LibDay8: Quiet in the Library

Last week I took part in Round Eight of the Library Day in the Life Project. This is the second time I've taken part in the Library Day in the Life Project; last time I was off work for the summer and busy with my librarianship dissertation (slightly frightening to think that that was half a year ago). Since then, I've graduated, and am currently looking for my first job as a qualified librarian. Meanwhile, I continue with the day job.

I've had the day job now for over six years. I'm based in an academic library in the wapentake of Strafford, Yorkshire, and my role is "General Assistant": a junior-grade Library Assistant. Above me are the "Information Assistants" who take the brunt of the counter services, while below me are the "Shelvers": elven creatures who flit about the stacks during certain phases of the Moon. 

It's been a varied job: varied in hours, in locations, in range of work, and in amount of work. But by default I work weekday afternoons at a leafy, squirrel-infested campus, currently populated in the most-part by trainee nurses and PE students.

Here's a pointless visual glance at how my working week worked out:

Each day has been reduced to a 24hr clock. Pink represents entertainment, grey is sleep, orange is the humdrum and the day-to-day, blue is travel, yellow is pissing about on the internet (or manning the returns desk, which tended to amount to the same thing this week), green is professional development activity of some kind or other, red is manual labour, and purple is office work or work-shadowing. 

Monday was surprisingly busy: the shelvers had failed to materialize over the weekend, so there was a backlog of shelving to be done. But books were returning quicker than usual too (presumably there'd been a hand-in or something). It was great: just like old times. We even had plenty of processing (new stock to be labelled and tagged) to keep us busy. However, by Tuesday the processing was beginning to wear thin (it comes up from the other campus in small bursts, and increasingly (and infuriatingly) arrives pre-processed from the distributor (who usually gets some aspect of it wrong)), The flood of returns had also abated. Some problems with a door upstairs kept me out of trouble for a bit, and after 3pm I am pretty much on my own on Tuesdays, so that helps with the workload too, but things were already beginning to look quite desperate. Wednesday was worse: I had to resort to tearing books apart and gluing them back together again (you can always find a few repairs if you look for them). After a while the silence became so bad that I decided to start working on (the third and final draft of) my last blog post. I would've employed some of my time doing a deep tidy of the collection had there not been a problem with the lighting in my area of the stacks.

Another sensitive restoration.
Gaffer-tape and PVA are our main weapons in our fight against decay.

Thursdays tend to be my busiest day as I'm pretty much on my own for most of the afternoon and there are trolleys to be made up for the shelvers who come in on Fridays. No matter how quiet a week might be, I can usually keep myself reasonably occupied on a Thursday, and so it was this week. Fridays too are quite planned out for me: two scheduled shifts on the returns desk (assisting with the self-issue machines and supporting the students' use of printers and binding equipment) push me effortlessly through the first half of the afternoon, and then there are more trolleys to be made up for the weekend shelvers. It used to be that this making up of trolleys (that is, sorting and ordering books onto a trolley in order for them to be shelved) was the main part of my job, but that was in the days when we had more books (before the other campus started stealing them all) and when we had shelvers here every day. Now they're just in on Fridays and the weekend, and so I must find other work to keep me busy during the rest of the week. This is usually a mix of sorting, processing, repairs, stock-tidying and generally assisting the staff and students. But this week students were for some reason in short supply and so thumb twiddling necessarily ensued.

How quiet is a quiet week? About a quarter of my time was devoted to manual labour, and another quarter to back-office work (and to work-shadowing one of the librarians). An eighth of my week was spent on the returns desk, which leaves about three eighths of my time at work spent struggling to find something useful to do. In that respect it represents the lower extreme of the varying workload we tend to get in our library. At least it means I had time to tweet about it! Come Easter we will be buzzing about the place, struggling to keep the books from piling on the floor, but for now we can sit back a little and savour the silence. Trouble is that too much silence can get a little tedious. You just have to keep busy as best you can.

Rough breakdown of my working hours this last week, showing just how dead things were.

Outside of work, what did I get up to? On average I spent nine hours a day in bed (to say I was sleeping would be an exaggeration, but it's the thought that counts), and eight hours a day being entertained in some other way (spoken-word radio and mp3s took up the best bit of three hours per day, music and telly about 1½ hpd each, computer Scrabble (my favoured game this week (I'm having a rest from Elite)) about 1 hpd, shopping about 40' per day, and social drinking about half an hour per day). I spent almost as much time indulging in 'personal development' activities (blogging, working on a cataloguing project, and applying for a job) as I did at work (about three hours a day), and only slightly less time was devoted to the mundane tasks of life (although three hours of that was spent in the bath, which is more an entertainment than an ablution). I spent 2½ hours of every day travelling (most of that on the bus, when I read, do crosswords or listen to the radio), and 1½ hours staring into the net.

I spent six hours this week researching job vacancies and completing an application (most of those hours lost negotiating drop-down menus on a particularly fiddly and draining on-line form). I spent a similar amount of time working on these last two blog posts. Now it's time to embark upon another one, because I've still to write up my trip to Mini Library Camp North West last weekend. Until then, here's a picture of a squirrel:

One day they'll train these things to handle books as well as nuts.
Then we'll all be out of a job.

LibDay7: Drink, Dreams & Dissertation

By day, tis said, I work in a library. But not in the summer months. In the summer months I am stood down to enjoy a life of leisure. Here in the northern hemisphere those summer months are happening right now. I am at home rather than in the library. But where's the leisure I was promised? It has been replaced by the pressures of a dissertation.

This, then, is where Round Seven of the Library Day in the Life Project finds me. Over the course of last week I kept a diary of my antics. Here's each day reduced to a 24hr clock:

Pink represents entertainments, orange is the mundane day-to-day, yellow is concentrated on-line activity, grey is sleep, and green... green is me in a spreadsheet with the dissertation data.

Over the course of the week, then, I spent the equivalent of a little over three days sleeping. Twelve hours were spent down the pub (including a lovely beer festival on Sunday and a meet-up with old Library School friends on Wednesday), ten hours were spent primarily engaging with music, radio or television, nine hours were spent pottering about on-line  (including signing up for Library Camp and booking a post-dissertation holiday), and five hours were spent eating. Three hours were spent getting up, and another three were given over to reading for pleasure. Two and a half hours were spent travelling.

Two whole days were spent working on my dissertation. TWO! More if you count Thursday, when I spent the night dreaming about manipulating spreadsheets. Brr...

Thursday was the day I spent most time on my dissertating. Sunday, comparatively, was a day of rest.

What have I been doing in this dissertation spreadsheet? I have been:
1) Marking up search-engine queries with respect to their content and structure, in order to gauge reformulation patterns.
2) Creating a number of tables and graphs from this data.

Both phases of activity vary in duration depending on a) the complexity of the searches, and b) the number of distractions. This week I have been accompanying my markings-up with a soundtrack consisting of Test Match Special, Five Live Drive, old John Peel tapes, and opera.

In all I have marked up about 10,000 search queries (about two thirds of them in this last week). I can now start to write about them. That's what I'll be doing for the next month. Hopefully I'll find time to squeeze in a few blog posts along the way.