DEFRA Library and Translation service

All staff get experience of enquiry work. Enquiries come from core Defra staff and its Executive Agencies and Non-Departmental Public Bodies (NDPBs), other government departments, other libraries and the general public and can include complex research enquiries. Today we undertook a detailed literature review for the Climate Change Unit on the impact of climate change in the UK, identifying the key papers, researchers and organisations dealing with this subject. This information will help build up the Climate Change Unit’s knowledge base, which will be used to inform future policy on climate change.

This morning we will be giving a talk about the key sources of information on the European Union for new members of Defra staff. This involves members of the Enquiries Team so there will be fewer people available to staff the Enquiry Desk. In advance we need to make sure we have enough handouts, that the room is set up properly and that we have the computer links we need. This is part of our marketing of LTS services to Defra staff, an activity that can range from making contact with new members of Defra staff, giving talks and presentations to Defra business units, maintaining the LTS website and running training sessions on how to use individual information resources.

Today is also the day we are meeting with the British Library to review the performance of the BL Inside service. This involves people from both the Enquiries Team and the Procurement Team, and we still have to cover the Enquiry Desk! Again we need to make sure we have all our papers organised, multiple copies in some case so we can share with the supplier (making sure we don’t mix these copies up with the handouts for the presentation!). And what is this information? Well, usage statistics, budget information and a note of any problems which we or our users have experienced are the basics. The in house team will have a quick chat before we actually meet BL so we all know what we need to get across. Given that we procure a wide range of stock, manage subscriptions and arrange access to electronic information resources and the processing of donations we are quite adept at supplier meetings but today will be the first supplier meeting for our new team member so some additional advance briefing is required.

In addition to all this we still need to get routine tasks like cataloguing done. We use Sirsi Unicorn for our catalogue and we use a mixture of MARC, AACR2 and in-house standards. Indexing is done using terms from the Library Thesaurus and someone is going to need to pull together the monthly list of changes to circulate to the other libraries in the Defra Network. It always does get done so we won’t panic today!

So no panic over the thesaurus but we do need to get some translations done promptly. This side of our work provides some distinct challenges and today it is organising the translation of a letter about training in the use of pesticides to into all the EU’s official languages other than Irish and Maltese. This turned out to be seven freelance translators and one agency in addition to our own in-house team and resulted in 20 letters. If this sounds over the top then remember that a professional translator only translates into their own native language.