A Day in the Life at Archway

Hi everyone, here is a blow-by-blow account of a typical day as graduate trainee at Archway Healthcare Library. We're located by Archway tube station on Highgate Hill, just opposite the Whittington Hospital, whose staff we serve. We also provide services for UCL medical students and Middlesex students (mostly nursing/midwifery, social work and complementary health students).

... I get up early and take it to the max every day. I'm usually up about 7.15 and out the house soon as I've showered and kissed my partner Dave goodbye. I walk to work because I'm too cheap to pay for travel, and I've got a nice route through Alexandra Park sorted.

I get to the library about 8.30ish and open it up if I'm first in; I'll set the computers on the desk up for the day etc and get some teas/coffees on the go for myself and my colleagues. I usually eat my breakfast in the staffroom before we open up which is kind of unprofessional, but I'm usually too hungry to consider this.

The full time library assistants here will usually spend 2 shifts of 2 hours on the enquiry desk each day and I do the same. That's about half the average day accounted for. When we're not busy with borrowers or red bags, blue crates, pull lists, book bins, SCONUL counts, shelving/shelf-checks etc we'll do some admin. tasks or data entry/filing. I also like to tell ribald stories and inappropriate jokes to my colleagues during any downtime.

When I'm not on the desk I'm never short of things to do. There's shelving of course and other tasks I've volunteered for or been assigned. At the moment I'm redoing the signage of all the stack ends, trying to catalogue materials for a reading list for one of our liaison librarians, helping/hindering with the survey of students who've had training at the library etc. Basically, I like to throw my weight around and poke my beautiful Roman nose into everybody else's business! I'm learning the ropes on interlibrary loans and repairing books is next on the agenda.

I usually have lunch as late as I can and spend the hour composing ribald stories and inappropriate jokes for my colleagues' amusement. I also like to listen to mid-'90s dance songs on my computer. Here's a link to one of my favourites!
Finding amusing pictures and making my colleagues look at them is one of my favourite pastimes. Here's a picture now:


The people I work with at Archway are ace, really good to talk to and good at what they do too. The borrowers can be more difficult to relate to but I try to remember that they're all at the library because they've felt a vocation and they want to contribute to improving people's health - and that's pretty admirable in my book.

Wednesdays are probably my least favourite day because that's when I have to process the recall notices. This involves putting blocks on borrowers' accounts, but it takes ages because our borrowers are slack so there are loads of blocks to put up! Mondays are a different beast entirely because I work the late shift (1 - 8) so it's just me and the boss 'holdin' down tha block' in the evening. I like having the morning free and the library's nice 'n' peaceful in the evenings - especially with summer coming on.
Most weekday evenings I stay behind for a bit to do dead important things then run back home.
Fridays are cool because at closing time the team are usually begging me to take them down the pub and tell them some ribald stories and inappropriate jokes to kick-start their weekend.
I oblige, natch.

Hope that's shed some light on the subject. Any questions just blog me. Thanks,
Adam Charles Tocock.

Day in the life at Cat Hill

I've been a bit slow off the mark with my blogs, mainly because I've only just realised how to get onto it... but my first post will also be a ‘day in the life’ kind of thing, so I hope it turns out to be useful!

As Cat Hill is the smallest of our three campuses, and therefore has less members of library staff than the others, my experience has tended to be pretty varied and at some point I’ve been involved in most of the tasks the library assistants do here. This is definitely a good thing, but it is going to make writing this a bit complicated as my days aren’t that structured.

Sophie will be glad to hear that Cat Hill is a little quicker to get to from central London than Trent Park, so if I arrive into Oakwood or Cockfosters station at around 8.40am, I’ll get to campus before 9am. Both stations are a similar distance away, but I think the walk down from Cockfosters is a bit nicer, and downhill!

The first thing I usually do at the beginning of each day is to cash up the previous day’s takings with Jane. This takes around 15 minutes and so at around 9.15am I’ll begin shelving for an hour. Before the New Year, I had been shelving the final two rows of shelves in the library (photography, film, literature, etc.) but since taking over the journal processing from Katie in January, I now shelve the journals which tend to be less strenuous than the hefty photography books!

The rest of my mornings are usually filled with an hour on the issue desk and an hour doing various activities which differ from day to day. These could be ongoing projects being carried out in the library such as withdrawing stock, or smaller jobs like making signs and notices.

I’m usually starving by 12 so I’ll have my lunch from 12-1pm. At Cat Hill we don’t have a very sizeable or accommodating kitchen so we eat at our desks. Just one piece of advice - take a look inside the microwave before you decide to use it!

After lunch I will probably spend one or possibly two more hours on the issue desk (although sometimes I only have one hour on the desk in a day) and process any journals we have received in the post. This involves checking them in on the serials check-in part of Horizon, embossing them (the best bit!), stamping them, putting in a tattle, and then passing them on to Sue or Marion to look through. The rest of the afternoon varies from day to day – it could include replying to comments taken out of our suggestion box, hunting for claimed returned books around the library, mending books or making new spine labels for books without them, shelving books in the reserve room etc.

Jobs for Friday

As Jane doesn’t work on Fridays, I open up the library and the issue desk in the morning (unless Sue beats me to it). This just involves logging onto the computers, stamping and putting out the day’s newspapers, and updating the date stamps. On Fridays I also print out two copies of next week’s issue desk rota and put one up in the staff workroom and one behind the issue desk counter.

Other duties on the issue desk

Whoever is lucky enough to be on the issue desk first thing in the morning is responsible for unlocking the library doors at 9am, closing the book box and checking in any books in there, checking in the books that have arrived in red bags from other campuses, taking down any expired reservations from the reservations shelf, and collecting the post from the post room at 10am (although the post doesn’t always arrive by then so this could be done later).


And that's more or less it! Cat Hill is a really nice library to work in and I'm sure you'll both enjoy your time here. I hope this post has given you a bit of an introduction to what I do!!

Day in the life of a graduate trainee at Hendon

Right then, to Hendon, where the library does seem to work in a different way to Trent Park and Cat Hill. I think the main thing with Hendon is that it's bigger and very departmentalised (I don't think that's a word). The different departments all work very much within their own areas and for me, being in the on-campus customer services department, this means that my work can sometimes lack the variety that Sarah and Becky obviously experience.

I have found, however, that offers to work in other departments are very well received so although I know you guys are only here for a week - my advice would be to get as involved in all aspects of the library as you can by talking to lots of different people. Everyone here is incredibly helpful and friendly and willing to talk about what they do which is great.

So my day starts at about 6:45, with an aim to leave the house at 7:45 for the long ride up the Northern Line from Clapham South to Hendon Central. This is fairly painless, actually, and gives me plenty of opportunity to read which is super.

On arrival at work, I usually do an hour of shelving. We're meant to do this between 9-10 every morning but if something else comes up then I work it into my day whenever I can. I like to check my emails in the morning first thing so normally I do more like 9:15 - 10:30. After this, it's back to the desk and work varies - I have been helping out with the expired or canceled hold list recently. This is generated off Horizon and involves pulling all the expired holds off the shelf at the transaction desk and then if there's time, looking for stray ones on the main shelves. It's remarkable how many expired holds somehow work themselves back onto the shelves without being checked in.

I do 2 hours work on the transaction desk a day which is usually made up of two sessions, one at around midday and one in the afternoon. This is probably similar to what you guys do except involves checking books in and out with RFID and a LOT of password changes. I enjoy this part of the day and always feel energised afterwards which is good as lately I've been spending my lunch hour in the gym! Interesting decision, I realise, but there's not much time in my day to exercise given the commute and getting married in June has proved a powerful incentive!

The afternoon is usually made up of various tasks. The longer I'm here, the more varied the tasks have become. I'm helping Jamie Halstead with a nursing blog that he runs off his library subject pages. I update the blog with any relevant articles that have been recently published. I've also been involved in the running of a library help desk in the Hendon quad which was aiming to take the library out to the students to showcase everything we do and it seemed to work quite well. I've been attempting to collate the statistics that were gathered which has been keeping me busy recently.


I hope you guys have a great time here, I'm sure you will.

A Day In The Life Of A Graduate Trainee - Part 1

For my first entry I thought I'd write what I do in a typical day. Hopefully, this will be of some interest and also will give the other grad trainees an idea of what my job involves as we will soon be in the midst of the job swap where we go to other campuses. Here goes guys, sorry for rambling on a bit (readers of this blog will soon realise being concise is not one of my strengths).

6.30 AM. Stagger to the windowsill in my room to shut up my alarm clock. Have discovered this is the only way to wake up and stay awake.

6.45 AM. Admit to self that I really do need to get up now...although five more minutes in bed is so tempting...

7.30 AM. Leave the house, shortly to be devoured by the bowels of the underground

8.30 AM. Emerge blinking into the sunlight - catch the shuttle bus if I'm feeling lazy or walk down Snakes Lane if I'm feeling good.

9ish Whilst waiting for computer to fire up, note down my duties for the day from the timetable on the door of the staffroom. I usually spend 2-4 hours on the counter and I may have the post to do as well.

The first job of the morning is to collect up the requested books and put them on the hold shelf – known as the “pull list”. At Middlesex, students and staff can request books that are already in the library. This is a major help for part-time students and those who don't live on campus, but it can be quite a big job for me! During term time I have 50-100 books to do each day. It can take 2-3 hours on a bad day, but if pushed I can do it in an hour. I tend to do all the books first that are where they should be (maybe 75%) and then worry afterwards about looking in the oversize section, trolleys, searching high and low in various nooks and crannies. You have to turn into a bit of a detective sometimes to try to figure out where students may have hidden books.

For the remainder of the morning until lunch I tend to do the succession of never-ending tasks that most librarians know well - book moving, shelf tidying, shelving...

12 noon -1 PM. The all-important lunch hour - AKA a chance to check Facebook! Usually I bring something in to eat but sometimes I walk to the Mansion Cafe to buy something.

1-3 PM. This tends to be the shift I do the most often at the issues desk as I am busy doing the pull list in the morning. Even though it can get stressful at times, this is the part of the day I enjoy most of all. Sometimes when you’re doing other tasks you can lose sight of the fact that you are here to help the students and staff using the library, and to serve their needs as best you can.

3-5 PM. I don’t tend to have anything specific scheduled for this time, but that doesn’t mean there is a shortage of things to do. For example, I have just started to help checking in the journals. I am still learning and tend to get stuck so end up calling Maryvonne half way through for some help.

If I am out doing work in the library itself, such as re-doing the signage, I tend to get accosted by students a lot. The first question always used to be "Do you work here?" but I must have now gone native as no-one asks me much anymore. It's always good to have someone out there as the Enquiry Desk is only open from 11-3, so at least there's someone there to assist with simple enquiries.

5 PM Hopefully, someone nice will give me a lift to the underground station – thanks should go to Carol, Ele and Rosie here! I tend to get home between 6 PM and 6.15 PM – if I’m lucky, to some lovely home-cooked grub, courtesy of one of my housemates.

So that’s my typical Trent Park Library day in a nutshell. I say typical, but what I really like about working in a library is that no two days are the same. I don't think there are many jobs with such variety, and I'm sure Becky's, and especially Sophie's, days differ considerably from mine.

UCL interviews

Sarah and I both had an interview for the MA in Library and Information Studies at UCL last week. We don't find out whether we got in for another 3 or 4 weeks so fingers crossed.

The interview itself was about half an hour long and more of a conversation than anything. The two women interviewers, Vander and Lucy, were friendly and chatty which made for a relaxing atmosphere. The questions were mostly focused on what I was doing here at Middlesex, why I wanted to study Librarianship and what sort of career I was interested in having. Nothing too nasty at all thank goodness!

Welcome to the Graduate Library Trainees at Middlesex Blog!

Not a catchy title, I admit - may have to think about that. Becky, Sarah and I hope to keep anyone who cares to read this up to date with our adventures at Middlesex University as graduate library trainees.

I am based in the Sheppard Library at Hendon, Becky is based at the CatHill campus and Sarah is at Trent Park.

Unfortunately, we're already four months into our year of training but I think we still have plenty to learn and to write about. I know there's loads of people here I still want to meet and talk to about what they do in their day to day employ at Middlesex.

The big news today is that the HERA ruling on pay scales etc came in and us graduate trainees are getting 5, yes that's 5 more days holiday a year which is very exciting. We're also getting a bit more money which is always nice!