Heythrop Library

Here at the Heythrop Library, we have been offering work experience placements for a few years now for those keen to explore a career in the library sector. We are open in theory to anyone aged 16 and over who may feel they would benefit from working with us.

In practise, you might be wondering what factors into our process for choosing who to take on – and what goes into crafting an interesting and informative work experience placement. As the library’s work experience co-ordinator I can hopefully provide some insight.

Firstly, how might we be approached? There are two ways this usually happens:

• Anyone can email us at heythroplibrary@jesuit.org.uk and express an interest. We invite all enquirers who approach us this way to our work experience form, where they can tell us more about their skills and interests, any previous library experience they have, and their availability. If it feels like a good fit and we can offer them what they are looking for, we add them to our waiting list.

• We work with schools, sixth-form colleges and UCL’s Library and Information Studies MA programme, to facilitate school-organised work experience placements taking place at specific times of the year. Usually the schools/colleges/universities contact us directly and assign particular students to us. We do however have scope to accept school students who contact us under their own steam; we’ll next ask them to provide us with the name of one teacher who knows them well enough and their contact details (and who we would have permission to contact).

Once we have the name of a student, a timeframe for the work experience, and someone who can vouch for them, we next arrange for an informal, face-to-face chat to take place. This is where we discuss with the student in more detail what their placement will involve and make sure it’s a good fit. Once this has taken place, the preparations for the placement itself can take a lot of work. We create a personalised timetable for the student with a variety of tasks that might interest them – or they at least might find helpful for figuring out if working in libraries could be for them!

It can take quite a bit of time and consideration putting this together; ideally, we want to provide a balance of shadowing vs. hands-on work, and of mentally stretching vs. some more monotonous tasks (this admittedly doesn’t sound much fun but realistically will be a part of any library job). If we are taking a student via a school-organised placement there is also often a lot of paperwork to complete, particularly around health-and safety, risk assessments, safeguarding for young people, and employer liability insurance.

Finally, the date of the placement arrives and the real work begins! We start with the principle that everyone on the library team should get a chance to share the responsibility and supervise, so we get our student working with everyone at least once as early as is feasible. We are only a small team of 3, with limited workspace and only so much spare capacity alongside our usual duties, so who gets assigned to each task depends on which day it is, who is in the office, and who is able to juggle teaching our work experience student a new skill with their own workload.

As you can probably imagine, it is not always easy and relies on each of us having to be flexible. We are not believers in giving our work experience students pointless busywork, such as filing endlessly, shelving books all day or making tea! Our aim is always to have helped the student get an accurate sense of how a small research library works and what a career working in one might involve.

If you would like to know more and hear directly from our previous work placement students, you can read their own words about their experiences on our blog. There are a number of posts there written by previous work experience people: https://heythroplibrary.co.uk/tag/work-experience/.

SV