In summary

Some things that have happened in my library world since January:

Secondment (January-March)
At the beginning of the 2008, I went on secondment to work as a Faculty Liaison Librarian, but I’ve already written about that elsewhere, so I won’t write about it in this post, althought I may write about it again in the future.

Application for Faculty Liaison Librarian post (February)
As one of the FLLs left her post there was an opportunity for me to apply for a permanent job as the Faculty Liaison Librarian for the faculty of Health and Social Care. I applied for the post, and was granted an interview, but didn’t get the job. In fact, no one who was interviewed at that time got the job! I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted the job and it wasn’t a very good time for me to have an interview because I was thinking about my inpending surgery so I wasn’t at all surprised when I didn’t get the job. In fact, I was rather relieved. The fact that I don’t really think I want to be an FLL anymore does beg the question, ‘well, what do I want to do?’, but that’s a question I haven’t been able to answer as yet. I’m hoping that going through the chartership process will help me to decide.

Sick leave and secondments (March – July)
I went into hospital on 18th March and was then off sick until June. This meant that other people in the Reader Services team were seconded to cover my job. One of the Senior Library Assistants took on the role of Assistant Librarian and one of the Library Assistants was, in turn, seconded to cover the role of Senior Library Assistant. I had a phased return to work, so, although I returned to work in June I didn’t go back to being Assistant Librarian until July. During the period of my phased return I was asked by my line manager to write a manual of how to do various Reader Services related tasks. More of this later, I expect.

Staff changes (June – October)
I think the next thing was that the other Senior Library Assistant in the team left for a new job in another department, which of course meant that we had to advertise for and recruit a new member of staff. I was involved in the recruitment and selection process (more in the selection rather than the recruitment) and we appointed a new Senior Library Assistant who started work in Reader Services at the beginning of September. I was responsible for his induction and training.

At the same time as the new SLA started we had a student on work experience with us for a week. He was a good student but getting the paperwork together (Health and Safety risk assessment) was a bit fraught, due to it all being a bit last minute.

In the meantime, one of the Library Assistants left and her replacement began her work in Reader Services on 1st October. I wasn’t really involved in the recruitment and selection for this post, which I was quite glad about as there were over 100 applicants (after which the line manager realised that the job description needed to be tweaked!).

New issue desk rota (September)
A revised issue desk rota came into play on 1st September. Now, instead of having a rota that is basically fixed for the whole year, the rota now has to reflect who is actually in, when they go for break and who is covering their breaks. In effect, this means that at least some of it changes every week, which can be a bit of a pain.

“Reader Services support at the issue desk” (April? )
Part of the issue desk has now been allocated as a Reader Services support bit, where people can be referred to if their query can’t be dealt with by the people working at the issue desk. Despite some initial reservations, this has made life in the Reader Services office a bit quieter and slightly less fraught, as we no longer have such frequent interruptions from people at the issue desk wanting to check things or ask us questions.

Library management system upgrade (August)
Our library management system (Aleph) was upgraded in August. This meant that we had to offline circulation  for a few days, which of course comes with its own problems, and we then experienced other data related problems the effects of which we are still feeling. Aggh.