Library Day in the Life 2010, post one

Julia Gross. Faculty Librarian for Education and Arts at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia.

This is my first post for Library Day in the Life 2010


Started the day at home catching up on Twitter, while listening to the glorious striated pardalote peeping away in the neighbours old gum tree. They are a glorious little birds, but you hardly ever see them as they spend most of their day way up high in the canopy. I'm a bit of a bird nut!

Today is the first day of semester and I came in later as I’m doing the evening shift. I have been flat out, because I’ve been away on leave for 10 days there is lots of catching up to do: socialising speaking to the team and getting through the mountain of emails.

There are a couple of big projects on the horizon, one is the university's Research Week and I’m on the university committee for this. The library is planning some displays and a series of research seminars. We have the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) on my home campus and they come within the Faculty of Education and Arts portfolio, which is pretty exciting. So I spoke to a library staff member about doing a music installation display for Research Week, using work from one of our Music academic staff members. The WAAPA research in the creative areas challenges the library in all sorts of ways, such as how to store creative research on our institutional repository.

I emailed the faculty team with some catch up news. There are staff on two campuses, so it’s important to keep everyone informed. Had some casual conversations wiht colleagues about staffing and a new librarian’s induction. We also have two librarians about to join a web2.0 leadership project which is a federally funded collaboration with three local Perth unis, so I spoke to people about that.

I met a new PHD student who is doing Creative Writing. He’s coming to see me later this week to get started with the library research part of his PHD.

Today I have also been getting ready for going to research data management training at ANDS in Canberra and have been doing some prior reading up for that.

And finally I did one desk shift til 7pm. Good just to keep my hand in.

It is interesting, looking back over all this and it’s clear a lot of my job these days is concerned with support for research.

PS the photo of the big crane is the construction site of our new engineering building.