HLG Nursing Bulletin Vol 32 (2)
Continuing from the last edition of the Bulletin here is the next in our series of “a day in the life of…” a member of the Libraries for Nursing Committee feature.
A Day in the Life of Sophie Pattison
Sophie Pattison,
Assistant Librarian Trainee
Anglia Ruskin University,
Chelmsford
I work as an assistant librarian trainee for Health, Social Care and Education. The post is offered for two years and aims to help bridge the knowledge gap between the newly qualified and the experienced professional. I have been encouraged to take advantage of as many learning and development opportunities as I can manage.
In the morning I visit SPLASH (Student Personal Learning and Study Hub) at the University of Surrey, and take a tour of the extended and refurbished Library and Learning Centre. Set in the modern and leafy Stag Hill campus, the library is very well resourced and designed. SPLASH itself is based within the library, providing a converged service between the learning advisers and academic liaison librarians. It’s a place for all students to improve their grades through use of the advice zone (offering drop-in sessions, individual appointments and group training) or the well-equipped group study rooms.
Back to the office and straight to my emails. Approximately 40 have been received this morning so there are plenty to get through. Some relate to the team meeting we had yesterday. The library has recently purchased LibGuides – online resource guides. Our meeting focused on how these will be implemented, the number of guides we will make (course-based rather than discipline-based) and how we will ensure the content is logically organised and relevant to our users. Using terms that are easily understood by our users is essential to ensuring students can easily navigate our guides. A page tab with ‘find articles’ is far more relevant to the majority of our users compared to a term such as ‘databases’. It makes sense to label our top-level pages accordingly. Only a few days ago a very worried and confused nursing student came to the enquiries desk. He explained that his tutor had told him to search databases for his literature review and that he had no idea where to start. The student had in fact already been searching CINAHL, but hadn’t realised this was a database. Some students do not understand what are to us very common day-to-day terms.
Other emails focus on planning for our research skills sessions which are now embedded into module 2 of the undergraduate nursing curriculum. This is a new curriculum which started last September so there are improvements to make for the second delivery.
To finish the day I do some book ordering which must be completed by the end of June to ensure budgets are spent. Our main supplier is Dawson. If a book is not yet published then I save it for later using their lists feature, which I then check regularly. We are also coming to the end of our Patron Driven Acquisition project by EBL. If a student rents an EBL e-book on our catalogue then we are charged a rental fee. Once rented more than 5 times the book is automatically purchased and part of our permanent collection. It’s quite interesting to see which books the students have chosen; mostly good choices, though sometimes American based and less relevant to UK nursing practice.
I tend to leave the office a little late, but today I leave on time as I have Friday off to attend a wedding. Next week looks busy already with customer service and copyright training, a course committee meeting and academic services biannual team meeting, as well as a review of our collection management policy.
Health Libraries Group 