Library Day in the Life - Post #1

This year I have decided to participate in the Library Day in the Life Round 8 project. Twice a year librarians, library staff and library students from all over the globe share a day (or week) in their life through blog posts, photos, video and Twitter updates. I'm working on Blog updates and possibly some twitter ones too.

So to start with I should give you a bit of background (for those that don't already know me). Today is my birthday!! Yes it really is so what better time to start a blog project.

I work in a regional public library service on the mid-North coast of New South Wales, Australia. I manage three branch libraries. Our Shire (the three branch libraries sit in) has a population of around 13,369.

All of our Shire library branches are closed on Monday's so this is a day I use to catch up with the tasks I can't complete when I'm doing circulation/shelving duties. Today was the first day I have had to catch up since returning from 3 weeks holiday I took over Christmas. On top of that our Shire was inundated with floods last week so it is making catch up a little bit harder. Add to that we are now on a Flood Watch with possible minor to moderate flooding from tomorrow onwards. However, we are very much used to rain and floods here - it is a way of life!!

Today started with me walking into the library and realising that a numbe of people must have returned their books on Saturday and my staff member did not have time to shelve them all. Three trolley loads of shelving ready to be shelved and a full return chute. I'm still trawling through the shelving and using it as a break from the computer.

I then caught up on some emails and printed out the papers for our next Library Committee meeting. I have read through them briefly and plan to read through them in more depth later today and make notes to raise during the meeting.

Our IT guy came over to look at some of our public computers to see why Internet Explorer wouldn't open. We went through the process of how to update the computers and lock them back down so that each time they restart they are "cleaned." I am taking over the role of maintaining our public computers as we only limited IT support to support the whole of Council. I visit my branches every month so will do the updates during that time.

I answered some telephone calls concerning borrowers wanting renewals and when our opening hours are. I returned and shelved some more books. I took the mail to Council administration, next door, for posting and said "hello" to all the staff in the Council administration building. I also checked in on a staff member whom I had assisted finding some books to read last week to see if they enjoyed them - they did!!

Lunch time came around and I took off to our local swimming pool to do some laps. Very proud to say I managed to do 50 laps of the 25 meter pool. The water was a bit cool but it makes you swim faster.

I returned from lunch and now I am here updating my blog and thinking about what I have to get through this afternoon. I have some professional reading to catch up on, more returns and shelving, running the allocations list to pick reserves from the shelves, and getting to the meeting papers.

What did you get up to today??