Tom Roper's Weblog

CPD23: Thing 20: Library Day in the Life and Library Routes/Roots

I've participated in both these activities in my time. I have taken part in four of the Library Day in the Life projects to date, to wit July 2011, January 2011, July 2010, and July 2009. The links will take you to my posts for that round.

As for my library roots, see this: http://www.roper.org.uk/tr/2009/10/library-roots.html

Library day in the life 7: Tuesday

I can't claim much library-related activity today, apart from writing my latest CPD23 post, on Evernote and Google Calendar.

On the career front, I ran my usual weekly web search. I have bookmarked in Delicious the jobs webpages of a series of organisations I'd like to work for, one set local to me, another set in London. There's over sixty organisations in these lists; not one had a vacancy. I tell a lie, one did, but it was for internal applicants only. So why put it on a public-facing webpage?

Nevertheless, there is hope. I had the following e-mail:

Hi Tom Roper Roper [sic]

Have you ever considered a career as a private financial trader? 
Did you know many private financial traders take home £100k to £2m per annum, with some traders starting with less than £10k in their trading accounts?

[name redacted] is Europe's largest trader coaching company (and Sunday Times FastTrack 100 Finalist) and is running some completely free workshops to show you how you can get started, regardless as to whether you choose to trade full-time or part-time as a positive addition to your income.

So that's all right then; no need for me to do anything real, like help people create and disseminate knowledge, or find information to improve their lives. All I need to do is find that spare £10k I left in the biscuit jar in the kitchen and follow in the footsteps of Nick Leeson.

 

 

 

Library day in the life 7: Monday

This is perhaps an unconventional library day in the life, in that I'm not working in a library. Indeed, I'm not working at all, and haven't since the end of my job with NHS Evidence Eyes and Vision, which disappeared in a reorganisation of NHSEvidence, in which the specialist collections were reorganised and large chunks of them outsourced to the private sector.

Given that the point of library day in the life is to give the outside world, particularly those who aspire to a career in this great profession of ours, an idea of what it is we do, should I be doing this? I think I should, for the following reasons:

• many of us, until we replace an economic system driven by profit with one driven by people's needs, will experience unemployment from time to time. I don't think we should try to hide the fact
• one of the characteristics of a profession is that one is a librarian, or doctor, or nurse, or teacher, first and an employee of whatever capitalist organisation or bureaucracy second. That I am not currently working at the trade does not mean I cease to be an information professional
• it may be amusing

They say looking for a job is a full-time job in itself. It probably is. At the beginning of each week I assess the state of my applications. I track these in a Bento database. At the moment I have four in preparation, am waiting to hear from another that I was interviewed for last week, and have two others that may call me for interview. I check closing dates and decide which I'll work on. I'm helped in this by being an early riser . When I was working I was up at 5 am every day, and though I don't get up quite so early, when not working, I hate to waste the day. The rest of the family, with the exception of kittens Humprehy and Percy, don't share this habit, so I can be sure of uninterrupted time. 

Later in the day I write up the second task of last week's homework for the CPD23 programme. This one required me to think about my involvement in professional organisations; here's the results. This week we move on to Evernote, which I've been using for nearly two years, so I should have plenty to say.

I try to keep myself busy so, as well as CPD23, I'm mentoring three people through the process of acquiring CILIP qualifications. One has sent me a draft of a submission for my comments. I've also been doing things like the Brighton LibTeachMeet, and am involved in Voices for the Library. The Voices team had a busy weekend when comments on a post we'd written about the use of volunteers in libraries took off. Today there's a few e-mails between the team, but nothing as hectic. 

At about 4 pm I had a phone call from the chair of the interview panel for a job I went for last week. I knew it wouldn't be good news, as they'd have contacted me sooner if they wanted me. The chair gave me useful feedback, at least; not every potential employer does, I am bound to say. I'm more than usually disappointed. I'd thought myself into the job, could see myself doing it, knew many of the people I'd have been working with. But I knew I hadn't answered at least one of the questions well, probably more.

One of the agencies e-mails me with a job, but it's at a library eighty miles away. A train journey there would take two and three-quarter hours, a car journey one and three-quarters. I don't mind commuting, but this would take up too much time and money. As I decline it, I doubt myself. Perhaps I should take it and endure the commute. But in any case, they probably wouldn't want me.

The fifth day of library day in the life: in which I discuss beauty

I finished a few small jobs today, such as collating some of the information I'm required to send to the centre for the people who will take over our jobs in April. I finished doing my monthly scan of some information resources to see if there's anything of interest to people interested in eye health. I discovered that one charity had, on the tenth of the month, declared that January will be National Disease-Name-Redacted Month. Since I only found this out today, there was little I could do to help them.

I found myself thinking about the buildings in which I've worked, and their environs. Bridget Cherry, who brought Pevsner¹ up to date, tells me that my current workplace was built in 1897-9; the King George V extension was added in 1933-5 and boasts a small sculpture by Eric Gill showing Christ healing the blind, once above the main entrance; the entrance has been moved so the scupture is now less obvious. Cherry also mentions some nursery rhyme tile pictures made for the Eye Hospital in High Holborn, which were moved to Moorfields when High Holborn closed in 1988, but I cannot trace where they are. My colleagues in the Joint Library will be able to tell me, I'm sure.

These things matter. I started my library career in the suburbs, in places which had no meaning except that one had to travel through them in order to leave London. I have been happiest working in beautiful locations. At the British Council from my office high in the Spring Gardens block, I looked over St James's Park and saw the IRA mortar attack on 10 Downing Street; at the RCVS I walked through the royal parks on the way to work and could wander over the river to the Museum of Garden History or Lambeth Palace or stay on the north bank of the Thames and visit the Tate of a lunchtime. Sussex University too, in a natural bowl in the downs, and with its stunning  Basil Spence buildings, was beautiful.

So my final lesson for the young would-be librarian is simply this, work somewhere beautiful.

¹Cherry, Bridget and Pevsner, Nikolaus
The Buildings of England: London 4: North
London: Yale UP, 2002;

The fourth day of library day in the life

Some days at work form a harmonious whole. One leaves at the end of the day aware of concentrated and satisfying effort. There are others, and today was one of those.

I had a team meeting with my delightful manager. I have been managed by various people over the years. Being managed by other librarians is fine; we speak the same language. I've been managed by some people who have been quite outstanding, and others who, ahem, have perhaps been less inspiring. That's the luck of the draw. Sometimes I have been managed by doctors, and that's wonderful. They can be capricious, demanding, and quite maddening at times (my present one is none of these, just intellectually stimulating and clever and fun) but even when they ask you to produce something at five minutes notice which in fact requires five hours work,  there is always a sense of intellectual excitement, of worthwhileness. The worst times have been when I have been managed by managers, that is to say people who have bargained away whatever professional roots they once had in exchange for money and a meaningless job title. That's rarely been good.

The rest of the day I prepared some information I need to send back to the centre for the transfer to the private company who will take over the evidence hubs at the end of March, lists of patient organisations we use, and professional bodies we have links with. I wrote up some notes from the management meeting and thought about a session I'm going to run with a group of registrars on information management. After the first session, I may offer them a critical appraisal session. I played with lists of members of our External Reference Group, bringing them up to date and putting them into Access.

Today's lesson for the young would-be librarian: choose your manager with care. You can't have mine!

 

Meetings, bloody meetings

I took a day's leave today to attend the first ever face-to-face meeting of the Voices for the Library team.
VftL, as it is known to its intimates, is a group who came together to make the case for public libraries, as we face cuts which, at the lowest estimate, could result in the closure of around 400 libraries.
I won't bore you with the details of our discussions, only to say that it was a great pleasure to meet in person so many people I have only known digitally.
One way to measure the progress we've made would be to contrast yesterday's Westminster Hall debate, called by Lisa Nandy, with the lacklustre one last year.
This, I firmly believe, is not off-topic. If library workers don't get active and involved, we'll only have ourselves to blame when our services and jobs disappear.
Today's lesson for the young would-be librarian: it is necessary, as the existentialists taught us, to be engaged, engagé.

In which I learn about moles: Library Day in the Life 2

Today I went to work. It's a strange time there; I work for one of the NHS Evidence Specialist Collections, and on 1st  April the collections transfer to new private-sector providers, whose identity was revealed yesterday. A lot will change and fit's unclear how many of us will have jobs.

Nevertheless, we bash on, and today I spent most of my time preparing our next Annual Evidence Update, on retinal vein occlusion, something of a hot topic in ophthalmological circles at the moment. This is interesting work; while it inlvovbes me in sifting large numbers of references (my intital search found some 1,100 items), it's a real insight into the varying qulaity of evidence in tghe medical literature. I fin dvery few systematic reviews, a few randomised controlled trials, but heaps upaon heaps of case reports.

My favourite find of the day was an insight into the retina of the Iberian mole, Talpa occidentalis; it won't go in the update, but it intrigued me nevertheless:

Carmona FD, Glösmann M, Ou J, Jiménez R, Collinson JM
Retinal development and function in a 'blind' mole.
Proc Biol Sci. 2010 May 22;277(1687):1513-22. Epub 2009 Dec 9.

If you enjoy the byways of the biomedical literature, I heartily recommend NCBI ROFL. Beware: the humour is sometimes a little undergraduate, but it's all taken from the NCBI databases.

In other news, a sandwich exploded and covered my keyboard with bits of rocket (arugula for North American readers) and I went for a lunchtime run.

Lesson for the young would-be librarian: bash on!

 

 

in which I go nowhere near a library. Library day in the life round 6: first day

I'm Tom Roper, I'm the Information Specialist/Librarian for NHS Evidence - Eyes and Vision. Today is the first day of the sixth running of Library Day in the Life, a project in which librarians of all types describe their working days for a week, for the greater edification of each other, for people contemplating a career in information work, and to contribute to the gaiety of nations.

However, I was not at work today, but had to go to hospital for a gastroscopy. Is it an advantage to be a medical librarian in these circumstances? Perhaps not; as Jerome K. Jerome noted in Three Men in a Boat,

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight...

Most of the doctors and nurses nowadays are well-equipped to talk to an informed patient. I only came across one example today of one who was not who, when I asked what an abbreviation she had used meant, ignored my question.

For each of my posts this week, I shall finish with a moral or lesson for the young would-be librarian. Today's is, as you become an old librarian, you will spend more time in hospitals.

Library day in the life 5, Friday: the disappeared

A while after the event, I come to write up the last day of the Library Day in the Life week, which was Friday 30th July. I'm not sure how this will help those thinking of a career in librarianship, or those seeking a better understanding of the profession, for I hope it is atypical. For this was my last day, having been told at 4 pm the day before that I was to be made redundant. It was also Polly's last day, who had run one of our campuses for six months and in that short time had worked miracles; everyone will be very sorry to see her go. Apart from her professional attributes, she was a tower of strength in solving the Guardian cryptic crossword.

I started the day with our morning prayers meeting, with doughnuts (proper jam-filled ones, not the transatlantic apologies that seem so popular nowadays) provided by Polly. Then at 10 I she and I had an exit interview, to review her time with the college. I passed the rest of the morning penning handover notes, compiling lists of logins to various e-resources sites to hand over to Ewa, the E-Resources Co-ordinator and so on. Then I went for a final lunch at the excellent Pantry, where Dave and his staff, the food, and the graceful and attentive service, have done so much to keep me sane in the past two years.

Then back for another meeting with Margaret, the other campus manager, to wrap up issues from her site. I spent the afternoon continuing the handover, putting out-of-office messages on the phone and e-mail, cutting up my college credit card and returning it to finance (I used it once, for train travel to the CoFHE/UC&R conference in Exeter) and packing those personal effects one accumulates in an office: a phone charger, paracetamol and so on.

The afternoon did not drag, and I left, leaving the keys to my office for my successor and handing in my ID badge to security on the way out. They seemed shocked. Life in FE colleges is rather like that in South American fascist dictatorships: people disappear, and are never spoken of again. I left. I felt a sense of liberation, that never again would I have to enter that consummately ugly building that squats on the High Street like some batrachian monster. There is a prison nearby; I often wondered if they used the same architects.

I went to the florists to collect flowers for Polly, and we reconvened in a pizza restaurant; the event had been planned to mark Polly's departure and we presented her with some tokens. I was touched that, in spite of the short time involved, they also presented me with a card, a book, Foyle's Philavery and a voucher. With some wine, pasta and a glass of grappa inside me, I went home content.

Kathy and Joan anticipating pizza

This is not a normal day; though we will see more redundancies in the profession in the coming period, on a much greater scale, entrants to the profession should not be put off. I still believe that what we do is valuable, that we should fight to preserve it against philistinism. I may have lost this battle, but the war continues.

Library day in the life 5: Thursday

(Sorry if you came here earlier this evening to read this post. Internet gremlins stole my post)

The main event of the day, which somewhat overshadows everything else, is that I've been made redundant. I hope this is the only time someone has to pass on this news during library day in the life.

Contrast my departure, with the statutory minimum redundancy payment for two years service, to that of the CEO of the Learning and Skills Council, who left with a bonus of £36,000 and a pay-off of £120,000, according to the TES, or Tony Hayward's package from BP.