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.

On Thursdays this summer I have an early morning (7am-9am) radio show on WUAG 103.1, our campus radio station. I’ve been working for the station for a few years–when I was a LIS student I was the Program Manager. Feel free to make requests via Twitter!

In at 9:15 am: Downloaded Evernote to my laptop. Went through some emails. Created Slideshare account for the Library. I’m supposed to be writing, but this will be ones of “those” days.

10:15 am: Now I will start revising our article to send off. Maybe I will be done with it today? We will see!

11:00 am: Lunch with Jimmie John’s to go. On the way ran into the radio station’s General Manager, Jack Bonney. I told him he should start using Twitter as way to get requests!

12:00 pm: Sent email to the campus newspaper asking for promo story on our Game Night. We generally don’t have great responses from them, but maybe this time my contact is good (got it from the radio station General Manager). Figures crossed. Read over Creative Commons workshop notes and sent out reminder email.

1:00 pm: Post lunch zombie state has commenced. I’m going to work on practicum preparation that doesn’t involve thought–only a calculator!

2:00 pm: Creative Commons workshop. We followed the article in CRL&N pretty closely. The only thing we added was an activity for them to think through an appropriate creative commons license for our Irma Minerva’s Audio Magazine with the goal of prompting discussion about the different CC licenses. I think it went well. The part I enjoyed most was playing with Netop School (Do you think the name is purposelessly like Black Ops?) It is software that allows you to capture any computer screen in the room. We let people show off things they found and discuss the details of their CC licensed finding. Pretty fun.

3:15 pm: Met with a former intern, now colleague. We are submitting a chapter proposal. I have to say that I love co-authoring. It makes things more fun!!

4:30 pm: Checking the emails. Found out our online subscription to Europa was canceled even though the Reference Department had canceled the print subscription for the purpose of de-duplication. A bit frustrating honestly. I know times are tough, but communication doesn’t cost!

5:00 pm: Reference desk shift. Let’s see how slow, how slow…

Signing off here. Song for the day is Stereo by Pavement because “Listen to me. I’m on the stereo!”

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.

I heard about Library Day in the Life this weekend and, yes, I decided to jump on the bandwagon. Librarians of all stripes will share details of their days for a week. All entries will be tagged librarydayinthelife for your easy discovery. Come on and join us! You know you want to drink the kool-aid!

I admit that I’m curious to see the range of differences, and maybe similarities, in our jobs. I admittedly know nothing of the public library world. Plus, there aren’t a whole lot of subject specialist/GODORTy types, so I decided to represent! Mind you it is summer in academic libraryland; this week will not be representative of the insanity that is the semester. But, on the other hand I wouldn’t even have the time to write this during the school year.

So, here is your warning now that the next series of posts will be pretty self-indulgent, but I’ll try to keep them entertaining. And, guess what?! I will even provide a soundtrack. Picture a quiet morning scene as the music kicks in starting with Addy will know by SNMNMNM (Great live band btw. They have a tuba!). Here is a week in the life of Lynda the librarian…