top of my brain.

After lunch I finish off two bulletins (one for each of my departments) on important library stuff they need to know about. There is an

enormous amount going on at the moment, to do with Reading Lists (and reading list software), a new 24hr loan category, a newish service to digitise key texts, and the new catalogue – plus a £20million refurbishment of the premises. It’s hard to communicate it all in a way that’s interesting enough that the academics will actually read it all the way through... Fortunately for me one of my colleagues has assembled all the info into one document and then sent it round for others to adapt and use if they wish – there’s a lot of this sharing of resources in Academic Liaison. This is really useful for me as I’ve only been in the role for 2 months.

I flirt with the idea of making the bulletin available via this format (e.g use Issuu to present the information, but without the ersatz-journal graphics obviously) in an effort to make it more engaging, but wonder if the academics will just think I’m bonkers.

I’ve also discussed the ins and outs of communicating this kind of information, with my Dad who used to be an academic in one of my departments. He pointed out how important it was to make it bespoke to that department, and to make it obvious that it’s bespoke – if

academics think they’re just being sent some generic library update they probably won’t read it at all...

Before I go home I email Angelie, Prezi’s ‘Chief Evangelist’ (ace job title!) who originally reached out to me about my Prezi guides, and let her know the new one is ready to go, should she want to do anything with it.

Wednesday 27th: Sent off the 20:20 to the Head of HR. I found a nice creative commons set of numbers on flickr which I’ve used to introduce each section:

This morning I’m looking into the library’s provision for those studying popular music. I remember from my own Music MA here at York that the collection lacked a bit in this area, and recent student feedback has indicated this is still the case, so I’m working with the library rep to see what we have and how we can make it better.

This is a fairly complicated process – first of all

ascertaining what we have and what we’re lacking, then seeing what there is which could help fill the holes, and then trying to balance overhauling the collection with other budgetary needs (such as a big on-going project to improve the library’s holdings of music scores).

Like much of librarianship, it’s about making the ‘best’ compromise. Almost none of us have enough budget to do whatever we want, so judgement calls are a feature of every working day, pretty much.

This particular issue is complicated by differing definitions of ‘popular music’ – to a music academic this a blanket term covering an awful lot of ground including stuff like blues and jazz; to everyone else it means pop music specifically (and not stuff like blues and jazz). It’s important that we understand which of these definitions the students are most concerned with.

I also set to work at creating the hand-outs for the Prezi workshop, which I expected to take me about 5 minutes as it’s mainly just screen-grabs from the Prezi itself, but actually it takes ages because I can’t help trying to add a bit more context...

At lunch time what I should be doing is trying to find out how to change my web-hosting plan – I’m now nearing the top end of my 10gig a month bandwidth, so need a bigger package.

However this kind of thing is complicated and makes my head hurt, so I put it off.

Angelie from Prezi has emailed me back to say they’ve put the Prezi guide Prezi on Facebook and on their Explore page. I should have held off emailing her until next week in case this happened, because now the Prezi is launched to the world before I actually use it to deliver the session it was made for! Overnight it’s been viewed already more than any other Prezi I’ve done, and lot’s of people have left comments.

This also makes me think back to the debate currently on-going on my blog about braverybased librarianship, and how much we should be talking about it in a public forum. Like everything else I do, the Prezi links back to the blog (the guides I write to online platforms tend to be read by non-librarians, so if they like them I’m always keen to point out that I am an Information Professional!) so a bit of nonlibrary traffic will be heading towards the debate on bravery. Hmm.

I wonder about blogging the Prezi guide itself so at least they find that first when they arrive at my site, but I’m reluctant to do that because a: I want to use it for its primary purpose first, delivering the in-house workshop and b: I’m near the top end of my bandwidth for this month and blogging it will likely cause a spike in traffic which might push me over the edge and cause my entire site (not just my blog) to stop working until August, which would be rubbish.

The Day in the Life blog post for which this journal is bring written, for example, wouldn’t see the light of day until after LibDay7 is done and dusted.

I resolve to look again at upgrading my hosting package with Clook. It turns out my existing package expires in four days anyway (I probably knew that at some point and then failed to adequately process the information...) so I renew and upgrade to a 20gig package, which adds £36 on to the price. Never mind. I was going to have to upgrade later in the year anyway when I add a second website, for the book.

The afternoon is dominated by catalogue implementation stuff which I can only just understand, and an encroaching fear about how

much I have to before term starts - which essentially paralyses me even though I know the only way to beat it is to JUST FRIGGING DO ONE OF THE THINGS WHICH IS SCARING ME. At times like this I feel like I’m trying to force a big suit-case full of panic closed by pushing down on it, sitting on it etc, and that if I let go everything in the suit-case will spring out and fly across the room.

(Later on I get home and play with my daughter and it all melts away.)

Thursday 28th: Did a small amount of work on the book last night – trying to ensure I’ve got case studies slotting into the right places, mostly. I’ve realised I don’t really have much for the ‘Marketing on a budget? If only...’ chapter, which essentially looks at low-cost marketing which doesn’t suck.

If you’re skilled in the art of producing high quality marketing stuff (printed materials, campaigns, ideas – anything) without spending a load of cash, and fancy writing a case study, please get in touch!

I have bandwidth again now so I decide to publish the Prezi guide – it’s already been viewed 6,000 times so there doesn’t seem much sense in keeping it quiet any longer!

Before I come into work I also update the Guides page on my website, using the FireFTP tool in Firefox. It’s a page which collates all the guides I’ve written to stuff like Prezi, twitter, presenting and so on – I have to edit it in the raw code because I don’t have access to DreamWeaver, so it takes a while...

Had training on the new A/V equipment this afternoon – this was a lot more interesting than it might sound! As it’s a new building the Harry Fairhurst has some bang up-to-date gear. I particularly like these big screens for the students to use in the collaborative study areas:

The little strip in the middle opens up to reveal VGA cables which students can then plug their laptops into. The photos don’t really do it justice but the screens are huge – it’s a nice way for students to work together in the library.

In the morning we had a meeting of the Project team responsible for implementing the new catalogue. It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to go into all the details here, but basically it was about all the stuff in the email I’d been too scared to read earlier in the week... Luckily I had digested its contents by today. I have quite strong views on next-gen library catalogues so I was delighted to get involved with this whole thing, but it is requiring a level of technical knowledge which is far beyond my comfort zone. As I’ve said before, I have my fingers in lots of technical pies but not that far into any of them.

I’m on the Social Networking group, and next week I’m giving a report to the rest of the group about taking our social networking activity to the next level. (Love my job.) I’m going to be working with the Marketing Manager from my local Picturehouse Cinema to try and tie in what they do with what the students in my department are doing (as well as the obvious films angle, City Screen also live-screens Operas, ballets etc via satellite). I’d quite like to use our social media presences to enhance the student experience in a sort of more holistic way – give them information about stuff which is

happening in the City generally which relates to their academic activities. Will be interesting to see if this works and what other people have to say about it.

I’m also considering benchmarking our Twitter account. As Terry Kendrick always says, proper marketing (as opposed to a series of unrelated promotional activities) is characterised by putting a number on things... We have a certain number of followers now – I’m considering naming a target and a time-frame, and seeing if we can, say, double our followers by introducing the changes I’m suggesting. We may fail, of course, but it won’t be a public failure, just slightly embarassing for me – and I think it is important to take a bravery-based, riskembracing approach to librarianship, after all...

But I don’t think we will fail – I’m confident we can apply some simple principles to our twitter activity and bring the numbers up. Ultimately, I think we can use twitter not just to communicate useful messages to the students, but to help manage the library’s reputation.

Watch this space!

Friday 29th: It’s just before 8am, and I’m shortly off to the Royal York Hotel for Away Day madness. It’s an all day thing and there’s drinks afterwards, so I figure I’d be better off publishing this now...

9am registration is accompanied by bacon & egg butties. WOOF. Wish me luck with the 20:20!

- Ned