First day of Library Day in the Life started about pretty well, at least until I went outside to pick up my paper this morning. As I opened the front door a little gray tabby that had been hiding under my porch table went running towards the road. He ran right into the wheel of a car driving down the street. The driver tried to swerve, but he couldn’t have avoided hitting him. The cat was a neighborhood stray and died almost immediately. Not a happy start to the morning.
Needless to say I was late getting to work.
Arrived about 9:00 am and tried to settle in. I usually prep for the week on Mondays–I tried Friday afternoon de-briefings for a while (BAD idea). Checked my voicemail, which is really rare for me because I hate voicemail, and my email.
The highlight of my emails was finding out about the new OECD Explorer from Katharin Peter, the Univ of Southern California data librarian. It is pretty cool; my only complaint is that the “user guide” is a PDF. A PDF. WTF? I’m sorry but give me vids in addition to your 25 page quick start guide. Also the library got lots of new but ambiguous information about our lack of state and university operation budgets. North Carolina basically has no money.
At 10:00 am I switched to working on our intern program. Amy Harris and co-coordinate our graduate Library and Information Studies intern program. Today was all about scheduling their hours and scheduling our training sessions. It is like the analytical reasoning section of the GRE (WR’s shift can be next to MO’s, but MO can’t be next to JW). You get the idea.
At 11:00 am I started updating a new library blog that is a guide to the 2010 census. I’m trying to make our library an official partner with the Census Bureau to promote the Census 2010. The blog will hopefully be a dissemination point for our users. It isn’t finished yet, so if you have any suggestions please let me know!
As a side note, I really don’t understand why libraries haven’t been more involved with Census efforts. We are perfectly placed to promote the Census and we are HUGE users of the data (Hello! Statistical Abstracts?!).
At 11:30 am Amy and I went to have lunch in the staff lounge. Our normal tendency is to eat lunch in 15 minutes while sitting at our desks. We are forcing each other to go to the lounge and to take an hour. We’ve succeeded two days now, which is pretty good considering our bad habit. I just hope it lasts through the fall because I think we both need it. Having something to read helps. She is reading the All-Freshmen Read, Enrique’s Journey, and I’m reading Marketing Today’s Academic Library by Brian Mathews.
At 12:30 I checked email a bit and worked on the Census 2010 blog. Also had informal meetings with our Reference Head, Mary Krautter, and our new Access Services Head, Joe Williams, about our public services for digital media (scanning and streaming video mostly). We also talked about the impending move of our government document collection to a new location.
At 1:30 the Distance Education librarian, Beth Filar Williams, met to practice our Creative Commons workshop. We got the idea from an article in the College and Research Libraries News. You can see more information plus the article citation on our workshop web page. This isn’t really in our job descriptions but we like presenting plus somebody needs to talk about it. Being forced to present on something always helps me learn more about a topic.
From 2:30 or so until about 4:00 pm I spent talking with Beth about our instructional technology efforts, about the work of some of our graduate student interns, and brushing up the last of the Creative Commons workshop. The workshop is on Thursday, so I will let you know how it goes.
The last hour was spent going through the last of my email and contacting some random people. One of our interns is graduating and moving to Denver, so I sent an email to say goodbye. It is always sad to see them move on, but they always do great things! We have two–Amanda Click and Claire Walker–currently at Immersion this week. I wish them the best.
Because the day did not start off so well, the song for this post will have to be I Remember Me by the Silver Jews. It is a song about loss and memory. It is the saddest song I know. Here’s hoping for a better day tomorrow.
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