Library Day In The Life: #libday6

I thought I'd have a go at this for the first time as I've followed it for a while but never had time to contribute. So here goes...

Day 1 (Monday) started with checking the inbox and dealing with some emails that had come in over the weekend. After a quick cup of coffee I was on the desk for the morning - which was a mixture of dealing with face to face enquiries and finishing up the student support emails that had come in over the weekend.

We've recently been supporting a new unit of study for a large number of students. It's an interesting one because the vast majority of the reading the students need to do is available electronically and linked to from the unit. Which is great but has led to a need to support some of the students who haven't used eresources before. Walking them through athens account setups and logins is made a bit trickier due to the students being taught at a different campus so most of the support is happening through email, online or over the phone.

After a busy morning on the enquiry desk I made it back to the office to spend a bit of time working on the reading list for another unit. This is another one where we're doing our best to make the materials available electronically, using ebooks, ejournals and our ereserves facility for any book chapters that aren't available electronically. This allows us to scan chapters (with CLA limits) to let students access them from the VLE. It's great to have engagement from the academic running the unit in this case - they've really put alot of effort into selecting reading material so I'm pulling out all of the stops to facilitate this one - once it's ready it'll be a great example of making learning resources accessible that we can maybe use to get engagement from other units...

Over lunch I take a phone call from one of our distance students who's been struggling with refrencing. To be fair they were trying to cite a picture in a newspaper at secondhand. Not the easiest thing to reference but we got there in the end.

Back on the enquiry desk for a bit in the afternoon, and later staffing our CHAT (virtual enquiry service) dealing with a whole range of enquiries from renewals to lit searching... One of the things I really like about this job is the variety. In the calendar this week is desk and CHAT sessions, school meetings, teaching, tutorials and a bit of studying and writing. Today's definitely been about student support but as a mixture of face-to-face, online and phone support.