librarian – Page 2 – Dumpling in a Hanky

I aren’t dead

I’m just busy!

So, in mid January, I started my new role…and was promptly informed that my colleague would be leaving in 2.5 months.

YEEK!

So I very quickly had to get myself up to speed on a lot of things: how things worked in the library, who our main users were and how they preferred the services to be delivered to them, what I was responsible for, who I should be working with on various cross-department projects, where all our stock is located, how we fit within the organisational structure, where we can offer more or improved services, and core things like how our circulation system works, and what our policies on multiple day-to-day tasks like binding are. Plus I undertook a fairly massive physical and electronic clutter clear out (if I never have to spend another day in a basement with motion sensitive lighting again, I’ll be a happy girl) that could only be done while my colleague was here to staff the library when I was buried in old materials in a cellar. Altogether, my first few months have been pretty hectic and although not stressful in a “OMG I just can’t do this” sort of way, my brain was being rammed so full of information I was struggling to sleep because I had so many thoughts and ideas racing around my head, and then that continued into dreaming about work once I actually got to sleep! Thankfully though, that phase is now past!

It’s been a very demanding process, but it’s also been hugely rewarding – I’ve been able to go through things from top to bottom, assessing what might need changed, and then actually implement those changes, which I’ve never really been in a position to do in roles I’ve been in before. My departing colleague has been fantastic, giving me the information I’ve needed to enable me to make informed decisions on issues, rather than me having to faff about on my own, going backwards and forwards to gather information to enable me to make appropriate choices. It’s meant I’ve been able to be quite productive in my first few months in the post.

But now, it’s suddenly here: my colleague leaves tomorrow.

EVEN BIGGER YEEK!

I’ll have some excellent temporary assistance for a month, then the new member of staff will take up their role at the end of April. While it’s unfortunate that there’s going to be no direct handover period, the new member of staff has been able to come in and shadow my departing colleague for a period of time beforehand, so they’ll be able to start with a good grasp of the basics of the role.Which is going to be a HUGE help, because I’ve not really had enough time to learn both roles fully. My new colleague having a head start on the role is going to be very helpful!

In the meantime, I’ll be “learning through doing”…ultimately responsible for the duties of both roles being performed properly, and training my new colleague on the role. Again, however, this is a good opportunity – it’ll enable me to look at both roles, and see how I want them to work, now that I know how mine works from experience. I’ll be looking at desk rotas, enquiry spreadsheets, communal resources folder management, and all sorts of little bits and pieces that could easily continue the way they are, but I’d prefer they were done differently.

So, if anyone has any top tips on how two staff with one enquiry desk can best balance their time, let me know! And if you see me huddled in a corner somewhere over the next few months…take pity on me, and bring me Sour Cream and Chive Pringles, and some Irn Bru?

Another year, another new start

As 2014 changes into 2015, my employment will be changing too, as I’ll shortly be starting another role in a new workplace.

Unfortunately, in October last year my previous employer went into administration, and although it was quickly bought out of administration by another law firm, there weren’t any roles available for the library staff at the new firm. So it was time to launch into the job hunt again! I have the dubious honour of being the only person to have worked for the only two law firms in Scotland to go into administration, and at one point it was suggested to me that I could make a career out of approaching all the remaining firms and asking them to pay me not to work for them… 😉 I did think that once again, I would have to leave the legal sector to find employment, but some fortunate timings mean that I will be staying in the sector, although I will be moving away from working directly with solicitors. My new role is also a permanent one, and as stable as any job can be, which should hopefully mean that I can permanently retire my job hunting spreadsheet and recruitment site search terms!

So, what will I be doing for the rest of 2015? Getting to grips with my new role. Getting to know the people I’ll be working with, and for. Learning more about criminal law (I’ve been told this should be relatively simple in comparison to civil law, but we’ll see….). Finding out what role-specific groups I should be involved in, and what events I should be attending. Working out what sort of things I can do to improve the service (I’ve already muttered about investigating iPads/tablets ) and what new tools could be useful for the users. Being on best behaviour during my 6 month probation. Wondering if I’ll be allowed to have a fish tank on my desk….

The prospect is simultaneously both quite exciting, and quite scary – it’s more responsibility than I’ve ever had before, but I’m ready to go in and librarian my ass off! 😀

Onwards and upwards!

Reinventing the wheel

I noticed an advert on the TV during the summer, and while watching it, I found myself becoming increasingly more irritated by its content as it went on. Then, not long after that, I saw another advert along the same lines, for the same group. I was reminded of my reaction to viewing those adverts last weekend, when I attended Library Camp Glasgow. One of the sessions I took part in covered advocacy, and what can we do to better promote the profession. The existence of these adverts is evidence of, to me, why we need to continue to work hard to show the wider public that “librarian” does not (and never has) equal “timid person who stamps books and says shhhh a lot”.

So, this is one of the adverts that so annoyed me, for Barclays Digital Eagles:

https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/7hG6c_mz6JQ&source=uds

Now, I’m not disputing the fact that the concept is great: Barclays are funding people specifically to assist those who don’t have the skills needed to make full use of the internet, and the many opportunities it offers. This is an excellent thing to be doing, and will certainly help those that most need support to get online. It’s fabulous, and a great thing for Barclays to fund!

But this is where I get frustrated with the initiative. Did nobody at Barclays realise that an infrastructure to support these activities, and experienced staff were already available…in public libraries? Is there such a low awareness of what public libraries offer that not one single person involved in this campaign at any point stopped to think “Hey, you know what? Rather than reinventing the wheel…why don’t we provide the funding to public libraries to allow them to have a dedicated information skills member of staff to be a Digital Eagle? We’d still get the excellent PR of our name being associated with something that’s being done for the good of others, but we wouldn’t have the problems of creating a whole new system, and having to make space in our branches for this initiative.”

Nope. This idea didn’t occur to anyone, apparently.

I can understand that there’s probably an element of a corporate desire to get people into the Barclays branches, in order to eventually persuade them to become Barclays customers, but surely the conversion rate of “came in to be shown how to use a computer” to “being suddenly inspired to switch bank accounts” must be so low that the cost of the areas being used for Digital Eagles activities must far outweigh the commercial benefit?

The coverage and reach of this service certainly isn’t anywhere near as good as the public library service – if I wanted to go to one of their “Tea and Teach” sessions, I’d need to go to…Aberdeen. That’s the only place in Scotland that provides this service. There was an event there on the 6th of November, held between 10am and 3pm, which as a working adult, means that the Digital Eagles service and support is totally unavailable to me. Yet if I wanted to pick up computer skills via a public library, I could go to Edinburgh City Libraries, and use their Adult Learner facilities, which include an online computer skills programme. Library staff would be on hand during evenings and the weekend to assist me to get access to these resources, so I could fit in access around my working life. Unfortunately, the public library staff available to help me don’t have the time or resources to give the more intensive support I’d need as a person with minimal or no computer skills. Surely this is where the Digital Eagles should be: where people are already going, looking for help? The public library is where the public are used to coming for assistance with a wide range of information needs, and although library staff are not there to teach information skills, they nonetheless do end up squeezing them into their days, as an unpaid, unofficial additional responsibility. It would have been far more effective, in both cost and PR terms, to have given the funding used for the Digital Eagles programme to local authorities, ring fenced to be used to fund equivalent roles, in public libraries.

So Barclays: your Digital Eagles are a good idea, but wouldn’t they be an even better idea if they were in libraries?

Learning ALL THE STUFF..and showing people we know about it

Land Registration (Scotland) Act 2012 seminar notes

TUPE update notes

Because my new role means that I’m regularly asked do to legal research, it also means that I need to make sure that my level of general knowledge of a wide range of legal topics is pretty high, and that it stays high. Helpfully, my employer runs in-house training sessions on all sorts of things, for all sorts of departments, and these seminars are also open to a range of staff. That means that my colleagues and I can take the chance to get some excellent information from speakers on relevant topics, both drawn from our own staff and from external experts. I’ve been learning about land law, employment/company law, and there’s some environmental training coming up soon too.

These sessions are interesting on multiple levels – it’s great for me to be able to have access to the level of professional training that the solicitors have, which helps me get my knowledge up to a higher level, but it’s also allowing me and my colleagues to get out of the library and meet staff, even those that don’t currently have any work they need me to do for them. As we are an internal department, we don’t have any help in marketing our service to our users to increase engagement and awareness of what we offer – the Marketing department’s time is taken up with promoting the skills and knowledge of the solicitors to external users (although I have heard of an information service in a law firm that Marketing used as a test for an internal publicity campaign). That means that if we want to publicise our service internally, we have to do it ourselves. By going to these internal training events, we’re raising our visibility level within the firm, putting our faces to the “Information Services” department, making ourselves approachable, and showing that our knowledge on legal topics is as current as it can be. When you’re a librarian in a commercial environment, you have to make your own opportunities to promote the service!