A week in the life of a medical librarian: day 5

Well, we’ve made it to the end of the week. It was another mixed bag today:

• One-and-a-half hours working on my presentation
• One-and-a-half hours updating our e-book holdings
• One hour on email
• Two hours working on our offsite access URLs
• Two hours troubleshooting access to our e-journals

So what did I spend my time on this week?

• Nine hours on literature searches
• Seven hours on the front desk
• Seven hours troubleshooting access to our e-journals
• Four-and-a-half hours checking the links for our offsite access authentication
• Three-and-a-half hours on emails
• Three-and-a-half hours planning and preparing my presentation for next month’s Health Libraries Australia Professional Development Day
• Three hours of meetings
• Two-and-a-half hours on e-book usage statistics
• One-and-a-half hours updating our e-book holdings
• One hour working on a submission for our hospital Quality and Innovation Awards
• One hour providing EndNote training
• Half an hour updating usage statistics for last month
• Lunch with Schrödinger the hospital cat (including a selfie)

I’m not surprised that literature searches and troubleshooting online resources were at the top of the list. My job is to maintain the library’s e-journals and offsite access systems, so those tasks should take up a lot of my time. I did seem to be doing more of that this week than usual, though. We also had quite a few literature searches come through recently, so that’s why it was at the top of my list.

I found it an interesting exercise to track what I did each day, and I hope it gives you a bit of an insight into what medical librarians do.