This is the first in a series of posts by DIS students for the Library Day in the Life Project.

I’m Annie, a full time student on the MA Library and Information Studies course. Full time LIS students have just got back from a two week work placement, and we’ve just handed in all of last term’s coursework, and started a new set of modules. This term for me consists of Information Sources and Retrieval, Management, Publishing Today and Cataloguing and Classification II (which follows on from the introductory module last term).

I don’t live in London so my day started with a train journey in from Hertfordshire. It’s not a bad commute, and I usually while away the time quite happily reading or checking emails etc.  Today I came into UCL an hour before my first lecture in order to get some books out from the Science Library and make a start reading for an essay on legal issues facing libraries.

Our department is on the left, and the Science Library over on the right.

I had two lectures today. This morning’s was with Lyn Robinson from City University on the history of information retrieval tools, from ancient Mesopotamia to the present day. The people on our course come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and those with previous degrees in archaeology, history, and English literature were all at times called upon to add to the discussion. Alas, my music degree didn’t do me much good in this situation!

After lunch I had one of my optional modules this term, Cat & Class II.

At the moment we are doing the classification part of the course with Vanda Broughton, looking at thesaurus construction and controlled vocabulary. I’m finding this quite interesting and after today’s lecture I think I might do one of my assignments for this module on this topic.

And that was the end of my #libday8, time to get on the train again and go home. Other DIS students will be taking turns to blog each day this week, so watch this space!

This week is the eighth round of Library Day in the Life, a blogging and microblogging communal diary initiative started in July 2008 by Bobbi Newman.

As it says on the project wiki, “It’s a great way for students who are interested in the library profession to see what we really do.” I thought that prospective librarians might be just as interested to see what happens at library school, and, now that our student blog is fully operational, several of this year’s cohort have agreed to blog some of their activities here.

Look out for posts this week from Ellen Allardice, James Curtis, Karina de la Garza Gil, Annie Johnson, William Earp and Jennifer Yellin.

If you want an idea of the sort of things they might have to say, take a look at Helen Doyle’s ‘My Week’ column in Library & Information Update, February 2011 (close-up of cutting here) and Sarah Maule’s blogging for libday6 (week commencing 24 January 2011). Sarah also blogged libday7 in July 2011, when she was completing her MA LIS dissertation and working full time.

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Image: UCL Portico on graduation day 2011.