A day in the life of an academic law librarian
The day starts early at 5.50 a.m. with Radio 5 Live at an excruciatingly loud volume
(which is a peculiar choice really as my husband despises Nicky Campbell); I live in
Hertfordshire and although the train into Kings Cross only takes 30 minutes I like to
be at work some time before we open. From Kings Cross, City is a 20 minutes walk
through the backstreets, past lots of nice houses I'd like to live in. At about 8.15 I get
into my office (which is situated actually on the floor of the law library) and open up
all the windows to get some air into the building which is always hot because of the
low ceilings, students and zero air conditioning. I then organise all the books that are
waiting to be re-shelved for my assistant Edward into rough shelf order. This makes
life a bit easier for him, as the sheer volume of books the students remove from the
shelves in one day can be a bit daunting at 9am!
A day in the life of an academic law librarian is totally different depending on the time
of year; if this were September to December I would be spending it teaching, marking
coursework and getting through the questions that new students queuing at my office
door fire at me. However, at this time of year it's a bit less manic. Today I start as
most people do by ploughing through emails, and then tuning into XFM on the web or
getting my ipod going. I need music as it gets a bit lonely in my office on my own.
Next thing on the list is to finish off a new section on www.lawbore.net City's legal
portal. I've been harassing students to get them to write brief profiles of the voluntary
work they do for the Pro Bono section and I need to make these into web pages. I'm
hopeful this might encourage more law students to get involved. This doesn't take too
long and I manage to get them up without too much trauma, before adding a few
student messages to the LawBore notice board from the Law Department
administrators.
Next I have an individual training session with a PhD student from Sociology who is
doing some tentative research into the law relating to abortion both in the UK and
US. This is largely spent getting her up to speed with legal databases, how to search,
what she can get and where. She has no legal knowledge so this takes some time,
explaining citations, hierarchy of law reports and all sorts. Prior to lunch I spend time
planning materials for some presentations I'm doing on LawBore (Social Science
Online seminar and Biall Conference parallel session).
Lunch is pretty uninteresting, with a homemade rice salad and a copy of Metro, a
colleague of mine tries to get me hooked on those Su Doku puzzles and I fear I may
have been sucked in.
The afternoon is set aside for a meeting with a colleague from the Inns of Court
School of Law, Verena Price, regarding a new legal skills module we're planning for
CitySpace (our VLE) for the new academic year. This is really a development
meeting to work through structural practicalities and to allocate work. The module is
going to be video based and I'm already hunting down LLB students to play starring
roles. The day ends by sorting outstanding email and dealing with a student
complaint about non-law students in the law library making noise by rustling papers
and whispering, thus distracting those trying to revise. The stresses of revision are all
too familiar to me as this is what I have in store when I get home (I've got my final
exams in May for my CPE).
