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Library Student Day in the Life: Day Three

By Laura J M Newman, on 6 March 2013

Welcome to todays chapter of a day in my life! This is my third day of blogging for the Hack Library Student Day in the Life project, sharing what my life is like as a library student.

Today is all about my working life. I work part-time in an academic library when I’m not studying, doing 15 hours a week. This is a bit more than I would ideally like as it means I don’t have much spare time, but I need the money to be able to fund full-time study. I started work at 9am this morning, and given that I didn’t get much sleep last night I wasn’t feeling very happy about it! My job is working within a subject team, to support the Subject Librarians in any jobs that need doing. Something I enjoy about the job is that it can have a variety of tasks, but on the other hand it is often very repetitive which can be a little boring at times.

This morning I started my day by catching up on emails (you tend to have a fairly full inbox when you only work two days a week) and then by completing the weeding task I had started last week. The relevant Subject Librarian had given us a list of periodicals that needed weeding and sending to Store, so I’ve been taking them off the shelves, measuring them (so the staff at the Store know how much shelf space they’ll take up), documenting and boxing them up ready to go. It doesn’t sound very interesting, but I actually find it strangely satisfying.

Boxes

My desk, surrounded by boxes after the morning’s work!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I spent a large proportion of my day doing that for various subjects. It’s quite physical at times, as it requires lifting heavy volumes and then pushing a huge trolley full of them back to my office (which naturally was the opposite end of the building). On the plus side, I now know where to find the German Periodicals! I’ve only been in my job for three months, and the library is a bit of a rabbit warren – I still don’t know where lots of things are!

empty cabinet

One of the rather empty cabinets after I’d had a go at it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the periodical weeding I had lunch (soup again), then started on a very long reading list. This basically just involved checking the list against our catalogue to see whether we already have them, or whether we need to buy them (budget allowing, obviously). It’s a fairly easy task (although sometimes that catalogue seems to fight you all the way), although todays list had quite a lot of books not in English which made it somewhat more challenging! At 3.30pm I went for tea with some colleagues, and then after that continued with the reading list until I left at 5pm, to catch my train by the skin of my teeth. Then I rushed home so that I could have a quick dinner before my friend came to pick me up – I went to the cinema again. I hate to miss the opportunity of an Orange Wednesday!

To see more of my blogs, have a look at http://butilikesayingshh.wordpress.com/ or find me on Twitter @librarylandL

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