For my sixth-form college’s work experience week, I decided to undertake a placement at Heythrop Library, where I gained an insight into what a librarian’s role at a specialist library looks like.
During the week, I was immersed into the world of librarianship as I undertook a variety of tasks. These ranged from more typical ones such as shelving, labelling and covering books to more specific ones like indexing withdrawn books and duplicate journals, putting recently received journals on the catalogue and making a contribution to the ‘Exploring Collections’ social media project, amongst others.
As well as hands-on work, the week involved a fair amount of shadowing where I learnt about classmarking and cataloguing, which turned out to be more intriguing and fascinating than expected, on account of the depth and intricacies of these fields and the library’s unique hybrid of the Library of Congress and Lynn-Peterson classmarking systems. Not having properly encountered these fields of library work before, I felt I learned a lot from this shadowing and gained a sound foundational understanding and familiarity.
Besides being productive, I found my time and work at Heythrop Library thoroughly enjoyable, owing to how friendly and welcoming Clemens, Sophia and Amelia were (which really helped calm my initial anxiety). All the insights and stories they shared were enlightening and also made for a lively atmosphere!
All in all, my brief time at Heythrop Library was a productive, enriching and pleasant experience which definitely helped build my confidence as an aspiring librarian!
Austeja (Work experience: 9-13 February 2026).