My bus gets me to work quarter of an hour early, and I spend the extra time catching up with colleagues and reading a bit more of my commute novel. We start at 8:30 at the moment – summer hours – and I catch up with the e-mails that have come in over the weekend.

Actually, my routine at the moment isn’t the same as usual. (Although for one reason or another it’s probably been a year since anything recognisable as “usual”.) For about a month I’ve been wrestling with some mild RSI so when I sit at my keyboard I put on my wrist braces and I don’t do any any type of work for more than an hour at a time. And I’m dictating this post with the voice recognition software I have on my home laptop.

So at nine o’clock I go and do our retrievals which someone else would normally do. These are the books that our users have requested from the areas upstairs being renovated after the earthquake. Earlier this summer the stacks were covered in black plastic, but that’s been taken down now, so I don’t need the torch any more.

At 9:30 I walk across campus to another branch where I can work on the front desk, which is busier than ours. I do my stretches on the way. It’s still fairly quiet this morning, mostly students borrowing textbooks.

After an hour I walk back, and arrive in time for an impromptu meeting with a new supervisor and a tour of construction progress (even before the earthquake we were planning to renovate the entire ground floor. All except two small spaces at the back of the building which we’ve been working in over the summer while they’ve gutted the rest of the floor – our temporary main entrance is normally a fire escape).

I do the retrievals again, scan some blogs, and then it’s time for lunch. I take my book out into the sun and by some miracle don’t get sunburnt in the glorious weather.

Checking my twitter alerts, I notice a news article about the library, which I forward onto our Facebook page. Then I go back to the other branch, where we get engineering students asking about earthquake damage and a phone call with an Endnote query from a desperate student with a deadline.

II getback in time for afternoon tea, then retrievals again, and then join my colleagues with a trolley full of books that have thrown up errors in the RFID conversion process (another project going on above our heads at the moment) to determine what’s causing the error in each one and whether we should be keeping each item. Most of them are terribly old, and half aren’t even on the catalogue. One of my colleagues comments that we come alive when weeding, and it’s funny because it’s true. Between this, and issuing books to the occasional borrower who manages to find us, we fill the time to 5 o’clock, and home.

Oh, and I’ve made it through the day without any twinges of discomfort from my wrists. 🙂

On Wednesdays I work the afternoon/evening shift, so I spent the morning sleeping in, doing the laundry, and watching my sister ice a cake she volunteered for the “Chocolate Day” my colleagues and I had planned for today. My bus brought me to work at 12:45 and I sat and watched Top Gear with two colleagues on their lunch break while everyone else drifted in and “OMG”d at my sister’s truly awesome cake.

At 1pm I was on the desk shift as the normal person rostered for that hour was on sick leave. (A propos of which, today’s A Softer World strip provides a brilliant rebuttal to a certain proposed employment law change in New Zealand. I like sick leave, it means that my colleagues are less likely to come and infect me.) It was semi-steady circulation and basic enquiries, and a query about finding sources for a small literature review on pneumatic conveyers, but I also had time to do some background searches on the PhD topic of a new student in my subject area, and to quickly check my email.

Said student came at 2pm – I spent the next 50 minutes talking with her about where she’s at so far (I didn’t spend as much time on this part as I’d like – I’m still learning how to have this sort of conversation without sounding like the Spanish Inquisition) and what resources we have available (interlibrary loans are always high on the interest list but of course we also talked databases etc) and then I gave her a tour of the building. Before we parted I had the wit to ask if I can check in with her in a month or two – so now I can do so without feeling like I’m nagging.

Though what feels like nagging is frequently good – among my emails was one from a lecturer about setting up a time for a session with one of his classes that I’d been asking him about. I scheduled that in.

At 3:30 (we have scheduled breaks and lunch hours; I’m always a bit shocked to see overseas folk talking about not finding time for lunch) I went to enjoy a slice of my sister’s awesome cake.

Back at my desk I scanned Twitter and Friendfeed and Google Reader for awesome news stuff. I compiled a bunch of that for the draft of the library section of a department’s weekly newsletter; a bunch more will go in my next “Links of interest” post on the internal library blog. My colleague in the same office talked about an article she’d just been reading about the emotional dissonance between how information literacy instructors have to act in the classroom and the reactions we get from students. I’m describing it badly, I need to read it myself.

From colleagues I answered a phone query re opinions on our multisearch, and an email query about duplicate copies of something in storage. There were two wrong numbers at some point, and two misdirected emails. I tidied some stuff up, and also replied to another lecturer about some other classes in a couple of weeks (there’ll 6-8 sessions) and about the associated library assignment.

From 5-9 it was just two of us staffing the branch. So at 6pm I had another desk shift and it wasn’t much quieter than 1pm – lots of people borrowing 3-hour loans, someone wanting instruction on using the mopier’s scan-to-email function, someone asking about an ebook that’s mysteriously disappeared from the content provider’s database (I sent an email to our e-resources expert).

I stayed on a bit longer while my colleague shelved books and collected the books requested by users in our branch and others. 7:20 I had my dinner break; 8pm my final shift and still no quieter though I caught a bit of time to update our electronic noticeboard (tomorrow’s weather forecast, partly in Māori in honour of Te Wiki o Te Reo) and to start writing this post.

8:45 we dinged the bell to warn students it’s nearly time to leave, and I walked around closing windows and picking up discarded student magazines and soft drink cans as subtle reinforcement that the day’s over. There was only one group I had to tell verbally that we were about to close. Doors locked at 9pm; but I hung around inside for about 15 minutes waiting for the interwebs to inform me that my bus was about to arrive; finished this post on the bus and hit ‘publish’ from home.

I didn’t do this at the same time as everyone else for a few reasons:

• when it was announced, I was off sick with flu (my brother calculates that, statistically speaking, it was probably swine flu, so that’s exciting) so my day-in-the-life post would have been “spent the day catching up with a week’s worth of emails and blog posts”
• only a month ago we learned that we have to merge two of our branches between now and the start of next year so I’ve been feeling too busy to write anything
• it would have been awkward to write about a day in my life when those things were all related to this merger that hadn’t been fully announced to our users

But I have been keeping brief notes of my days for a few weeks now on Memiary as a way to reassure myself, “See, I did accomplish something today,” so I can recreate these now:

There’s an average of two hours a week on the desk on top of these.

Mon 27 Jul 2009
1. Attempt to catch up after sick leave.
2. Set up Te Wiki o te Reo Māori display.
3. Reply to the Facebook comment re selling textbook and set up a discussion topic.
4. Attend meeting re merger.
5. Make blogpost about Knovel title of the week.

Tue 28 Jul 2009

1. Caught up blogs.
2. Weeded more.
3. Worked on merger communication plan.
4. Arranged to meet colleague in another department.

Wed 29 Jul 2009

1. Met with manager re merger communications.
2. Weeded duplicates from TN.
3. Desk shifts, virtual reference.

(Thursday I seem to have been too busy to make notes. It probably involved desk shifts, weeding, weeding while on the desk, and stand-up meetings at the desk about weeding.)

Fri 31 Jul 2009

1. Finished Facebook launch report for library leadership team.
2. Facebook event housekeeping.
3. Weeded in TAs. And continued.
4. Lunch meeting.
5. First blog post re merger.

This week is continuing fairly similarly for me but with an added booksale of the books that we’ve been weeding.