Library Day in the Life - round 4

This is my contribution to the Library Day in the Life project. But rather than a day in my life, what follows is more of a round-up of what this Scottish Government Librarian has been up to in the last 2 weeks.

I joined Civil Pages (a social networking site for the UK civil service) and Yammer (enterprise microblogging). Continued to administer and deliver a range of Internet skills courses (Internet Skills in the Workplace and Web 2.0 Workshop) for Scottish Government staff.

I co-delivered our Web 2.0 Workshop on 28th January. Two colleagues delivered our Internet in the Workplace session on the 2nd February in our training room, but found the room double booked. Not our fault! Some quick thinking by colleagues secured us another training room. But I checked all future bookings were OK. Thankfully, they were! This course is always popular. We have 22 people on the waiting list, so having arrange 2 additional sessions recently, I arranged a third for 23rd February.

Attended EBSCO A-Z WebEx training on 2nd February. Quite impressed by WebEx as way to deliver our own library tutorials.

Tried Ping & Posterous for ‘life-streaming’ – a quick way to update my various social media tools at once with one email. Pretty nifty!

Attended a quarterly meeting of Scottish Government librarians on 27th January in New Register House. Seeing colleagues again in a glorious building, even getting a tour, an exhibition and whisky chocolate. A wonderful morning!

With our appraisal year ending on 31st March, I arranged a progress meeting with a colleague on two of our objectives - developing our current awareness services and Library Intranet pages on 26th January. Happily, we are well on track with both. However, I did volunteer to pilot how feasible and beneficial it would be for librarians to provide an alerts service based on RSS to complement our more traditional alerting services.

Arranged for a Chartership candidate working at another library to visit us on 3rd February. Our team gave him an overview of how we operate, focusing on current awareness and marketing. Quite alot of information to cover in one morning, but he seemed to get alot out of it. He arrived back at his library to an email containing a load of links and docs we thought he would be interested in.

One of our core services for Scottish Government staff is our literature search service. Our searches are fairly comprehensive involving detailed searching of carefully selected resources, then neatly presented as a reading list in an easy-to-read Word template. Subjects I searched include:

Charging models or schemes relating to planning fees
Abolishing patient charges for prescriptions
Business models
Multi Disciplinary Practices

Posted via email from Paul Gray's Blog