librarydayinthelife 27 July 2009
hm... yes I'm a bit late for the Library Day in the Life record of 27 July... but better late than never. I will try my best to remember what happened on that day... not that long ago really.
But before that I could explain what I do for a living... I'm the Librarian of a Language Centre and I'm a one-person library so basically I do more or less everything, from library assistants' jobs to librarians'.
The 27 July (a Monday) was the beginning of the pre-sessional courses in English at our Centre and I was happy to welcome the students and give them an extended library tour. I feel a lot in common with them: being a foreigner myself and having to learn British English when I moved to the island.
Most of the day was spent answering emails (as I was back from an extended weekend). I made a booking for an event organised by the central Library at your University about shelf-ready books with two important suppliers, which, in the case of a one-person library (ie me!), would be great. I answered a query about various Asian languages that we have in our library and finished my email inviting the person in the library (as I suspected he was not from the University. I believe I was right as I never heard from him again) and to be frank I did not spend too long a time on this query. I double-checked with one of our most important suppliers that they will stock enough Chinese and Portuguese books for our students next academic year. I answered a query regarding book donation + a visit to your library, and once again I suspected (rightly) that the people were not from our University: I thanked them very much for the book donation (a poisonous present always, book donation...) but I would have liked to know more about the books, was there a list? Same as with the previous reader's query, I did not hear from them again. There's always a lot of readers in the summer trying their luck in playing tourists in libraries, or in getting rid of their old books' collections. One should not generalise of course, and sometimes some books' collections have been great... but it's always best to be prepared to refuse anything! Rather than later discreetely "recycling them". (sending books to Africa or other countries in need to books is a solution... but one must not forget that they too, have the right to refuse useless, smelly, damp library material. They are not a bin!). One last email I sent (not completely work related I have to confess) is a email to help the Hubbell Library in New Orleans.
The rest of the day, I'm not sure what I did. Perhaps I ran our robot, xenu, to check broken links on our website so that I took some broken links off, perhaps I went into the web 2.0 world adding sites of interest in delicious, or added something to the library blog, or wrote something in our facebook or netvibes account, or quite simply, I put books back on the shelves from our trolley and made sure the English sections of the library looked good and were in order so that our new students would be happy. I think I put back the big library tables in place (we just have had our carpeting redone) and seats so that everybody would be happy using the library again. I also, quite simply, spent sometime admiring the brand new carpet!
Sorry really I cannot remember... so really I created another day, in August, with a proper record of what I have really done on the day!
But before that I could explain what I do for a living... I'm the Librarian of a Language Centre and I'm a one-person library so basically I do more or less everything, from library assistants' jobs to librarians'.
The 27 July (a Monday) was the beginning of the pre-sessional courses in English at our Centre and I was happy to welcome the students and give them an extended library tour. I feel a lot in common with them: being a foreigner myself and having to learn British English when I moved to the island.
Most of the day was spent answering emails (as I was back from an extended weekend). I made a booking for an event organised by the central Library at your University about shelf-ready books with two important suppliers, which, in the case of a one-person library (ie me!), would be great. I answered a query about various Asian languages that we have in our library and finished my email inviting the person in the library (as I suspected he was not from the University. I believe I was right as I never heard from him again) and to be frank I did not spend too long a time on this query. I double-checked with one of our most important suppliers that they will stock enough Chinese and Portuguese books for our students next academic year. I answered a query regarding book donation + a visit to your library, and once again I suspected (rightly) that the people were not from our University: I thanked them very much for the book donation (a poisonous present always, book donation...) but I would have liked to know more about the books, was there a list? Same as with the previous reader's query, I did not hear from them again. There's always a lot of readers in the summer trying their luck in playing tourists in libraries, or in getting rid of their old books' collections. One should not generalise of course, and sometimes some books' collections have been great... but it's always best to be prepared to refuse anything! Rather than later discreetely "recycling them". (sending books to Africa or other countries in need to books is a solution... but one must not forget that they too, have the right to refuse useless, smelly, damp library material. They are not a bin!). One last email I sent (not completely work related I have to confess) is a email to help the Hubbell Library in New Orleans.
The rest of the day, I'm not sure what I did. Perhaps I ran our robot, xenu, to check broken links on our website so that I took some broken links off, perhaps I went into the web 2.0 world adding sites of interest in delicious, or added something to the library blog, or wrote something in our facebook or netvibes account, or quite simply, I put books back on the shelves from our trolley and made sure the English sections of the library looked good and were in order so that our new students would be happy. I think I put back the big library tables in place (we just have had our carpeting redone) and seats so that everybody would be happy using the library again. I also, quite simply, spent sometime admiring the brand new carpet!
Sorry really I cannot remember... so really I created another day, in August, with a proper record of what I have really done on the day!
Comments
Post a Comment