lyndamk

I’m participating in the Library Day in the Life project. Join us! It’s painless. Me = Data Services and Government Information Librarian. I do numbers and like politics!

I work the night Reference Desk on Wednesdays, so my work day won’t start until 1pm. The past few Wednesday mornings I’ve been using a couple of hours for writing time. Today I’m hoping to make headway on a first draft for a chapter in a book I have to write over this next year. Let’s see what happens!

9:00 am: Made pretty good progress. Gave myself the goal of 500 words and made it to over 1000. Here’s to low starting expectations! I may switch to reading articles so I don’t jinx it!

9:30 am: Fun with stats–the book should be at minimum 45K words long (totally arbitrary imho). If I write 1000 words each session, that’s 45 sessions. I have 40 weeks with probably about 3 sessions each week (fingers crossed on that), which would be about 120 sessions. The numbers tell me even if I have a major block I should be able to get everything written and revised! And numbers are never wrong.

10am-1pm: personal time, lunch, watched an episode of The State!

1:00 pm: Arrived at work (on time!) and checked emails. I started looking over a guide on the General Social Survey. We just got a new release from Roper Center and I wanted to check it out.

2:00 pm: Quick coffee break otherwise I won’t get through my 3pm meeting today. At 2:30 pm I read over the Creative Commons article from C&RLN again to prepare for tomorrow a bit.

3:00 pm: Meeting on Digital Media Services–where are we going, what expectations do we have, what do our users need?

4:00 pm: Check emails, rss and to do list. Remembered I need to check my voicemail (Ah voicemail will you not go the way of the 8-track? Now.)

4:45 pm: Went to “lunch”. Skimmed over the ICPSR Data Bytes newsletter. I found it amusing that they say they have 45 Twitter followers but don’t provide their screenname. Plus I searched for them and couldn’t find them. Maybe they only want 45 followers!

I’m still reading Marketing Today’s Academic Library by Brian Mathews. I love his point about students not following our 9-5 schedule. Although I cut back on my evening hours, I wanted to keep some in the fall so that I could meet with Political Science students. They seemed to appreciate being able to stop by after 5pm to talk with me last semester. I think we sometimes falsely assume that if the Reference Desk is slow in the evenings then students don’t use the library. But maybe they would come for consultations if the subject specialists had hours available.

It is now 5:40 and I will be heading out to the desk soon for a four hour shift. Because it is summer and the last week, it will be slow. Usually from 6-7pm I get one difficult question along the lines of “I’m trying to set up a small business and I need demographic data”. The rest of the night I’m listening to crickets chirping. So, unless something crazy happens, here was my Wednesday in the life. My theme song today is Ending the Orange Glow by Talkdemonic, a two-piece from Portland, Oregon. Great music to write to because it’s instrumental (no words getting in the way), soothing, and all things wonderful! Great music to listen to at sunset.