A week in the life of a subject librarian - with a difference!

Abstract

Everyone knows what subject librarians do, or at least we hope they do: mainly research enquiries; collection development; liaison with academic departments; and information skills support, in training sessions, by providing workbooks, or by developing e-learning projects. Many of our users are distance learners who can never visit our library. So perhaps supporting a course based in Ethiopia is not so different to our usual activities after all. I’m the Law Librarian at the University of Warwick, and in November 2008 I spent a week of my working life in Mekelle, in Northern Ethiopia. Other subject librarians have done this before, so you may have already heard their accounts. However, it was a first for me! The School of Law at Warwick is working in partnership with the Faculty of Law at Mekelle for the next four years, in a capacity-building project to set up a postgraduate law programme, with PhD candidates as well as an LLM course