As I explained in my introductory Library Day in the Life post for round 8 I have been keeping a detailed record of my work activities. My aim was to use this record of an average week to see if some estimates I had made previously (for how I spend my time over a term) were anywhere near accurate.

The charts below show the percentage of time I spent on various activities that were identified as the main tasks of an Academic Support Librarian. The first chart shows the time I spent on each activity during the past week. The second chart shows the estimates I made for how much time I spend on each activity during the Spring term (January – April).

Comparing to the two has left me fairly happy with the estimates I made about how I spend my time. The activities missing from my work this week, that came quite high in my estimate, were teaching and project work. I’ve done no teaching this week, but have already done some, and will be doing more this term. As for project work, a lot of the work I did this week that I classed as production of teaching materials was also project work for an information skills tutorial I am creating.

Given the job I do I think it is unsurprising that liaison and enquiries came out as top activities on both charts. Within liaison in this week’s tracking I included all work I did on email (6 hours and 22 minutes in total) as well as meetings with staff in the business school and the one Student Staff Liaison Committee meeting that I attended.

One thing I was particularly interested in, having been asked a few times lately, was how much time I spend on Twitter. My total for the week was 1 hour and 33 minutes, an average of a little under 20 minutes per day.

Professional activities scored quite highly this week as I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on developing a new website for the Business Librarians Association. I also used the “Other” category this week which I had used for the estimate. Within this category I included the time I spend doing general admin and planning my week.

New things used to scare me. Until recently, I had a long mental list of “things I don’t do” and would have no trouble saying no if there was even a hint that I might be asked to do something on that list. This attitude was fixed and applied both at home and at work.

You will note that I’ve been writing in the past tense and I hope you’re asking “so what’s changed?”, well here’s where the story begins…

Over Easter last year I went on a trip to New Zealand. This was a holiday and the chance to meet the rest of my in-laws (Laura’s mum is a New Zealander and the majority of her family live there). During the trip we spent a lot of time with Laura’s aunts, Sue and Sharon, in and around Wellington. Whilst getting to know each other we talked about our outlooks on life and plans for the future. Through these conversations I learned a lot about myself and took some valuable advice and inspiration from Sharon. When we were leaving she gave me this card and I have been using the words as my mantra ever since:

What prompted me to write this post was an experience on the WAMP workshop a couple of weeks ago. As part of a session on performance management we did a role-play exercise. You know that mental list I had of “things I don’t do”? Role play was definitely on it and 12 months ago I would have found it difficult to take part. Now that I am saying ‘yes’ more often there was no doubt in my mind that I would give it a go. I was a little scared but my overriding thoughts were that it would be a really good opportunity to get some practical experience of performance management and that I could learn a lot from it.

I found the whole role-play experience tiring and challenging but ultimately extremely useful. As well as doing our own role-plays it was really good to get the opportunity to observe others in action and see how different people and personalities approached a range of issues.

New things used to stress me out, but I’ve found that by saying ‘yes’ more often I’ve become more relaxed about the things that life throws at me and I feel I can take them on with confidence. Give it a go and see if it helps you too!

Every time I have participated in Library Day in the Life I have taken a different approach to it:

• Round 2 – detailed accounts of my day
• Round 3 – summaries of my day
• Round 4 – daily summaries with pictures
• Round 5 – daily summaries based on my to do list
• Round 6 – videos!

After the videos of round 6 I clearly felt I’d reached my peak and didn’t participate last time around. For round 8 I’m getting back into the game and have yet another new approach. This time I won’t be posting daily, instead I have chosen to keep a detailed log of how I am spending my time during the day and will post an overall summary at the end of the week. I am doing this for one specific reason – to see exactly how much time I spend on different tasks in an average week. I was asked to do this recently for a review of a subject librarian’s activities, but without the time to log exactly what I do the form I submitted contained estimates. I’ve got no idea whether I was even close with my guesses so I’ll be interested to compare that to the resutls from this week’s log.

Yesterday I attended a seminar run by Sarah Brear from the Copyright Licencing Agency. I think I know about copyright, but every time I’m asked a question about it I doubt myself. I am therefore always keen to refresh my knowledge. The session was principally about the licence our university subscribes to and what is permitted (and perhaps more importantly not permitted) under its terms, but also covered the basics of copyright.

I’m not going to regurgitate the whole session for you but pull out a few things I noted down that were either interesting, or new to me. I’ve divided them into two sections, those relating to copyright generally and then more specifically under the Basic HE Licence.

Copyright

Ownership – Sarah addressed the issue of ownership, in this case relating to the creation of work for an institution by an individual. The owner is generally whoever paid for the work’s creation. So, if as part of my job (that I am paid for) I wrote a paper my institution would own the copyright of that document. There may however be some exceptions stated in an individual’s contract.

Fair dealing – there is no definition of this in law. It is not a right, but a defence that you can use if accused of infringement. It should not be confused with fair use which is a US concept and is more generous than fair dealing.

Exceptions
These are general principles, but when applying them you should still make an assessment of each individual case:

• work copied by hand in preparation for instruction
• work used in examinations; for questions and answers, but not if either is to be published afterwards unless clearance has been granted
• work used in criticism or review for news reporting

The CLA Basic HE Licence

The CLA provides indemnity for subscribers so that if an individual (staff or student) infringes copyright it would be the individual, not the institution who faced prosecution, providing the institution can demonstrate good practice under the licence.

Distance learning students can access materials made available under the licence but overseas campuses, and the students attending them, are not covered as standard under the licence.