Library Day in the Life 5 post

Ok. Here it is.

Got in to work a little before 9:00am. Normally, I would open up my email first thing in the morning, but today, CAL was holding a training session for SecondLife. We met at the Sustainable Living Library. Even though I am not a member of CAL, they attendees welcomed me to the session. I used to use SecondLife when I first discovered it about three years ago, but I haven't used it lately. I also knew that they changed their interface, so I wanted to put it through its paces. The new interface is ok, but I was experiencing some severe time lag issues. Once I teleported to a different island, then my performance got better. In any case, I had a good time chatting with several other Colorado librarians.

Once I was done with that, then I got my chance to look over the email that accumulated over the weekend. I had 27 messages in my main inbox, 69 items had gathered in various filter folders based on certain topics or projects. I also had 25 that were listed in the junk folder. One of the items in a filtered folder was from the Library Journal Academic Newswire. There was an article about a new JISC report concerning Generation Y researchers. I found it interesting, so I put it into my delicious account.

That reminded me that I wanted to put in something else into delicious. One of my colleagues wrote an article concerning collaborative collection development. At the end of the day, I ended up tagging 5 things.

I have some saved searches in Google Scholar. One is for "Information Seeking" and the other covers the topic of collaboration and libraries. I usually get about 3-5 items on both topics every couple of days. I was going to blog about a new article concerning collaboration in libraries (for Collaborative Librarianship News), but then I saw that the article actually came out about 12 years ago -- not exactly new news.

I sent an email to a discussion list for LIS students at the University of Denver concerning #LibDay5. I hope some of them will be able to use some of the insights from the various librarians participating in this project.

I also responded to emails concerning Morgan & Claypool and an article in an obscure chemistry journal.

I was at the Research Desk (formerly called the Reference Desk) from 1-3pm today. Normally, we have graduate students work the desk during the summer, but we needed to have some time slots filled, and I was happy to cover for a couple of hours.

I got some questions concerning:

• Income tax and depreciation codes and books
  
• Our collection of foreign films and DVDs.
• A newly cataloged browser book that was still in "processing", so we had it rush processed while the patron waited. (Great service guys and gals!)

During down times at the desk, I continued a discussion concerning social media and social networking tools with Walt Crawford, so I read up on his blog, Cites and Insights to get the inside scoop on his opinion.

I became of friend of Gulliver the Turtle -- he is the mascot for the Open Access publisher BioMedCentral.

I also read other documents to get ready for an SLA Sci-Tech Division Leadership Webinar meeting the following day.

Once I got home from work, then we finished painting Mr. 10's bedroom. The weekend project turned into three days worth of work, but the room looks pretty good.

I have also been wanting to try to load Linux on an old laptop (Over 7 years old) that we have, but Ubuntu isn't working out for me. It isn't loading from the flash drive, even though I changed the BIOS settings. I also tried to install with a CD-ROM, but it was taking way too long. I will give Puppy Linux a try the following day. I have read some reviews that it works very well on old machines with small amounts of RAM. The laptop has 512MB, so that should be more than enough. I will let you all know how that works out.

My day in libraryland

This is part of the Library Day in the Life Project.

Before I got into work, I dropped off my son (Mr. 9) at his elementary school. Normally, I would read my email as soon as I get into work about 9:00am, but not today. When I was at the
Physical Society Publishers Oversight Committee meeting last week, the hard drive of my laptop crashed. When I got into work today, I decided to wait a little while to use a different PC to get to my email.

Our reference office is getting renovated, so we needed to clear out everything so that new cubicles with doors can be installed. Because I will not be at work for most of this week, I needed to finish the bulk of the move today. For over an hour, I moved many, many boxes, files, folders, books and other material to our reference conference room. At about 10:15, I talked to some people in our systems office to deliver the dead laptop, and to see if they had any advice. I dropped off two books that I needed to return to the circulation desk. I read most of The Case for Books by Darnton, but I didn't get a chance to read this one. From 10:30-11:00am, I hopped on a computer to read my email.

The Director of the DU LIS Program asked me to teach the Science and Technology Reference class (LIS4375) during the Spring Quarter on Tuesday nights instead of during the Summer Quarter. I had to pass that by my better half, and we approved of the change. I should be able to get more students that way. I was also told by a different colleague that I needed to have an updated CV on file. I told her that I could get it done by early February. I am preparing to go to the SLA Leadership Summit on Wednesday morning, so I just don't have time at the moment to update my CV. That will simply have to wait a little bit.

While I was reading my email, another colleague told me that the Dean and Director of the Libraries (my boss, Nancy Allen), wanted to get an update of the Multimodal pilot project. She recommended that a group of the reference librarians meet with the Writing Instructors (the ones who are teaching the multimodal classes) to make sure that our services are working out ok for their students. Eventually, one of the Writing Center staff said that we should wait to meet at the end of the quarter (Mid-March).

I also chair the Scholarly Communications and Open Access (SCOA) task force. We have a meeting tomorrow to try to finish up a draft of a PowerPoint presentation for the Dean and Director, since she will be speaking to the Faculty Senate about scholarly communication issues in February. I let the task force know that the meeting location needed to be changed.

From 11:00am till 1:00pm, I was scheduled in the "Research Help Center". Last year, we split the Reference desk in half. The front "Research Help" desk is staffed by graduate students, and they handle the quick questions. If someone has a more difficult question, the person is referred to the consultation room where the reference librarians can spend more time help the student with their research one-on-one. Today, I had a tough question on a quote concerning Shakespeare. After about 30 minutes of digging, we found that the quote was in this book, page 258.

My shift was done at 1:00pm, but a graduate student (Hi Natalie) asked me to post something to the RMSLA discussion list concerning a resume & interview workshop. So, I stayed on the computer to post that message. From about 1:20-1:40, I had lunch.

I had a Website Redesign Task Force meeting from 2:00-3:30pm. We are preparing for the external launch of the beta version of the new library website (and some new blogs) on February the 9th. After that meeting was done, I registered Mr. 9 for PASS Camp for a week in August.

I also worked on some other email. I found out that my hard drive might be dead dead. (I wonder when the last time I did a full backup was?...) Had some more back-n-forths concerning the multimodal pilot project. I let the SCOA task force know that a chapter from The Case for Books book is online. The chapter on "Open Access" was reprinted from The Crimson. Dr. Darnton presented his thoughts to the faculty at Harvard, and I would like the DU Faculty Senate to hear something along the same lines when Nancy Allen speaks to them in February.

I printed out some information about the SLA Leadership Summit, and I made sure that I had good seats in the plane to and from St. Louis. I thought a little more about how I might talk about the success of the STELLA Unconference to some of the SLA members at the Summit.

At the end of the day, I turned on my FriendFeed channel to see what was being discussed by librarians in and around the LSW group. Mary Carmen really brightened the end of a really long day for me.

Then I drove home.