It’s a good start to the day as the lift goes direct to F
Floor Stephenson without stopping; I do walk up the stairs in summer when the
bus gets me here earlier but no time to do that today.
Kate is already in and sending out email reminders the day before
books are due back, there will then be a flurry of emails to reply to granting
renewals if the books haven’t been reserved by another reader.
Sarah is out at the PCCU ward round meeting as part of our
clinical support work – we also attend Surgery & Neurosurgery meetings on a
regular basis, she will probably come back with at least one literature search
for evidence to work on during the next couple of days.
The library email accounts are checked and a collective sigh
of relief goes up as (so far) there isn't a request for 17 articles by one of
our regular clinicians...we are convinced he saves them all up for Friday
afternoons!
A couple of support workers come into the library to ask for
help logging on the the e-learning platform and after negotiating the choosing
a password minefield they settle down to complete some training.
We have medical students in today too – they like working in
our library as it is smaller and cosier than many of the university ones and
this group seem particularly keen on our dark chocolate KitKats and cappuccino
coffee.
We advertise that we can answer ‘all questions even the
silly ones’ although we are momentarily flummoxed by a phone call asking if we
have OED...what strange medical condition is this we wonder ....till it
transpires that it is the precise definition of a word that is required and as
we do have access to Oxford English Dictionary on-line we are able to help.
Someone comes to the counter asking for a particular book
except that all he can remember about it is that it is on a particular topic
and has a blue cover. Book is finally located (with a green cover) and reader
goes away happy.
A doctor comes in for a pre-booked individual training
session on how to use the Healthcare Databases Advanced Search (
HDAS) this
lasts for about an hour and we get through it without the system crashing which
does make life easier.
Sarah is due to visit
Becton in the near future to explain
or services to a group of staff and how they can access electronic resources,
so some time is spent working out the best mode of transport.
A group of lost staff come into the library looking for the
Webster seminar room....this happens so frequently that we have written instructions ready to give them.
Lunchtime comes at last and along with it a discussion of
what cakes Sarah & Kate are going to make for the next InfoBites session
(see previous blogs), Sarah also bakes regularly for the Journal Club(see
previous blogs)...it’s not that we are obsessed by cake or anything..honest!
The emails are checked again and some requests from other health libraries in the UK are supplied – we have a good fast reciprocal
service and can supply most article requests in a couple of days.
I spend an hour ordering new books and replacements for old
editions..we shall soon be able to advertise another sale of withdrawn items.
I then walk across Weston Park to collect some books previously ordered on our behalf
by the University of Sheffield, the duck pond is frozen today and the ducks
look most disgruntled. Fortunately there are only 3 small books to pick up,
some of our books are very heavy.
Catch up on TweetDeck when I get back and
retweet
information that I think will be of interest to our followers – it will
automatically appear on our
Facebook and
Linkedin pages too. I then add recent
publications by SCH staff to our
Delicious bookmarking page. I've only recently
set up an alert to catch these and hopefully having them all in one place will
help raise the profile of the
Trust and make it easier for people to see what
others are working on.
It’s one of my late nights tonight (Mon-Thurs we open till
7 pm) so I settle down to catch up with some paperwork but make the mistake of
checking the library emails again and see that instead I will be searching for
and supplying 17 articles
Gill
.
