So what do librarians do?

[quintus_marcius]

It's summertime, which in a university library means that there are far fewer students around, and therefore far less enquiry work. So I've had my team checking whether all the books are in the library, and then helping me work out which of them we need to replace with new editions. Of course, when you get in new books, you have to find something

Comments

[cholten99]

> law librarians are among the people who know how much work would be required to achieve it

So it sounds like they would be good people to provide project management or quality assurance rather than necessarily doing the dog-work.

I wonder how much can be scraped / built automatically from existing free sources.

[prunesquallormd]

I used to love my university library in the holidays, especially the summer ones. So much more peaceful and so much less full of people pretending to work (except when I was there. I was very good at pretending to work. Possible that's the reason my final MA dissertation was 5 months late XD).

I can entirely understand, and mostly agree with, the point made in your first link, but I was still getting a knee-jerk bibliophile's response. I could really do with getting rid of some of my books but I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to bring myself to.

[meggitymeg]

I think many people are surprised at how many books librarians throw away, but if you think about it, it must be almost as many as they buy. It's been something of a trend for me to start a new job by working out what needs to be thrown away.

As I begin my third week of actually-being-paid-to-manage-this-branch (as opposed to the nearly three years I've been doing it without the commensurate pay or title), I have prepared and printed my dead stock lists and am almost resentful of the fact that I'm off on Wednesday as otherwise it'd be the perfect day to start weeding the junior fiction!

(I may have to work this Wednesday and take next Wednesday off instead, as we've just learned of an opportunity to send withdrawn junior stock to Uganda provided we can have it boxed and ready to go by Friday....)