The Ward library - Stories from the Placement

On the Thursday afternoon, Raman (the Mt Druitt TAFE placement) and I went to the UWS Ward library at UWS Penrith.  There, we got an overview of the "engine room".  The downstairs section of the library or "backroom".  The Ward library is where the centralised activities of the UWS library's occur.  This includes acquistions, sending of items out to the various libraries, bibliographic and cataloguing activities.  I was very glad that we got to see this because it allowed for us to get an overview of the range of activities that a library would be engaged in.  The main activity of the UWS Blacktown library was customer service and liason librarianship.  From a teacher librarianship standpoint it was definitely a better idea to do the placement at the Blacktown campus because it has more of a teacher focus than a library focus.  Most of the activities that I was involved in involved teaching and showing library users how to better access library resources.  Sometimes I think that I gave the students too much support.  As I often heard during my placement, the teacher in me kept coming out.  I kept wanting to do more for the students.  To an extent this compromised their need (which can be painful) for independennce.