My library day

This should be a short little piece about #libday7.  I've taken part in #libday in the past, but only back to Libday4.

On Monday, July the 25th, I got into work a little late, since I needed to drop my 11 year old kid off at a summer camp.  It is just a week long camp at the Littleton Town Hall Arts Center.  He is learning about comedy and improvisation.

Of course, email is the first thing that I slog through, and I had a lot of it to slog through.  I was off work last Thursday afternoon and Friday.  (We went out camping with the Boy Scout Troop at the Wilderness on Wheels camp about an hour SW of here.  One of the kids designed a bench [we helped him build it] and ran a fishing and camping workshop as an eagle scout project.)  Over the weekend, I read some of the more important messages, but I left the non-essential messages till Monday.

Soooooooo, here are some of the topics of emails that I responded to.

• I let the reference faculty and staff know that the new interface of the Web of Knowedge (WoK) doesn't work very well with IE9.
• Last week, we changed all of the URLs for the databases we have in the WoK interface except for the Journal Citation Reports which hold the impact factor data.  I requested that someone from our E-Resources team change that URL as well.
• The Penrose Library is going through a huge renovation project.  I tweeted a little bit (from the Penrose Library account) about the fact that a big fence is going around the old library on Tuesday the 26th.
• I received the final signed version of the Governing Document for the Sci-Tech Division of SLA.  I posted the document on the DST website the following day.
• I worked with some people concerning an article that was submitted to the journal, Collaborative Librarianship. This took quite a bit of time to get resolved, with many emails back and forth.  I also write small blog posts for Collaborative Librarianship News.  I didn't write anything on Monday, but I did on Tuesday.  We now have over 500 blog posts!
• Got an email concerning the Handheld Librarian Conference (which is going on as I write), but I have too much other work to do today to register for it. (Such as: finish this blog post; work on an article for the Sci-Tech News; begin work on a section of the Reference Department Annual Report; continue work on an article concerning Open Access Resources with a colleague in Egypt.)
• I registered for a webinar concerning the Mendeley service on Tuesday. The presentation was captured on YouTube.  (Read that Beth also attended!)
• Saw this announcement about a free online conference, Library 2.011, and I might try to present something at it.
• I also marked three items in my delicious account.  They were: Social media find place in classroom - USATODAY.com; British Research Libraries Say No to ‘Big Deal’ Serials Packages - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education; and The Future of Universities and Their Libraries - Committee Report - June 2011 | ALA Connect
• Investigate a problem with the footer of the library website.
• Swap a consultation shift with a colleague.

After lunch, I listened to some of this online workshop session concerning how our admissions office is using social media to interact with prospective and new students.  I often attend the WebEd workshops in person, but I didn't today.

During the rest of the afternoon, I worked as a peer reviewer for the journal, Practical Academic Librarianship.  This is a great new journal from the Academic Division of SLA.  I read most of the paper last week, but it took me a little while to write the reviewers report concerning the article that was assigned to me.  This is the first time that I have been a peer reviewer for a journal, so I wasn't sure how much feedback to provide, so it took me a while to write out my response and thoughts about the article.

That was pretty much my day.  Exciting, huh.

Videos on the future of libraries

While I know about quite a number of websites and reports (see these blog posts from John Dupuis, this LISNews report, this PLoS article, this ARL report, this book, these ACRL reports, and the Darien Statements) that are about the future of libraries and other information services, I recently learned about some new videos that are about the future of libraries.

• Betsy Wilson's Crystal Ball: New Directions for Libraries (Crystal Ball Gazing: New Directions for Research Libraries Tuesday, October 16; 8:30-10:00; Morrison Library, University of California, Berkeley)

• New Directions: Imperatives Defining the Future Relevance and Impact of the Academic Research Library -- by Jim Neal (James Neal is the Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University in New York City, providing leadership for university academic computing and a system of 25 libraries.)

• New Directions -- by Peter Brantley. (He is the Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation, a not-for-profit international association of libraries and allied institutions. He has served as the Director of Technology at the California Digital Library, New York University, UC Berkeley, and UCSF.)

• We can't forget about students... Take a look at a vision of students today -- by Michael Wesch (This summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.)

• The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age. This took place at Texas A&M University, February 11-13, 2009. A bunch of the videos and reports are relevant.