Library Day in the Life - Tuesday

This is my second post for Library Day in the Life, my one for yesterday can be found here. I really enjoyed reading other people's posts last night, especially those from students studying for their Masters degree! (I'm taking notes...)

Apart from the morning routine of emptying the bookdrops and reshelving the books (which I do every day), today was quite different from yesterday. This was mainly because it was the day of our Library Committee meeting. We have a Library Committee made up of the librarian, several members of the college teaching staff, and two students. In the meeting the discussion included the main University Library's (relatively) recent change of allowing all undergraduates to borrow books. (Before September, only 3rd year undergraduates and above were allowed to take books out - I think! I wasn't working here then.) There has been a mixed reaction to this, naturally the undergraduates are happy to be able to borrow from the UL, while other students are feeling the knock on effects of the books being out on loan more often. We're going to add a question on this to our annual library survey to get more feedback from students.

Another item on the agenda was a proposal that I had put forward, to create a Twitter account for the library so that we could interact with our students in a more informal way, bringing library news to them rather than them having to go and check our library website to find out what's going on. I was expecting to have to argue my case a bit, but was very happy to find that both the student reps were very enthusiastic and positive about it, and the staff all were happy to give it a try! So as of this afternoon, @NewnhamLibrary is now on Twitter :)

'Lion' by safari-partners on Flickr

For the rest of the afternoon I tried to catch up on some of the book processing which has been building up - there's still a lot left to do! I also catalogued a few more bits of sheet music, including the wonderful poems Four Cautionary Tales, and a Moral by Hilaire Belloc, set to music by Liza Lehmann. I remember a couple of these poems from a tape we had when I was little. There is 'Rebecca (who slammed doors for fun and perished miserably)', 'Jim (who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a lion)', 'Matilda (who told lies, and was burnt to death)', 'Henry King (who chewed little bits of string and was early cut off in dreadful agonies)', and the highly moral goody-two-shoes 'Charles Augustus Fortescue (who always did what was right, and so accumulated an immense fortune)'. That's the kind of poetry I like guys!