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.