Librarians everywhere are signing up for the Library Day in the Life project as a way of showing what we do to fellow librarians, library school students, and anyone curious. I missed out on this the last time it occurred so I definitely wanted to participate this year, especially since I’ve been looking for ways to kickstart the library content on this blog.
My position at my place of work (MPOW) is Information Lifecycle Management assistant. The job title is not the most self-evident and in the year and one month I’ve been working in this position the responsibilities and definitions have shifted. Basically, I work with people and records whether those records be active (records management) or permanent (archives). My typical responsibilities involve accessioning records for storage or for archives, retrieving & returning boxes at the request of an administrative or faculty office, and answering reference questions related to archival material.
That scratches the surface, and hopefully this exercise will explain more. With no further ado, I present…
A Day in the Life of an Information Lifecycle Management Assistant
Monday
- wake up (late). My son gets me up with zerberts and lots of giggling. Get ready for work.
- My wife drives my son and I to the school. He goes to the childrens’ center, I go to the library.
- begin work day by checking emails, planning out tasks for the day and other administrative tasks.
- check out Twitter and FriendFeed to see how my other library peeps are doing.
- continue an ongoing reference project to learn about details of the lives of students from China who attended the school in its early years. This involves reviewing registrar records, yearbooks, and alumni bulletins among other things.
- at request from a faculty assistant, arrange to have boxes picked up and returned to offsite storage
- prepare a student file for loan to the admissions office.
- Lunch! I eat a salad and read the Rex Libris graphic novel.
- Spend an hour on-call to page materials from the stacks for patrons in the reading room. Spend the time populating a spreadsheet for records storage stats and reading scholarly articles and blogs relevant to my job.
- At request of my manager, I refile boxes related to a reference question we worked on last week. Also photocopy a few pages of interest to the patron. I cut my finger when trying to remove the staple. Ouch!
- Resume research on Chinese students. Also work on a similar question about the school’s earliest research in India.
- Close out my day of work.
- Go to childrens’ center to pick up my son.
- Take bus to public library. I get teased for going to the library on my time off, but MPOW generally doesn’t specialize in stuff I’m interested in.
- Ride subway home. My son is inordinately fussy.
- Relieved to get home, eat supper, put the boy to bed and go to bed myself. Whew!
I’m glad to get that done. Now I’ll have to find time to read what everyone else wrote.
Panorama of the Mountains 