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!

ClickView intentions

Some things take time to achieve.
Image by kamera.obskura

Back in September  I started to oversee ClickView, the library’s online streaming service. Our subscription package allows us to record six Freeview channels twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for a rolling 14 days. There are some great programmes on TV which may be beneficial to learners and ClickView allows us to record and store these programmes. It works in a similar way to BBC iPlayer, except programmes do not automatically expire after a pre-defined period of time.

This academic year I have started looking at it from a management viewpoint.  After a term of finding my feet with the system I feel much more confident. It is a sound concept and can produce some excellent resources for learners to use. The main issue I find is the marketing of the service. In October I attended a drop-in session with the college marketing department and asked how to publicise ClickView.  Usage of the service could be higher and there is plenty of room for improvement.  The marketing department suggested various methods of raising the profile including one which had not been tried before – going into curriculum team meetings.

Systems integrations – ups and downs

Image by James Cridland

One of the achievements I am most proud of in my current role is the integration between the LMS and the computer booking system. As Systems Librarian, it is my responsibility to manage the systems we use in the library and earlier in the year these two main systems were integrated.

In March, I attended a MyPC user group session. Whilst there, I met Sue Walsgrove who works in the library at City of Wolverhampton College and operates an integrated Heritage and MyPC system. I arranged a visit and spent an afternoon grilling her about the nitty-gritty of integration. During the Easter half term break, I secured the services of an IT Technician and we set about linking these two systems. It took the best part of a week to complete, most of which was trial and error. We followed guidance from ISOxford and ITS; both covered the same steps but were incredibly different! After a necessary remote access session with ITS, all that was left was altering the settings to establish the access management limits we required.