Weyburn and Yorkton Law Libraries

One picture of all the material we had to throw out in Yorkton

As promised, here is a post about my recent trips to two rural law libraries that are a part of the Law Society of Saskatchewan Libraries.

This summer one of the things I got to do at my new job was visit and clean up two rural libraries in Saskatchewan. The first was in Weyburn. The Weyburn courthouse had just been through a major renovation and the library had been moved to a new location within the courthouse. Because of all these renovations the new books for Weyburn (over 90 boxes!) had all been stacked on the floor of the new room. What wasn't known was that there was some sort of water problem in the basement and all these boxes had been absorbing water for a few weeks when we arrived!

Unfortunately, we had to throw out quite a few boxes which included numerous sets of old law material. With law, the primary sources are the most important, so it was quite a big loss to have to throw out all this valuable material. What we worked on for the next day and a half was throw out all damaged books and re-shelf all the material that was still useful.

The next library I went to was in Yorkton. The Yorkton library was going to need a clean up because the users wanted to turn it into a sort of lounge area with a fireplace (around books?) and big boardroom table. So they asked the LSSL staff to come and re-arrange the books around the perimeter of the room. For a day and a half we recycled most of the old textbook collection and kept the more recent textbooks and some of the old but "pretty" leather bound books. We also worked on relabeling the textbook collection as they were still in the old moys numbers.

Visiting these two libraries was a great experience and I'm glad I was able to participate, even though we had to throw all those books away!

The next few posts will be about some of the old material in the Law Society Library of Regina, my next book club meeting + my book review of my book club selection and maybe even a post about my vacation this week! 

Also me and my library co-workers have issued each other the challenge of keeping an updated blog and so hopefully you will all see an increase in posts here!

My new job

So I thought I would make a post about the job I got back in June and have been working at since.

I did a three week practicum (work study) at the Law Society Library of Regina in May to finish my SIAST programme, and it was the best of the three practicum's I've had. I finally got to work in a special library, which is a library with material that is specific to a field (law, medicine). I got to do all the neat things library technicians do (cataloguing, labeling, data entry, check-in/out) and some not so fun things (invoicing, filing) but all of it was useful to know for future job positions!

While I was there the person who I was shadowing was in the process of leaving her position, and so there was a job posting up. I applied and because I was basically being trained to do the job being advertised I was one of the preferred applicants.

I finished my practicum, went and graduated (yay!) and scheduled a meeting with the higher ups of the Law Society (parent company of the Law Society Library) for an interview. The interview went smoothly (although I was a little nervous) and about an hour later I got an email with a contract!

I had been worried about finding a job as the end of my programme got closer, because I kept hearing how bad the job market was out there. Some of my past classmates hadn't necessarily found their jobs right away and that made me a little worried about the future. I had only applied at two places, the Law Society and the library at my old high school.

The timing of getting this job was perfect and I am settling into the workforce quite easily. My coworkers are great, I always have work to do, and I get to learn about a subject I had never thought of being interested in!

Next post I'll talk about the two trips I made to two of our rural libraries.