So I’m taking the plunge for the Library day in the life project – Round 5 – the idea being to log your day / week and share with the world that librarians do a lot more than you may realise – a laudable aim indeed – so here’s Monday
I should start with introductions – I work on the Virtual Training Suite, a set of free Internet tutorials to help student develop Internet research skills for their university course, but this is not a typical week – it’s the last week that I work for Intute, the database of academic website – I’ve been with Intute (nee SOSIG) for the last 5 years specialising in the Social Sciences (Economics and Education) and learning technologies.
The day starts abruptly at 8 AM with a loud and unwelcome alarm – ah, the joys of rampant insomnia. My day will be full of inputs, media, screens and other stuff screaming for my attention, so I deliberately begin the day quietly – no TV, radio, e-mail checking, just a silly comedy podcast like The Now Show or Answer Me This to accompany me on the short walk to work, and put me in a good mood.
The communications catch-up from the weekend usually takes longer, but it appears that it has been fairly quiet since Friday, so I can concentrate on my “Informational Nerve Centre” or Google Reader to normal people. I track mentions of Intute and the Virtual Training Suite across the web, repost some items to the VTStutorials Twitter channel and keep a few things unread to return to later.
Next week I’m off to an event on Creating and Re-using Information Literacy Learning Objects (CaRILLO) which looks very interesting. One of the things we will be looking at in the coming year, is making the Virtual Training Suite more relevant to the Information Literacy community, so this is a great opportunity to learn more about their needs and what they are doing already.
As background reading I plough through the JISCmail Lis-InfoLiteracy list and a call for contributions to the development of a UK Online IL Assessment Question Bank has a nice summary of Information Literacy issues – a quick copy and paste to Wordle, helps me get to grips with the key topics …
Time for lunch before an afternoon of meetings, but not before a wondrous distraction in the form of Jane Austen’s Fight Club – very silly indeed!
The afternoon is dominated by our last ever Intute: Social Sciences meeting – an audio hook-up with our colleagues at the University of Birmingham who we have worked with over the last few years.
There’s little actual business to discuss, just a few odds and ends, as we hand over the Internet Resource Catalogue to the gang at Mimas, who will be maintaining it during the final year of Intute. Much more importantly we get the chance to pool our knowledge about what our colleagues at the seven Universities that made up the Intute consortium are getting up to in the future – it seems as though most have found lifeboats of one form or another, which is a relief to know.
The afternoon ends a little earlier than normal, as our boss takes us out to the Hope and Anchor, an idyllic pub with a great beer garden to mark the passing of Intute: Social Sciences (nee SOSIG). We are joined by a few “friends and family” who have worked on the service over the years, including the original project director who got the grant for the pilot service back in 1993!
It’s a nice send-off to mark the end of an era – more of a fond farewell, than a wake.
As for this librarydayinthelife stuff – I think it will have to be edited highlights for the rest of the week!
