A Day in the Life of the Ministry of Defence Library Team

Our alerts cover a wide range of different subject areas ranging from quite general subjects, such as data protection, to some very specific military subjects which might look at different types of equipment. We use the Factiva news database to compile most of them but we also incorporate content from other sources such as BBC Monitoring and our own intranet to give the customer the widest possible perspective. Feedback from our customers tells us that they like the fact that this information is sent to them directly and it helps them to keep up to date with the latest developments in their areas of interest.

In-depth literature reviews are another thing that keeps us busy every day and we might switch from one to the other during the course of the day. We will search a wide range of different databases in order to compile a reading list for customers. As our customer base is very diverse the subjects that we cover can be very varied and provide a real challenge to our skills, but then as librarians we are quick to gain expertise as we go along. Sharing our knowledge is key to the way the team operates. Horizon scanning for some of the factors that could influence military policy proved a real challenge but our satisfaction comes in seeing it influence policy making.

We all take turns on the enquiry desk; it might be a straight forward loan or it may a complex enquiry but the plus is always that we get to interact directly with our customers. It is good to be able to chat to our customers and we quite often pick up useful information from them that will help us to answer other enquiries. Enquiry Desk duty is also the time when we get a chance swap information with each other informally. Sometimes it gives us the route to resolve that testing literature search we were struggling with earlier, or we may learn something that helps us with our intranet publishing role!

Talking of intranet publishing we have responsibility for the Library Channel on the Defence Intranet, the place where most of the MoD’s internal documents are published. The easy bit is the items we publish for ourselves. The challenge comes in managing the publishing of everyone else’s documents, that involves quality checking documents themselves, checking currency of existing items, dealing with queries from around MoD All of this work is fitted around some of the other tasks, such as producing alerts, which the whole team does.

At the end of the day there is a real sense of satisfaction; we have delivered a lot of work to deadline that helps MoD function. On a more personal level there is a real buzz through working together, sharing knowledge and juggling priorities. Successes really are team successes.