Tales from a Professional Placement

It's with great pleasure that I introduce an ALIA Sydney guest blogger for today's blog post, Kristine Boardman. Kristine has just started doing her professional placement as a librarian with me, and I'm enthusiastic about showing her all of the aspects of my job, as an academic librarian. I'm also excited about all of the things that Kristine will be able to teach me along the way, and the things that I will learn being a professional placement supervisor. So without further ado, I introduce Kristine:

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As part of the Librarian degree through Charles Sturt University I have commenced my Professional Placement at The University of Sydney’s SciTech and Badham libraries this week. As I am employed as a Library Technician, the opportunity to see the difference in the roles is something I am really looking forward to.

After the first few busy days the main difference I have noticed is the amount of teaching and training done by the Faculty Liaison Librarians (FLLs), especially early in semester. I have sat in on two classes and the focus on Information Literacy skills for students commencing their research is a major part of these training sessions. The FLLs have demonstrated their depth of knowledge in database searching, evaluating sources and the use of reference management software, Endnote.

The opportunity to gain knowledge about this role and an understanding of the responsibilities that go with a position such as this will be very beneficial when applying for jobs at this level. There is a lot I still don’t know about the finer details of FLL role and some things which I particularly want to explore include:

·         How to develop effective working relationships with academics, research and teaching staff

·         Managing the collection and gaining a more specialised knowledge of the subject area and resources

·         Planning, marketing and promotion of services and activities for clients

I am very fortunate to have an extremely enthusiastic staff member who volunteered to be my Placement Supervisor and this has a great bearing on the opportunities I will be able to participate in, in my time here. Already the amount of help and goodwill from all the staff and time they have set aside for consultations is wonderful. As the University of Sydney Library is such a large organisation there is so much to learn about and people to meet. The extent to which the library serves its clients will become clearer to me over the next couple of weeks and I am privileged to be able to do this placement in such a dynamic library.

Kristine Boardman is a Library Technician at the Univeristy of Sydney Library and she is currently studying towards her library degree at Charles Sturt University.

Crystal Choi is an academic librarian and a member of the ALIA Sydney committee. She tweets @crystalibrary.

Disclaimer: I didn't in any way put Kristine up to the lovely comments in her blog post!!!