Library Day in the Life - Round 4, Day 5

See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for info on the project. I also participated in the last round in July 2009. You can find all my posts for this project (this round and the last round) by searching the librarydayinthelife tag.

Friday, January 29, 2010

6:30am - Up. Shower. Breakfast. Coffee. Give cat a small amount of milk again today. She tries to trip me on the way to her food bowl and then tries to knock the entire milk carton out of my hand. I'm not sure she realizes that killing me would be a bad thing...

7:30am - Leave for work. It's COLD today.

8:05am - Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, chat, other various programs. Open up Voyager cataloging and acquisitions modules and OCLC Connexion. Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages. Start this post.

8:20am - Schedule meetings with each of my staff to review the questionnaire about their workspace. Send an email with the times and letting them know I remembered to bring in my tape measure if they need to borrow it.

8:45am - Review former intern's cover letter. I'm always happy to read over cover letters, review resumes, etc. and provide constructive criticism. I've read enough cover letters and looked at enough resumes to know what works and what doesn't work.

9:10am - Forward a message to multiple people about some free webinars from OCLC that are now available online.

9:20am - Begin work on a survey to be sent to various colleagues. I'm using SurveyMonkey. When did SurveyMonkey and Google become linked? I was able to set up a SurveyMonkey personal/free account by logging in via my Google account.

10:00am - Complete survey, send to colleague for review.

10:20am - Start sorting through the piles on my desk and try to complete some actual cataloging work. Don't get very far. Walk around and check in with staff.

11:00am - Meet colleague downstairs for last review of space/shelving to be used for the barcoding project. Help clear off some of the shelving and move items (collapsing extra space/interfiling them with other material).

11:30am-12:30pm - Lunch with a colleague/friend and other colleague/friend who's currently out on maternity leave. Coo over her baby for a bit.

12:35pm-12:45pm - Check email. Try to replicate a reported problem with a streaming video. Can't reproduce the error messages. Respond to email so the troubleshooting with the URL portion can be addressed in another department.

12:45pm-1:25pm - Make sign to designate shelving in storage room downstairs for barcoding project. Take field trip to tape signs up so shelves don't get filled between now and when things get started on Sunday evening/early Monday (that happens a lot - "oh look! free storage space!" and whoomp! it gets filled with stuff almost immediately). Take staff involved in barcoding project with me on my field trip to show them the space. Send follow up email repeating what we talked about and with door code for the room. Send follow up email to colleague in charge of staff that will be pulling the volumes for us that we are ready to go and the space is ready.

1:25pm - Check email. Review subjects and delete listserv messages. Walk around and check in with staff. Drafting of several emails that will be sent early next week.

2:50pm - Brief chat with friends about evening and weekend plans, coordinating times and locations, etc.

3:00pm - Another round checking in with my staff. We're currently spread out across the room, so I try to make sure I walk by several times a day.

3:20pm - Back to sorting through the piles on my desk. I have an original cataloging record to do, including NACO work, for the annual report of the Sanitarium Association of Philadelphia. There are illustrations! The things that get "discovered" hiding up in our own stacks. It was considered a "fresh-air charity" (actual LC subject heading) for people, mainly children, to escape the summer heat in Philadelphia and in addition to the hospital ward, kitchens, etc., it had outdoor swings and bathing (i.e. swimming). Sign me up, please.

4:00pm - Email. Finish up survey based on feedback from colleague. Chat with another colleague about another upcoming project. Final check of email. Schedule this post.

5:00pm - Log out and close programs. Log out of network, shut down (restart) computer. Walk home, meeting up with friend along the way for happy hour. Happy Friday, all!

Two best quotes of the week:

• "Got time for some last minute crazy?"
• "Did you kick puppies in a former life?"

My colleagues crack me up sometimes.

Library Day in the Life - Round 4, Day 4

See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for info on the project. I also participated in the last round in July 2009. You can find all my posts for this project (this round and the last round) by searching the librarydayinthelife tag.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

6:30am - Up. Shower. Breakfast. Coffee. Give cat a small amount of milk in an attempt to appease her as she's awfully demanding and mouthy this morning.

7:35am - Leave for work. Stayed up a bit late watching the President's State of the Union Address last night and the post-speech rebuttal, reports, and analysis. Tired today. Notice that my wrist hurts less. It still hurts when I write with a pen/pencil or move/rotate my hand specific ways, but I decide to not wear the brace (although I did bring it with me).

8:11am - Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, chat, other various programs. Open up Voyager cataloging and acquisitions modules and OCLC Connexion. Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages. Start this post.

8:15am - Blinking light on my phone indicating a message. Check voice mail. Message from staff person that they're out sick. Note on appropriate HR spreadsheet/timesheet for reporting.

8:30am - Mail dropped on my desk. w00t! I received a copy of the issue of Serials Librarian in which my conference report from ALA Annual is published. I can now show it to my grandmother so she can commence bragging (because grandmother's do that kind of thing - honestly, no one else cares, right?).

Back to more email and reviewing my schedule for the day.

8:50am - Walk around to check in with early arriving staff. Pass out space inventory sheet (preparation and information gathering for our upcoming physical reorganization of the technical services space).

9:30am - Meeting with my boss to touch base.

10:00am-11:40am - Meeting with all the unit and department heads in technical services to review things that affect all of us.

11:45am - Email. Check in with staff. Field trip up to the stacks to see what call number we're at for barcoding the As.

12:15pm - LUNCH. Read through various news feeds, read through subjects and then delete listserv messages. See that J.D. Salinger died, read memorial on Powell's Books blog. Well that sucks.

1:00pm - Email and preparation for this afternoon's CONSER webinar. Had to find my notes from the ALA Midwinter CONSER session. Things have been so busy around here I haven't had a chance to do any ALA follow up, including reviewing my notes and converting them into reports. That needs to happen, and soon.

1:30pm-2:30pm - CONSER ALA Midwinter Web Follow-up Meeting webinar. CONSER has been using the Elluminate software for online meetings and discussions. It's working well for us. Also, of all the various webinar software I've used over the past year (or more), I like Elluminate best. Good interactive options, intuitive interface, and I have yet to experience connectivity issues or lag time during the sessions. That said, I still goofed and sent a message to all participants when I meant to send it to just one person in response to a question. Sigh. Technology: 1, Shana: 0.

Topics of the webinar included cooperative authentication by CONSER members of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), if changes from CD-ROM to DVD-ROM means a new record (generally no!), more information from Regina Reynolds on ISSN and ISSN-L, and a brief summary of the general (positive) response to the repeatable 260 implementation.

[In the middle of the webinar I notice my wrist has seriously started to ache, probably because I'm taking notes by hand rather than typing, so I put the brace back on.]

2:30pm - Email. Check in with staff I haven't spoken with because I've had back to back meetings much of the day.

3:06pm - Email our metadata specialist asking her to re-run some old reports for me ASAP. So many clean up projects, so little time (well, not really...continuing resources cataloging is pretty much continuous clean up and maintenance projects so we have all the time in the world, it's just never ending).

3:00pm-5:00pm - Retirement party for a colleague. I didn't get there until 3:30pm, but fortunately didn't miss the very nice speeches.

5:05pm-5:15pm - Return to desk. Final check of email. Schedule this post. Log out and close programs. Log out of network, shut down computer. I'm tired, and it's late and cloudy and cold, so I decide to take the bus home today.

Library Day in the Life - Round 4, Day 3

See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for info on the project. I also participated in the last round in July 2009. You can find all my posts for this project (this round and the last round)by searching the librarydayinthelife tag.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

6:30am - Up. Shower. Breakfast. Coffee.

7:35am - Leave for work. A little later than I should have for the 1 mile walk, but everything is still taking a bit longer than normal with my gimpy left wrist.

8:12am - Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, chat, other various programs. Open up Voyager cataloging and acquisitions modules and OCLC Connexion. [Yes, I open my programs in a specific order...but what do you expect? I'm a cataloger.] Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Accept a meeting in my calendar for next week and move another meeting. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages. Start this post.

8:30am-9:05am - Open MarcEdit to look at a file of records and figure out why we're getting errors when trying to load them. Some minor wrangling with the edit subfield data tool and voila! Fixed! Send email to colleague so records can be loaded into the catalog immediately.

9:10am - Start to track down colleague to discuss space needs in one of our storage rooms. We need shelves for rotating through the volumes to be barcoded. My colleague has a series of shelves in a room labeled as his but that aren't being actively used anymore. I need those shelves and must persuade him to give them up. His status on chat says he's busy. Damn. Decide to send email with what I need (and offer to bribe if needed), and will have to track him down in person later.

9:30am-10:25am - Weekly meeting with my boss.

10:30am - More emails about space for the barcoding project. It appears we'll have the space we need!! w00t!

10:55am - Interruption from building manager about the drilling for the installation of the sprinkler system downstairs. Rooms are scheduled, but we'll still have access during the installation process so nothing to worry about. Good.

11:00am - Pull up webpage I need to work on for my unit. Discover my (very basic) HTML editor has an update available. Close page. Update editor.

11:10am-11:30am - Field trip downstairs with colleague to look at shelves/space we'll be getting for the barcoding project. It's going to work beautifully!

11:30am-Noon - Web page editing. It's been awhile, so the HTML knowledge is slow to resurrect itself in my brain. Many stops and starts and viewing source page data to remember all the code for the display I want.

Noon - Field trip outside to acquire a cupcake from the Buttercream Cupcake Truck!

[What actually happened: noon: staff person stopped by my desk with a question as I'm about to walk away, 12:05pm I walk away from my desk, 12:07pm stop to see if colleague in another department wants to come with and end up in side conversation about barcoding project, 12:15pm finally manage to leave the building after multiple interruptions/side discussions, 12:20pm acquire cupcake, 12:25pm acquire coffee (need more coffees today!), 12:30pm return to desk]

12:30pm-1:00pm - LUNCH. I mutilate my orange trying to peel it with my right hand again today.

1:00pm-1:25pm - More web page editing punctuated with breaks to deal with email, questions, etc.

1:25pm-1:35pm - Realize staff person doing barcoding has created hundreds of items with the wrong status (forgot to verify that the default got changed on his machine - an oops on my part, now fixed, make note to check the defaults on other staff person's machine that's working on this project) and the OPAC display is all wonky. Politely ask colleague in quality management who has bulk-change abilities to change all the items to the correct status so we don't have to change them one by one. Fixed. Whew.

1:35-2:15pm - Back to webpage editing, which continues to be punctuated with email, questions, etc. I actually complete the update to one page. And I pull additional pages and documents off the server to work on. I prefer to edit a copy on my desktop, preview it, and then replace the file on the server once all is well. Safer. Prevents me from potentially screwing up a live page.

2:15-2:30pm - Prepare for 2:30pm meeting I co-chair with a colleague. Open meeting room, etc.

2:30pm-4:00pm - Meeting. Have to take notes by hand. Learned that writing hurts my wrist much more than typing.

4:20pm-5:10pm - Return to desk after returning keys, etc. Email. Update calendar (force the sync via file transfer). Check in with staff. Answer a myriad of random questions that came up during the course of their daily work.

5:15pm - Schedule this post. Log out and close programs. Log out of network, shut down computer, and walk home.

Library Day in the Life - Round 4, Day 2

See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for info on the project. I also participated in the last round in July 2009. You can find all my posts for this project (this round and the last round)by searching the librarydayinthelife tag.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

6:30am - Up. Shower. Coffee. Discover my left wrist still hurts when I try to bend/twist it. It was really really sore last night, but I had hoped it would be better this morning. Damn. By the way, just to make it more complicated/interesting, I'm left handed. So I take some ibuprofen and dig out the wrist brace from a car accident injury (long since healed) from nearly 8 years ago now. And hope it's just a sprain. Also, my hair is a mess...it's very hard to deal with long hair when one wrist is less than cooperative. It's braided, but the braid is not one of my neater ones and there's some serious frizz going on.

7:35am - Leave for work. A little later than I should have for the 1 mile walk, but everything this morning took a bit longer than normal with my gimpy left hand. Seriously...I had to have my right hand help me pour the milk!

8:06am - Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, chat, other various programs. Open up Voyager cataloging and acquisitions modules and OCLC Connexion. Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages. Start this post.

8:10am - Drilling noises. Followed by pounding. How nice. Fortunately they are short lived.

8:30am - More emails. We're in the middle of planning for a very large physical reorganization of our technical services. Pretty much every single staff person is changing desks/cubes. This involves over 60 people. So we're making lists and checking them twice, and filling out inventory questionnaires, etc. etc.

9:09am - And the drilling is back. As is the pounding. Sigh.

9:35am - CONSER work. A few things to finish up from yesterday.

10:00am-11:30am - Meeting with a colleague from other department to discuss the barcoding project. A few things to figure out, such as determining space needs, but we have a target to begin the joint version of the project by this coming Monday.

11:30am-11:50am - Brief discussion to fill in my boss on the barcoding project and what questions we're working on at the moment.

11:50am-12:20pm - Deal with some basic staff issues and questions. Email staff about space planning. Managing people can be time consuming.

12:20pm-12:40pm - Email triage. See email informing us that the drilling will be continuing off and on in the mornings for the next month and a half to work on the sprinkler system in the building. Yay.

Respond to email about a collection of MARC records for a set of e-books and what site the initial records were downloaded from. Records were initially available from two sites, but now only from one. There does not, however, appear to be addendum files for updates to the collection posted. Our bibliographer for that collection is looking into why we haven't received updates or any notifications about record availability (we paid for MARC records for the ebook collection so he's motivated to find out where the records are).

Sent email to sign up for the Thursday CONSER webinar to follow up on the discussion that occurred at ALA Midwinter.

Open ALCTS e-forum email folder and promptly get completely overwhelmed by the number of messages for current e-forum on "Shifting Technical Services Priorities Meets Evolving Needs of the Institution." Not sure when I'll have time to read them all, which is frustrating as it's a topic I'm interested in hearing about what is being done elsewhere. Always looking for ideas about how to streamline our workflows and deal with new types of formats/materials.

12:40pm-1:20pm - LUNCH. Leftover spicy albondigas soup. And yogurt with ginger(!) flavored honey from the Harmony Acres honey farm in Mikado, MI. Yum.

[side note: given that my left/dominant hand is only semi-functional, and the lack of fine motor skills in my right hand, me trying to do some things today right handed has been downright comical at times. At other times, it's just sad. For example, I nearly mutilated my orange trying to peel it.]

While eating, check various social software sites. Read through #libday4 feed on Twitter. It's fascinating to see what other people deal with all day.

1:20pm - More email. More emails about collection sets and where we are in terms of workflow. Naturally the questions are about those sets that have been identified as problems or that need additional work outside of our established workflow. Start email to metadata librarian (who actually does the scripting and loading via the Voyager back end) to schedule meeting to review what's in process and where.

Also, I am tired of email.

2:00pm-3:30pm - Meeting of the unit heads for my department of technical services. There are four librarians total in my department: 3 unit heads and our department head. We meet weekly to review what's going on and coordinate actions/duties among the staff in our units.

3:30pm - Email. Again. Clearly this is the theme for the day. Finish and send various draft messages. More triage, collection set questions, and deletion of mass numbers of messages from listservs.

3:50pm - Update calendar. Forced the sync between work calendar software and Google calendar. They don't play nicely together, so there's iCal file transferring involved. I do this because I can't access the work calendar at home easily, but my Google calendar is available anywhere...even on my non-smartphone cell phone.

4:00pm-5:00pm - Check in with staff that are still here. Track down colleague to ask a question. Final check of email.

5:00pm - Close all programs and log out of network. Walk home.

6:15pm - Collapse on couch. Review this post and then publish it to my blog.

Library Day in the Life - Round 4, Day 1

See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for info on the project. I also participated in the last round in July 2009. You can find all my posts for this project by searching the librarydayinthelife tag.

A bit of background: I'm a cataloger at a rather large academic library. Specifically a cataloger of electronic resources (anything online, in any format), and continuing resources (serials, etc.). I participate in the PCC program, doing NACO and both CONSER and BIBCO work depending on what I'm dealing with at the time.

Much (most?) of the cataloging for continuing resources and many online resources is maintenance work and updating of the bibliographic records to reflect current information. Changes can be anything from the frequency, to a change in publisher, to a title variation or title change. Cataloging these types of materials is like trying to hit a moving target or nailing jello to the wall. There's also the ongoing inventory maintenance on our holdings records to deal with keeping our holdings current, including withdrawn/lost/missing volumes, general edits to fix accuracy issues, etc.

I have four para-professional (or support) staff in my unit. Two that work an early shift, and two that work a later shift. In an attempt to cover the most ground, my schedule says I work from 8am to 4pm, although I usually don't actually get out of the office until 4:30 or 5pm.

Monday, January 25, 2010

6:30am - Up. Shower. Breakfast. Listen to wind pound rain against windows. Make executive decision to take bus into work even though it's only an one mile walk in an attempt to keep myself from being soaked through. Even with riding the bus my pants from the knees down end up all wet. Yeech.

My early arriving staff are off today. That means I have a little over an hour before my 9:15am staff arrive, and about 2 hours before my 10am staff arrive.

8:00am - Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, other various and sundry programs. Open up Voyager cataloging and acquisitions modules and OCLC Connexion. Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages. Start this post.

8:30am - CONSER work - email report of duplicate records (same title/resource, but cataloged in different formats) to colleagues at OCLC, manage to complete authentications and edits to the records for a few resources, and then get stuck editing the record for the next resource. I end up digging through email looking for the series of messages about how to handle dead-URLs in records (keep them...but what subfield again?!?). Some days I really wish Thunderbird allowed the tagging of emails...folders are great, but frequently not specific enough. My CONSER folder tends to be a bit unwieldy and searching just isn't quite robust enough since it doesn't search the text of messages.

9:15am - Hear first staff person arrive.

9:45am - Returned some updated resources to staff person. Check in on status of her work and projects. Currently there are a couple of sets of ebooks that need title-level cataloging, an ongoing deduplication project for bibliographic records for many of our serial titles, and a regular monthly spreadsheet of online resources to be cataloged. Progress is being made on all fronts.

10:00am - Back to CONSER work.

10:10am - Hear other staff person that's here today sign in. Make mental note to check in with them once more CONSER work is completed.

10:45am - Phone call from a bibliographer about one of our collection sets and what bibliographic records are in our catalog already. He is pleased to learn that what he needs is in the catalog so he can show students in an upcoming BI session.

10:55am-11:05am - Chat (GTalk) with my boss about the upcoming physical reorganization of the technical services space.

11:20am - Returned more completed record updates, authentications, etc. to staff people for local processing. Take walk over to other staff person's desk to check in. Answered questions about strange notation on the spreadsheet of holdings to be corrected for one of our branch libraries. The branch did a shelf-read, and sent us a spreadsheet of all the discrepancies between what's in the catalog and what's on the shelf (the list is over 200 titles long!). My staff are now updating the catalog bibliographic and holdings records based on the spreadsheet.

11:40am - More CONSER work. Start reviewing slightly leaning pile of problems/questions on my desk. I don't get very far before getting stuck. This is why the pile is still on my desk...

Noon-1:10pm - Lunch with a friend. Thai food (yum!). I actually left the building. Of course, it was pouring rain on the way to the restaurant, soaking my pants for the second time today, but it had fortunately stopped raining for the walk back to the office. But it's definitely muggy outside, and unfortunately, also inside the library.

1:10pm - Check email. Delete mass numbers of listserv messages. A massive thread about a squirrel loose in a library and follow up posts from others on related stories, how to catch it/convince it to leave, or suggestions to get/borrow a cat/dog/whatever to get rid of the squirrel. Really? Do people have nothing else to do on a Monday?!?

1:40-1:55pm - Put together paperwork (photocopy receipts, find Amtrak stubs, photocopy attendance request form, etc.) for reimbursement for ALA Midwinter trip to Boston.

2:00pm - Meeting with colleague to discuss interview of potential intern from last week.

2:30pm - Return to desk. More email wrangling.

3:00pm - Took a break to freak out upon learning that one of my favorite bands Ozomatli will be performing in May with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra at Powell Hall!! OMG SQUEE!! Hatched plan with best friend in St. Louis to get tickets...I will now start sacrificing goats and anything else I can think of so that the gods may smile upon me to be able to take the time off from work and to find affordable airfare so I can go.

3:15pm - Back to email. Reply to a thread on CONSER about institution specific URLs in master records and what to do with them when authenticating the record. My two cents: please remove them. Institution specific information never ever belongs in the master record outside of the world of rare book or manuscript cataloging. I'm talking about information like subscription restrictions, proxy info, or URLs that for paid resources that have institution specific access keys embedded in the URL.

[rant] It gives me great headaches and causes much ::headdesking:: (side note: did you know today, the last Mon. in Jan., is bubble wrap appreciation day? - always use bubble wrap desk protection when ::headdesking::!!) when data like that makes it into master records, especially when I'm batch loading them into our system, and I have to creatively find and remove all the information that's relevant to no one but that institution and correct the URLs. I know some of it gets batch loaded by accident, but please, for the love of all that is holy, do everything you can to NOT put your institution's specific access information or proxied URL in the master records, batch loaded or not. PLEASE. For the sake of my sanity and head. [/rant]

3:25pm - Walk upstairs to drop off reimbursement paperwork in the business office.

3:30pm - Back at desk. Phone call to set up meeting with colleague in another department (head of stacks) to discuss and determine details of the workflow for a giant barcoding project to get item records for all our bound journals. We didn't start creating items for our bound journals until around 2005. It's going to take us a couple of years at least, even with two of my staff barcoding for 50% of their workday. Meeting set up for tomorrow morning.

3:45pm - More email wrangling. And attempts to finish up some more CONSER editing/authenticating work. Walk around for end of day check in with staff.

4:40pm - Final email check. Close all programs and log out of network. Leave office for the walk home. I must stop at the public library to drop off things that are due and then stop by the grocery store on the way home. I'm out of milk and I need to pick up a last few things to make this spicy albondigas soup recipe for dinner. Mmm...soup.