Today we feature a guest post from Eleanor Winterbottom, also embarking on her Library career here in Oxford:
Hi! My name is Eleanor and I am the Apprentice Library Assistant at St Antony’s College.
My position is a little different to that of a graduate trainee, as instead of going on to do a masters I will be achieving, through my role, a Level 3 apprenticeship qualification in Libraries, Information and Archives Services (LIAS) from Westminster Adult Education Services. This role is fairly new to the college, I am actually St Antony’s first apprentice! I am loving every moment so far, I find it is the perfect balance of academic and vocational training.
I spend most of my working day in the beautiful main reading room of the college library, which used to be a chapel from when the college was a monastery for the Society of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. St Antony’s College is quite young, and we have gained over the years a plethora of modern and quirky buildings that reflect the college’s multicultural subject areas, but the Old Main Building and library has to be favourite place in the college (though of course I am biased!)
I’m also lucky that on St Antony’s campus we don’t just have the college library, but access to the Middle East Centre library, the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre library, and the Bodleian Japanese library. Although I don’t work in these libraries myself, having such close access to them means I am able to immerse myself even more in the weird and wonderful world that is the Bodleian libraries.
***
Thank you Eleanor for sharing your experiences so far! For more information about Library Apprenticeships see: Apprenticeships – CILIP: the library and information association
