A day in the life of a Systems Librarian

Hello! Here I am at the library helpdesk

In recent years I enjoyed taking part in the Library day in the life project. This ran from 2008-2012 and saw library staff from all disciplines across the world record and upload their daily diaries for a week. I found it invaluable and really interesting, and was quite sad when the person who organised it announced there would be no more. You can read my participating blog posts here.

The library in which I work has a very active blog and this year I decided to introduce a series of posts based on the idea of a daily diary. There are 11 of us in the team and we each blogged about our day at work; these posts were uploaded once a week over a period of 11 weeks.  We publicised it within college as the chance to see what goes on behind-the-scenes in a library. Whenever a new post was published we would highlight it on the staff intranet and the library's social media profiles. They were by far the most viewed posts on our blog! It was mentioned at regional JISC events and we even had another FE library say they enjoyed reading the series so much they were planning a similar one for their blog. A huge compliment!

As a rule, I tend not to link this blog to my workplace blog, but on this occasion I'll make an exception. If anyone fancies reading about a day in the life of an FE systems librarian, here's the link to my post. Enjoy!

Interviewer versus interviewee

It was several months ago now, but at the start of this academic year we needed to appoint an evening-only assistant to replace someone who had resigned. Just as we did the previous year when appointing a library apprentice, the college librarian and I both went through the applications. Eighteen people applied and using a generic matrix procedure from HR, we shortlisted five candidates who were then invited for interview.

Within the college, job interviews are conducted by a member from HR and the head of the appointing department (plus a member of the senior management team if necessary). However, the college librarian personally knew one of the shortlisted candidates; in order to ensure fairness in the selection process he withdrew from the interview panel. This meant that I was offered a position on the interview panel. Although I have been involved in the competency testing part of interview days, I had never before been on an interview panel.