Frenzy to a fizzle - January 9th-13th 2012

I got to admit I found it hard to motivate myself this week to blog about my week at work. Probably because in general not a lot happened! The week started in a frenzy but fizzled out by Friday, helped by the unusually sunny weather for January. Judging by the calls received, I think a circular letter had been sent out to readers that had less than 10 books on their list.

The break from the routine for me was that it was my turn to represent the Reader Services Team which is just a formality since we preselect in advance. One of the important things is that we have a representative from the Production Department attend to keep us up to date with issues that can affect selection ie monthly quotas or we are selecting books that are too complex to produce in a particular format. The big issue at the moment is that we can’t pick any braille or giant print at the moment due to lack of capacity in production with the fear that we may have to deselect titles. This seems to be a recurring problem over the years and something that irritates me in that we have a service agreement with Production, yet they overestimate the quotas and don’t seem to build in a contingency plan to take into account of things like staff shortages due to redundancies. Although they have a representative at the meeting, we don’t get enough feedback to make decisions in advance. Although Production have got it wrong, it’s the customer - the National Library Services - that suffer and ultimately - the readers themselves as we end up losing a few months’ worth of selection and titles slip through the net. Thankfully talking books haven’t been affected and titles are being selected as normal. After the book selection meetings, it’s then my job to go through all the titles and move any customer requests to a different spread sheet. We did well this month as I moved an impressive 123 requests over altogether. It’s one of those jobs that takes longer than it sounds.

I managed to email my revalidation log for my second year to CILIP and am busy going through my log looking for gaps in my evidence to put in my portfolio. My next job is to look for a mentor as I’m going to need some guidance as I’ve never put a portfolio together before. My Chartership was in the days of the 6,000 word report. I’m a bit concerned that there’s not been enough professional development, my portfolio is looking rather slim. I’m hoping that’s where the mentor will come in and put me on the right track.