Thursday, August 03, 2006

Karen and Chritine decided what our blog needed was it's own page dedicated to the lives of us working gals. Please take a look, A Day in a Life...

Karen, from Williamstown, USA has written the first article:

I work in an art library in a small museum in a small town in Massachusetts (USA). Though the museum and the town are small, the library is not; it occupies four floors, has 250,000 volumes, a staff of twelve, and a healthy acquisitions budget, and is a major player among art libraries in the US. One of the things that makes it a wonderful place to work is that it serves many different kinds of people; the library serves the museum staff and scholarly programs, it serves a graduate program in the history of art, it serves undergraduate students and faculty at a sister liberal arts college, and it is open to the public from 9 to 5 each weekday. This means that as the library’s only reference librarian, I get to work with curators, visiting scholars-in-residence, graduate students, undergraduates, college and graduate faculty, and visitors to the museum who want to find answers to questions about artists and works of art.

In addition to providing reference service, I also do Interlibrary Loan, and on a daily level these are the two main parts of the job. Students, scholars, and faculty send me requests for books they need that our library does not have, and I request them from other libraries. During the day I am available to help anyone who comes in, phones, emails, or sends a letter to ask a question.

November 30th, 2005 was such an interesting day that I kept a record of the course of the day. I am always fascinated to know how people spend their working days; what kinds of tasks they do, what kinds of decisions they have to make, how they interact with colleagues and customers or patrons. My hope in writing this piece is that others will be inspired to keep logs and describe their working days. This day is not necessarily a typical day, but it gives a good picture of what it is like to work in an art library... (more)

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