08:30
Leave for work. I’m lucky to live walking distance from the Art library and don’t have to rely on public transport- the only things that slow me down are my own legs or crowds on Cornmarket Street!
08:45
Arrive at work. I pop up to the staff room to put my lunch away, probably get distracted talking to everyone else doing the same, then head to the front desk. At the Art library, desk shifts are usually 3 hours long, either in the morning or afternoon, and two people sit at the desk together.
Today I’m on desk in the morning, so I turn on the self-issue machine and login to a PC. Our Reader Services Teams chat is named after an animal and changes most days- and today I change it to Pleasing Fungus Beetle.
08:55
Get started on the lapse list. At the Bodleian Libraries, readers can request books from our offsite storage facility to be sent to libraries. Some of this material is loanable and can be given to readers to take away, but some of it has to stay in the library. This is stored on the Self-Collect shelves, and the lapse list involves taking items off the self-collect shelves that needs to be sent back offsite. I take these books off the shelves, scan them out and put them in crates that get picked up every afternoon.
09:15
The Art library opens at 9am, and even outside of term time can get quite busy. By this time we already have a fair few readers, some of which have been queueing to get in! Now I’ll sit at the desk and help readers. Most of the time, readers need pretty straight forward help- loaning or returning books, finding the toilets, locating a printer or PC they can use… but sometimes people ask a tricky one and you have to hit them with a “let’s try and find out together…”
The Art library can be quite confusing to use as there are a lot of different shelfmark systems on the books, and the library is round so you can end up walking in circles for a while. It took me a while to feel confident helping readers find books, but I’m getting a hang of the collections and can usually direct people to where their book is. I still sometimes walk readers in a loop around an entire floor before I know where to look!
10:30
Break time. I head up to the staffroom to make a coffee, browse the biscuit tin and chat to people over the jigsaw. We always have a jigsaw on the go in the staffroom, right now it’s Agatha Christie themed.
10:50
Back at the desk, and now it’s a bit quieter I can do some new book and journal processing. We get sent a lot of new material each week that we need to check is catalogued properly, has all the correct stickers on, and then we can scan it into the library. New books are displayed on our ground floor New Books Displays each week. I’ll do processing in between helping readers and responding to emails and Teams messages.
12:00
I’m off desk now, so take all the books I’ve processed to our workroom to be put on display next week. While there, I hear that we’re swamped with scan requests so I roll up my sleeves and help out. The Bodleian offer a scan and deliver service for PDFs of journal articles or sections of books. If readers don’t feel like trekking all the way into the library for a single article, they can send us a request and we’ll usually get it back to them by the next day. Among the scans today are a chapter on Tudor portraits, an article about ancient Greek poetry and a chapter on food in Bronze Age Britain.
1:00
I go up to the staff room, warm up my lunch, eat it while half-heartedly helping people with the jigsaw, then pop out for a walk. I try and walk every lunch time if the weather’s okay, and today I go to the University Parks and listen to a podcast.
2:00
I head back to the Art library and go to the Haverfield room on the ground floor to work on my trainee project. The Haverfield room is a small, slightly chaotic room mainly filled with books about ancient coins. My project is to do my part in making it slightly less chaotic, which for now involves doing an audit of some large folios at the back that haven’t been looked at in a long time. I take each one off the shelf, note down the barcode (if it has one), note the condition of the item and if it’s in poor condition, measure it so it can be boxed in conservation approved boxes. There’s very little information available for some of the items, so I have a look through and try to see if a) it’s relevant to our collections and b) where it came from. It’s easy to get distracted looking at books on early Christian art in catacombs, or the symbology in German coats of arms.
3:10
I go for another break, omitting coffee this time and instead have a tea and chat to people.
3:30
I’ve finished the shelf I was working on in the Haverfield room, so now I go down to the Craft Cave (also referred to as the Repairs Dungeon, or more politely, the Basement Office) to do some book repairs.
At the Art and the Taylor we’re trialling a scheme where reader services staff carry out small repairs on books to extend their lives and get them back on the shelves quickly (the previous Art trainee Emma made a great triaging system and resources for minor repairs that we still use now, you can read about her project here).
Down here I carefully repair broken covers, loose pages and fraying corners, and nearly forget to look at the clock close to home time!
5:00
I say goodbye to the evening staff who are just arriving, and head home.
