My Workspace

Only one more week to go before #Library30 is over - I wonder how much more there is of lockdown? Do I need to dig out my #Museum30 prompt list for May? I won't - this has been fun but time-consuming, and I need to have a break and get back to my Framework Five tasks, not to mention my actual work!

So my workspace - that's changed a bit very recently, having gone from this:

To this:

You'll notice, I suspect, the terrible mess and heaps of boxes - see, we only moved quite recently and there was still work to be done on the house so we have three rooms we can't actually use. Then the library uses a lot of stuff, so I've got boxes of books, files and equipment, in addition to all the stuff crammed onto my desk. The table is also used as a desk for the children, so I'm sharing it with their art supplies.

But there are similarities, I suppose. The first, and most important, is the light - I could not work without heaps of sunlight! The next is I tend to keep both spaces quite regulated - here's where I do this task, then here's where this task happens, and so on. And there is one small advantage to working from home - two monitors!! Cataloguing takes half as long when you can have both screens available! Also a much faster computer, running Windows 10, even if it is on crappier internet - talk about swings and roundabouts...

I will say that I miss my absolutely humungous desk at work though. And my trolleys!

Typical Day

Ahahaha, hahaha, ha. Ha.

This will be a post of two parts, I think - a typical day as I remember those things how wot they used to be, and a typical day for me now. Let's flashback...

So in olden days, I would go to work in my library. I swing past the library pigeonhole to collect the post in the morning, and deal with that first, before checking my inbox and triaging it. I'd check for enquiries, or requests for purchase, and go through those unless there was anything more pressing. Then I'd look at the plan I made in my bullet journal the day before and do anything urgent from that.

Preparation for the day ahead, assuming the library is open that day (the museum is closed on Mondays so the routine's a bit different and involves far more time shunting books around), usually takes me to opening time. We have a lot of volunteers who need their work prepped and ready to go, and if I've not fetched a book for a reader then I'll need to go and do that. Sometimes I'll try and deliver new books to their excited recipients around the museum - that's a great opportunity for a 5-minute chat with various colleagues and can lead to great ideas or progress being made somewhere along the line.

At opening time everything stops for a few minutes while I grab my coffee from the café, but I rarely have an actual coffee break, because usually I'm supervising visitors and can't leave them alone. I carefully make sure I've left the jobs I can do at the desk for opening time because I'm stuck there for the next 3 hours most days - that will usually include processing books, updating files and budgets, answering reader enquiries...all those typical library chores.

Lunch is usually away from my desk, with a Welsh lesson or two from Duo Lingo, then the afternoon is much the same as the morning. I've noticed that the organised readers tend to want to book in for mornings, while the ones who tend to assume that they can just walk in and get what they need the same day tend to leave it to the afternoon. One phoned up at 4pm to ask what time we closed, before requesting books and announcing that they'd just walked to the museum and were waiting outside - it was lucky I was able to fetch the items so quickly!

And now...?

Obviously now there are significantly fewer enquiries from outside (and I wouldn't be able to help much even if there were). I start my day with the children, doing #PEwithJoe which is a great way to boost my energy and spirit in the morning. Then it's call negotiation with my husband, where we work out which calls we have and what time, and who's going to look after the kids while the other's working.

Then our rest of day is pretty much governed by the children's routine: milk/snack at 10:30, lunch at 12, daily walk until the toddler's asleep, then milk at 2:30, snack at 4, dinner at 6. In between, I try to meet with my team or whoever I'm seeing that day, doing the little jobs that crop up (purchasing or paying invoices, emails to colleagues or vendors, work on Framework Five). The rest of the time I'm mostly cataloguing. I say rest of time - that could be 20 minutes of the day or 2 hours, depending on how guilty I'm feeling about the amount of work my schoolchild is not doing!

But I still try and end my day the same way I did as at work - plan the next day on my bullet journal. It keeps me aware of what things are more pressing, and how much I've done (and if there's anything I ended up neglecting). I find routine is really helpful at the moment, and stops me sinking into a completely unproductive black hole!

I'm not sharing mine - this one is so much neater!

Library Advice

Today marks the start of the second half of this prompt list, which means I am officially halfway (even though in trying to avoid having to write on weekends I've actually done a few out of sequence and so I'm actually further than halfway - woohoo!). I don't know of any advice I can really offer about libraries particularly, beyond getting to know your readers, finding out what they really want, and staying abreast of developments generally, so you can give them what they want before they even ask for it.

But as we're all in a very strange situation right now, and struggling to work at home through a crisis, maybe I can share the advice I've found useful to my situation.

1. Goalsetting: don't expect too much of yourself or others - productivity is way down at the moment across the board. But do try to set a goal or a task with a definite result if you can - little successes will boost your spirits.
2. Routines are really helpful. We have young kids, so this was a no-brainer for us. Every morning we're up and dressed at the same time (yes, even weekends), then we schedule the day around the kids' food times and baby's nap. This has been especially useful with the 5 year old, who would otherwise sit in front of the tv all day. Knowing that 2pm is quiet reading time means that they're more likely to actually do some reading.
3. Get outside, every day, even if it's just your front porch, and see sunlight. If you have a park nearby, take a turn around it. If you have a garden, go there and stretch your arms to the sun and breathe deeply. We feel better when we're closer to nature (most of us, anyway).
4. Never work outside your working hours. Seriously. Just don't. If you can't get the work you planned done during them (and this is a target you set yourself, rather than one set by your work), revise your expectations down and try again. If it's set by your work, hopefully you can talk to your line manager about pushing back deadlines to something achievable.
5. Take time to be creative. I'm finding about an hour a week with my work knitting group, but it really, really helps. Something that occupies your mind enough that everything else just has to switch off for a while is so therapeutic.
6. Limit news - particularly about Covid-19. Only check in once, maybe twice in a day. Anything more and you're just creating unnecessary anxiety for yourself.
7. Boredom is good for you, improving creativity. Embrace it if you can. If, like me, it's not so much boredom in stillness because it's the boredom of repetition of exhausting tasks (like childcare), I don't really know what to suggest. I always have a book on the go on my phone, so any minute I can pick it up and read, and I've been learning Welsh on Duo Lingo, so those have been my outlets most of the time!
8. Help others if you can, and only if you can. It gets you outside of yourself and makes you feel like you are doing something productive. But it might be too much, so looking after just yourself is okay too.

I think that's all the advice I can give. I know I'm doing things wrong, like I haven't played my piano for ages, which I'm missing but just can't work up the energy to do it. But you do what you gotta do to get through, and that's the single biggest take home I can give at the moment.

Conservation Win

This is a tough one - I've been racking my brains for several days trying to come up with something, particularly something I've got to hand, but I've so far come up with a big fat zero. Most of my books don't need conservation in the usual sense of the word - maybe a bit of binding repair, or cleaning, or sometimes the books are so damaged that were they valuable they might be conserved, but because they're often not rare or too old, I can usually source a replacement which is cheaper than getting a conservator in to do any work.

So I thought I'd share a conservation win from the main museum instead. People still remember the pots getting smashed 14 years ago, and they still get asked about by visitors! Here's the story about the work that was done to repair them so that they look stunning from far away, but you can see the huge amount of work done on them when you get close up.

In the meantime, I think a lot of conservation wins probably happen after conservation fails. "Oh dear, this happened, what steps do we need to take to not let it happen again?" sort of thing. I'm sure every museum has a disaster plan, and I think it's going to be interesting to see how these plans hold up to the current situation. Flood, yes, fire, no problem - but epidemic?

That brings me to another win, although it's not really conservation-related. Being part of the university, we're very lucky to have a lot of infrastructure ready for everyone to be working from home in a way that I imagine a lot of the bigger museums, particularly the ones in London, probably don't. It seems anathema to have to work away from the collections, but many of us have no choice, and the fact that we're even trying (and sometimes succeeding) is surely a win!