I’m back in the office today! Well, not my office as such… On Thursdays I spend all day at St George’s Library. Usually I’d be included on the counter rota for at least two hours but as I did this earlier in the week I’m free to get on with some other activities. These two hours are the only face-to-face contact I get with library users on a weekly basis. The only other opportunities I get to see students is if they ask for help directly or during induction.

Induction takes place over the first few weeks of term (mid Septemberish) and as most of my induction groups include 100+ people a time I don’t really refer to this as face-to-face. It’s also one of the few opportunities I get to broadcast key messages from the library on such a grand scale.

So this morning started with catching up with emails from yesterday – not too many of these luckily but there are a few I’ll have to keep pending until after year-end e.g. book recommendations. One email in particular stood out and that was some exciting news about the assessment of the Information Commons for the SCONUL Library Design Award (that stands for Society of College, National and University Libraries – and is quite prestigious in the higher education sector). I think I’m probably biased but it’s a pretty awesome building and hopefully the Working Group on Space Planning will agree!

Anyway the next job queued up was to type up some notes from yesterday’s training event. I’ve started working towards my CILIP Chartership – a professional qualification demonstrating a commitment to career development – and keeping a record of this kind of thing is important for my portfolio submission. It also reminded me that I need to finish off my Personal Professional Development Plan (PPDP)… seems my two week deadline has passed. It’s OK though, there’s not much to do on it.

By 11am it was time for meeting number one of the day. Since July 5th we’ve had the ebook reader pilot service up and running and today was the first meeting following the launch. It was an opportunity for us to discuss initial feedback and start putting hard plans in place for the prize draw. In exchange for feedback our users are eligible to win an ereader of their own, although reading through some of the feedback makes me think they might not even want one.

Back at the desk I got on with some reading around professional development to pin down more activities I want to include in my PPDP and had a play around with TicTOCs to keep on top of related literature. I also cleared out a load of RSS feeds I’ve not been paying much interest to lately – a tedious task but unfortunately one in grave need of doing. Lunchtime came around pretty quickly after that and off I went to dive into last night’s risotto.

My second meeting of the day was an ‘eMaterials Forum’. I like these meetings mostly because we get to hear reports from colleagues in ‘MeTS’ (I don’t even what this stands for, maybe metadata and e-technology services [?], but they’re the ones that do all the stuff behind the scenes with our electronic journals/databases etc.) These reports usually consist of some pretty impressive figures on collection development and any changes in service provision. Today’s figures didn’t disappoint:

• 46,076 ejournals (up 4,000 from Dec 09);
• 10,362 ebooks (up 2576 from Dec 09);
• and 376 databases (searchable indexes of bibliographic information).

We also had a rather lengthy discussion about branding electronic content to make it more clear to our users that access is provided by the library – because we pay for it. At present the catalogue indicates the location of ejournals/ebooks etc as the ‘Internet’ rather than the library’s digital collection. We all agreed that this suggests the content is freely available online especially when accessed on campus via Google for example. As well as this we’re trying to get more visible branding on supplier platforms to emphasise this further.

For the remainder of the afternoon I ticked off a few minor actions from earlier meetings and had a look over the minutes from my last team meeting to see if there was anything I needed to do before tomorrow (the next team meeting is first thing)… Alas not and hometime rolled around!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Libraries and tagged as ebooks, ejournals, ereader, eresources, libday5, librarydayinthelife, meetings. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.