lyndamk

#librarydayinthelife
I am participating in the Library Day in the Life project. Join us! It’s painless. Me = Data Services and Government Information Librarian.

Arrival at 9:00 am, but wishing I could have taken the day off. Oh well! Emails, vmails, rss are the usual starting points.
9:30 am: Started brushing up on some statistics. T test anybody?
10:30 am: Spent some time trying track down the library’s video camera that a LIS student was supposed to use for interviews with our library liaisons. Found it in the DE librarian’s desk (with her permission of course). There goes that half hour. I was actually hoping I couldn’t find it so I wouldn’t have to do an interview today That’s what I get for efficiency.
11:00 am: Early lunch because of filming: Amy at noon and me at 1:00 pm.
12:00 pm: Sent off emergency email to the NCLA Government Resources Section board about changing our sessions. I’m ready for the conference to start. No changes can be made then!
12:15 pm: The student came early to film. It went fine, but you never can tell when filming the Lynda. We want to use these short segments as videos for our subject guide welcome pages. Good stuff. Glad I have the rest of the afternoon to myself though.
12:30 pm: Started working on my reappointment package. Sigh. Not looking forward to it, but need to just get it done! Decided to work on it for exactly an hour and no more!
1:30 pm: Wanted to work on something easy so switched to updating the user guide for our Blackboard integration project. Listened to the latest Evernote podcast while working on it. I love Evernote. Love it. Big thanks to Lauren Pressley for showing it to me back a year ago.
2:30 pm: Met with Beth, my co-presenter from the Creative Commons workshop. We created a short evaluation through Google forms and sent it out to the group. The difficult part was remembering who was in the session.
3:30 pm: Met with Amy (impromptu) and talked about creating a pre & post-test that could be launched in a wide variety of classes. Now we acquire qualitative data that requires quite a bit of work. I’d like to see something a bit easier.
4:00 pm: Started reading articles for a writing project as the rain starts to fall. This will end out my day.

Here is to the end of July. Because August is usually just preparation for the semester, I’m considering summer officially over. So, the theme song for today is Summertime Blues by The Who.

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.

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.