Comments on: Monday Muse – 5 things I didn’t realise I would be working on…….

By: Kathryn Greenhill

Kathryn Greenhill — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:04:37 +0000

1. Teaching university staff and students how to create avatars and negotiate an online virtual world. Nope, didn’t see that one coming.
2. Meetings. How much of my day would involve scheduling or attending meetings, and how often the attendees would not be library people.
3. Working from home. Libraries were mainly about books and buildings when I was going through library school – so how could you be a librarian away from these?
4. Understanding file formats, compression and codecs.
5. How much of my day is spent connecting with people – talking, presenting, emailing, texting, chatting. I thought that I would spend much more time in solitary thought.

By: CW

CW — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:43:10 +0000

1. Managing and supervising people. I always thought I would do reference and never imagined that I would have to deal with library staff!
2. Copyright and licensing issues. It seems obvious to me now (of course copyright and licensing issues are a big deal in academic libraries!) but I have learned a lot since I started work as a librarian. Currently the issues I deal with: permissions for document delivery and reserve use of electronic material.
3. Competition. The Library is no longer necessarily the first place people think of when they’re looking for information or working on an assignment or project. The Internet was just taking off as I finished library school…
4. How much I would have to keep learning and learning and learning to maintain my edge as a library professional.

By: Peta

Peta — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:00:08 +0000

1. Project managing a university-wide content management system implementation
2. Upgrading library management systems and applying service packs
3. Coordinating research publication data gathering across a University – glad to have handed that one on to a colleague some years back