Library Day in the Life - round 5

This is my contribution to round 5 of the Library Day in the Life project. But rather than a day in my life, what follows is more a round-up of what this Scottish Government Librarian has been up to in the last week.

This year the Scottish Government Library was at last able to secure accommodation in one of our key offices - Victoria Quay in Edinburgh. So I'm now working peripatetically between two sites. This week, working 3 days at our office in Saughton House, Edinburgh and 2 at Victoria Quay.

So. What's a week in the life of this Government librarian like? I'm part of an 5 strong enquiry team, which shares the enquiries desk on a daily rota. Of course, this is great as I never know what I'm going to get. Although in truth many requests are for copies of publications, which our super-efficient Library Assistant answers usually within 15 minutes. Though I had my share of more detailed enquiries this week which ranged from a member of the public requesting copies of responses to a fairly old consultation conducted by the Scottish Government on regulations for milk quotas for farms in southern Scotland, to finding a copy of the consolidated version of the Railways Act (1993). On average over the past three months 4.4% of our requests came from members of the public.

As part of my job I also conduct literature searches. These are varied, often interesting and topical. For example, this week I conducted literature searches across a wide range of subscription databases (beat that, Google!) on:

Flexible staff resourcing
Imaginary companions in adults
Decriminalisation of drugs

Can't resist the swipe at Google, but I mention it because one of the requesters for one of these searches had searched Google and came to us when he found very little. Some carefully built search strategies and considered choosing of databases soon revealed quite a few 'spot on' publications he hadn't found on Google.

This leads me onto my information literacy work, which largely involves me co-writing and co-delivering information skills training for Scottish Government staff.

Our training is part of the course programme for the whole organisation. With the next programme running from October to March, I'm involved with other team members in pulling our library programme together. This week myself and my boss had an initial discussion sketching out the programme. With growing waiting lists for our courses (which is quite flattering) the discussion led onto our desire to deliver our training as elearning packages so all Scottish Government staff can access our courses on their desktops. Probably via Moodle. This is something we really want to do urgently. But to do it well will take some time.

Incidentally, anyone can see our training materials here.

This week also saw me complete a stage of a big project I'm managing, and all of us in team are working on, to create a subject based library of RSS feeds via Netvibes for Scottish Government staff. Or in fact, anyone who would find it useful. It's still in development, but you'll find the completed Government through to Planning and Building pages here.

Particular challenges the project threw up this week had me scratching my head over why some EBSCOhost RSS feeds appear to break after a while, and considering the merits of RSS to email services offered by Feedburner and MailChimp.

Yes. RSS to email. The irony of having folk check in on a Netvibes page to see results of RSS feeds hasn't escaped me, so part of this project is to offer an RSS to email subscription service. Which you can also try out right now on our Netvibes page if you wish.

And that, is a week in the life of a Scottish Government librarian.

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