Library Day in the Life - Round 5, Day 5

See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for info on the project. I also participated previous rounds in Janurary 2010 and in July 2009. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday5.

There is no post for Day 4, Thursday, July 29, 2010. I was at home battling a migraine, which required aspirin, water, a dark room, a cold pack for my head, and lots of quiet.

Friday, July 30, 2010

6:25am: Roll out of bed. Shower, dress, breakfast, coffee. Pour remaining coffee into travel mug. No packed lunch today. It's "food truck Friday"! All summer a small group comprised of myself and a few of my colleagues have been sampling the various food truck options in and around campus. The food truck culture here is incredible. So many delicious options.

7:35am: Walk to work.

8:05am: Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, chat, other various programs. Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages. Check in with early-arriving staff. Catch up on news feeds, and library-related Twitter lists while finishing coffee. Start this post. Review my calendar. Review the scribbled to-do list I made at the end of the day Wednesday. Send more emails.

8:40am: Sent off final report for ALA committee and upload it into the committee's ALA Connect workspace. Upload other various documents and reports from my time on the committee (and as Chair) to the committee's Connect space. I have now completed all my duties for that committee. I was on it for seven (yes, 7!) years. That's a long time. But it's also time to move onto other committee work elsewhere.

8:50am: Set up new subscriptions for MARC records for an electronic book collection set. This set has lots of subsets, so I double check I'm ordering records for the right ones. I print out the confirmation screen and put it in the inbox for our electronic acquisitions person so she can watch for the invoice and process the payment.

9:00am: Review and update the spreadsheet for all our electronic collection sets. Start reviewing 3 sets of MARC records processed by my colleague in preparation for loading them into our catalog.

9:30am: Check in via IM with my boss. She sends me a document to review later this morning. Must finish reviewing the MARC records first.

10:20am: Finish looking at third MARC records file. All seems to be well. Checked report of URLs, and all is well there. Yay! We can cross this set off our list. Send email to colleague that the records can be loaded and update the tracking spreadsheet accordingly. Review email and start reviewing document from my boss.

10:30am: Remember that I told a colleague at another institution I'd email her a list of, um, challenges I encounter when working with MARC records from vendors for our electronic collection sets. Quickly make list of issues and send email. Records from vendors tend to have a lot of variation and present some interesting challenges. I always try to encourage the use of the PCC MARC Record Guide for Vendors. It's a good resource for any vendor looking to create MARC records for their customers.

Run errand upstairs to color photocopier to make copies of unit statistics sheet for new cataloging.

Remember I have to send weekly time sheet for unit to HR. Double check sign in sheet and my calendar to make sure everything is correct, and send it off.

11:25am: Back to reviewing document from my boss. I *will* finish this before lunch. Make a few comments and send the document back to her.

11:45am: LUNCH. Food truck Friday didn't go as planned. We tried two different trucks. The first one wasn't there, and the second one was closing up shop early. So we ended up at a nice sushi place instead. Mmmm. Sushi. Such a perfect light summer lunch. Filling yet not heavy.

1:15pm: Make final revisions to a recommendation for a colleague and post it to online form. This involves a small battle with the online form, which gives me an error message whenever I try to upload a file. Finally I just copy and paste into the text box and submit it. I'm hopeful for my colleague.

2:00pm: More email review. Clean out the listserv folders. Wonder again at the pertinacity of a particular listserv thread. And now there's two of them. They're multiplying. Damn Friday threads.

2:15pm: Type up notes from Wednesday afternoon's meeting and distribute them accordingly.

3:05pm: IM with colleague regarding other large collection sets of MARC records. I'm trying to do more with MarcEdit to distribute the work on these sets a bit more. Having to write a PERL script for each one, especially sets that are single-time loads, is a bit much. I attended the MarcEdit workshop pre-conference at ALA and learned a LOT from Terry Reese. Now I'm trying to replicate the things he showed us MarcEdit can do. It's a much more powerful tool than I realized. So much potential. I now have several very large (100,000+ MARC records) sized sets to play with and test the limits of MarcEdit. Hopefully I won't break anything (my desktop included).

3:30pm: Post updated version of spreadsheet tracking our electronic collection sets to the library webpage server via FTP. Nearly forgot my password. Yikes.

3:45pm: Copy monthly statistics from report posted online. Only the current month of daily statistics is kept, so I have to copy the daily stats on the last working day of each month. If I didn't have a handy dandy tickler in my calendar I don't know I'd remember to do this otherwise.

4:15pm: Week wrap up. Final email check. Clean out email listservs. Check feeds and blogs. Schedule this post.

4:30pm: Log out from network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work. Yay weekend!

Library Day in the Life - Round 5, Day 3

See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for info on the project. I also participated previous rounds in Janurary 2010 and in July 2009. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday5.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

6:35am: Roll out of bed. The cat appears to be in a good mood this morning. Following me around, actively seeking attention. Huh. Wonder what trouble she's been up to. Shower, dress, breakfast, coffee. Pack lunch. I really do bring my lunch every day unless I know I have other plans. Pour remainder of coffee in travel mug.

nearly 7:40am: Walk to work.

8:05am: Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, chat, other various and sundry programs. Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Send reminder email about a meeting this afternoon. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages. Check in with early-arriving staff. Catch up on news feeds, and library-related Twitter lists while finishing coffee. Start this post. Review my calendar. Review the scribbled to-do list I made at the end of the day yesterday. Send more emails.

9:30am: Weekly check in meeting with my supervisor.

10:30am: Back at desk. More email.

11:00am: Took a moment to post a comment on Librarian by Day's recent Library Day in the Life post. A comment was posted (a rather negative, attacking, inflammatory, judgmental comment) essentially saying if you're not dealing with the public directly (face to face) every day, then you're not a librarian. Needless to say, I beg to differ. I am a librarian. And I don't have face to face time with patrons. And I'm OK with that. Still, everything I do is with the patron in mind. My job is to make sure things we own or have access/subscribe to are findable. If the patron can't find what they need, then I'm not doing my job. So I constantly think about the patron, even if I don't interact with them face to face.

11:15am: Open up ALA ALCTS report form and notes from my (former) committee's meeting at ALA Annual. Reports are due at the end of the week, so I really just need to finish it today and get it off my to-do list. Pull quick draft together to be sent out for review by the committee.

12:05pm: Break for lunch and cupcakes! There's a food truck that travels around the city and sells nothing but delicious little gourmet cupcakes. Wednesday is when she's on campus. Om nom nom. Also check Facebook and giggle uncontrollably at a hilarious t-shirt found by a friend.

1:30pm: Back to ALA committee report. Post notes from the ALA meeting to the committee's Connect space for review and email report draft to current chair for review before submission.

1:45pm: More emails. This time for a NASIG committee. Resurrect the draft announcement and start filling in all the information that's been gathered and decided upon in the past few weeks.

2:15pm: Meeting at 2:30pm that I, um, moderate/chair (for lack of a better word). Leave desk early to open room and retrieve copies of documentation.

2:30pm: Meeting. Lots of discussion and the meeting runs the full 1 1/2 hours it's scheduled and a little over. Whoa.

4:20pm: Back at desk. Email check. There's an existing MARC record collection set that is now coming in a new way and the collection itself has changed a bit. I track all our collections on a giant spreadsheet, so I enter the necessary information about the changes and next steps. Basically I have to treat it like a new collection and start from scratch, from the point of setting up the "brand new" subscription to the MARC records from the vendor.

4:45pm: Edit yesterdays to-do list. Cross off things accomplished and add new things for first thing tomorrow. Chat with colleague and agree we need to meet to figure some stuff out. More email. Clean out email listservs (good heavens the AUTOCAT list went crazy today on one specific thread). Schedule this post.

5:10pm: Log out from network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work.

Library Day in the Life - Round 5, Day 2

See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for info on the project. I also participated previous rounds in Janurary 2010 and in July 2009. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday5.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

6:35am: Roll out of bed. Realize that something is up with NPR. Usually I wake up to Morning Edition and Marketplace, but this morning there is no broadcast, just static and a high-pitched buzz. Huh. I'm glad I woke up. Shower, dress, breakfast, coffee. Pack lunch. Pour remainder of coffee in travel mug.

7:30am: Walk to work.

8:00am: Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, chat, other various and sundry programs. Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages. Check in with early-arriving staff. Catch up on news feeds, and library-related Twitter lists while finishing coffee. Start this post. Review my calendar. The only thing on my calendar for the day is the TechTrends ALA Annual Conference 2010 webinar. Guess I have no excuse to avoid the statistics (ugh).

8:45am: Open up spreadsheet of unit statistics and retrieve paper forms submitted by staff. Spend next hour entering numbers for last 4 months, verifying totals, and cursing under my breath.

9:30am: Open up draft annual report. Start to enter numbers. Spend the next hour-plus flipping back and forth between multiple spreadsheets, worksheets, and the report. More cursing under my breath. Realize that some of the numbers are spread over multiple different spreadsheets, as the PCC has a different fiscal year than we do (they operate on the government fiscal schedule which starts in Oct.) and some of my reports pulled from our catalog are by calendar year and not fiscal year. Dammit all to hell. I need more coffee to deal with this.

10:50am: Break to check in with staff and check email. Respond to email message from colleague at another institution regarding Provider-Neutral e-monographs and digital reproduction registry programs. Open up OCLC Connexion to view records in question. End up chatting about it via IM rather than multiple emails.

Back to statistics. Create a summary spreadsheet to pull together the statistics from various sources, including stats that were adapted from different date ranges to conform to our fiscal year report cycle.

11:30am: Meet up with a friend and walk to favorite coffee truck for iced coffee. Followed by lunch at my desk. Check email, perform listserv triage (scan and delete), read library-related Twitter feeds and check news blogs.

12:45pm: Sign in for the TechTrends ALA Annual Conference 2010 review webinar. I remembered to shut my office door, but forgot to write on the dry erase dots that I was participating in a webinar. I have no visitors all day, and then as soon as I shut my door, I have two colleagues stop by to talk to me. ::facepalm:: I must remember to make notes on those dots when I need to not be disturbed.

Listened to webinar, while taking notes, as well as monitoring and participating in the official Twitter feed (#TTwebinar) for the session. I might have some minor ADD...or is it "continuous partial attention" these days?

One of my takeaways: There's an overarching trend that's all about personalization. Users want to make it what they want to see, not what we want to give them. This extends through all our interfaces, including the catalog and mobile options.

2:05pm: Go track down the two people that wanted to talk to me during the webinar. Call first colleague and get an update on the space in basement we will be moving to for the giant barcoding project. We were in one room, but that room is being converted to rare book storage, so we'll be moving to another room next month. Several things have to happen before we can relocate, so we are currently in a "temporary" space in the now rare book storage room. Result: I now have too many keys on my office key ring.

Track down second colleague in his office and to discuss OCLC database enrichment activities and what we can and cannot do regarding formats we do not have Enhance/BIBCO authorization for yet.

Stop into tech services director's office to ask her about a spreadsheet of numbers for collection set cataloging. I work with another colleague to manage and load large sets of MARC records for collections into our catalog. Generally these sets are purchased from vendors or OCLC, and require some editing/massaging before they can be loaded into our catalog. I do the editing using MarcEdit software, and then my colleague does the loading. For subscriptions, I work with her to create a script (using Perl) to perform the edits so she can just "script and load" as updates arrive. I remember seeing a spreadsheet with our numbers, but now I can't find it in my email. Fortunately our tech services director has it and will email it to me again so I can finish my annual report.

Finally, call yet another colleague to let her know we need her staff (stacks maintenance staff) to pull another group of volumes for the barcoding project. They pull, we barcode the volumes (create item records and update the holdings), and then her staff re-shelve them. Sounds complicated, but it works well. They feed us whatever volumes/titles/call numbers they need barcoded and it also means we stay out of the way of projects up in the stacks.

Yes, this is all part of my week. It is loosely grouped under the category of "workflow and project management." This category is becoming a larger and larger piece of my job.

2:55pm: Return to statistics and annual report. Plug in final numbers. Write up highlights of changes, workflow enhancements, and Unit accomplishments.

3:55pm: Finally finish report and email it to my supervisor, along with the summary spreadsheet of statistics compiled from 4 different sources.

Review document for individually cataloging titles in an e-book collection that has no collection set option. These titles are cataloged in a different department as part of the copy cataloging workflow. My role is to ensure that we are using the correct standards and coding for all our electronic materials, regardless of format or who is cataloging them. In other words, I try to ensure consistency for all our e-resources cataloging.

4:00pm: Final email check and clean out of the listserv folders. Make to-do notes for tomorrow. Schedule this post.

4:10pm: Log out from network. Shut down (restart) computer. Leave work. I have an errand to run downtown before 5pm.

Library Day in the Life - Round 5, Day 1

And it's time for another round of Library Day in the Life posts. See: http://librarydayinthelife.pbworks.com/ for info on the project. I also participated previous rounds in Janurary 2010 and in July 2009. You can find all my posts for this project by searching my blog's librarydayinthelife tag. You can also follow my Twitter posts @slmcdanold with the hashtag #libday5.

Obligatory 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, July 26, 2010

6:25am: roll out of bed. Attempt to pet my cat, who's blinking at me and still curled up on the bed, and get a cranky "mrow" and swiped at in response. She then buries her face under her front paws as if she's attempting to block out the morning light. My cat is not fond of mornings. Shower, dress, eat breakfast, drink coffee. Give cat (who has finally gotten up and followed me to the kitchen) a small amount of milk in an attempt to improve her mood. It doesn't work, but she does drink the milk. Pour remaining coffee into my to-go cup.

7:25am: leave for work. It's a little over a mile to work from my apartment, which translates into about a 20 minute non-hurried walk. The horrendous heat wave has finally broken, so for the first time in about 2 weeks the walk is pleasant and I'm not drenched in sweat by the time I arrive at work.

8am: Login to work network. Login to email, calendar, other various and sundry programs. Thunderbird and Firefox both require and update and restart. Twiddle thumbs while updates process. Message light on my phone is blinking, and telling me I have two missed calls. Check messages (while Firefox and Thunderbird complete updates) and discover that two of my staff are out sick. With one on vacation, and one who's regular day off is today, that means I have no staff here today. Update HR spreadsheet and calendar appropriately and create draft of weekly staff time-off email report.

8:15am: Login to email for second time. Read email. Forward and respond to necessary messages. Catch up on news feeds, work email listservs, and library-related Twitter lists. Scan subjects and then delete mass numbers of listserv messages. Review my calendar and realize with some minor alarm and then small celebration that I have no meetings today. In fact this whole week continues the "meeting lite" month that July has been so far. This is a pleasant change, yet also makes me nervous.

8:35am: Realize belatedly that it's Library Day in the Life week again. Start this post.

8:45am: Check in with boss. Let her know my summons for jury duty arrived in the mail on Sat. I'm slated for August. There's an epidemic of jury duty lately, both within the library and my friends across the country. An awfully high percentage of my friends, colleagues, staff have all received jury duty summons lately. As my boss said: "That's what you get for voting." Sigh.

9:00am: Start reviewing records that have been merged by OCLC. I send them a long list of messy duplicate records on a fairly regular basis. These are duplicates that would not otherwise be caught by their duplicate detection and resolution software. They're largely duplicates that have been cataloged following a medley of old, interim, and current rules, often ending up with different record types and some creative title variations as a result. Once OCLC merges them for me, I go in and update the cataloging to bring it up to current rules and update the description.

Some of the records I decide to authenticate (giving them the PCC stamp of approval and a nice shiny new LCCN (Library of Congress Control Number) from my stash). This is dependent on a number of factors, including number of holdings attached, age of resource, how much information I have and how much I can trust that information, etc. All of this (authenticating or updating/enhancing) involves verifying information from the websites themselves, trying to ferret out useful information from "about" or "faq" pages like how often something is updated, who's responsible for content, or when the thing first went live online. Needless to say, sometimes this is easier than others.

I take periodic breaks during the morning to deal with incoming email and listserv messages, deal with some committee work, check the Twitter stream, and have a snack.

12:30pm: Lunch outside with a colleague. The weather is gorgeous and I need to get out of the building and away from my computer for a bit. Let me eyes take a break and give my fingers and toes a chance to thaw out. My office is always chilly. I keep several cardigans, a lap blanket, a pair of emergency cotton socks, and a pair of fingerless gloves in a desk drawer. One (or frequently several) of those items is in use pretty much every single day. I think I need to acquire a small space heater.

1:35pm: Back from lunch. Check email. Scan subjects and delete more listserv messages.

2:00pm: Resumed review of merged records. Yes, I'm likely going to spend the entire day on this. I'm a cataloger. It's my job to create, improve and update the bibliographic description of things to make sure they're findable and uniquely identifiable. If the data isn't there, no amount of fancy searching is going to find the thing you're looking for or help you figure out if what you found is what you need. So I spend large amounts of time creating, updating, or improving that data, or advising other people working on data, or supervising my staff who are also working on data. It may not be "sexy," but it's necessary.

2:20pm: Interruption to review a file of records from a vendor before we purchase them. Have to make sure the records contain sufficient data and have all the required elements for us to load them into our system. We don't want to spend money on records we either cannot use or will have to spend way too much staff time on to edit and make them work.

2:40pm: Take brief walk with spare change to raid the "snack store" kept by a staffperson. I'm in need of some chocolate.

2:45pm: Back to reviewing merged records.

3:20pm: Take break to resurrect last fiscal year's annual report for my unit and begin editing it for this fiscal year. I realize there are several months worth of statistics I need to evaluate and enter and stall out. I will have to start on the statistics much earlier in the day.

3:45pm: Back to reviewing merged records.

4:10pm: Review email and clean out listserv messages. Schedule this post. Log out and close programs. Log out of network, shut down (restart) computer.

4:30pm: Leave work to walk home in gorgeous mid-80s sunny weather.

Dear Anonymous commenter

Recently I received the following comment on my May 13, 2010 post "Common sense has left the building":

"The narcissistic person is marked by a grandiose self-image, a constant need for admiration, and a general lack of empathy for others..."

The comment was left by "Anonymous". I don't know who this person is. They could be the person who I discovered is a perpetual victim with anger issues and summarily said "buh bye" to back in March/April. They could be the individual with the profile name "MrAssMan69" [seriously...that's his username...and no, I didn't look at his profile...he showed up in the list of people that visited my profile] who I've been making fun of for the past week [how can I not with a profile name like that? how could he think that was a good idea?!?]. Anonymous could be one of several petty individuals I know who like to leave anonymous comments on people's blogs because they think it's funny to either attempt to piss them off or leave nasty/judgmental comments just to be mean (as both mean people and mean-spirited actions).

At any rate, I do not know who they are. Anonymous commenter did not provide an email. This leads me to believe that they are too much of a coward to engage in dialogue related to their comment.

So since Anonymous hasn't left me a means of contacting them or responding privately, I'm choosing to respond to their comment publicly in this post.

Dear Anonymous,

Your comment lacks context. Who is the narcissistic person you are referring to? The people who participate in online dating? Myself for having some expectations? Are you attempting to judge me? Judge online dating in general?

Because if it's me, well, pardon me for expecting someone that's using an online dating site to actually want to get to know me as a person. You know, to DATE. As in pursue a relationship with. It's kind of hard to do that unless you take some time to actually get to know someone. To that end, I have expectations (as detailed in the post cited above and summarized here):

• Expectations that someone might actually read my profile before contacting me.
• Expectations and hopes that they might actually be going into this with the same genuine intent I am and aren't just looking for casual sex.
• Expectations that they might want to get to know ME and not some fantasy.
• Expectations that they are representing themselves honestly and to the best of their ability by taking some time on their own profile.

If I'm the narcissistic one for having expectations, well fine. I don't think my expectations are all that unreasonable or even narcissistic by your definition given that this is about trying to date people.

So, Anonymous, care to weigh in? Provide some context? Reveal your identity and own what you're saying instead of hiding behind the safety wall of anonymity? It's not like this is a 12 step program where anonymity is critical to create a safe environment for people seeking help. This is a blog for goodness sake. A blog on the internet.

Also, care to cite the source of your definition?

Looking forward to hearing from you to continue the dialogue.

-Me.